Month: August 2021

Enlarge / What's the cheapest used electric car you'd take a punt on? Let us know in the comments. (credit: Sakkawokkie/Getty Images)

When you write about cars, you can expect people to ask for your advice on which car they should buy. But when the question is actually "which used car should I buy," many of us go quiet; driving an ever-rotating string of low-mileage new models leaves you unprepared to comment on long-term reliability or the like. Last week, a friend posed an even harder variant, asking for suggestions for a used plug-in electric vehicle. And my default suggestion of a sub-$20,000 BMW i3 wasn't going to cut it.

As luck would have it, I noticed that Kelley Blue Book—which does keep track of things like long-term reliability and depreciation—just published a list of its best affordable used hybrids and EVs for 2021, with top-10 lists for cars that cost less than $15,000 as well as those under $20,000.

As you might expect at those price points, the lists are dominated by parallel hybrids like the Toyota Prius. No Teslas, I'm afraid—the cheapest used Model 3 that shows up in a brief search this morning still costs $28,000, and the rest all had prices that started with a three. But some battery EVs do make the KBB's top-10 list.

Enlarge / A 2014 Tesla Model S driving on Autopilot rear-ended a Culver City fire truck that was parked in the high-occupancy vehicle lane on Interstate 405. (credit: Culver City Firefighters Local 1927 / Facebook)

US government regulators are opening an investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system after cars using the feature crashed into stopped emergency vehicles.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration announced the investigation today, and it encompasses 765,000 Teslas sold in the US, a significant fraction of all of the company’s sales in the country. The agency says the probe will cover 11 crashes since 2018; the crashes caused 17 injuries and one death. 

The NHTSA is looking at Tesla’s entire lineup, including Models S, X, 3, and Y from model years 2014–2021. It’s investigating both Autopilot and Traffic Aware Cruise Control, a subset of Autopilot that does not steer the vehicle but allows it to match traffic speeds. 

Enlarge / Arc will be the brand name for the Intel GPU formerly known as "DG2." (credit: Intel)

Intel has been working for years to enter the high-end graphics card market to compete with Nvidia and AMD, and today those efforts get a name: Intel Arc (not to be confused with Intel Ark, the site you go to when you need help with Intel's indecipherable processor model numbers). The earliest Arc products will be released in "the first quarter of 2022" and will be based on a GPU codenamed "Alchemist," a new, more memorable codename for a GPU previously known as "DG2."

The first Arc cards will be a follow-up of sorts to DG1—a card released only to system builders—which performs a lot like the GDDR5 version of Nvidia's aging, low-end GeForce GTX 1030. We don't have spec sheets for any of the Alchemist-based Arc cards yet, but the trailer Intel showed confirmed support for modern GPU features like real-time ray tracing and "AI Accelerated Super Sampling" that will compete with Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FidelityFX upscaling technologies. The trailer also showed Arc silicon running real (if somewhat older) games like Forza Horizon 4 and Metro Exodus.

To demonstrate its commitment to the discrete GPU market, Intel announced several more GPU codenames that will succeed Alchemist in the coming years, including "Battlemage," "Celestial," and "Druid" (note both the alphabetical order and the high-fantasy theme).