Class action claims Tesla favored visa holders to cut labor costs over Americans.
Lawsuit says Tesla hired 1,355 H-1B workers while laying off thousands of citizens.
Plaintiffs allege Tesla refused interviews after learning they did not need sponsorship.
The way Tesla hires and fires its workers is under fresh legal scrutiny. A proposed class action lawsuit filed against Tesla in San Francisco alleges that the automaker has violated federal civil rights law by favoring visa holders over American workers to reduce labor costs. The suit also claims Tesla has fired US citizens at disproportionately higher rates compared to foreigners working at the company.
Alleged Hiring Bias
According to the complaint, Tesla hired roughly 1,355 skilled workers on H-1B visas in 2024 while laying off more than 6,000 U.S. workers, “the vast majority” of whom are believed to have been citizens. Although it remains unclear how the plaintiffs plan to prove the alleged discriminatory practices, they are seeking damages on behalf of American citizens who were rejected after applying for jobs at Tesla, as well as those who were terminated.
Two plaintiffs are named in the lawsuit. The first, Scott Taub, says he had been dissuaded from applying for one job after being told it was only available for H-1B visa holders, and he did not receive an interview for a second job. The second plaintiff, human resources specialist Sofia Brander, said Tesla would not interview her for two jobs, even though she had twice been a contract employee.
Both Taub and Brander claim Tesla refused to hire them after learning that neither of them would need sponsorship for employment, suggesting that they were US citizens, reports Reuters.
Claims of ‘Wage Theft’
“While visa workers make up just a fraction of the United States labour market, Tesla prefers to hire these candidates over US citizens, as it can pay visa-dependent employees less than American employees performing the same work, a practice in the industry known as ‘wage theft’,” the lawsuit claims.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk himself once held an H-1B visa, and the complaint cites a December 27, 2024 post he made on X voicing support for the program.
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Musk wrote.
Geely re-hired former Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson to lead the automaker for two years.
Samuelsson says electrification is inevitable and will make cars cheaper within a decade.
He believes some Western automakers will fail to adapt and could disappear entirely.
Volvo may have walked back its commitment to transition to an all-electric brand by 2030, but despite that, it still acknowledges that EVs are the way forward, even if it takes the industry a little longer than originally forecast to make the shift.
As electrification begins to grow and brands from China establish themselves as serious global juggernauts, the Swedish automaker’s CEO predicts that some Western carmakers will collapse.
Since April, Volvo has been led by Hakan Samuelsson. The 74-year-old Swede had previously steered the carmaker for almost a decade but stepped down as boss in 2022, only to be brought back on a two-year contract to steer Volvo through choppy waters. Samuelsson believes that “there’s no turning back,” against the inevitable electric transition of the industry and that new dominant players will emerge.
Industry Upheaval Ahead
“The industry will be electric – there’s no turning back,” he told Bloomberg. “It may take a bit longer in some regions, but the direction is clear. In (about) 10 years, cars will all be electric and they will be lower cost. There will be new dominant players, exactly as Ford, GM, Toyota and Volkswagen were in the old world.”
“In the new world, there will be two or three very strong Chinese brands,” Samuelsson added. “That makes the room for the old ones tougher. So this will trigger a (wave of) restructuring. Some companies will adapt to new circumstances and survive. Others will not.”
An Electrified Future
To ensure it can survive, Volvo is investing heavily in battery-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, ensuring it can cater to demand for different electrified vehicles around the world. According to Volvo’s boss, plug-in hybrids will serve as an important “bridge until charging is everywhere,” noting that it “may take some more years beyond 2030,” before EVs can dominate, depending on customer demand and charging infrastructure.
Chinese Ties As An Advantage
Volvo is in a unique position among European car manufacturers as its parent company, Geely, is Chinese and among those brands at the forefront of the EV revolution as the owner of brands including Lotus, Zeekr, Polestar, and Lynk & Co. Samuelsson noted that “the stronger the Chinese car industry becomes, the more valuable our connection with Geely is.”
“Chinese brands are already more than half the market in China, and they are entering Europe. That puts pressure on Europeans and Americans, who are competing in a shrinking part of the market,” he added. “China, whether we like it or not, will be a very big player in the car industry in the future, not just in China.”
Musk’s 2025 CEO award sets an $8.5 trillion market cap by 2035.
Goals include $400B in annual EBITDA, 1M Robotaxis, and 1M AI bots.
He must stay at Tesla for up to 10 years before shares can vest.
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has built a reputation for sometimes making the impossible seem inevitable. From electric cars dominating global markets to rockets that land themselves with pinpoint precision, his record is extraordinary. Yet, even for someone with those successes, the 2025 CEO Performance Award just presented by Tesla’s board represents a challenge of unprecedented scale.
The plan could grant Musk over 423 million shares and a total compensation package of around $1 trillion. Of course, that only happens if Tesla hits some staggering milestones. The award is split into 12 tranches, each unlocking as Tesla hits specific market capitalization targets.
According to the SEC filing detailing the package, it goes as follows: the first tranche at $2 trillion, nine more at $500 billion increments, and the final two at $1 trillion each, culminating in a mind-bending $8.5 trillion valuation by 2035. Right now, Tesla is worth a little over $1 trillion.
A Trillion-Dollar Tightrope
Market cap is only a small piece of the story, though. Musk must also achieve at least $400 billion in sustained annual adjusted EBITDA and hit operational targets that push Tesla into uncharted waters. Among them: putting 1 million fully autonomous Robotaxis into commercial service and delivering 1 million Optimus AI bots.
Market cap is only a small piece of the story. Musk must also deliver at least $400 billion in sustained annual adjusted EBITDA, which is finance-speak for the company’s earnings from its core business before accounting for things like taxes, interest, or non-cash costs such as depreciation.
On top of that, he faces operational goals that push the company into uncharted territory, such as putting 1 million fully autonomous Robotaxis into commercial service and delivering another 1 million Optimus AI robots.
Today, Robotaxi still requires a safety driver in the car, so these targets aren’t theoretical; they demand breakthroughs in autonomy, scaling, and execution. It’s a package that forces a hard look at Musk’s history. He’s undeniably a visionary, but he’s often over-promised and under-delivered. He’s often been late, sometimes very late, about tech promises. That’s to say nothing of his political engagement.
Betting His Legacy On Autonomy
At the same time, if he can actually achieve everything laid out in this compensation package, it’ll be hard to argue that he’s not the defining innovator of our era. That said, the board has set up this award in a way that Musk can’t simply hit the goals and cash out.
He must remain at Tesla for the next 7.5 to 10 years. The goals must be met by 2035. Tesla said it “believes that Mr Musk’s vision and leadership are critical to nailing that execution”.
At this point, all of Musk’s promises of autonomy are all the more intriguing. His salary and perhaps his legacy rely on him being right about Tesla leading the autonomy charge sooner rather than later.
US authorities have apprehended at least 450 people at a Hyundai EV plant in Georgia.
ICE teamed up with Homeland Security, the FBI, DEA and Atlanta ATF to raid the facility.
Multiple South Korean nationals were detained in the operation at the new $7.6 bn plant.
US immigration authorities have detained at least 450 people in a raid at Hyundai’s new EV plant in Georgia. Atlanta’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed that it had apprehended hundreds of “unlawful aliens,” but South Korea has expressed concern over reports that 30 of the detained were its country’s nationals.
ATFA Atlanta said it had joined forces with various federal organizations including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to perform the operation on September 4. The search warrant executed cited allegations of “unlawful employment practices and other serious federal crimes,” the Department of Homeland Security said.
“Today @ATFAtlanta joined HSI, FBI, DEA, ICE, GSP and other agencies in a major immigration enforcement operation at the Hyundai mega site battery plant in Bryan County, GA, leading to the apprehension of [around] 450 unlawful aliens, emphasizing our commitment to community safety,” ATFA Atlanta wrote on X.
