The Drivecast

No, really. A Tesla Model S just drove itself 3,081 miles from Los Angeles to New York City with zero accidents and zero human intervention for the first time. Was it just another stunt, or a watershed moment for self-driving tech?

Today we're taking you inside the Tesla FSD Cannonball Run, as its organizer and wheelman Alex Roy named it after the famous cross-country speed record challenge. Joel is joined by Alex and The Drive editor Byron Hurd, who broke the news of the run in an exclusive story late last month, to dive into the planning, the challenges, the surprises, and the significance of a car actually driving itself across the US. In the middle of a brutal winter, no less.

Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology has been a flash point since it launched in limited public beta tests in 2020. Its capabilities on surface streets and highways have since reached incredible heights through successive software updates—but it's also been plagued by unpredictable errors, dangerous glitches, its involvement in multiple fatal crashes, and an ongoing federal probe. Adding to the controversy is Tesla's reliance on cheaper cameras to help the car "see" instead of the lidar-based systems used by other major automakers. Also, despite the name it still requires the driver to look at the road ahead and be ready to take over.

But as Alex and his co-pilots Warren Ahner and Paul Pham showed, for all its faults Tesla FSD is still the most advanced semi-autonomous driving technology on the market today. And while it's taking longer than predicted, the leap from here to an actual self-driving car might be smaller than we think.

00:00 Intro

04:20 Alex Roy has a plan

10:50 How it came together

24:19 Winter is coming

37:15 What it really means for drivers

52:31 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ferrari's first electric car is a massive gamble for a company steeped in heritage. So is tapping the designer of the iPhone to create a revolutionary new interior and make a statement about the place of screens in cars today.

This week, the automaker revealed the cabin of the Ferrari Luce designed by LoveFrom, the firm founded by Jony Ive, the former head of design at Apple, and his partner Marc Newson. It's a retro-modern centerpiece that's very much Ferrari meets the Apple Car: restrained simplicity, aluminum and glass everywhere, lots of squircles, and clever touches like a pivoting center screen that looks like a giant Apple Watch. Critically, there's also an emphasis on physical controls like buttons and toggles for all key functions.

Ive and Newson have never worked on a production car before, so it tracks that the Luce's interior is like nothing else we've seen before. That's by design, because Ferrari can't act like its first EV is just business as usual.

There's a lot on the line, and not just for Ferrari. Ive is very open about how he thinks the auto industry learned the wrong lesson from his work at Apple. Giant screens in cars might feel like "the future," but they aren't the answer to designing a functional interior; in fact, routing critical controls through a screen you can't operate by feel while driving is dangerous.

The unintended consequences of his creations are one of the reasons why Ive left Apple in 2019, and why he and Newson felt compelled to take on the Luce project. So can two legendary designers and automotive outsiders show the car industry the error of its ways?

00:00 Intro

02:49 The Apple Ferrari?

13:08 Steering wheel

19:05 Gauge cluster

24:52 Center screen

28:16 Why glass and aluminum?

33:31 Lessons for the industry

40:12 Ive's regrets about screens

46:11 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we're rolling out The Drive Awards, aka the Slashies, our annual celebration of the very best new cars and trucks on sale right now. We're running through the winners, the losers, the almost-got-it-rights—and we're peeling back the curtain to explain our picks and how exactly The Drive runs a comprehensive car review operation.

Every year, we review well over a hundred new cars and trucks to see if the promises car companies are making actually bear out in the real world. Next, we take the top-scoring models in our six main categories that best represent where the market is today and subject them to a staff-wide debate to make our picks. And finally, we put the winners of each category through one more round of voting to determine who gets the ultimate prize: Car of the Year.

This episode is special for another reason: The Drive's entire editorial team will be joining Joel and Kyle round-robin style as we walk through our thinking and methodology for each category. Get to know these names and voices, because you're going to be hearing from them a lot in the future.

Without further ado, these are your 2026 winners of The Drive Awards, with links to the full stories explaining each pick on thedrive.com.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

03:53 BTS of The Drive Awards

09:47 Best Truck with Joel Feder

17:24 Best Value with Andrew Collins

22:57 Best SUV with Caleb Jacobs

30:17 Best Performance Car with Byron Hurd

37:59 Best EV with Cyril Soliman

45:28 Best Hybrid with Adam Ismail

52:13 Car of the Year with Kyle Cheromcha

01:01:21 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For our very first episode, we're taking a hard look at Volvo. The Swedish company once known for quirky wagons and safety innovations is in trouble after dumping billions of dollars into an early, all-in bet on electric vehicles five years ago that led to a mess of software issues and production problems, tanking reliability and dragging its global sales to dangerous lows.

Last year, then-CEO Jim Rowan warned of "turbulent" times ahead for Volvo as tariffs scrambled its manufacturing plans—shortly before Volvo's Chinese parent company Geely replaced him with Hakan Samuelsson, who led the company through the boom years of the 2010s before retiring in 2022. Classic move to bring back the old guy.

Samuelsson knows he has to nail this turnaround, and the first car launching under his watch is the Volvo EX60, a midsize electric SUV that represents everything Volvo is trying to get right—new platform, new motor+battery combo, new software stack, new everything. And Joel was on the ground in Sweden for the reveal event last week, where he grilled Samuelsson and the rest of the executive team to find out if Volvo's really learned from its mistakes, or if the company is doomed to repeat them.

Check out all our exclusive stories mentioned in this episode:

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices