Month: July 2022

Enlarge / When all you have is a sledgehammer, everything looks like a sledgenail.

In the late aughts and early 2010s, the Saints Row series offered gamers an even more over-the-top take on the open-world third-person action-adventure genre dominated by Grand Theft Auto. This zany approach reached its apex with 2013's Saints Row IV, in which the player took the role of the president of the United States (who also happened to be a superhero).

Aside from a standalone expansion released in 2015, the Saints have been quiet for nearly a decade since then. But that’s about to change with a “reimagined” Saints Row due out in August.

And a lot can change in a decade, as the developers at Volition are well aware—parent company THQ declared bankruptcy during the development of Saints Row IV, and Volition was acquired by Deep Silver in 2013. Despite the tumultuous events of the last few years, though, Saints Row remains a core part of Volition’s DNA, according to Creative Director Brian Traficante. “Saints Row has been such a major contributor to Volition,” he told me during an interview at a Las Vegas preview event last week.

Enlarge / Ford's electric F-150 Lighting (L), eTransit (M), and Mustang Mach-E (R) battery-electric vehicles have all been such successes that they're all sold out for the rest of the year. (credit: Ford)

On Thursday, Ford Motor Company announced that it has secured 60 GWh of battery cells that will allow it to build 600,000 electric vehicles by late 2023. And it says it has contracts for cells that will allow it to build 1.4 million EVs by 2026, 70 percent of the 2 million EVs it plans to build globally that year.

"Ford's new electric vehicle lineup has generated huge enthusiasm and demand, and now we are putting the industrial system in place to scale quickly," said Jim Farley, Ford’s president and CEO and president of Ford Model e. "Our Model e team has moved with speed, focus, and creativity to secure the battery capacity and raw materials we need to deliver breakthrough EVs for millions of customers."

The automaker says that its plan for 2023 will consist of 270,000 Mustang Mach-Es for North America, Europe, and China, 150,000 F-150 Lightnings for North America, 150,000 e-Transit vans for North America and Europe, and it will launch an additional electric SUV in Europe, building 30,000 in 2023 before ramping up production significantly in 2024.

Enlarge / No, this isn't a rendering from a Pixar film; it's what the new USPS mail delivery vehicle will look like. (credit: USPS)

In 2021, the United States Postal Service picked a new delivery vehicle to replace its fleet of aging Grumman LLVs. However, the USPS drew immediate criticism, as the vast majority of a potential 165,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, which will be built by Oshkosh Defense, would not be electric.

But on Wednesday, the USPS changed its mind and says it will now limit its NGDV purchase to 50,000 NGDVs, at least half of which will be battery-electric vehicles. Additionally, it says it will purchase 34,500 commercial off-the-shelf vehicles, "including as many BEVs as are commercially available and consistent with our delivery profile" according to the Federal Register.

Oshkosh's NGDV has been designed to be fitted with either an internal combustion engine or a battery-electric powertrain. When the USPS first selected the NGDV, it said that only 10 percent of the order would be for BEV mail vans—Postmaster Louis DeJoy pleaded poverty on behalf of the Postal Service, which he said could not afford to purchase more BEVs.