Just a few short years ago, General Motors and Ford were all in on electric vehicles, spending billions of dollars on those efforts. Now the two biggest American automakers are hardly talking about EVs with their investors. TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, to analyze the last seven years of GM and Ford quarterly earnings calls and found that both companies are talking about EVs at a lower rate than they did before the pandemic. This shouldn't shock anyone who's followed the news over the last two years. Both companies have altered, delayed, or outright abandoned plans for new EV models, prompting layoffs and scaled-back factory plans. And while GM and Ford still sell EVs and have new models in their product pipelines, their collective focus has shifted, and it shows in the data. 'We've been very clear and consistent in communicating our view that EVs are the end game, the strength of our portfolio today, the loyalty of EV customers to the technology, awards we've won, our growing EV market share, and our commitment to continue investing in technologies like LMR (lithium manganese-rich) to improve profitability,' he said in an emailed statement....

Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for her contributions to robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. Awarded jointly by the Bavarian State Government and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, it is the most highly endowed award for technology and engineering in Germany. Rus accepted the prize on July 23 at the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residence. The selection committee cited four strands of her work: self-organizing robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired artificial intelligence. Together they describe a 30-year effort to build machines that hold up outside the lab, in conditions no one scripted in advance. That effort has arrived at a moment when physical AI has become a preoccupation for industry leaders and policymakers alike. When human-robot collaboration comes up, the examples tend to be household chores or the factory floor. Rus is working several orders of magnitude wider than that, developing algorithms and systems that put autonomous robots into transportation, agriculture, medicine, the home, and environmental monitoring. She is also a pioneer of soft robotics, where compliant machines manipulate the world more safely and adapt to it more readily than rigid ones can....

Enterprise AI startup Freehand has raised $75 million in a Series B funding round to scale its autonomous AI agents, which manage complex supply chain spend and back-office operations for enterprise companies. Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners co-led the financing, which included participation from Nexus Venture Partners and former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. With its latest capital injection, San Francisco-based Freehand has now raised $100 million. The deal comes as tariffs, taxes, and immigration policy strain the outsourcing model that ran supply chains for decades. Freehand's fundraise also lands amid an uptick in venture funding to supply chain and logistics-related startups, with 2026 on pace to deliver the strongest year since 2022, per Crunchbase data, with $6.2 billion raised by such companies in the first half of this year across 350 deals. Freehand was founded in February 2024 by Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, two enterprise logistics veterans who previously co-founded and recently sold Pando, a SaaS transportation management system (TMS) and procure-to-pay system of record for large enterprise logistics....

Critics compared the wedge-shaped Luce with a Nissan Leaf and said Chinese EVs would outperform it while undercutting it on price. Even former Ferrari chair Luca Cordero di Montezemolo was among the haters. Ferrari's stock dropped 8% the day after the reveal. Their conclusion: The Luce would be a dud. Ferrari hit this year's sales target for the Luce in just two months, according to a report by the Financial Times. The automaker was hoping to sell just under 500 of the '555,000 ($630,000) EV, and based on previous reports, it sounds like at least 20% will make their way to China. That's not surprising, given that the Luce seems tailor-made for the Chinese market, which favors fast, sleek four-door EVs. Much of the internet's hate was directed at the Luce's styling, which hewed to some Ferrari norms while throwing others out the window. Appearance is subjective, and I've seen enough cars in my day to know that some designs don't translate well on-screen. Maybe seeing one in person tipped buyers into placing an order....