Month: June 2020

Enlarge / The Nikola Two truck drives out on the stage at an April 2019 event. (credit: Megan Geuss)

Tesla's stock price soared above $1,000 on Wednesday. The rise pushed the company's valuation to around $190 billion—within striking distance of the world's most valuable valuable car company, Toyota, at $215 billion.

Tesla's stock surge comes a week after one of Tesla's leading electric vehicle rivals, Nikola, debuted its stock on public markets. Like Tesla, Nikola is building all-electric vehicles. But there are a couple of big differences. First, while Tesla initially focused on passenger cars, Nikola will initially sell trucks along with off-road vehicles and a jet ski. Second, while Tesla cars run on batteries, Nikola is focusing on fuel cells—though some vehicles will have a battery option.

Nikola's first week on the stock market has been strong, with the stock price nearly doubling to reach Wednesday's closing price of $65. This makes Nikola worth nearly $30 billion—on par with Ford—before it has shipped its first vehicle.

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  The Pixel 3 XL. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Francisco Jeronimo of IDC published some surprising sales stats for Google's Pixel line, saying that 2019 was the hardware division's best year so far, and with sales up 52 percent from 2018, Google managed to outsell OnePlus in 2019.

Google's Pixel line was most recently in the news for the fallout from a disappointing Pixel 4 launch, so some positive sales news is unexpected. A report from The Information claims that Google Hardware leader Rick Osterloh internally criticized the Pixel 4 before launch, and both the Pixel line's general manager and the Pixel Camera lead have left the team in the past year. As a response to the report, Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave an interview to The Verge saying "hardware is hard" and that he takes a long-term view of the Pixel team's hardware efforts.

These sales numbers are mostly not about the Pixel 4, though. In terms of devices, 2019 device sales for Google mostly means the Pixel 3 and 3a. While the Pixel 4 launched in 2019, that was only in October. The Pixel 3 was for sale the entire year, having launched just a few months before 2019, and the cheaper Pixel 3a was available from May 2019 onward.

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  This is the 2020 Honda CR-V Hybrid. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

A hybrid SUV should be the best of both worlds—a big, spacious vehicle with good fuel efficiency. That was certainly the hope for the latest version of Honda's CR-V. One of the country's best-selling crossovers, this year the CR-V got the addition of a hybrid powertrain for the first time. It's Honda's third hybrid for the US market, joining the Accord hybrid and the Insight, which we rather liked when we tested it a few weeks ago. But does the addition of some lithium-ion and electric motors work as well for this crossover?

I’ve seen this powertrain before

If you're familiar with the Accord Hybrid, you'll be familiar with the CR-V Hybrid's powertrain. Instead of the 1.5L engine in 'normal' CR-Vs, the hybrid version combines a 2.0L four-cylinder, 143hp (107kW), 129lb-ft (175Nm) Atkinson-cycle engine with two electric motors. One of these works as the starter motor and as a generator driven by the internal combustion engine to charge the 1.2kWh lithium-ion battery that lives above the rear axle. The other electric motor is the one that usually drives the wheels; in this case, it's 181hp (135kW), 232lb-ft (315Nm).

Like the other Honda hybrids, there's no conventional transmission here. Most of the time, the internal combustion engine won't directly contribute to forward motion, although it can do so under some conditions via a clutch that connects it to the output of the electric drive motor. Unlike the other Honda hybrids, the CR-V is capable of all-wheel drive via front-mounted transfer case. So the rear wheels will do their share of the work when you move off from a stop, going up a steep grade, or if the CR-V's digital brain starts to detect the front wheels beginning to slip. But for most day-to-day driving, only the front wheels will be powered, because let's be honest—almost no one is going to be crossing the Darien Gap in any crossover, and just being FWD is more efficient. More on that later.

Enlarge / The (replica) disembodied marble head of David probably didn't need a 3M mask, but he nonetheless looked fashionable sporting it in the window of a jewelry shop in Switzerland in March 2020. (credit: Christiane Oelrich | picture alliance | Getty Images)

3M—which manufactures N95 filtration masks that have been in high demand since the COVID-19 pandemic began—is suing merchants who used Amazon to sell 3M and counterfeit masks for more than 18 times their standard price.

A group of third-party merchants on Amazon "operated an illegal scheme to advertise and sell counterfeit, damaged, deficient, or otherwise altered respirators" to customers, 3M alleges in the complaint (PDF), filed in federal court in California.

3M has drastically increased its production of N95 respirator masks, the company says, but has kept its pricing between $0.63 and $3.40 per mask, depending on the model. The resellers in the suit, however, were allegedly selling a model that has a typical list price of $1.27 for for an average of $23.21 per mask, more than 18 times higher than 3M's price.

The Nasdaq chart representing Apple's stock performance over the past five years. (credit: Nasdaq)

Today, Apple became the first US company to achieve a $1.5 trillion market capitalization. The stock surged even as investors began pulling back in many other areas of the economy.

Reasons given by investors for the optimism include anticipation of the launch of a 5G iPhone this fall, signs of strong App Store sales, and interest in the potential of ARM-driven Macs, based on a Bloomberg report yesterday that said Apple may announce an ARM transition at its annual developer conference later this month.

Yesterday and today, Apple's movement ran counter to most of the rest of the market, where investors' actions have reflected fear of a global coronavirus resurgence and anticipation of bad news from the US Federal Reserve in a report due out today.

Enlarge / Voting machines are shown at a polling location on June 9, 2020 in West Columbia, South Carolina. (credit: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

OmniBallot is election software that is used by dozens of jurisdictions in the United States. In addition to delivering ballots and helping voters mark them, it includes an option for online voting. At least three states—West Virginia, Delaware, and New Jersey—have used the technology or are planning to do so in an upcoming election. Four local jurisdictions in Oregon and Washington state use the online voting feature as well. But new research from a pair of computer scientists, MIT's Michael Specter and the University of Michigan's Alex Halderman, finds that the software has inadequate security protections, creating a serious risk to election integrity.

Democracy Live, the company behind OmniBallot, defended its software in an email response to Ars Technica. "The report did not find any technical vulnerabilities in OmniBallot," wrote Democracy Live CEO Bryan Finney.

This is true in a sense—the researchers didn't find any major bugs in the OmniBallot code. But it also misses the point of their analysis. The security of software not only depends on the software itself but also on the security of the environment on which the system runs. For example, it's impossible to keep voting software secure if it runs on a computer infected with malware. And millions of PCs in the United States are infected with malware.