Automotive

October 8 will mark two decades since the second DARPA Grand Challenge, the competition the Pentagon launched in 2004 to fast-track unmanned ground vehicles for military use, dangling cash prizes to draw engineers and hackers. The 2005 edition culminated in a big step forward: for the first time, autonomous vehicles successfully finished the desert course,…

Last updated: October 3, 2025 The heaviest R&D job losses this year cluster in hardware and semiconductors, with sizeable single events at Dell, Microsoft and Intel’s Oregon sites, while biopharma cuts are smaller per event but frequent as firms triage pipelines. Federal labs have also reduced staff amid budget uncertainty, including the CDC, NIH and…

Months after nationwide showroom protests over Elon Musk’s now-ended role in President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, a little over four months, from Jan. 20 to May 30, 2025, and a 13% year-over-year slump in Q2 deliveries to 384,122 vehicles, Tesla is trying to pivot the narrative to development-led profits. The board is asking shareholders…

Impel, an automotive AI company, announced a public showing of its LLM and the release of Archias, an expert model designed to advance AI safety standards on Tuesday.  Impel built its custom verticalized LLM in partnership with AWS. The LLM is designed for the automotive retail environment. The model will replace the existing third-party LLM…

This week in R&D, we’re watching emerging technologies for how we secure critical assets, treat chronic disease and discover novel materials. Highlights include a new self-driving lab that accelerates materials discovery tenfold and a collaboration between the British and French governments to protect GPS from jamming. In the AI space, Mira Murati, a former OpenAI…

In this week of research and development (R&D) updates, we see early signs of demand for clean energy plummeting after emerging as one of the fastest growing sectors among industries, with jobs in wind and solar power benefiting from that upswing. The shift comes as new legislation threatens to reshape America’s energy landscape with far-reaching…

The R&D World Index (RDWI) slid this week even as several companies rolled out big new R&D projects. For the week ending May 9, 2025, the index closed at 3,773.11, down 3.85% (–151.24 points). Sixteen of the 25 members fell. Eli Lilly & Co. was the biggest laggard (–10.81%) despite breaking ground on a huge…

Stellantis N.V. and Boston-based Factorial Energy have advanced their joint solid-state battery program with the internal validation of a 77-amp-hour, automotive-sized pouch cell built on Factorial’s FEST (“Factorial Electrolyte System Technology”) platform. The milestone clears an early technical hurdle for the partners as they work toward commercial deployment in future Stellantis electric vehicles. The newly…

[Updated on April 10 with new facts and a more robust model with essentially identical results to the prior version.] After the trade conflict dramatically escalated on April 9, new U.S. tariffs pushed cumulative rates on many Chinese goods toward 104%. Separate “reciprocal” tariffs targeting the EU and other trading partners were set to follow.…

Get ready for potential sticker shock: President Trump’s new 25% tariff on imported cars and auto parts, kicking in from April 2025, aims to bolster U.S. manufacturing but is poised to drive up vehicle prices and squeeze automakers’ pocketbooks. R&D budgets could be in the crosshairs as auto companies, many dealing with a sluggish market,…

This past week, some of the world’s biggest R&D players doubled down on growth — Johnson & Johnson pledged $55B in U.S. investments, and AstraZeneca announced a new global R&D center in China — while others tightened their belts. Audi and Siemens both revealed significant job cuts, underscoring the shifting priorities in a fast-paced market…

With tech shake-ups, automotive layoffs, and healthcare funding cuts all recent themes, the R&D World Index dipped nearly 4% last week. Specifically, the R&D World Index (RDWI) for the week ending March 14, 2025, closed at 3,951.90 for the 25 companies in the RDWI. The Index was down -3.76% (or -154.52 basis points). Five RDWI…

Why care about F1 tech? Not only does the engineering behind these roughly 1,000-horsepower machines find its way into everyday cars, but the rapid-paced R&D in Formula 1 often drives cross-industry breakthroughs in materials science and high-efficiency manufacturing methods. R&D professionals can observe how F1 teams iterate prototypes in days rather than months. The field…