A High-Profile Target
The raid took place at the $7.6 billion, 3,000-acre EV site opened by Hyundai close to Savannah last year. Agents were focused on the construction zone for the new battery plant that’s scheduled to open in 2026, and Hyundai claims the operation didn’t impact the neighboring EV plant, which currently produces the Ioniq 5 and 9.
Though US authorities haven’t released names or details of the 450 people it detained at the site, Korean media reports that 30 are Korean nationals, something that has alarmed the country’s lawmakers.
Diplomatic Tension
“The economic activities of Korean investment companies and the rights and interests of Korean citizens must not be unfairly infringed upon during US law enforcement operations,” a spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry said in a statement. South Korea sent diplomats to the site, BBC News reports.
President Trump pledged to deport undocumented migrants in the run-up to his 2024 election victory, but he has also said he welcomed foreign companies to set up manufacturing businesses inside the US, as Hyundai has done.
Atlanta ATF/Hyundai
Today, @ATFAtlanta joined HSI, FBI, DEA, ICE, GSP and other agencies in a major immigration enforcement operation at the Hyundai mega site battery plant in Bryan County, GA, leading to the apprehension of ~450 unlawful aliens, emphasizing our commitment to community safety. #ATFpic.twitter.com/su6raLrLu6
Rivian cut 1.5 percent of its workforce, mainly in sales and service departments.
It faces a projected $100M revenue hit from changes in credit and policy rules.
Legacy companies no longer need to buy compliance credits from EV makers.
For as good as the Rivian R1T and R1S are, they do not sell at the volumes needed to ensure the brand can be profitable. This is why it is venturing downmarket, gearing up to release a more affordable model range known as the R2. And in preparation for its launch, Rivian is looking to slash costs, which means making layoffs.
Rivian confirmed that it recently cut about 225 jobs, roughly 1.5 percent of its 15,000 employees. The reductions targeted its commercial division, which oversees sales and service operations, and affected staff in both the United States and Canada.
Speaking with The Wall Street Journal, a company spokesperson confirmed that employees who were let go are being encouraged to apply for other open positions.
The Trump Effect
While the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House for his second term has been good news for some car manufacturers, including Stellantis with its gas-guzzling Dodge and Ram brands, things are proving to be more difficult for EV makers like Rivian.
As the US administration has eliminated fines for violations of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules, Rivian will no longer need to sell compliance credits to other automakers that would have fallen foul of these rules.
According to Rivian, this alone will cost it an estimated $100 million in revenue. That’s money that could have come in very handy in launching the R2, as well as other future models like the R3, R4, and R5.
Industry Pullback
Rivian is not the only EV maker recalibrating under the new landscape. Several other car companies have also been preparing to reduce production of their EVs, given that the federal EV tax credit will end on September 30. In Detroit, GM has temporarily laid off roughly 360 employees for a month to reduce GMC Hummer EV and Cadillac Escalade IQ production.
Tesla has claimed that all of its EVs built since 2016 contained full self-driving hardware.
A judge criticized Tesla for failing to demonstrate a true long-distance self-driving capability.
The ruling could open the door for multiple class action lawsuits against the automaker.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system, along with its ambitious claims, has repeatedly drawn the company into controversy, and it now faces yet another round. The company is once again facing legal trouble, this time after a U.S. District Judge in California ruled that Tesla must answer a certified class action alleging it misled drivers about the self-driving abilities of its vehicles. Tesla had argued the case should be dismissed, but the court disagreed.
The automaker has consistently promoted the idea that all vehicles it built since 2016 came equipped with hardware capable of full self-driving, albeit under supervision. These assurances were made across Tesla’s website, blog posts, social media channels, and directly by chief executive Elon Musk.
In practice, though, the cars have not lived up to those promises. Tesla also asserted that vehicles with its Full Self-Driving package would eventually deliver Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy, but neither has materialized.
Judge’s Assessment
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin noted that claims about Tesla vehicles lacking the necessary hardware for autonomous driving, combined with the company’s failure to “demonstrate a long-distance autonomous drive with any of its vehicles,” provide grounds for lawsuits brought by two groups of drivers.
Tesla does not engage in typical mass advertising, and the Judge noted that ordinarily, the channels it used to promote its self-driving hardware and software may not be “enough to establish a class-wide exposure for a traditional car manufacturer.”
However, she said it’s reasonable to infer that class members went to Tesla’s website for information on its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) technology. She added that thousands of people likely saw a claim on Tesla’s website from October 2016 to August 2024 that said its vehicles contained the hardware necessary for fully autonomous driving.
Tesla’s Defense
Tesla countered that it is unreasonable to assume all class members saw those statements. The automaker also argued there is no unified proof showing the claims were significant enough to influence purchasing decisions, according to Reuters.
The class actions in California include drivers who purchased the Full Self-Driving Package from May 19, 2017, to July 31, 2024, and who opted out of Tesla’s arbitration agreement, as well as drivers who purchased the package from October 20, 2016, to May 19, 2017.
In the US, Tesla’s arbitration clause requires all disputes to be resolved through arbitration rather than in court, unless a purchaser or lessee opts out of the clause within 30 days of buying or leasing a Tesla vehicle.
Dongfeng is selling its 50 percent stake in a long-running engine joint venture.
The partnership with Honda has operated since 1998 and built combustion engines.
The joint venture factory employs 827 workers and carries 3.3 billion yuan in debt.
Since the late 1990s, Honda has worked side by side with Dongfeng in China, producing hundreds of thousands of internal combustion engines through a long-standing joint venture.
That partnership may soon look very different, as Dongfeng has decided to sell its 50 percent stake, a move that reflects the sharp decline of traditional engine sales in China and a growing push toward electric vehicles.
Dongfeng officially listed its stake on the Guangdong United Assets and Equity Exchange earlier this week. While no reserve price has been set, the listing carries a deadline of September 12.
Details in the filing show the joint venture held assets worth 5.4 billion yuan ($752 million) last year, along with debts totaling 3.3 billion yuan ($459 million). The factory tied to the venture employs 827 workers.
Pressure on Legacy Partnerships
Japanese carmakers like Honda have been feeling the squeeze from homegrown Chinese brands, many of which have surged ahead in producing innovative and competitive EVs. Dongfeng has faced a similar struggle, lagging behind rapidly expanding rivals such as BYD.
The company’s annual sales tell the story clearly, falling from 3.8 million vehicles in 2016 to just 1.5 million last year across both its own brand and joint ventures with Honda and Nissan.
It’s unclear what the next step for Dongfeng Honda will be. Honda may opt to buy out Dongfeng and bring its Chinese engine operation completely in-house, or it may hope for another local brand to step in for a new joint venture. For now, Honda’s automobile production joint venture partnership with Dongfeng remains intact.
Earlier this year, Honda introduced a new EV designed specifically for the Chinese market in collaboration with Dongfeng. At the same time, it also launched the GAC Honda GT through its other joint venture with GAC Group, showing that while the old engine-focused model may be fading, the EV era is already shaping the company’s next chapter in China.
Global EV sales up 27% in 2025 to 10.7M units, led by China and Europe.
North America up just 2% amid policy and incentive challenges.
China’s sales rate fell 13% from June to July, hinting at a slowdown.
In the USA, electric vehicle sales are suffering some major hurdles. Tariffs, dying incentives, and preconceptions contribute to a reduction in sales momentum. Despite all that, overall EV sales have increased compared to 2024. In fact, the latest data suggests that EVs are getting more popular not just in America but in most other major markets around the world.
