Formula 1 returned to the Spa-Francorchamps circuit for the Belgium Grand Prix this weekend. This ribbon of tarmac in the Ardennes is one of the sport's historic venues, featuring in the first F1 season way back in 1950. But as yesterday's race showed, the current F1 machinery is utterly ill-suited to this dramatic venue.

As we saw at Suzuka in Japan earlier this year, a 2026 F1 battery is able to power the race car's electric motor for only a few seconds a lap; for much of the rest of the lap, the energy-starved cars have less power going to their rear wheels than in the junior F2 feeder series.

The best race track in the world

For many, including much of the current F1 grid, Spa is considered perhaps the planet's greatest race track. In fact, both Spa and the Belgian Grand Prix predate the F1 world championship, with its first race held in 1922. Back then, the circuit was a 9-mile loop of public roads, taking in the towns of Malmedy and Stavelot before returning to Francorchamps. In the postwar years, the layout shrank slightly to 8.7 miles (14.1 km) and was ferociously fast, with average lap speeds of up to 150 mph (240 km/h)—and ferociously dangerous, given cars with huge amounts of power and minimal concessions to safety.

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When Lucid introduced the Air electric sedan in late 2021, the first Air Dream Edition I tested packed over 1,100 hp (820 kW) and carried a $180,000-plus window sticker. It's easily the most powerful street car I've tested; the only vehicle I've driven with more power was a purebred race car with a third the mass, and it was on a proper track. Its combustion engine was also about 1,000 times louder than the Air, helping to remind us that "combustion" really does mean explosion after explosion.

For Lucid's second act, the company debuted the Gravity electric SUV last year, and I've just tested the 2026 Gravity Touring, which starts at about $82,000 in the US, including the required destination charge.

My test model carried a bevy of options, including a 22-speaker audio system, the Comfort and Convenience package, third-row seating, a Dynamic Handling package (combining rear-wheel steering and three-chamber air suspension), a luxury seating package (bundling Nappa leather and massaging and ventilated front seats), and special metallic paint.

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© Jim Resnick

For year after year, more Americans have bought Toyota RAV4s than anything that isn't a pickup truck. The brand's reputation for solid reliability has kept it ahead of SUVs from other automakers, and the nation's embrace of SUVs and crossovers relegated the poor old Camry to near-bottom of the top 10. For the latest generation—the sixth since 1994—all RAV4s are electrified. Most will use a mix of internal combustion engine and brakes to recharge their hybrid powertrains' traction batteries, like the millions of Priuses out there on the roads. But there's also a plug-in hybrid EV option, with an all-new powertrain with some noticeable improvements compared to the outgoing PHEV.

Just as Toyota's designers and engineers have tried to improve on the previous RAV4 with each successive generation, their counterparts in the powertrain department have similarly been iterating and improving the combination of electric motors and piston engine. Under the hood there's a naturally aspirated 2.5 L four-cylinder engine that operates on the Atkinson-cycle, aided by variable valve timing on both intake and exhaust sides.

The engine, which on its own generates 186 hp (139 kW) and 172 lb-ft (233 Nm), is connected to one of two electric motors under the RAV4's hood, as well as to Toyota's electronically controlled variable ratio transmission.

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© Jonathan Gitlin

At the end of last September, electric vehicle adoption in the US began to crater. That followed the abolition of the IRS clean vehicle tax credit as part of a series of moves by President Trump and congressional Republicans to undermine energy efficiency and pollution control measures. Until then, buyers of some EVs could claim up to $7,500 from the purchase as part of the IRS Section 30D credit, assuming the EV was below the price cap and the buyer earned less than the income cap. Since then, EV sales have dried up, and automakers have canceled entire product lines as they face the reality of a US government that has soundly rejected moving past oil dependence.

But EV buyers in California aren't quite as unlucky as their peers in the other 49 states and the District of Columbia. Yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new EV rebate into law for residents of the Golden State.

As Newsom said in a statement:

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Volkswagen Group is doing well with electric vehicle sales in its home region, but costly tariffs and eroding market share in China and North America have been hurting it badly. Europe's largest automaker, which also owns brands including Audi, Porsche, Skoda, and Lamborghini, has seen its profit margins evaporate, and yesterday the company's supervisory board was presented with a plan to ameliorate that. An expected call for factory closures and redundancies wasn't included—at least not in VW Group's public statement—but according to Reuters, the measure failed anyway in a 12-7 vote.

Unlike most automakers, worker unions are extremely powerful at the VW Group. Half of the 20 seats on the supervisory board are appointed by worker councils. Another two seats are spoken for thanks in part to the company's partial ownership by the German state of Lower Saxony—currently held by that state's minister of education and minister-president. So while profit has been important, it's not the only thing that matters to the decision-makers.

Over the years, there have been lengthy fights over any suggestion of redundancies. Lately, VW Group and its unions spent months in negotiations in 2024 before finally agreeing to a plan to cut 35,000 jobs by 2030.