The R&D World Index (RDWI) for the week ending March 7, 2025, closed at 4,106.42 for the 25 companies in the RDWI. The Index dipped –1.37% (or -56.96 basis points). Seventeen RDWI members gained value last week from 0.08% (Stellantis NV) to 12.51% (Volkswagen AG). Eight RDWI members lost value the previous week from -0.25%…

As the global race for clean energy solutions intensifies, two prominent U.S. universities are uniting to promote a technology often overlooked in the electric vehicle revolution: hydrogen-fueled internal combustion engines (ICEs). The University of Michigan and the University of California, Riverside, have announced the establishment of the Hydrogen Engine Alliance of North America (H2EA-NA), a…

The R&D World Index saw a slight gain of 0.22% last week, closing at 4,163.38 points. Corporate actions focused heavily on new manufacturing investments, with Apple doubling its Advanced Manufacturing Fund and Eli Lilly announcing plans for four new U.S. drug manufacturing plants. Technology companies continued their push in advanced computing, with Amazon and Google…

The R&D World Index saw a slight gain last week amidst a landscape of innovation and cost-cutting within global industries. Pharma giants Eli Lilly and Merck announced a partnership with Purdue University to launch the Young Institute Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Consortium, aimed at bolstering domestic pharmaceutical production. However, automotive supplier Continental AG revealed further job cuts…

The R&D World Index saw gains this week, driven partly by a surge in Intel’s value amid significant developments across various sectors. Honda and Nissan have ended their merger talks, citing concerns over autonomy and decision-making, while GlaxoSmithKline consolidates its vaccine R&D in Cambridge, MA. Novartis is set to reacquire rights to a blood clot…

The Chinese EV giant BYD is shaking up the automotive market by breaking cost barriers in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Its new “God’s Eye” technology — known technically as the DiPilot system — brings Level-2 autonomous features as standard equipment on EVs priced under $10,000. While Level 2 autonomy (SAE-defined) requires driver supervision (For context,…

Researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) are studying how electric vehicles (EVs) could be charged while in motion, addressing concerns like “range anxiety” and the growing demand for EV infrastructure. Their work, published in the journal IEEE Access, focuses on Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer (DWPT) roadways, which use transmitter pads embedded…

Welcome to our weekly briefing on R&D headlines shaping technology, energy, manufacturing, and more. In this edition, we continue to explore how the Chinese startup DeepSeek is potentially rewriting AI training assumptions, the potential ripple effects on global energy demand, new tariffs upending automotive supply chains, plus highlights from the Idaho National Laboratory, Procter &…

A coalition led by the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM), Hyundai Motor, and Kia has developed “the world’s first engine capable of directly injecting ammonia into the combustion chamber at high pressure.” The coalition reported overcoming longstanding challenges in power stability and emissions. Direct High-Pressure Injection: The engine eliminates the need for gaseous…

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—yet AI patents aren’t exploding the way you might expect. Could it be that innovators are keeping their best secrets out of the USPTO’s public view? “When we look at AI patents, we see machine learning going down, likely because AI is absorbing it. It’s not necessarily that there’s less AI activity;…

Welcome to our weekly briefing on R&D headlines for January 27, 2025. In this edition, we cover the disruption from China’s DeepSeek reasoning AI model R1, which punches above its weight class. Ostensibly trained on a shoestring budget, it outperforms OpenAI’s o1 by some measures, according to DeepSeek’s technical report. The company also has publicly…

Welcome to our weekly briefing on R&D headlines that are shaping technology, healthcare, and industry. In this edition, we explore NVIDIA’s global expansion plans (plus a sharp rebuttal to new U.S. AI policy), Google’s ambitious Gemini user goals, a big-ticket pharma acquisition, tighter U.S. chip controls, and more. Keep reading for the latest developments and…