Back in March, the US Environmental Protection Agency finalized a long in the works rule requiring automakers here to dramatically increase the number of battery-powered vehicles they’re putting on the roads. The government has mandated that by 2032, more than half of new cars sold must be electric. There are some caveats, namely that plug-in hybrid cars will fulfill the federal requirements for what a “battery-powered” vehicle is.

This has led to a flood of hybrid cars hitting the market. This week, we talk about what this means for people who are considering buying a new car now, or in the next few years. We explain the differences between plug-in hybrids, full hybrids, and electrics, and we tell you what your options are if you live in an apartment without a convenient place to plug in your car while it’s parked.

We are joined this week by WIRED staff writer Aarian Marshall, who breaks down the facts, shatters the myths, and turns us all into hybrid car experts.

This episode originally aired on April 2, 2024. Read the transcript.

Show Notes:

Read Aarian’s story about the new US emissions rules. Also read her story about automakers struggling to hit their US sales targets for electric cars.

Recommendations:

Aarian recommends going to one of those baseball games where you also bring your dog. (They let you run the bases!) Mike recommends The New York Trilogy by novelist Paul Auster, who died this week at 77. Lauren recommends The Lights, the newest book of poetry and prose by Ben Lerner.

Aarian Marshall can be found on social media @aarianmarshall. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Even if you’ve never taken a puff from a vape in your life, you know about Juul. At the company’s peak in 2018, its e-cigarette was one of the most recognizable consumer devices on the planet, and Juul Labs was worth $38 billion. Just a few short years later, after being squeezed by government regulators and prohibition-minded anti-tobacco advocates, Juul’s valuation plummeted and its market share vaporized.

The story of Juul—and its thousands of imitators—is outlined in Backfired: The Vaping Wars, a new nine-part podcast from Prologue Projects. The show traces the history of e-cigarettes, nicotine vaporizers, and synthetic nicotine by following the paths of Juul and its thousands of competitors as the vape companies gain public acceptance, fight for market share, and butt heads with government agencies. It’s a fascinating ride filled with new reporting, so even if you’ve read and listened to everything about Juul and vaping, you’ll hear some shocking new information in this series.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with Backfired’s hosts, Arielle Pardes and Leon Neyfakh.

Show Notes:

Backfired is an Audible original, so go to audible.com/backfired to listen. Also check out Louise Matsakis’ story about the next generation of cheap, illegal vapes coming from China.

Recommendations:

Arielle recommends Timeshifter’s Jet Lag App. Leon recommends the Yoto Player for getting kids into podcasts. Lauren recommends The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray. Mike recommends Subpar Pool, a game by Holedown creator Martin Jonasson.

Arielle Pardes can be found on social media @pardesoteric. Leon Neyfakh is @leoncrawl. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Web crawling—the act of indexing information across the internet—has been around for decades. It has primarily been used by search engines like Google and nonprofits like Internet Archive and Common Crawl to catalog the contents of the open internet and make it searchable. Until recently, the practice of web crawling has rarely been seen as controversial, as websites depended on the process as a way for people to find their content. But now crawling tech has been subsumed by the great AI-ening of everything, and is being used by companies like Google and Perplexity AI to absorb whole articles that are fed into their summarizing machines.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs joins the show to talk about web crawling and the controversy over Common Crawl. Then we talk with Forbes’ chief content officer and editor Randall Lane about how Perplexity.AI repurposed a Forbes article and presented it as its own story, without first asking permission or properly citing the source.

Show Notes:

Read Kate’s story about how publishers are going after Common Crawl over AI training data. Read Randall’s story about how Preplexity.AI copied the work of two Forbes reporters.

Recommendations:

Randall recommends his new horse racing league, the National Thoroughbred League. Kate recommends the book Victim by Andrew Boryga. Lauren recommends the show Hacks on Max.

Randall Lane can be found on social media @RandallLane. Kate Knibbs is @Knibbs. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.