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Anyone who has followed the aftermarket automotive performance industry for long enough can tell you just how dramatically it has changed over the past few decades. What once required mechanical tinkering and a lot of know-how can now be done in mere minutes via an electric control unit (ECU), which can extract significant boosts in horsepower and torque from naturally aspirated, turbocharged, or supercharged engines.

In some ways, though, the process has become much more difficult.

Just ask Alabama-based Audi Performance & Racing, more prominently known as APR. As modern vehicles become increasingly software-driven and OEMs continue to tighten security, the company has had to work harder each year to offer ECU tuning that delivers more power while staying within factory parameters for overall reliability. It's a far more arduous process now than it was in the early aughts, when my own B5-generation Audi S4 was still fresh on the market.

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Ruf has come quite a long way from its roots as a tuner of Porsches. The German company (no doubt familiar to those of us in the PlayStation generation as Gran Turismo 2's workaround because someone else owned the video game rights to the real 911) has evolved past that stage and now builds cars of its own design. And today at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England, it fired up a brand-new engine for the first time in public.

In fact, the German authorities have considered Ruf a distinct manufacturer (as opposed to a tuner) for some time—the BTR in 1983 was the first to carry a Ruf vehicle identification number rather than the one that Porsche originally stamped on the chassis. Then in 2007, it revealed the CTR3. The Porsche DNA was clear, but the CTR3 was mid-engined, unlike the rear-engined 911, and featured a frame chassis developed by Ruf together with Multimatic.

More recently, it has been building its own all-carbon monocoque chassis for cars like the SCR and Rodeo, which otherwise look like 964-era Porsche 911s. Those still use horizontally opposed six-cylinder engines, but for its next generation of cars, it seems Ruf wanted something a little different.

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Robotaxi companies have thrived in California, where the good weather, enthusiasm for technology, and sophisticated labor force have supported their growth for nearly two decades. But a delayed decision from a state regulatory agency is now slowing Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo, the US leader in driverless robotaxi service.

The holdup means that Waymo isn’t yet allowed to expand into parts of Northern and Southern California. And, in an upside for riders, Waymo still isn’t able to charge California passengers for rides in its new vehicle, a pale blue Chinese-made car it’s calling the Ojai, which started picking up riders last month.

If Waymo continues to operate these vehicles in its driverless ride-hail service, they could be gratis until the end of September and perhaps beyond. (The company continues to charge for rides in its Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis, which make up the majority of its fleet.)

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Two California teens have learned that Waymo's robotaxis can and will enforce their rider rules on misbehaving passengers. It probably seemed like a marvelous jape—ride around in the back of a robotaxi getting drunk and doing drive-bys, shooting stuff with gel beads. And perhaps it was, until that robotaxi and Waymo worked out what was going on. Waymo then stopped the car and alerted the San Mateo Police, who showed up and detained the troublemakers, according to a post on the department's Facebook page.

"After calling us and stopping the car, we were able to safely remove both subjects and determined they were shooting Orbeez from the car as they sipped on afternoon libations while being chauffeured around town in the driverless vehicle," the police wrote.

This isn't the first instance of a Waymo robotaxi snitching on misbehaving passengers. According to Reddit, last year two men in Los Angeles were reported to the police for drinking inside a robotaxi.

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To varying degrees, each form of motorsport combines sport, entertainment, and technological development. As Ars has explored, there are valuable lessons that companies can learn from competition, particularly when the pressure is as intense as Formula 1. If you asked me last month, I would likely have said that when it comes to historic racing, it's almost all about the sport and entertainment, with precious little tech development.

But that was before I spoke with Matt Faulks, executive innovation director at Lola Cars, about the company's new run of T70s. The original T70 debuted in 1965, and Lola built more than 100, which in the latter half of the 1960s proved effective in short races like the Can-Am series as well as endurance events like Le Mans or Daytona. Latterly, T70s have proved popular among the historic racing crowd, and as Lola rebuilds itself after being saved in  2022, it's joining some of the other storied manufacturers by digging into its archive. Lola will have 16 new cars, configured either for historic racing complete with the necessary FIA homologation papers as the T70S, or as a UK road-legal version, the T70S GT.

But it's the use of materials that makes the new T70S particularly interesting.

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Formula 1 returned to what is a home race for most of the teams on the grid this past weekend with the British Grand Prix. Yet again this season, we saw the fastest car not win the race, as reliability has been a problem. But racing giveth and racing taketh away, and the beneficiary of one driver's bad luck was another driver who really needed that win. Perhaps the bigger story, though, was the unfulfilled expectation that we'd see a late-race restart after the safety car came out on lap 48 of 52. An on-screen message told commentators and viewers this would be the case, but it was displayed in error, and what had been an entertaining race ended as something of a damp squib.

Silverstone, like many of Britain's race circuits, was a World War II airbase before being demobbed, which means it's quite flat and can be rather windy. It's also pretty fast even in its current layout (which was changed in 2010), with corners that are among the best places in the world to watch an F1 car change direction. There were worries that the new cars would find their hybrid power units starved of energy part-way round the track, and in qualifying, the cars were limited to recovering and deploying just 6.5 MJ across a lap, compared to the 8 MJ per lap allowed in the sprint and main race.

