BMW and Daimler Announce They’ve Shit the Bed in Autonomy Partnership

If you’re following the autonomy race closely, you’ve probably already heard that BMW and Daimler released a joint statement ending their autonomy partnership yesterday. The memo was one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while, because it sums up the state of autonomy software at legacy automakers so well. I wanted to pick […]

SEC Investigating Whether BMW Faked Sales

William Boston in Berlin and Mike Colias in Detroit bring news of fraud in a story for the Wall Street Journal: The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into whether German luxury car maker Bayerische Motoren Werke AG manipulated sales figures, according to people familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal Fraud? The regulator is […]

BMW Cuts Bonuses to Save for EV Transition

New from Christoph Rauwald on Bloomberg: BMW AG will slash bonus payments and expand working hours for some employees in Germany as the luxury-car maker grapples with the costly shift to electric and self-driving vehicles. Bloomberg Costly? I thought they would fund the transition with all their profits on polluting cars? While BMW’s efforts lack the bite […]

Dissecting Tesla’s Gigafactory Berlin Anouncement

Today at Das Goldene Lenkard, the German new car-model award ceremony, Tesla made a surprise announcement: the location for the European Gigafactory will be in the Berlin area. Leaving aside the announcement itself, the video of the ceremony itself feels surprising and historic in a lot of ways –– so let’s pick it apart together […]

BMW Uses Elon Musk’s Face to Scare Employees

Check out this gem from the American Financial Review posted by Twitter user @AfMusk. Inside a bright auditorium at an abandoned airfield near Munich, rows of men and woman gaze at images flashing by on a giant screen: a Mercedes sedan; Porsche and Jaguar SUVs; the face of Elon Musk. “We’re in the midst of […]