Video First

Henrik Fisker, a widely respected Danish automotive designer, joined the battle for electric vehicle dominance in 2007 with his first endeavor, Fisker Automotive, but failed. The company ended with his resignation and bankruptcy in 2013. Now the designer-turned-CEO is back and determined to get it right.In 2016, he came back with a new company bearing almost exactly the same name and logo. The new plan: Instead of making high-end sedans with six-figure price tags, target the mass market with a midrange, midsized electric…

Norway boasts the highest electric vehicle adoption rate in the world. Some 82% of new car sales were EVs in Norway in 2023, according to the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV). In comparison, 7.6% of new car sales were electric in the U.S. last year, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates. In the world's largest auto market, China, 24% of new car sales were EVs in 2023, according to the China Passenger Car Association. "Our goal is that all new cars by 2025 will be zero-emission vehicles," said Ragnhild Syrstad, the state…

The total addressable market for new and used car sales in the U.S. is estimated to be somewhere between $2.5 trillion and $3 trillion, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.And e-commerce behemoth Amazon is attempting to do what insiders say no one has been able to do yet: bring a seamless online shopping experience to a complex and highly regulated industry.Last month, the company officially began its pilot program to allow a small number of Hyundai dealers to sell vehicles through the Amazon platform…

In November, CNBC visited Apple's campus in Cupertino, California, to get a look inside one of the company's many chip labs. CNBC also got a rare chance to talk with the senior vice president of hardware technologies, Johny Srouji, and Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, about the company's push into the complex business of custom semiconductor development, which is also being pursued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.Unlike traditional chipmakers such as Nvidia and Intel, Apple is not…

The U.S. is running out of miners. More than half the nation's mining workforce, about 221,000 workers, is expected to retire by 2029, according to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, and the number of candidates willing to fill those slots is shrinking."Our workforce is aging," said Bold Baatar, chief executive of copper at Rio Tinto. "There is a lot of baby boomers that will be looking to retire or are already retiring, and we're continuing to rely on their expertise."At the same time, demand for rare…

Copper mines like Rio Tinto's Bingham Canyon mine on the outskirts of Salt Lake City are on the frontline of America's transition to clean energy.Global demand for copper, a major component of electric vehicles, is expected to grow from 25 million metric tons to nearly 49 million metric tons by 2035, according to S&P Global.But miners face a multitude of issues as they ramp up production, including addressing the concerns of local stakeholders, mitigating environmental damage and operating in remote regions of the…

New York City's yellow taxis have been a symbol of the metropolis for decades. But taxi drivers only make up about 10% of the total driver landscape in the city — giving way to Uber and Lyft.While this is in large part due to consumer choice and the ease of ordering a ride-share car, it's also a result of the tough work conditions taxi drivers have faced. They work an average of 9.5 hours a day, 6 days a week, according to the National Library of Medicine. In addition, to driving a taxi, drivers have to own or lease a…

Demand for lithium, a key component for electric vehicle batteries, is expected to surge, from 500,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate in 2021 to three to four million metric tons in less than a decade, according to McKinsey & Company.Albemarle, the world's top producer of this critical metal and the operator of mines in Australia, Chile and the U.S., says it plans to bring another domestic lithium mine online by 2027 — Kings Mountain in North Carolina. It already operates Silver Peak in Nevada.related investing…

As the automobile took over America, so did parking lots and parking garages.There are between 700 million and 2 billion parking spaces in America — or put another way, between 2.5 to seven spots for every registered vehicle. About 10% of that inventory is paid parking. And for decades, it was a pretty stable business.But low barriers to entry make it a crowded, fragmented industry. Competition is fierce. Insiders say demand for paid parking is either flat or declining in nearly every market, except for health-care…

Lithium-ion battery performance has hit a plateau in recent years, but a breakthrough in technology promises new heights are soon to be in sight.Batteries made with silicon instead of graphite — the commonly used material in battery anodes today — have been shown to enable significantly higher energy density and faster charging. "Silicon anode has 10 times higher energy density than graphite," according to CEO Kang Sun of Amprius Technologies, one of the companies working on the technology. "We've demonstrated that we can…