RHO Motion specializes in EV supply chain research and insights and sales data are a key factor in its business. After studying the first seven months, it says the entire globe is buying electric vehicles at a higher rate than last year. That rate isn’t a measly basis point or two either – sales are up globally by 27 percent year over year.
EV Sales Jan-Jul 2025 vs 2024
Global: 10.7 million, +27%
China: 6.5 million, +29%
Europe: 2.3 million, +30%
North America: 1.0 million, +2%
Rest of World: 0.9 million, +42%
In total, 10.7 million EVs have been sold, the vast majority of which, specifically 6.5 million, in China. While that market is up 29 percent on its own, European EV sales are up 30 percent (2.3 M) over the same seven months in 2024. The “Rest of World” saw sales increase 42 percent up to 0.9 million. Notably, North America saw the least amount of growth (2 percent) with just 1 million sales.
Of the slower uptake west of the Atlantic, RHO Motion says that “North America’s growth has been muted so far in 2025, with the US facing policy headwinds and Canada seeing a slowdown. We expect a short-term lift in US demand ahead of the IRA consumer tax credit deadline in September, followed by a likely dip. Despite regional variations, the overall trajectory for EV adoption in 2025 remains strongly upward.”
Notably, that growth is seeing some signs of slowing. China’s sales rate fell 13 percent from June to July. It’s unclear how much of that is tied to suspect subsidy programs. Overall, it appears that every market outside of the USA is embracing EVs and hybrid technology. Whether or not that affects the U.S. auto industry is something we won’t know for quite a while.
Ford says its new generation of EVs will shake up the industry like the Model T did.
It simplified its EV platform to reduce weight and costs, and reimagined the build line.
Instead of traveling down one line, cars are built in three parallel lines that then merge.
The big news from Ford the past week was the announcement of the $30k electric pickup arriving in 2027, an EV that’s just the first of many coming in the next five years. But its engineers say the really big story is how they ripped up the rulebook on building EVs to come up with a production process that will leave rivals, and especially newcomers in the industry, floundering in its wake.
“I don’t think many legacy car manufacturers could pull off a project like this,” said Doug Field, Ford’s Chief EV, Digital and Design Officer. “And I don’t believe new electric vehicle startups will be able to keep up with our Ford engineers and manufacturing teams making this a reality.”
Ford’s Universal Electric Vehicle Platform was conceived by a small skunkworks team headed by former Tesla engineer Alan Clarke, who worked in near secrecy in California with a bunch of brains recruited from inside and outside of the automaker’s ranks.
The architecture the team created broke from Ford tradition in key ways. One is the use of unicasting, where large one-piece aluminum castings replace multiple welded panels on a current Ford vehicle. This technology – also being used or developed by other brands, including Tesla and Toyota – allowed the team to eliminate three-quarters of the parts, two-thirds of the welds, and half of the fasteners versus a traditional pickup. Another big leap that saves both time and weight is the removal of almost a mile (1.6 km) of wiring versus an older of Blue Oval’s EV.
Ford
But equally important is how these new-generation EVs will be produced inside Ford plants. Henry Ford is credited with revolutionizing the car industry by introducing a moving production line that ramped up efficiency and drove down cost. Now, though, the company is moving away from the idea of a single production line to what it calls a production tree.
Instead of vehicles moving down one track, they’ll start off on three parallel lines, one building the front, one the rear and the other the structural battery core. When each sub-section is complete the three lines converge and the EV is finished off, having spent far less time in build than a conventional car. Ford says these combined efficiencies – the platform and the production process – will help it compete with Chinese automakers.
“The Model T was affordable not because it was a thrifted version of other cars, but because brilliant minds took fundamentally new approaches to old problems,” said Doug Field. “That’s exactly what we set out to do in creating the Ford Universal Electric Vehicle Platform.”
Ford says the 2027 mid-size electric truck will be as quick as an Ecoboost Mustang and as roomy as a Toyota RAV4. It also promised a five-year cost of ownership that will be “lower than buying a three-year-old Tesla Model Y.” Images shown at the pickup’s announcement revealed the same platform could be used to create a diverse range of other vehicles from a two-door panel van to a three row SUV.
Mercedes’ boss says the EU should not set a date on the phase-out of ICE cars.
Ola Källenius thinks buyers should be incentivised to switch to electric vehicles.
He suggests better charging infrastructure, cheap electricity, and tax breaks.
Less than a month from now, Mercedes CEO will reveal the company’s new GLC EV at the Munich IAA and tell the world how this fast, long-range SUV with the retro-futuristic illuminated Benz grille will drive the three-pointed star into the 2030s. But separately, Ola Källenius is calling for an urgent rethink on EU legislation that will force buyers and carmakers to go electric by the middle of that decade.
“We need to do a reality check,” Källenius told Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper, referring to the EU rules that will effectively outlaw combustion-powered cars from 2035. “Otherwise, we’ll be driving full speed into the wall.”
Concerns over market readiness
Källenius is concerned that the European car market could collapse if lawmakers force EVs on buyers who aren’t ready for them. He believes customers will rush to buy the last remaining petrol and diesel cars in the years running up to the 2035 cut-off, and claims there are better ways to clean up the continent’s air without threatening entire nations’ economies.
“Of course, we have to decarbonize,” Källenius said, “but it has to be done in a technology-neutral way. We mustn’t lose sight of our economy. I wouldn’t set a specific date for the phase-out of combustion engine technology. An absolute target at a fixed time with draconian penalties won’t help.”
Instead, the 56-year-old German suggests more needs to be done to persuade buyers to make the shift of their own accord.
“Look at China. There, there’s no end date on this issue, no ban on any technology,” he told Handelsblatt. “Instead, low prices at charging stations and tax breaks provide strong incentives to buy all-electric cars. At the same time, however, unlike in Europe, various hybrid versions and combustion engines are permitted.”
Industry pushback grows
Källenius is pushing for a 2035 rethink not only as CEO of Mercedes, but in his new role as president of the European Automobile Industry Association (ACEA). And he’s not the only senior industry figure calling for the combustion ban to be overturned. Last year, BMW CEO Oliver Zipse declared the 2035 cutoff “unrealistic,” warning that it could increase European automaker reliance on Chinese batteries.
UK electric sports car startup Longbow has added some big industry names to its masthead.
Mike Flewitt, Michael van der Sande and Dan Balmer have experience at McLaren, Alpine and Lotus.
The company plans Speedster and Tesla-rivaling Roadster EVs starting at $84,000 from 2027.
Elon Musk’s long to-do list contains plenty of projects deemed more important than the long-awaited Roadster, which still has no firm ETA. But a British startup hopes to capitalize on that delay by launching its own Roadster EV, and it’s already snagged some high-level car industry execs to help make it happen.
Former McLaren CEO, Mike Flewitt, ex-Lotus Europe CEO Dan Balmer, and Michael van der Sande, whose resume includes stints at Lucid Europe, JLR’s special projects division, and as head of Alpine, have all joined the advisory board of Longbow. The company was co-founded by engineer Daniel Davey, who brings experience from Lucid and Tesla.
Two cars, one platform
Longbow is working on two similar cars built around the company’s own aluminium EV architecture, the first of which is scheduled to start production in the UK in 2027. Called the Speedster, it’s a two-seat, rear-wheel-drive EV with no windshield, a target curb weight of an incredible 1,973 lbs (895 kg), and a promised zero to 60 mph (97 km/h) time of 3.5 seconds.
Launching after the $110,000 Speedster is the related Roadster – and yes, that name is a deliberate dig at Tesla, whose own Roadster was originally mooted to carry a $250,000 price tag.
Costing just $84,000 if things go to plan, the removable-roof fastback is a tenth slower to 60 mph than the Speedster due to a 220 lbs (100 kg) weight penalty. Though even with the extra ballast, it still weighs less than a 15-year-old Lotus Elise, and half as much as most modern EVs.
