Every car company is running the same experiment: how much can you take out before somebody feels it. Today's five stories are five answers, and what separates the good from the bad is not the size of the cut. It is whether the engineer knew in advance what the cut would cost.
Rivian's team spent their Munro Live segment describing removals. A layer of body structure gone, folded into the battery pack. Aluminium castings gone, replaced by stamped steel for roughly half the cost and less weight. Air suspension, hydraulic roll control and semi active dampers gone from the front end. What stayed was the thing the company believes a Rivian buyer actually notices, which is how the car drives. Whether that judgement holds is the R2's entire risk.
Lexus made cuts too, and Throttle House found them inside an hour. No heated rear seats, no ventilated rear seats, no third climate zone, in a car priced around eighty thousand Canadian dollars that now has to cover for the departed LS. The chassis work is good and the hosts say so repeatedly. The removals just landed in the wrong place, which is the seat where the person paying for the car might be sitting.
Ferrari is the inverse case: a company adding back something that has no reason to exist. There is no gearbox in an electric car, so the Luce got paddles that shift torque instead, and a sound its engineers insist is extracted from the motors rather than invented. That is cost added for no functional purpose beyond Ferrari's belief that the sensation is the product.
Then the two stories about what cannot be cut at all. Swift Solar's chief executive explained on Still TBD that a new solar technology has to clear performance, lifetime and cost, and that the last two take a decade of unglamorous work no press release can shorten. The ABC's China report showed the other end of that: two decades of policy, supply chain and factory spending that nobody skipped, and now, by the ABC's count, almost three quarters of the world's EVs.
What to watch over the next six months is which Western launches subtract well. The ones that trim structure and material and leave the cabin alone will sell. The ones that leave a cold back seat in an eighty thousand dollar car get reviewed the way this one just was.
Bottom line: cost cutting is not a failure of ambition, it is the main event, and the companies that win the next two years will be the ones whose engineers can name out loud exactly what they removed and why nobody will miss it. Rivian can. Lexus, on this evidence, cannot.
Original editorial commentary drawing on third-party video reporting. Figures and claims referenced here are as presented in those sources and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.