Letting Your ASS Hang Out

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It’s been a busy week, so today’s installment is a massive double-feature to make up for the lack of post on Tuesday. Let’s get into it.

In This Issue

• Toyota Is Blitzing EVs

• Chad Around Town

• Feeling Like a Rockstar

• Automatic Stop Start (ASS)

• iPod Your Aston Martin

Toyota Is Blitzing EVs

Next week is Toyota’s semi-regular Toyotathon event. It’s not actually called Toyotathon, but I don’t know anyone in the business that refers to it by its official name. It’s an event where journalists are brought in to see everything the company is working on.

Ahead of that event, Toyota is dropping new and updated product announcements this week. So far, they’ve been electric vehicles. As of the time of this posting, Toyota will officially have more EVs on sale next year than Ford will (assuming you don’t count the E-Transit). That’s a bit shocking.

First up, Toyota announced it’s bringing the updated bZ4X to the United States. Great. But as part of that announcement, the company said that it would change the name in the United States to just bZ. It will no longer have a name that sounds like the model of a Brother fax machine.

When I saw that, I thought that maybe Toyota was going to give up on other EVs in the U.S. When the bZ4X was first announced, we expected a bZ5X and a bZ3X to eventually come along. Dropping the naming scheme made me concerned for the EVs in the United States.

But have no fear, because just a day later Toyota announced the return of the C-HR (Coupe-High Rider) as an all-electric crossover. Plus, just this morning, Toyota announced the bZ Woodland, the off-road-ish focused version of the bZ that’s extremely similar to the Subaru Trailseeker that debuted in New York.

There was a time, not long ago, where members of the media (including myself) criticized Toyota for its lack of EVs. We expected compliance-only vehicles (and the first bZ4X felt very compliance-y) and that’s it. But it seems like Toyota is ready to start showing the world it can build capable and competent EVs for the United States market.

I haven’t driven these cars yet, but I’ll admit that my original thoughts might be inaccurate. Because I think electrification is the future, regardless of what the current administration thinks, it’s reassuring to see Toyota getting in on the action in a meaningful way.

Hopefully the tariff situation doesn’t throw a wrench into everything.

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Chad Around Town

Last week, I attended a backgrounder event at General Motors’s Warren Technical Center to learn about the company’s LMR battery development. The General has been working on the Lithium Manganese Rich chemistry for a few years now, and it claims to have cracked the code.

My full coverage of this event appeared at ArsTechnica, and if you’re interested in learning more, you should check it out there.

Feeling Like a Rockstar

Earlier this week, I was in Savannah, Georgia, driving the new Hyundai Ioniq 9 electric three-row SUV. I’m sworn to secrecy about how it drives until the 20th of this month, but I wanted to you about an experience I had while driving it.