“You have plans and you have ideas, but what you need to be able to do is sense check each of those with people who’ve done it before,” Davey told Autocar, explaining his rationale for bringing Flewitt, van der Sande, and Balmer on board.
Flewitt, who resisted calls for McLaren to produce an SUV and resigned abruptly in 2021, told the magazine he saw qualities in the Longbow cars that are no longer evident at other carmakers.
Veteran insight
“You look at [the Longbow] product, it’s a compact sports car; it’s built around driver engagement; it’s a good size; It emphasises lightweight,” Flewitt said.
“These are all the characteristics which, frankly, I feel are starting to be lost in the industry. And to see somebody coming in with leading edge technology, but with those attributes at the forefront, is quite novel, and it really stood out to me.”
In another galaxy not that long ago, conversations about contracting school transportation focused solely on the yellow school bus. Not anymore. Today’s discussions, while still centering on school buses, have evolved to include the growth of alternative vehicles such as vans, sedans and SUVs.
Many of these are operated by third-party companies with no previous school bus experience. Traditional school bus contractors also now offer this form of transportation, and that has led the industry to do something that is even more historic. As previously reported, the National Congress on School Transportation in May for the first time approved non-school bus recommendations. This month, I talk with the recent alternative transportation writing committee chair, Tyler Bryan.
He is the education associate for the Delaware Department of Education and de facto state director of student transportation. Bryan is also the president-elect for the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services, which organizes NCST.
He told me that this topic has been of great interest to him because Delaware, like all states, is grappling with alternative transportation for schoolchildren and how to provide training and oversight. A couple of states have strong laws or regulations, such as California’s inclusion of mandatory pre-employment drug and alcohol testing among the provisions that go into effect this month. But most states do not. Hence, the writing committee was formed at the behest of my good friend and renowned expert in transporting students with disabilities and preschoolers, Linda Bluth, TSD Conference tenured faculty emeritus and long-time magazine contributor.
The main issues discussed at NCST were driver credentialing, vehicle inspection and student behavior management, as the intent of the recommendations is to more align vans and the like with what is required to operate a school bus. These are much needed aspects of alternative transportation and reasons why recommendations needed to be made in the national school transportation specifications and procedures.
In the meantime, one of the vital aspects of alternative transportation that had not been addressed, at least to the liking of certified child passenger safety technicians I have spoken with, is the issue of child safety restraint systems on these alternative transportation vehicles. The NHTSA-sponsored, eight-hour, hands-on Child Passenger Safety on School Buses seminar that is presented again at STN EXPO West in Reno, Nevada, this month and returns to the TSD conference in Frisco, Texas, in November provides everything a student transporter or a child passenger safety technician needs to know about the differences with CSRS in school buses, compared to other vehicles.
The training also demonstrates how to properly and safely secure students in a variety of CSRSs, whether those are traditional rear- or forward-facing car seats for infants and toddlers, the various safety vests and harnesses that students with disabilities might need, or proper securement and support in wheelchairs.
CPSTs I’ve spoken with were at first dismayed that initial industry conversations on alternative transportation lacked focus on CSRS. In the run up to NCST, a NASDPTS paper on alternative transportation did not mention the need for training alternative transportation providers on correct CSRS usage (Indiana is the only state that requires CSRS for preschool children riding in school buses.) Those same CPSTs expressed relief when CSRS training did make it into the NCST proposal in Des Moines, Iowa, where state delegates approved it.
That was a win for the industry. It gives the guidance that alternative transportation companies as well as school districts need when increasingly transporting students with disabilities, out-of-district students, and preschoolers in non-school bus vehicles. Already we have seen proactive measures taken by providers when it comes to managing student behavior. EverDriven announced earlier this year it is requiring video cameras in all vehicles. Ostensibly in response to the CSRS inclusion in the national specifications, HopSkipDrive last month said it was offering new rider assistants and a “car seat program” in addition to wheelchair-accessible vehicles.
The new industry recommendations that give best-practice guidance on alternative transportation could be a defining moment in the industry’s evolution.You can bookmark that, literally. The updated National School Transportation Specifications and Procedures manual is expected to be available later this summer.
Editor’s Note: As reprinted in the July 2025 issue of School Transportation News.
Immigration officials questioned and detained contractors working on apartment buildings in Tallahassee, Fla., on May 29. Construction employs more immigrant laborers, many likely living here illegally, than any other industry, and the industry is starting to draw more attention — even in conservative states — as the Trump administration pushes for more deportations. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix)
As President Donald Trump sends mixed messages about immigration enforcement, ordering new raids on farms and hotels just days after saying he wouldn’t target those industries, he has hardly mentioned the industry that employs the most immigrant laborers: construction.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration is going after construction workers without legal status to meet its mass deportation goals — even as the country has a housing shortage and needs new homes built. A shortage of workers has delayed or prevented construction, causing billions of dollars in economic damage, according to a June report from the Home Builders Institute.
Almost a quarter of all immigrants without a college degree work in construction, a total of 2.2 million workers as of last month, before work site raids began in earnest. That’s more than the next three industries combined: restaurants (1.1 million), janitorial and other cleaning services (526,000) and landscaping (454,000), according to a Stateline analysis of federal Current Population Survey data provided by ipums.org at the University of Minnesota.
Within the construction industry, immigrant workers are now a majority of painters and roofers (both 53%) and comprise more than two-thirds of plasterers and stucco masons. U.S. citizens in construction are more likely to work as managers and as skilled workers, such as carpenters.
Many immigrant workers are likely living here illegally, although there are some working legally as refugees or parolees, and others are asylum-seekers waiting for court dates. There’s also a small number of legal visas for temporary farmworkers, construction workers and others.
The pool of immigrant workers Stateline analyzed were employed noncitizens ages 18-65 without a college degree, screening out temporary workers with high-skill visas.
About half of the immigrant laborers in construction are working in Southern states, including conservative-leaning Florida, North Carolina and Texas, where there is more building going on, according to the Stateline analysis. Another 584,000, or one-quarter, are in Western states, including Arizona, California and Nevada.
In recent months, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, has conducted construction worksite raids in Florida in Tallahassee and near Ocala, and in South Texas and New Orleans, as well as more immigrant-friendly California and Pennsylvania.
Roofers are right out there where you can see them.
– Sergio Barajas, executive director of the National Hispanic Construction Alliance
Roofers may have been the first targeted by new workplace raids because of their visibility, said Sergio Barajas, executive director of the National Hispanic Construction Alliance, a California-based advocacy group with chapters in five other states.
“That’s the first place we heard about it. Roofers are right out there where you can see them,” Barajas said. He added that all segments of construction work have been targeted for ICE raids, and that even some legal workers are not showing up for work out of fear.
“Six or eight weeks ago, I would have said we weren’t affected at all. Now we are. There’s a substantial reduction in the number of workers who are showing up, so crews are 30%, 40% smaller than they used to be,” Barajas said.
In residential construction, a system of contractors and subcontractors opens the door to abuses, said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center. Lopezlira said contractors hire workers, often immigrant laborers, for low-wage jobs and pay them in cash, to save money on benefits and make the lowest possible bid for projects.
“It becomes a blame game. The developers can say, ‘I hired this contractor and I thought he was above board and paying people a decent wage.’ And the contractors can say, ‘I rely on subcontractors,’” said Lopezlira. “It becomes a race to the bottom.”
In many places, residential construction draws more immigrant labor because of looser state and local regulations and lower pay. But in some states with weaker unions and rules that are less strict, such as Texas, the commercial construction industry also employs many immigrants who are here illegally.
