A Day in the Life of the Technological Revolution

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 December 16, 2025.


This post is a summary of articles I read, or read about, today.


Ford takes a $19.5 billion write-off on its electric vehicle assets. It will take over a joint project it has with a South Korea battery company to only produce large-scale industrial batteries. Ford's electric F-150 pickup truck doesn't seem to have caught on with America's macho truck customers. Big surprise. (Personal comment. Assuming the U.S. continues to ban Chinese cars, probably the growth segment of the U.S. EV market will be hybrid SUVs and maybe hybrid sedans.)

Ford has a "skunk works" operation in California that is redesigning and reengineering how internal combustion and electronic vehicles are designed and assembled.

Volkswagen (VW) closes a German assembly plant. This is the first time this has happened in the company's history. The faculty will become a research and development center, probably working with VW's new R&D center in China.

General Motors plans to lay off or furlough 3,400 employees because of lagging EV sales.

Descriptions of American startups trying to develop new technology for batteries - cheaper, lighter, and less reliant on Chinese lithium-ion batteries and rare earth metals.

The company that produced the Roomba declared bankruptcy. It founder, a veteran in robotics, does not believe that humanoid robots will be practical for a long time.

Chinese EV companies are targeting Brazil as a new market.

Commentary on the effects of President Trump's new politics of eliminating all subsidies and tax breaks for buying EVs, combined with loosening average mileage requirements that pressured companies to produce EVs.

Fake AI-generated videos all over social media. Weak attempts by social media companies to identify fakes. Many are political. The example was a fake news program on people on food stamps selling them for cash, which is illegal.

An article in Foreign Affairs magazine arguing that AI-generated stories on social media are threatening American democracy.

Personal. Big increase in the cost of auto insurance and repairs has convinced me to sell my car and rely on local taxis and Uber. My children in San Francisco and Phoenix use robotaxis.

Investment in data centers and their contents will run in the trillions of dollars. But the big tech companies are offloading the risks and costs of constructing and supplying these centers onto various forms of private credit and sketchy intermediaries. These companies, in turn, are selling the debt to insurers, pension funds, endowment funds, and financial advisers. Also, the big tech companies are not signing long-term leases to back (finance) the debt, but rather a series of shorter-term, renewable leases. We've seen an earlier version of this before - financing the sub-prime mortgage market in the 2000s. (Personal comment. If Nvidia and other chip companies continue to rapidly develop faster and more powerful chips, as they have in the past, then some of the data centers with older chips and supporting technology may not be cost competitive or run at a lower capacity rate. If so, they might have trouble meeting their debt obligations.)

Tesla's profits fell in the third quarter, despite higher unit sales in the U.S. as consumers bought EVs to beat the elimination of tax credits.

The company also earned less money from clean-air credits that other carmakers had to buy to comply with environmental rules. Revenue from that source fell 44 percent, to $417 million during the quarter. President Trump and Republicans in Congress gutted clean-air rules, freeing established carmakers from paying Tesla for credits, which had often accounted for a large share of the company’s profit. Elon Muck once again said that the future of the company was in producing batteries, autonomous EVs, robotaxis, and humanoid robots.


For background on the robotics industry, and a few (hopefully) satirical comments about our future with robots, see

Robotics. "It's alive"






  

 

 

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