Month: April 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

This year’s Super Bowl featured three advertisements for new electric vehicle (EV) models, matching the total from all previous Super Bowls combined. With multiple automakers coughing up more than $5.5 million per 30-second spot during the United States’ marquee television event, EV enthusiasts hailed the milestone as a harbinger for the automotive sector in the coming decade. More skeptical industry watchers questioned whether we had actually hit a turning point.

Their concern isn’t unwarranted. After a large increase in 2018, EV sales as a share of the overall US passenger vehicle market barely grew in 2019, to 2.5 percent. A recent consumer survey from Cox Automotive found demand for EVs barely budged between 2016 and 2018. Automakers not named Tesla, whose Model 3 represented more than half of US EV sales in both 2018 and 2019, are still struggling to make inroads in the US market. Toyota’s Prius is old news, and though its sales are respectable, neither the Chevrolet Bolt nor Nissan Leaf has been a game-changing product. Offerings from Jaguar, Audi, and Porsche haven’t totally flopped, but their ultra-premium segment is a small fraction of the overall consumer vehicle market.

These automakers have all benefited from generous federal- and state-level incentives, some which have now sunset. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown state budgets into disarray, jeopardizing current and future incentive programs. Shutdowns across the country are devastating household finances and have sent oil prices to two-decade lows, potentially dampening EV appeal for the near future. Automakers face existential threats from the collapse in economic activity and must decide whether to double-down on emerging technologies or taper investments and retrench behind profitable business segments.

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  X-rays. From left to right: the previous iPhone SE, the iPhone 8, and the 2020 iPhone SE. [credit: iFixit ]

As has become a regular custom, iFixit has done a visual teardown of the latest Apple hardware. In this case, it's the iPhone SE, Apple's lower-cost handset that appears to cram the latest-gen A13 processor into the chassis of 2017's iPhone 8.

That relationship was the focus of the teardown. iFixit went in seeking to confirm whether this really is the iPhone 8 with just a few changes, and it even opened up the two devices side by side. The answer appears to mostly be "yes." When first inspecting the SE via X-ray, iFixit found it to be close to identical inside to the iPhone 8 “apart from some very subtle antenna rework and moving a few chips around the logic board.”

The two phones are so similar that many components, such as the main speaker or the Taptic Engine, are interchangeable between them. The iPhone SE also has exactly the same size battery as the 8, at 6.9Wh, but the battery connector is different, so the batteries are unfortunately not interchangeable.

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  Look at this beautiful, blemish-free display. [credit: @OnLeaks x @Pigtou_ ]

Would you believe that Samsung, of all companies, is working on a phone with a pop-up camera? OnLeaks has produced a render for the mystery phone you see above, which currently has no name. Seeing Samsung do this is kind of a surprise since the company's display division is a driving force behind all the hole-punch displays you see on smartphones.

With no name and no specs, it's hard to know what this phone is. It smells like a midranger, with the flat display, rear fingerprint reader, and a plain-looking rear camera setup that might be on the small side compared to the massive camera bricks that are in vogue right now. A good bet is that this slots in somewhere in the midrange "Galaxy A" lineup. Samsung isn't afraid to get experimental with the A series. This phone reminds one of the Galaxy A80, a phone with a pop-up swivel camera, where the back camera would rise out of the phone, flip around, and become the front camera.

We just saw one of the highest-profile pop-up camera phones, the OnePlus 7 Pro, dump the pop-up camera in the sequel, the OnePlus 8 Pro. Other companies that have produced pop-up camera phones, like Xiaomi, Asus, and OnePlus' sister company, Oppo, haven't kept the feature around in subsequent versions, either. Some outlets even called the OnePlus 8 the death of the pop-up camera. OnePlus said it dumped the pop-up camera for the usual reasons: removing the complicated mechanism means more battery space and less weight.

A screenshot from a 2015 video that shows an "unidentified aerial phenomena." (credit: U.S. Navy)

For years, UFO enthusiasts have excitedly shared three videos captured by US Navy pilots that show unidentified aerial phenomena. The videos, captured in November 2004 and twice in January 2015, were each publicly leaked a few years after their capture. They have been publicized on the History Channel and elsewhere.

On Monday, the US Department of Defense decided to officially release the three videos, which can be downloaded here. Before releasing the "Historical Navy Videos," the military determined that each did not reveal any "sensitive capabilities or systems," nor would releasing them "impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions" by unidentified objects.

"DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos," the statement reads. "The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified.'"

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  Mercedes-Benz evidently visited Washington DC at some point because this 2020 CLA 250 is driving along the Whitehurst Freeway in Georgetown.

Over 35 years ago, it irked a number of Mercedes executives and insiders when people referred to the then-new 190E sedan as the "baby Benz." Full disclosure, I worked at the company in the early 2000s and even by then, there were still people at headquarters who scrunched their noses and furrowed their brows at the term.

Yet now, we're well into another era of baby Benzes. Not only is there currently a second-generation of the CLA, there's also the even smaller A-Class. Both are compact and front-drive-oriented small sedans that borrow much of their form factors from the larger CLS, itself a design hit. Yet, the CLA wears the silly "four-door coupe" descriptor Mercedes gives it and others, while the A-class—which is clearly cut from the same design cloth—is classified as a sedan and not a "coupe."

For 2020, the CLA comes in three main flavors

The new CLA is larger in nearly every way than the previous generation, which helps it distance itself from the even smaller A-class sedan, though it shares a platform with the junior Mercedes. The CLA is actually 5.5 inches longer than the A-class and starts at $37,645, including destination, almost $4,000 more expensive.