It’s 2020, and good news is that the money continues to flow. This week, we tracked the rise of two big money industries—both related, it turns out, to the rise in home delivery. Electric delivery vans just might be the best way to use EVs, and British newcomer Arrival announced this week that, a) it exists and b) it’s obtained some $111 million in funding, courtesy of Hyundai and Kia. And we took a look at cities and real estate developers trying to capitalize off the growth of speedy delivery by getting creative with urban distribution centers.
Plus,Tesla hits new stock price records, and physicists have some tips for your next flight. It’s been a week; let’s get you caught up.
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Headlines
Stories you might have missed from WIRED this week
Political Endorsement of the Week
The hip kids still on Facebook (who are you?) will no doubt be familiar with 180,000-member group NUMTOT: New Urbanist Memes For Transit-Oriented Teens. The group specializes in meme-y, pro-transit, sometimes toxic conversations about urbanism, and this week its moderators did a crazy thing and endorsed a presidential candidate: Bernie Sanders. The moderators cited Sanders’ approach to transportation and housing policy, and to social and economic welfare. Are young city transportation nerds a real constituency? We’ll find out.
Stat of the Week: 20%
The share of California transportation emissions produced by trucks—even though they represent just 4 percent of the state’s vehicles. That’s according to the state’s Air Resources Board, which says the decentralized truck market, in which hundreds of thousands of companies and owner-operators own the vehicles in the state, makes their emissions especially hard to regulate.
Required Reading
News from elsewhere on the internet
In the Rearview
Essential stories from WIRED’s canonRewind to last fall, when Amazon announced it had ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans from the US company Rivian.
More Great WIRED Stories