Commercial construction labor costs are 40% lower in Texas than they are in large Northeastern cities where unions are more powerful, said David Kelly, a lecturer in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan.
“The large difference [in cost] suggests workers and their employers in some regions are not paying for income taxes, overtime, Social Security or unemployment insurance,” Kelly said in an email. “Since undocumented workers have limited employment options they may be more willing than others to accept these conditions.”
Despite political claims that Democratic policies result in immigrants taking jobs others need, noncitizen immigrant laborers were about 7% of jobholders nationally as of May — about the same as 2015, according to the Stateline analysis.
That share has hardly budged over the past 10 years, including in 2019 under the first Trump administration, dipping to 6% only in 2020 and 2021.
In construction, however, the share of jobs held by immigrant laborers has increased from 19% in 2015 to 22% in 2024, according to the analysis. Immigrant laborers have gotten more than a third of the 1.5 million jobs added between 2015 and 2024, as home construction reached historic levels.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with the full name of the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center and to clarify David Kelly’s remarks on regional labor costs. Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
On May 6, MIT AgeLab’s Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium, part of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, celebrated 10 years of its global academic-industry collaboration. AVT was founded with the aim of developing new data that contribute to automotive manufacturers, suppliers, and insurers’ real-world understanding of how drivers use and respond to increasingly sophisticated vehicle technologies, such as assistive and automated driving, while accelerating the applied insight needed to advance design and development. The celebration event brought together stakeholders from across the industry for a set of keynote addresses and panel discussions on critical topics significant to the industry and its future, including artificial intelligence, automotive technology, collision repair, consumer behavior, sustainability, vehicle safety policy, and global competitiveness.
Bryan Reimer, founder and co-director of the AVT Consortium, opened the event by remarking that over the decade AVT has collected hundreds of terabytes of data, presented and discussed research with its over 25 member organizations, supported members’ strategic and policy initiatives, published select outcomes, and built AVT into a global influencer with tremendous impact in the automotive industry. He noted that current opportunities and challenges for the industry include distracted driving, a lack of consumer trust and concerns around transparency in assistive and automated driving features, and high consumer expectations for vehicle technology, safety, and affordability. How will industry respond? Major players in attendance weighed in.
In a powerful exchange on vehicle safety regulation, John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, and Mark Rosekind, former chief safety innovation officer of Zoox, former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, challenged industry and government to adopt a more strategic, data-driven, and collaborative approach to safety. They asserted that regulation must evolve alongside innovation, not lag behind it by decades. Appealing to the automakers in attendance, Bozzella cited the success of voluntary commitments on automatic emergency braking as a model for future progress. “That’s a way to do something important and impactful ahead of regulation.” They advocated for shared data platforms, anonymous reporting, and a common regulatory vision that sets safety baselines while allowing room for experimentation. The 40,000 annual road fatalities demand urgency — what’s needed is a move away from tactical fixes and toward a systemic safety strategy. “Safety delayed is safety denied,” Rosekind stated. “Tell me how you’re going to improve safety. Let’s be explicit.”
Drawing inspiration from aviation’s exemplary safety record, Kathy Abbott, chief scientific and technical advisor for the Federal Aviation Administration, pointed to a culture of rigorous regulation, continuous improvement, and cross-sectoral data sharing. Aviation’s model, built on highly trained personnel and strict predictability standards, contrasts sharply with the fragmented approach in the automotive industry. The keynote emphasized that a foundation of safety culture — one that recognizes that technological ability alone isn’t justification for deployment — must guide the auto industry forward. Just as aviation doesn’t equate absence of failure with success, vehicle safety must be measured holistically and proactively.
With assistive and automated driving top of mind in the industry, Pete Bigelow of Automotive News offered a pragmatic diagnosis. With companies like Ford and Volkswagen stepping back from full autonomy projects like Argo AI, the industry is now focused on Level 2 and 3 technologies, which refer to assisted and automated driving, respectively. Tesla, GM, and Mercedes are experimenting with subscription models for driver assistance systems, yet consumer confusion remains high. JD Power reports that many drivers do not grasp the differences between L2 and L2+, or whether these technologies offer safety or convenience features. Safety benefits have yet to manifest in reduced traffic deaths, which have risen by 20 percent since 2020. The recurring challenge: L3 systems demand that human drivers take over during technical difficulties, despite driver disengagement being their primary benefit, potentially worsening outcomes. Bigelow cited a quote from Bryan Reimer as one of the best he’s received in his career: “Level 3 systems are an engineer’s dream and a plaintiff attorney’s next yacht,” highlighting the legal and design complexity of systems that demand handoffs between machine and human.
In terms of the impact of AI on the automotive industry, Mauricio Muñoz, senior research engineer at AI Sweden, underscored that despite AI’s transformative potential, the automotive industry cannot rely on general AI megatrends to solve domain-specific challenges. While landmark achievements like AlphaFold demonstrate AI’s prowess, automotive applications require domain expertise, data sovereignty, and targeted collaboration. Energy constraints, data firewalls, and the high costs of AI infrastructure all pose limitations, making it critical that companies fund purpose-driven research that can reduce costs and improve implementation fidelity. Muñoz warned that while excitement abounds — with some predicting artificial superintelligence by 2028 — real progress demands organizational alignment and a deep understanding of the automotive context, not just computational power.
Turning the focus to consumers, a collision repair panel drawing Richard Billyeald from Thatcham Research, Hami Ebrahimi from Caliber Collision, and Mike Nelson from Nelson Law explored the unintended consequences of vehicle technology advances: spiraling repair costs, labor shortages, and a lack of repairability standards. Panelists warned that even minor repairs for advanced vehicles now require costly and complex sensor recalibrations — compounded by inconsistent manufacturer guidance and no clear consumer alerts when systems are out of calibration. The panel called for greater standardization, consumer education, and repair-friendly design. As insurance premiums climb and more people forgo insurance claims, the lack of coordination between automakers, regulators, and service providers threatens consumer safety and undermines trust. The group warned that until Level 2 systems function reliably and affordably, moving toward Level 3 autonomy is premature and risky.
While the repair panel emphasized today’s urgent challenges, other speakers looked to the future. Honda’s Ryan Harty, for example, highlighted the company’s aggressive push toward sustainability and safety. Honda aims for zero environmental impact and zero traffic fatalities, with plans to be 100 percent electric by 2040 and to lead in energy storage and clean power integration. The company has developed tools to coach young drivers and is investing in charging infrastructure, grid-aware battery usage, and green hydrogen storage. “What consumers buy in the market dictates what the manufacturers make,” Harty noted, underscoring the importance of aligning product strategy with user demand and environmental responsibility. He stressed that manufacturers can only decarbonize as fast as the industry allows, and emphasized the need to shift from cost-based to life-cycle-based product strategies.
Finally, a panel involving Laura Chace of ITS America, Jon Demerly of Qualcomm, Brad Stertz of Audi/VW Group, and Anant Thaker of Aptiv covered the near-, mid-, and long-term future of vehicle technology. Panelists emphasized that consumer expectations, infrastructure investment, and regulatory modernization must evolve together. Despite record bicycle fatality rates and persistent distracted driving, features like school bus detection and stop sign alerts remain underutilized due to skepticism and cost. Panelists stressed that we must design systems for proactive safety rather than reactive response. The slow integration of digital infrastructure — sensors, edge computing, data analytics — stems not only from technical hurdles, but procurement and policy challenges as well.
Reimer concluded the event by urging industry leaders to re-center the consumer in all conversations — from affordability to maintenance and repair. With the rising costs of ownership, growing gaps in trust in technology, and misalignment between innovation and consumer value, the future of mobility depends on rebuilding trust and reshaping industry economics. He called for global collaboration, greater standardization, and transparent innovation that consumers can understand and afford. He highlighted that global competitiveness and public safety both hang in the balance. As Reimer noted, “success will come through partnerships” — between industry, academia, and government — that work toward shared investment, cultural change, and a collective willingness to prioritize the public good.
