The General Services Administration, the agency that manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down its entire network of electric vehicle chargers, according to a report in The Verge.
The GSA reportedly operates a network of hundreds of EV chargers with a total of 8,000 plugs that can be used to charge vehicles owned by the government and by federal employees. A source told The Verge that federal workers will receive guidance next week to shut those chargers down, with some regional offices already told to take their chargers offline.
Earlier this week, Colorado Public Radio obtained an internal email stating that charging stations at the Denver Federal Center would be shut down as they are “not mission critical.”
More broadly, President Donald Trump’s administration has been aggressively cutting government agencies and pulling back federal support for renewable energy, including for an EV charging infrastructure program that previously provided millions to Tesla.
TechCrunch has reached out to the GSA for comment.
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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is firing nearly half of a small government team that regulates autonomous vehicles, the Washington Post reported.
The firings are part of a broader 10% reduction at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as a result of firings of probationary workers and buyout offers, the Post reported, citing anonymous sources.
The firings come ahead of Tesla’s planned robotaxi launch in Austin later this year.
The NHTSA has investigated Tesla several times due to accidents that happened while Autopilot, Tesla’s advanced driver assistance software, was engaged. Some of the agency’s probes into Tesla are still open. In October, the NHTSA opened a new investigation into Tesla’s so-called “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” software after four crashes in low visibility situations were reported, one of which resulted in the death of a pedestrian.
Tesla’s FSD is said to be an advanced driver assistance system that can do automated driving in urban and highway environments. Musk’s goal is to improve the camera-based software to the point of full autonomy by this summer, a goal that he has said is right around the corner for years.
Aside from firing people who worked with crash test dummies or helped states get safety grant funding, DOGE eliminated three of about seven employees in a new office dedicated to overseeing autonomous vehicles, reports The Post.
The Post cited its sources as saying they believe these cuts will affect the federal government’s ability to understand the safety case behind Tesla’s vehicles.
Other companies will also be affected by NHTSA’s approach to regulation, including Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox. Both companies are facing their own investigations for safety incidents related to their autonomous driving software.
TechCrunch has reached out to NHTSA and DOGE to learn more.
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Rivian said Thursday it plans to launch a hands-off version of its driver assistance system for highway driving “in a few weeks,” and an “eyes-off” version in 2026.
The hands-off system will let Rivian compete with companies like Ford and General Motors, which have both launched similar systems in the past few years. (Ford has named its system BlueCruise, while GM has SuperCruise.) Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (supervised) system, which is not fully autonomous despite its name, requires users to keep their hands on the wheel.
The launch comes as Rivian is forecasting another challenging year, driven in large part by uncertainty around what changes the Trump administration might make to regulatory policy. The company did post its first positive gross profit in the fourth quarter of 2024. That was buoyed by a company-wide cost-cutting effort in 2024 but also an increase in software and services revenue.
Rivian’s autonomy ambitions were front-and-center when the company broke stealth in 2018. At that time, CEO RJ Scaringe was talking about dreamy scenarios where Rivian owners could start a hike and have their vehicles drive autonomously to meet them at the finish. But autonomy took a back seat in the years since — at least publicly — as Rivian focused on completing its IPO, and launching and scaling three different vehicles.
Rivian has now posted back-to-back years of building and delivering around 50,000 vehicles, and has some breathing room — thanks to a major deal with Volkswagen finalized late last year — to focus on rolling out features like a hands-off system.
Rivian is training its driver assistance platform using what’s known as “end-to-end” training, a similar approach to what Tesla is doing with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software. Instead of writing out hard-coded rules, Rivian uses data from the cameras and radar sensors to train the models that power its driver-assistance system.
Much like Ford and GM, Rivian is starting out by allowing the hands-off feature to only be used on highways. Scaringe said Thursday that, once the eyes-off version launches in 2026, Rivian will slowly allow the driver assistance system to expand beyond other types of roads.
“Ultimately, the end state, we think hands-free, eyes-off needs to be available essentially everywhere,” Scaringe said.
To reach that point, Scaringe said Rivian is evaluating a “variety of really creative ways we can access a substantial amount of GPUs without having to deploy the capex ourselves” in order to train its self-driving models — a notable break from how Tesla is spending billions of dollars on GPUs.
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Rivian’s cost–cutting measures have gotten it a lot closer to profitability, but the company is warning that 2025 could still be a challenging year – especially because of the whorl of uncertainty caused by the new Trump Administration.
The company announced Thursday its fourth quarter and full-year 2024 financial results, and along with it, shared plans to deliver between 46,000 and 51,000 EVs across 2025. Rivian cautioned that “changes to government policies and regulations, and a challenging demand environment” could affect those results, according to the shareholder letter the EV maker released alongside its results.
Rivian didn’t specify what those changes might be, but Trump said on the campaign trail that he was inclined to find a way to kill the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. Friend of the Trump administration Vivek Ramaswamy has also called for the $6.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy to be clawed back. That loan was finalized three days before Trump took office.
