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Korean OEMs seem to have figured out how to make good electric vehicles. The cars are well-made and offer better efficiency than anyone other than Tesla, which is why it only took an hour's test drive for the Kia Soul EV to make it to my "top 10 for 2019" list. We got that opportunity because Kia rustled up a single Soul EV to last year's World Car Awards test drive event: the electric "boar with a backpack" was in the running for (and won) World Urban Car of 2019. Which is why I read a report over at Roadshow with such alarm this morning.

According to an unnamed source, Roadshow reported that Kia has decided not to import the Soul EV to these shores, due to stiff demand for the BEV elsewhere and a limited supply of lithium-ion. As evidence for this cancellation, Roadshow points to the fact that there is now no longer an entry for the MY2020 Soul EV on the EPA's fuel economy website.

However, Kia has told Ars that it's not made any official announcement, "other than there are no pending plans to introduce before 2021 at the earliest." This suggests to us that, in fact, the box-like BEV is probably still US-bound but delayed by a year. That's obviously not great for those of us who want to see more EVs replace conventionally powered cars, but given the perilous situation in the United States thanks to an uncontrolled pandemic, it's also somewhat understandable.

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  The Mars 2020 Trevor Mahlmann ]

NASA is about ready to send its largest and most capable rover to Mars. With a mass of 1.025 metric tons, the Perseverance rover is about 14 percent more bulky than its predecessor, Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012.

Because the two rovers are similar in size and appearance, it would be easy to dismiss Perseverance as a copy of Curiosity. But that would be doing a disservice to the newer rover, which is carrying some unique experiments and hardware to Mars. With these, NASA will dare to try new things on another planet and jumpstart the search for ancient life.

In short, this is an exciting mission.

Enlarge / Bixby on the Galaxy S9. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Reuters and Bloomberg are both independently reporting that Google is pushing Samsung to back away from its duplicate Android ecosystem and promote Google apps instead. A "correspondence" between the two companies was seen by both sites, which saw Google push Samsung to promote the Play Store and Google Assistant over the Galaxy App Store and Samsung's Bixby assistant. Google was apparently willing to open its wallet and pay Samsung to make it happen.

Bloomberg's interpretation of the negotiations is pretty vague, saying the deal "would promote Google's digital assistant and Play Store for apps on [Samsung] devices." The later Reuters report is a lot more specific, saying Samsung is "considering dropping its Bixby virtual assistant and Galaxy Apps Store from its mobile devices." Reuters goes on to say that "Google is dangling more lucrative terms for Samsung than in previous deals if it retreats from its app strategy." Part of Google's immense web of Android protection is sharing ad revenue and Play Store app revenue with phone manufacturers, and offering Samsung a higher share is an easy way to bribe the South Korean company into submission.

Whether Samsung would actually be willing to kill Bixby and the Galaxy App store is up in the air. Samsung has invested piles of money in Bixby since its launch in 2017, but Bixby hasn't been very successful. Samsung acquired the assistant startup Viv Labs, which was founded by the creators of Siri, and put the company to work improving Bixby. But Samsung's voice assistant still can't hang in the same crowd as the Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Amazon Alexa.

Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection/Gado | Getty)

A federal judge has ordered the state of New York to quickly pay unemployment benefits to four Uber and Lyft drivers who have been waiting for the payments since March or April. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which filed a lawsuit over the issue back in May, says that the ruling could ultimately help thousands of drivers in similar situations.

Uber and Lyft have long argued that its drivers are independent contractors, not employees. That stance has come under increasing pressure. Since 2016, the New York Department of Labor has held that ride-hail drivers were employees for purposes of unemployment insurance. But Uber and Lyft have dragged their feet, failing to provide wage data that would enable the agency to calculate unemployment payments for each worker.

As a result, when Uber and Lyft drivers forced out of work by the pandemic applied for unemployment benefits, some were told that they weren't eligible because state data showed them with zero earnings. Workers continued to be denied benefits even after they submitted 1099 tax forms showing their earnings.