MyOpinion

Andreessen Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz said on their podcast that Chinese automakers have developed high-quality and affordable vehicles supported by a robust supply chain ecosystem.

With the American auto industry struggling with slowing growth in its EV market, American automakers need to be able to offer a compelling $20,000 EV that also competes on quality if the US doesn't want to "lose the auto industry," Andreessen said.

"What China has now is not just really good car companies, but they've got this entire constellation of supply chain componentry," Andreessen said.

China's government has spent at least $230 billion to support electric vehicle makers such as BYD since 2009, according to a study published in 2024 by the Centre for Strategic & International Studies think tank.

Andreessen said that Chinese car brands are outperforming American EV automakers in affordability and quality, calling them "super technologically sophisticated."

"For example, they've got this feature where you just come in, and you just drop your phone down on the center divider, and basically, the car lights up," he said. "The whole system inside the car comes off your phone — like all your music and your maps and your calendar and all that stuff is just automatically there."

The venture capitalist also highlighted other features, such as customized dancing animations in the LED headlights that greet the driver and self-driving capabilities, which are already integrated into several lower-cost Chinese EVs.

To keep up, American automakers need to be able to offer a similarly affordable and full-featured car at the $20,000 price point, Andreessen said.

Sometimes reading the stats is not enough. I like to see for myself. So, we went to China. We had been looking forward to cruising the Yangtze River upstream from the Three Gorges Dam and thought it an opportune time to see what “53% of new cars sales in China are plugins” looked like in the flesh — so to speak. The short answer is: spectacular! “What do all the green number plates mean?” the tour guide was asked repeatedly by our group. “Green number plates means the car is electric!”

We had been in China 8 years ago, and the transformation since then has been dramatic. The country is much wealthier. We landed in Chengdu (a city of over 25 million) and were immediately impressed by the fact that most cars on the road were less than 5 years old. (The Chinese government is giving incentives to update to cleaner, newer cars. I wonder where all the old ones went? Scrap metal by the looks of it.) Gone were the human-powered vehicles and the three-wheeled, smoke-spewing rickshaws. There were even fewer motor scooters — and the ones that were on the road were — you guessed it — electric.

I am a gas car fan, but not in the normal way. Most self-described combustion aficionados mean they've owned a few fun cars, maybe wrenched on one or two and usually kept up with whatever's on the cover of the magazines. But I went a little further into that world. I didn't own a few cars. I owned 13 gas-burners over the course of 5 years, almost all of them old and beaten up. I didn't just read the magazines, I built my life around working for one, then became the reviews editor at Road & Track. But when I got the call to work at InsideEVs, I knew it was time to take a step into the future.

I leased a new EV. It's a 2024 Chevy Blazer EV, and I love it. Let me explain why.

Its powertrain is quieter than the smoothest BMW inline-six. It rides beautifully because it isn't trying to be a sports car or a truck. And the technology I've derided as a built-to-last enthusiast turns out to be quite charming in my day to day life. Sure, no screens and a double-din stereo would be more repairable. But it's ok to admit that I like having Google Maps and Spotify built in to my car. I love having a 360-degree camera and a power tailgate. I love knowing I have modern-car safety, with potential life savers like automatic braking with pedestrian detection. The curmudgeon in me wants to complain that humans should be able to drive without electronic aids, but a hundred years of experimenting with that has lead to a lot of deaths.

I love that my car doesn't need to be turned on or off. Like every electronic in my life, it knows to turn itself on when I start using it, and turn itself off when I walk away. I love that it still has overrides to keep it on, or force it off. I love that I can heat up the cabin without waiting 15 minutes for the engine to warm up, regardless of whether I'm driving or using remote start. I love one-pedal driving, and the feeling of a 1-to-1 relationship between my right foot and the rate of acceleration. There's no delay, no waiting for a dawdling transmission to downshift.

Most of all, I love the feeling of driving it at night. I love zooming unto a dark highway, without noise or drama, blasting into the night lit by nothing but LED headlights. I love that moment where there's a quick break in traffic, and one quick press of the throttle rockets me forward with more immediacy than the best internal combustion car can manage. And I love that I can enjoy all of this without any tailpipe emissions.

Some 295,000 plugin vehicles were registered in Europe in September, rising 6% YoY, which represents the EV market’s return to growth for the first time since April. This is even more significant when you consider the overall market fell by 4%, to 1.1 million units.

Interestingly, BEVs are the ones pushing the market upwards, growing 14% YoY to 212,000 units. PHEVs remain stuck in red, falling 9% in September to 83,000 units.

Looking at the remaining powertrains, only HEVs were positive, growing 12% YoY, while petrol was down 19% and diesel continued to free fall, dropping 24%.

As such, September’s automotive market has seen some seismic changes, with plugin vehicle share of the overall European auto market rising to 26% (19% full electrics/BEVs). Added to the 34% market share of HEVs, that means that 60% of all passenger cars sold in Europe last September had some kind of electrification.