Building an underground tunnel for an aging Enbridge oil pipeline that stretches across a Great Lakes channel could destroy wetlands and harm bat habitats but would eliminate the chances of a boat anchor rupturing the line and causing a catastrophic spill, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Friday in a long-awaited draft analysis of the proposed project’s environmental impacts.
The analysis moves the corps a step closer to approving the tunnel for Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac. The tunnel was proposed in 2018 at a cost of $500 million but has been bogged down by legal challenges. The corps fast-tracked the project in April after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies in January to identify energy projects for expedited emergency permitting.
A final environmental assessment is expected by autumn, with a permitting decision to follow later this year. The agency initially planned to issue a permitting decision in early 2026.
With that permit in hand, Enbridge would only need permission from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy before it could begin constructing the tunnel. That’s far from a given, though.
Environmentalists have been pressuring the state to deny the permit. Meanwhile, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are trying to win court rulings that would force Enbridge to remove the existing pipeline from the straits for good.
Construction could have major short-term, long-term impacts
The analysis notes that the tunnel would eliminate the risk of a boat anchor rupturing the pipeline and causing a spill in the straits, a key concern for environmentalists. But the construction would have sweeping effects on everything from recreation to wildlife.
Many of the impacts, such as noise, vistas marred by 400-foot (121-meter) cranes, construction lights degrading stargazing opportunities at Headlands International Dark Sky Park and vibrations that would disturb aquatic wildlife would end when the work is completed, the report found.
Other impacts would last longer, including the loss of wetlands and vegetation on both sides of the strait that connects Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, and the loss of nearly 300 trees that the northern long-eared bat and tricolored bat use to roost. Grading and excavation also could disturb or destroy archaeological sites.
The tunnel-boring machine could cause vibrations that could shift the area’s geology. Soil in the construction area could become contaminated and nearly 200 truck trips daily during the six-year construction period would degrade area roads, the analysis found. Gas mixing with water seeping into the tunnel could result in an explosion, but the analysis notes that Enbridge plans to install fans to properly ventilate the tunnel during excavation.
Enbridge has pledged to comply with all safety standards, replant vegetation where possible and contain erosion, the analysis noted. The company also has said it would try to limit the loudest work to daytime hours as much as possible, and offset harm to wetlands and protected species by buying credits through mitigation banks. That money can then be used to fund restoration in other areas.
“Our goal is to have the smallest possible environmental footprint,” Enbridge officials said in a statement.
The Sierra Club issued a statement Friday saying the tunnel remains “an existential threat.”
“Chances of an oil spill in the Great Lakes — our most valuable freshwater resource — skyrockets if this tunnel is built in the Straits,” the group said. “We can’t drink oil. We can’t fish or swim in oil.”
Julie Goodwin, a senior attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental law group that opposes the project, said the corps failed to consider the impacts of a spill that could still happen on either side of the straits or stopping the flow of oil through the Great Lakes.
“My key takeaways are the Army corps has put blinders are in service to Enbridge and President Trump’s fossil fuel agenda,” she said.
Tunnel would protect portion of Line 5 running through straits
Enbridge has been using the Line 5 pipeline to transport crude oil and natural gas liquids between Superior, Wisconsin, and Sarnia, Ontario, since 1953. Roughly 4 miles of the pipeline runs along the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac.
Concerns about the aging pipeline rupturing and causing a potentially disastrous spill in the straits have been building over the last decade. Those fears intensified in 2018 when an anchor damaged the line.
Enbridge contends that the line remains structurally sound, but it struck a deal with then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration in 2018 that calls for the company to replace the straits portion of the line with a new section that would be encased in a protective underground tunnel.
Enbridge and environmentalists spar in court battles
Environmentalists, Native American tribes and Democrats have been fighting in court for years to stop the tunnel and force Enbridge to remove the existing pipeline from the straits. They’ve had little success so far.
A Michigan appellate court in February validated the state Public Service Commission’s permits for the tunnel. Nessel sued in 2019 seeking to void the easement that allows Line 5 to run through the straits. That case is still pending. Whitmer revoked the easement in 2020, but Enbridge challenged that decision and a federal appellate court in April ruled that the case can proceed.
Another legal fight over Line 5 in Wisconsin
About 12 miles (19 kilometers) of Line 5 runs across the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa’s reservation in northern Wisconsin. That tribe sued in 2019 to force Enbridge to remove the line from the reservation, arguing it’s prone to spilling and that easements allowing it to operate on the reservation expired in 2013.
Enbridge has proposed a 41-mile (66-kilometer) reroute around the reservation. The tribe has filed a lawsuit seeking to void state construction permits for the project and has joined several other groups in challenging the permits through the state’s contested case process.
Across a career’s worth of pioneering product designs, Doug Field’s work has shaped the experience of anyone who’s ever used a MacBook Air, ridden a Segway, or driven a Tesla Model 3.
But his newest project is his most ambitious yet: reinventing the Ford automobile, one of the past century’s most iconic pieces of technology.
As Ford’s chief electric vehicle (EV), digital, and design officer, Field is tasked with leading the development of the company’s electric vehicles, while making new software platforms central to all Ford models.
To bring Ford Motor Co. into that digital and electric future, Field effectively has to lead a fast-moving startup inside the legacy carmaker. “It is incredibly hard, figuring out how to do ‘startups’ within large organizations,” he concedes.
If anyone can pull it off, it’s likely to be Field. Ever since his time in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations (then known as “Leaders in Manufacturing”) program studying organizational behavior and strategy, Field has been fixated on creating the conditions that foster innovation.
“The natural state of an organization is to make it harder and harder to do those things: to innovate, to have small teams, to go against the grain,” he says. To overcome those forces, Field has become a master practitioner of the art of curating diverse, talented teams and helping them flourish inside of big, complex companies.
“It’s one thing to make a creative environment where you can come up with big ideas,” he says. “It’s another to create an execution-focused environment to crank things out. I became intrigued with, and have been for the rest of my career, this question of how can you have both work together?”
Three decades after his first stint as a development engineer at Ford Motor Co., Field now has a chance to marry the manufacturing muscle of Ford with the bold approach that helped him rethink Apple’s laptops and craft Tesla’s Model 3 sedan. His task is nothing less than rethinking how cars are made and operated, from the bottom up.
“If it’s only creative or execution, you’re not going to change the world,” he says. “If you want to have a huge impact, you need people to change the course you’re on, and you need people to build it.”
A passion for design
From a young age, Field had a fascination with automobiles. “I was definitely into cars and transportation more generally,” he says. “I thought of cars as the place where technology and art and human design came together — cars were where all my interests intersected.”
With a mother who was an artist and musician and an engineer father, Field credits his parents’ influence for his lifelong interest in both the aesthetic and technical elements of product design. “I think that’s why I’m drawn to autos — there’s very much an aesthetic aspect to the product,” he says.
After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University, Field took a job at Ford in 1987. The big Detroit automakers of that era excelled at mass-producing cars, but weren’t necessarily set up to encourage or reward innovative thinking. Field chafed at the “overstructured and bureaucratic” operational culture he encountered.
The experience was frustrating at times, but also valuable and clarifying. He realized that he “wanted to work with fast-moving, technology-based businesses.”
“My interest in advancing technical problem-solving didn’t have a place in the auto industry” at the time, he says. “I knew I wanted to work with passionate people and create something that didn’t exist, in an environment where talent and innovation were prized, where irreverence was an asset and not a liability. When I read about Silicon Valley, I loved the way they talked about things.”