That energy limit in qualifying was about right—unlike at Suzuka in Japan, where we had the rather pathetic sight of cars slowing down before the fast 130R corner, drivers in qualifying looked to be at the limit through corners like Copse, Maggotts, and Becketts.

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Bentley is preparing to add a fourth model to its rarified lineup, and today we know what it will be called: the Torcal. The carmaker has been working on its first electric vehicle for a while now; it was seen testing in the Arctic Circle late last year, giving us a sneak peek at the interior. A few weeks ago, another example was spotted at the Nürburgring.

Speculation had been mounting over what Bently would call its first battery EV—although sleuths spotted a European and UK trademark filing for Torcal earlier this year, the absence of a related US trademark filing led Car and Driver to suggest the car might be badged the Bentley Barnato instead. This referenced Woolf Barnato, who raced Bentleys with great success in the pre-war period, including three wins at the 24 Hours of Le Mans (1928, 1929, and 1930).

El Torcal de Antequera Nature Park in Andalusia, Spain. Credit: Matthias Balk/picture alliance via Getty Images

Instead, Bentley continues a convention it has used for the Bentayga, Bacalar, and Batur, taking a name from a natural landmark—in this case, El Torcal de Antequera, a spectacular collection of limestone rock formations in Spain. When the automaker noted that the name is also derived from the Latin "torquere"—the root from which the modern word torque also traces back to—that seems to be a clue that the Torcal will use an electrified powertrain, as these provide immense amounts of effortless torque.

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The temptation with a car like the Czinger 21C is to treat it as a collection of extreme specifications, and to be fair, it’s certainly not lacking in that department.

At its most basic level, the carbon-fiber-bodied 21C is a hybrid hypercar built around a bespoke 2.88-liter twin-turbocharged flat-plane crank V8 that revs to a searing 11,000 rpm. This power plant is matched up with a three-motor electric system—one electric motor drives each front wheel while a third serves as a crank-driven starter-generator. Combined output is rated at 1,250 hp (932 kW) and 691 lb-ft (937 Nm) of torque.

A seven-speed automated manual transaxle handles gear changes, chosen in part for its low mass and ability to tolerate high torque loads without the packaging penalties of a dual-clutch system. Tipping the scales at under 3,700 lbs (1,678 kg) with fluids, the 21C VMax is capable of hitting 60 mph (97 km/h) from rest in 1.92 seconds on its way to an 8.6 second quarter mile and a 253 mph (378 km/h) top speed, while the road course-focused 21C High Downforce model recently secured lap records at no less than five different California racetracks during a thousand-mile (1,600 km) road trip.

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If the car-buying public had qualms about Tesla, it appears to have gotten over them. This morning, the automaker released its sales and production numbers for the second quarter of the year. And if you're a fan of activist CEO Elon Musk, it's good news, as April, May, and June were great months for the company. In total, Tesla sold 480,126 EVs during Q2, a 25 percent year-over-year increase.

As expected, the Model 3 and Y make up the vast majority of sales; despite its size, Tesla still only mass-produces these two models, which accounted for 467,762 deliveries, a 25.2 percent increase compared to Q2 last year. The remaining 12,364 vehicles—a 19 percent increase compared to the same quarter in 2025—were a mix of the now-discontinued Models S and X and the controversial Cybertruck, which is only sold in North America and the Middle East.

Better news for Tesla fans is that the company appears to be getting a handle on its overproduction problem. As we noted when it published its Q1 2026 results in March, Tesla had a growing inventory problem, repeatedly building more cars each month than it could sell. But total production for Q2 was 451,758 cars; this is a 10 percent increase year over year but also nearly 30,000 fewer cars than it sold this quarter.

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Did you know the average new vehicle in the US grew an inch (25 mm) wider and 22 inches (558 mm) longer between 2013 and 2023? That's probably obvious to anyone who steps foot outside these days, and it's a trend that we ought to reverse. Bigger cars might make their occupants feel more secure, but they invariably need more energy to get where they're going. And with f=ma being what it is, bigger vehicles tend to leave a lasting and deleterious effect on anything unlucky enough to be the other party in a collision. That makes today's tale a rather bittersweet one, because the Volvo EX30 could be the perfect antidote.

It's a compact and efficient electric crossover with a tiny carbon footprint but no compromises on safety, and it would be perfect for the current moment, except that Volvo recently decided to stop importing the car to the US. With the order books now closed, once the ~1,200-odd cars left in inventory are gone, they're gone.

After teasing us for a while, Volvo finally showed off the EX30 for real in 2023. At the time, the headline news was its price: $34,950 for the rear-wheel drive version before any tax credit. That would have made it one of the cheaper EVs available for sale in the US, but with Volvo's premium badge attached. That was before geopolitics got involved.

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© Jonathan Gitlin