Even more importantly, for the first time, sales of HEVs (34% share) surpassed sales of petrol vehicles (29% share) in September, a trend that is surely here to stay. Meanwhile, diesel (8%) continues to lose relevance every passing day. At this pace, I wouldn’t be surprised if diesel was dead in Europe before 2030, with petrol following it a couple of years later.

These results kept the 2024 plugin vehicle share at 22% (15% for BEVs alone) through the end of September, which is only 1% less than where we were a year ago, at 23%.

Finally, looking at the sales breakdown between BEVs and PHEVs, despite the good result for pure electrics in September, they represented 72% of all plugin sales, and they are at exactly at the same level in 2024 as they were a year ago (67%). With new or refreshed models landing soon for both powertrains — namely, cheaper BEVs and longer range PHEVs — and new CO2 ceilings in Europe, it will be interesting to see how the two technologies behave next year.

There have been a few teasers over the past few days, but now the cat is out of the bag: Fireproof Games has unveiled a new VR game called Ghost Town.

In Ghost Town, you take on the role of Edith Penrose, a witch turned ghost hunter who runs a successful paranormal investigation agency. Set in 1983, Edith roams the haunted streets of London, tracking down and exorcising restless spirits.

Her world is turned upside down when her brother disappears and a mysterious new lead promises clues to his whereabouts. Edith's journey begins with a visit to a remote Scottish island in the hope that a gifted psychic can provide some much-needed answers.

Four years of development have gone into the new project. If Ghost Town turns out to be as atmospheric, creepy and challenging as The Room VR, then we can expect a real VR highlight. Unfortunately, we don't know exactly when the VR game will be released, but the studio says it's coming soon.

Code discovered in a recent Google Play update indicates the company may soon roll out support for XR headsets on its Android app store, which would mark a decisive shift in the competitive landscape.

As reported by Android Authority, code in version 43.3.32-31 of the Google Play app contains mention of “XR headset,” including a new headset icon that ostensibly indicates whether an app works with the supported device.

Google has technically hosted XR games on Play in the form of Cardboard apps since 2014, which use Android smartphones as ad hoc VR displays—something that was big in kickstarting user interest in the early days of consumer VR, but not so much in the day of standalone headsets like Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro.

The addition of a dedicated section in the Play store and official device support however points to something bigger than Cardboard, or even its now-defunct Google Daydream platform, which the company abandoned in 2019.

Developed by Myron Games (Deisim), Underworld Overseer is a villain-protagonist adventure where you play as the god-like Overseer fighting human invaders across an 18-level campaign. You're given many tools for defending your lair like placing traps and casting spells, alongside creating specific rooms that cater to your minions' individual needs, like farms for your food supply.

We enjoyed Underworld Overseer in our preview earlier this year, praising the "impressive" presentation with enjoyable strategic gameplay. Underworld Overseer's presentation already shows an impressive amount of polish. The cel-shaded visuals look great on Quest 3 for both NPCs and environments, even when you move up close. What I've seen so far looks very promising, and I'll be keeping an eye out for the full release. Underworld Overseer arrives today on the Meta Quest platform and Steam.

Battery-electric vehicles (BEV) are now hitting an all-time record of 22.2% market share in the state – more than twice the national BEV market share.

The MeganeX Superlight 8K isn’t called “Superlight” for a random reason: it is actually small and light. I was impressed by how this headset can be so small and lightweight yet so powerful in terms of resolution. I would like to make a comparison with the Bigscreen Beyond, but I haven’t had the occasion to personally test a Beyond, so I can not do that, sorry.

MeganeX claims on its website that the headset has a special design that guarantees no pressure on the face because there is a halo headband that you put around your head that takes care of keeping the headset still on your head. Then the headset is just rotated with a flip-up design so that it gently lies in front of your face. This claim is true, but it carries its own problems. The demo unit was clearly overused, so the flip-up juncture was a bit loose and the headset so was not stable in front of my eyes. I had to keep it still with one of my hands, which not only was uncomfortable, but also resulted in the occlusion of the SteamVR sensors, which made my display often become grey. So the idea on paper is good to deliver a headset that is not uncomfortable on your face and that you can flip up when you have to take a pause from VR, but in reality, it works only as much as the hinge properly does its job, and if over time it becomes loose, then you have a problem.

The headset features two little dials on the bottom, one on the left and the other on the right corner so that you can adjust the focus for both eyes. I performed this operation pretty fast, closing before one eye and then the other one. After that, I had the whole scene in focus.

Visuals

Given the high resolution of the display, visuals are where I concentrated my attention the most during the hands-on. Let’s start from the bright side of them: the resolution is literally incredible and so are the colors. I could perceive no screen door effect (SDE is almost gone already on Quest 3, and this headset has 3x of the pixels of the Quest) and everything looked very crisp. Thanks to the OLED displays, the colors were very bright and the black pixels truly looked black and not greyish like on LCD headsets. I was impressed by this, the visuals were amazing. For comparison, the BigScreen Beyond has 2560 x 2560 pixels per eye, so in this category of compact headsets, the MeganeX SuperLight 8K, with its 3552 x 3840 pixels per eye, truly shines.