During that time, Field took two years off to enroll in MIT’s LGO program, where he deepened his technical skills and encountered ideas about manufacturing processes and team-driven innovation that would serve him well in the years ahead.
“Some of core skill sets that I developed there were really, really important,” he says, “in the context of production lines and production processes.” He studied systems engineering and the use of Monte Carlo simulations to model complex manufacturing environments. During his internship with aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, he worked on automated design in computer-aided design (CAD) systems, long before those techniques became standard practice.
Another powerful tool he picked up was the science of probability and statistics, under the tutelage of MIT Professor Alvin Drake in his legendary course 6.041/6.431 (Probabilistic Systems Analysis). Field would go on to apply those insights not only to production processes, but also to characterizing variability in people’s aptitudes, working styles, and talents, in the service of building better, more innovative teams. And studying organizational strategy catalyzed his career-long interest in “ways to look at innovation as an outcome, rather than a random spark of genius.”
“So many things I was lucky to be exposed to at MIT,” Field says, were “all building blocks, pieces of the puzzle, that helped me navigate through difficult situations later on.”
Learning while leading
After leaving Ford in 1993, Field worked at Johnson and Johnson Medical for three years in process development. There, he met Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who was working on a project called the iBOT, a gyroscopic powered wheelchair that could climb stairs.
When Kamen spun off Segway to develop a new personal mobility device using the same technology, Field became his first hire. He spent nearly a decade as the firm’s chief technology officer.
At Segway, Field’s interests in vehicles, technology, innovation, process, and human-centered design all came together.
“When I think about working now on electric cars, it was a real gift,” he says. The problems they tackled prefigured the ones he would grapple with later at Tesla and Ford. “Segway was very much a precursor to a modern EV. Completely software controlled, with higher-voltage batteries, redundant systems, traction control, brushless DC motors — it was basically a miniature Tesla in the year 2000.”
At Segway, Field assembled an “amazing” team of engineers and designers who were as passionate as he was about pushing the envelope. “Segway was the first place I was able to hand-pick every single person I worked with, define the culture, and define the mission.”
As he grew into this leadership role, he became equally engrossed with cracking another puzzle: “How do you prize people who don’t fit in?”
“Such a fundamental part of the fabric of Silicon Valley is the love of embracing talent over a traditional organization’s ways of measuring people,” he says. “If you want to innovate, you need to learn how to manage neurodivergence and a very different set of personalities than the people you find in large corporations.”
Field still keeps the base housing of a Segway in his office, as a reminder of what those kinds of teams — along with obsessive attention to detail — can achieve.
Before joining Apple in 2008, he showed that component, with its clean lines and every minuscule part in its place in one unified package, to his prospective new colleagues. “They were like, “OK, you’re one of us,’” he recalls.
He soon became vice president of hardware development for all Mac computers, leading the teams behind the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro and eventually overseeing more than 2,000 employees. “Making things really simple and really elegant, thinking about the product as an integrated whole, that really took me into Apple.”
The challenge of giving the MacBook Air its signature sleek and light profile is an example.
“The MacBook Air was the first high-volume consumer electronic product built out of a CNC-machined enclosure,” says Field. He worked with industrial design and technology teams to devise a way to make the laptop from one solid piece of aluminum and jettison two-thirds of the parts found in the iMac. “We had material cut away so that every single screw and piece of electronics sat down into it an integrated way. That’s how we got the product so small and slim.”
“When I interviewed with Jony Ive” — Apple’s legendary chief design officer — “he said your ability to zoom out and zoom in was the number one most important ability as a leader at Apple.” That meant zooming out to think about “the entire ethos of this product, and the way it will affect the world” and zooming all the way back in to obsess over, say, the physical shape of the laptop itself and what it feels like in a user’s hands.
“That thread of attention to detail, passion for product, design plus technology rolled directly into what I was doing at Tesla,” he says. When Field joined Tesla in 2013, he was drawn to the way the brash startup upended the approach to making cars. “Tesla was integrating digital technology into cars in a way nobody else was. They said, ‘We’re not a car company in Silicon Valley, we’re a Silicon Valley company and we happen to make cars.’”
Field assembled and led the team that produced the Model 3 sedan, Tesla’s most affordable vehicle, designed to have mass-market appeal.
That experience only reinforced the importance, and power, of zooming in and out as a designer — in a way that encompasses the bigger human resources picture.
“You have to have a broad sense of what you’re trying to accomplish and help people in the organization understand what it means to them,” he says. “You have to go across and understand operations enough to glue all of those (things) together — while still being great at and focused on something very, very deeply. That’s T-shaped leadership.”
He credits his time at LGO with providing the foundation for the “T-shaped leadership” he practices.
“An education like the one I got at MIT allowed me to keep moving that ‘T’, to focus really deep, learn a ton, teach as much as I can, and after something gets more mature, pull out and bed down into other areas where the organization needs to grow or where there’s a crisis.”
The power of marrying scale to a “startup mentality”
In 2018, Field returned to Apple as a vice president for special projects. “I left Tesla after Model 3 and Y started to ramp, as there were people better than me to run high-volume manufacturing,” he says. “I went back to Apple hoping what Tesla had learned would motivate Apple to get into a different market.”
That market was his early love: cars. Field quietly led a project to develop an electric vehicle at Apple for three years.
Then Ford CEO Jim Farley came calling. He persuaded Field to return to Ford in late 2021, partly by demonstrating how much things had changed since his first stint as the carmaker.
“Two things came through loud and clear,” Field says. “One was humility. ‘Our success is not assured.’” That attitude was strikingly different from Field’s early experience in Detroit, encountering managers who were resistant to change. “The other thing was urgency. Jim and Bill Ford said the exact same thing to me: ‘We have four or five years to completely remake this company.’”
“I said, ‘OK, if the top of company really believes that, then the auto industry may be ready for what I hope to offer.’”
So far, Field is energized and encouraged by the appetite for reinvention he’s encountered this time around at Ford.
“If you can combine what Ford does really well with what a Tesla or Rivian can do well, this is something to be reckoned with,” says Field. “Skunk works have become one of the fundamental tools of my career,” he says, using an industry term that describes a project pursued by a small, autonomous group of people within a larger organization.
Ford has been developing a new, lower-cost, software-enabled EV platform — running all of the car’s sensors and components from a central digital operating system — with a “skunk works” team for the past two years. The company plans to build new sedans, SUVs, and small pickups based on this new platform.
With other legacy carmakers like Volvo racing into the electric future and fierce competition from EV leaders Tesla and Rivian, Field and his colleagues have their work cut out for them.
If he succeeds, leveraging his decades of learning and leading from LGO to Silicon Valley, then his latest chapter could transform the way we all drive — and secure a spot for Ford at the front of the electric vehicle pack in the process.
“I’ve been lucky to feel over and over that what I’m doing right now — they are going to write a book about it,” say Field. “This is a big deal, for Ford and the U.S. auto industry, and for American industry, actually.”
“So many things I was lucky to be exposed to at MIT,” Doug Field says, were “all building blocks, pieces of the puzzle, that helped me navigate through difficult situations later on.”
A Massachusetts university is developing technology that aims to use lasers to drastically cut emissions and energy use from Maine’s paper and pulp industry.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute recently received a $2.75 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to help ready the industrial drying technology for commercial use.
“We are all excited about this — this is potentially a groundbreaking technology,” said Jamal Yagoobi, founding director of the institute’s Center for Advanced Research in Drying.
In Maine, the paper and pulp business generates about 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, roughly half of the state’s industrial emissions. Much of these emissions come from the process of drying mashed, pressed, and rolled wood pulp to yield paper products. The emissions come mainly from three major operations across the state; three additional facilities contribute smaller amounts.