Rivian spent much of 2024 on a cost-cutting tear. It laid off 10% of its workforce in February, and rolled out simplified, cheaper-to-make versions of its flagship EVs – the R1T pickup and the R1S SUV – in June. The company ended up changing 600 parts on those vehicles to drive down manufacturing costs, while also revamping its electric architecture and software user interface.
Changes like those helped Rivian notch $170 million of positive gross profit in the final quarter of 2024 – though $60 million of that came from software and services.
Rivian reported $1.7 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, a 32% increase from the same period in 2023. The bulk of its Q4 revenue — about $1.5 billion — came from the sale of 14,183 vehicles as well as $299 million from the sale of zero-emissions regulatory credits to automakers. For the year, Rivian reported $325 million in revenues from the sale of regulatory credits.
Revenue from software is increasingly playing an important role. Rivian generated $214 million from software and services in the fourth quarter, double the amount from the same-year ago period. Rivian reported $484 million in revenue for 2024 from software and services.
Rivian may be in the business of building and selling EVs, but its future is also largely pinned to software, namely through a lucrative joint venture with Volkswagen Group.
Revenue from software was primarily driven by charging and subscriptions fees, repair and maintenance services, and new vehicle electrical architecture and software development services provided by the joint venture, according to Rivian.
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Electric trucking startup Nikola is hoping to sell what remains of its whole business as early as April, lawyers for the company told a judge Thursday during the first hearing of its bankruptcy case in Delaware.
The lawyers claimed Nikola already has at least three interested buyers (who they did not name) and that the company hopes to solicit other bids, with a submission deadline likely in late March.
If Nikola can’t find a buyer willing to take on the whole business, the company will pivot to selling off its assets in pieces in an attempt to satisfy more than $1 billion in liabilities. (Nikola claims between $500 million and $1 billion in assets.)
The hearing was held just one day after Nikola filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announced it would no longer operate as a standalone business, bringing an end to a company that has been plagued with drama after its founder Trevor Milton was convicted on multiple counts of securities fraud.
Nikola had been trying to sell itself for months, some of the early bankruptcy filings and lawyers’ statements show.
In a sworn declaration, CEO Stephen Girsky said Nikola worked with Goldman Sachs and solicited 22 potential acquirers in the truck manufacturing and transportation logistics spaces. Two “international automotive
manufacturers expressed interest” in a transaction, according to Girsky. One dropped out. Nikola also exchanged “various term sheets” with the other until that party also walked away in late 2024.
After that failed, Nikola worked with law firm Houlihan Lokey to solicit 24 financial investors to “gauge potential interest in both a standalone investment and an investment alongside a potential strategic partner.” The feedback, though, was that it would require too much money to turn Nikola’s nascent business around, according to Girsky.
In December 2024, Nikola wound up in discussions with another “international vehicle manufacturing company” about a potential acquisition, going through what Girsky described as “substantial due diligence” over a four-week period. But the prospective buyer “ultimately walked away,” which Girsky noted was a “disappointing conclusion.”
Now in bankruptcy, Girsky told the court Nikola is in “active discussions with at least three” parties interested in buying the company outright, and that they’re also marketing some of its highest-value assets for possible sales, such as the factory in Coolidge, Arizona.
Chazz Coleman, a lawyer representing Nikola in the bankruptcy case, said he expects the case and the sale process to be “uneventful and smooth.”
Nikola will continue to solicit interest until around March 27, the first proposed date for a bid submission deadline, Joshua Morse, another lawyer representing Nikola, said Thursday. Depending on how that process goes, there could be an auction held around March 31. A hearing on any potential sale would likely happen in the second week of April, with the transaction closing shortly after.
Morse also said during the hearing that inbound interest from potential buyers has only escalated since the company filed for bankruptcy protection.
“It does tend to crystallize the market,” bankruptcy judge Thomas Horan replied.
There was minimal disagreement during the hearing, mostly around the speed of the bankruptcy case. Nikola wants it to move quickly because it only has around $47 million in cash. Timothy Fox, a trial attorney for the United States Trustee’s Office, which oversees bankruptcy proceedings, said he wants to make sure he has enough time to meet with Nikola’s creditors.
No decision was made during the hearing on timing, but Nikola found support for a speedy process from an odd party: a group of shareholders that sued the company more than four years ago.
The plaintiffs in that case were granted class action status just last month, and Nikola agreed to settle the lawsuit shortly before filing for bankruptcy. Those plaintiffs have the fourth-largest creditor claim in Nikola’s bankruptcy thanks to that settlement, totaling around $13 million.
Joe Barsalona, a lawyer representing the class action plaintiffs, said Thursday that, given Nikola’s dwindling cash balance, “it is imperative to our client that this case move rapidly.”
“We believe it is a melting ice cube,” Barsalona said.
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