But I couldn’t avoid noticing some issues, though: first of all, there was a constant Barrel distortion I noticed in the imagery. The first unit I tried was showcasing a 360 video and this effect was very noticeable (maybe there was something wrong with the device or the video playback). The second unit I tried was showing a 3D environment I could navigate in and the effect was much less evident, but if I attentively looked at some straight lines, I could perceive it. Then the lenses gave a good image in the center, but the periphery of them showed clear aberrations signs, mostly spherical, but also a little bit on the chromatic side. As long as I looked straight, things were fine, but if my eyes started wandering around too much, the effect was evident. The eye box didn’t look too small. Regarding the FOV, I honestly didn’t pay much attention to it, but it looked a bit less than the one on the Quest 3 headset I usually employ. I guess FOV is perceived as a pain point for this headset because it is the only specification not listed on the website.

Germany's car giants were once the envy of the world, but now find themselves facing a myriad of threats.

BMW and Mercedes-Benz have issued profit warnings in recent weeks amid slumping EV sales in Europe and brutal competition in China, while Volkswagen is also facing a reckoning.

On Wednesday VW said net profit for the three months to September 30 plunged by almost 64% to 1.57 billion euros, with a 30% decline to 12.8 billion euros for the first nine months of the year.

A 4% rise in vehicle sales in North America and 16% growth in South America for the nine months was offset by a 1% decline in western Europe and a 12% slide in China — VW's biggest market outside Europe. It now expects to deliver about nine million vehicles this year, or about 240,000 fewer than 2023.

Volkswagen is seeking to cut billions in costs after issuing two profit warnings in three months. On Monday, its top union official said the company was planning factory closures in Germany for the first time, along with pay cuts and layoffs. The Golf and Polo maker is one of Germany's biggest employers with about 300,000 workers

Until now, the AR glasses have only been available to developers in the US. However, Snap announced that the latest version of its technological marvel will soon be available in Europe — but only for developers and creative professionals for the time being. I was invited by Snap Inc. to test the Spectacles 5.

The first thing you notice when you put on Spectacles 5 is the ultra-bright 2000 nits clear display. Thanks to the electrochromatic lenses, which can be darkened via the menu automatically, the headset can also be used outdoors in bright daylight — a really impressive feature!

Although the colors and resolution are far from perfect, the glasses already offer probably the best AR display available for the money.

Operation is entirely via precise hand tracking and gestures, which works surprisingly well after a short period of familiarization. The technology only reaches its limits in fast-paced rhythm games.

Two cameras in the front control all 6-DOF tracking and detect your surroundings. Two invisible infrared cameras on the bottom of the headset can also detect hands outside the central field of view. This feature is ingenious and will become the gold standard for everyday devices.

By the way, Snap offers spectacle wearers the option to insert their own prescription clip inserts into the inside of the Spectacles. However, I have also seen people pull the Spectacles over their own glasses if they were small enough. I don't know if and how much this can cause scratches.

California made climate history in 2020 when the state became the first in the nation to create an electric vehicle mandate, which eventually became a key part of the Biden-Harris climate agenda. Now the state wants to do the same for motorcycles, despite the problems the EV push has faced over the past four years.

California made climate history in 2020 when the state became the first in the nation to create an electric vehicle mandate, which eventually became a key part of the Biden-Harris climate agenda. Now the state wants to do the same for motorcycles, despite the problems the EV push has faced over the past four years.

The California Air Resources Board will vote next week on a proposal that will require motorcycle manufacturers to make 10% of the bikes they sell zero-emissions by 2028 and 50% by 2035. The rules, according to CalMatters, will also include restrictions on gas-powered motorcycles’ emissions.

If the rules are adopted, manufacturers would be forced to produce enough electric bikes to receive enough credits.

The credits could be bought and sold, so a manufacturer could reduce the number of electric bikes it sells if it buys enough credits from another manufacturer who has some available. The agency predicts that more than 280,000 electric or hydrogen motorcycles will be sold in California by 2045.

While CARB believes that forcing manufacturers to produce bikes will automatically sell those bikes, the EPA’s tailpipe emission standards were passed with the same expectation. However, waning consumer demand has left dealerships with more EVs than they can sell, and many automakers are walking back their commitments.

CalMatters quotes a few motorcycle enthusiasts, and they all express concerns about the plan. They say the short range of 100 miles, lack of charging infrastructure, and lack of an engine rumble make the E-bikes. The nonprofit publication notes that e-motorcycles make up 1% of all motorcycle sales, and motorcycles of all types make up less than 0.5% of all vehicle miles traveled in California.