These plants’ emissions will need to be addressed if Maine is to reach its goal of going carbon neutral by 2045. Furthermore, each of these plants is located in an area with an above-average population of low-income residents, according to data assembled by Industrious Labs, an environmental organization focused on the impact of industry. And two are located in areas with a higher-than-average risk of cancer from air toxins, suggesting a correlation between their operations and the incidence of cancer in the area.
At the same, the paper and pulp industry remains economically important to Maine, said Matt Cannon, state conservation and energy director for the Maine chapter of the Sierra Club.
“It’s got real union jobs — the paper industry is still very important to our community,” he said.
Worcester Polytechnic’s drying research center has been working on ways to dry paper, pulp, and other materials using the concentrated energy found in lasers. The lasers Yagoobi’s team is using are not the lasers of the public imagination, like a red beam zapping at alien enemies. Though the lasers are quite strong — they can melt metal, Yagoobi says — they are dispersed over a larger area, spreading out the energy to evenly and gently dry the target material.
Testing on food products has shown that the technology can work. Now, researchers need to learn more about how the laser energy affects different materials to make sure the product quality is not compromised during the drying process.
“For paper, it’s important to make sure the tensile strength is not degrading,” Yagoobi said. “For food products, you want to make sure the color and sensory qualities do not degrade.”
Therefore, before the system is ready for a commercial pilot, the team has to gather a lot more data about how much laser energy is incident on different parts of the surface and how deeply the energy penetrates different materials. Once gathered, this data will be used to determine what system sizes and operating conditions are best for different materials, and to design laser modules for each intended use.
Once these details are worked out, the laser technology can be installed in new commercial-scale drying equipment or existing systems. “This particular technology will be easy to retrofit,” Yagoobi said.
Industrial sources were responsible for about 1.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States in 2023, about 28% of the country’s overall emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Heating processes, often powered by natural gas or other fossil fuels, are responsible for about half of those emissions, said Evan Gillespie, one of the co-founders of Industrious Labs. Many industrial drying processes require high temperatures that have traditionally been hard to reach without fossil fuels, giving the sector a reputation as hard to decarbonize, Gillespie said.
“The key challenge here is: How do you remove natural gas as a heating source inside industrial facilities?” said Richard Hart, industry director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “The scale of what is happening in industry is enormous, and the potential for change is very powerful.”
To make the new technology effective, industry leaders and policymakers will need to commit to reinvesting in old facilities, Gillespie noted. And doing so will be well worth it by strengthening an economically important industry, keeping jobs in place, and creating important environmental benefits, he added.
“There’s often this old story of tensions between climate and jobs,” Gillespie said. “But what we’re trying to do is modernize these facilities and stabilize them so they’ll be around for decades to come.”
As a major contributor to global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the transportation sector has immense potential to advance decarbonization. However, a zero-emissions global supply chain requires re-imagining reliance on a heavy-duty trucking industry that emits 810,000 tons of CO2, or 6 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, and consumes 29 billion gallons of diesel annually in the U.S. alone.
A new study by MIT researchers, presented at the recent American Society of Mechanical Engineers 2024 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, quantifies the impact of a zero-emission truck’s design range on its energy storage requirements and operational revenue. The multivariable model outlined in the paper allows fleet owners and operators to better understand the design choices that impact the economic feasibility of battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell heavy-duty trucks for commercial application, equipping stakeholders to make informed fleet transition decisions.
“The whole issue [of decarbonizing trucking] is like a very big, messy pie. One of the things we can do, from an academic standpoint, is quantify some of those pieces of pie with modeling, based on information and experience we’ve learned from industry stakeholders,” says ZhiYi Liang, PhD student on the renewable hydrogen team at the MIT K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center (GEAR) and lead author of the study. Co-authored by Bryony DuPont, visiting scholar at GEAR, and Amos Winter, the Germeshausen Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, the paper elucidates operational and socioeconomic factors that need to be considered in efforts to decarbonize heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs).
Operational and infrastructure challenges
The team’s model shows that a technical challenge lies in the amount of energy that needs to be stored on the truck to meet the range and towing performance needs of commercial trucking applications. Due to the high energy density and low cost of diesel, existing diesel drivetrains remain more competitive than alternative lithium battery-electric vehicle (Li-BEV) and hydrogen fuel-cell-electric vehicle (H2 FCEV) drivetrains. Although Li-BEV drivetrains have the highest energy efficiency of all three, they are limited to short-to-medium range routes (under 500 miles) with low freight capacity, due to the weight and volume of the onboard energy storage needed. In addition, the authors note that existing electric grid infrastructure will need significant upgrades to support large-scale deployment of Li-BEV HDVs.
While the hydrogen-powered drivetrain has a significant weight advantage that enables higher cargo capacity and routes over 750 miles, the current state of hydrogen fuel networks limits economic viability, especially once operational cost and projected revenue are taken into account. Deployment will most likely require government intervention in the form of incentives and subsidies to reduce the price of hydrogen by more than half, as well as continued investment by corporations to ensure a stable supply. Also, as H2-FCEVs are still a relatively new technology, the ongoing design of conformal onboard hydrogen storage systems — one of which is the subject of Liang’s PhD — is crucial to successful adoption into the HDV market.
The current efficiency of diesel systems is a result of technological developments and manufacturing processes established over many decades, a precedent that suggests similar strides can be made with alternative drivetrains. However, interactions with fleet owners, automotive manufacturers, and refueling network providers reveal another major hurdle in the way that each “slice of the pie” is interrelated — issues must be addressed simultaneously because of how they affect each other, from renewable fuel infrastructure to technological readiness and capital cost of new fleets, among other considerations. And first steps into an uncertain future, where no one sector is fully in control of potential outcomes, is inherently risky.
“Besides infrastructure limitations, we only have prototypes [of alternative HDVs] for fleet operator use, so the cost of procuring them is high, which means there isn’t demand for automakers to build manufacturing lines up to a scale that would make them economical to produce,” says Liang, describing just one step of a vicious cycle that is difficult to disrupt, especially for industry stakeholders trying to be competitive in a free market.
Quantifying a path to feasibility
“Folks in the industry know that some kind of energy transition needs to happen, but they may not necessarily know for certain what the most viable path forward is,” says Liang. Although there is no singular avenue to zero emissions, the new model provides a way to further quantify and assess at least one slice of pie to aid decision-making.
Other MIT-led efforts aimed at helping industry stakeholders navigate decarbonization include an interactive mapping tool developed by Danika MacDonell, Impact Fellow at the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC); alongside Florian Allroggen, executive director of MITs Zero Impact Aviation Alliance; and undergraduate researchers Micah Borrero, Helena De Figueiredo Valente, and Brooke Bao. The MCSC’s Geospatial Decision Support Tool supports strategic decision-making for fleet operators by allowing them to visualize regional freight flow densities, costs, emissions, planned and available infrastructure, and relevant regulations and incentives by region.
While current limitations reveal the need for joint problem-solving across sectors, the authors believe that stakeholders are motivated and ready to tackle climate problems together. Once-competing businesses already appear to be embracing a culture shift toward collaboration, with the recent agreement between General Motors and Hyundai to explore “future collaboration across key strategic areas,” including clean energy.
Liang believes that transitioning the transportation sector to zero emissions is just one part of an “energy revolution” that will require all sectors to work together, because “everything is connected. In order for the whole thing to make sense, we need to consider ourselves part of that pie, and the entire system needs to change,” says Liang. “You can’t make a revolution succeed by yourself.”
The authors acknowledge the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium for connecting them with industry members in the HDV ecosystem; and the MIT K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center and MIT Morningside Academy for Design for financial support.
A new study by MIT researchers quantifies the impact of a zero-emission truck’s design range on its energy storage requirements and operational revenue.
Login
