automotive-manufacturing
(8)
The $1 Million Lesson Hidden Under a Work Van Floor
LEGEND turned the ignored cargo bay into a business case - fewer broken mats, lighter EVs, harder-to-rob vans and a floor sturdy enough to build the rest of the upfit on.
Volkswagen Built an American Car Company Inside a German Icon
Volkswagen of America sells more than cars. It translates a global industrial system into an American ownership experience - from Chattanooga assembly and dealer financing to the ID. Buzz, myVW and a second-generation Atlas.
Tesla Wants to Sell You a Car - Then Replace the Grid Around It
The company that made the electric car feel inevitable is now trying to turn vehicles, batteries, chargers and software into one enormous machine. The cars still pay most of the bills, but Tesla's next argument is about infrastructure.
General Motors
The Detroit giant is using the cash, scale and customer reach of its truck-and-SUV machine to build something broader: an automaker that also sells software, subscriptions, financing and power for the home.
aPriori Technologies
aPriori Technologies is a Concord, Massachusetts software company that turns 3D CAD designs into instant manufacturing cost, manufacturability, and carbon-footprint insights. Founded in 2003 out of University of Illinois research, its cloud Manufacturing Insights Platform - aP Design, aP Pro, and aP Generate - lets engineers, sourcing teams, and cost analysts simulate how a part will be built, what it should cost across regions, and how much CO2e it will emit, before tooling is ever cut. Manufacturers such as GE Aerospace, Carrier, Alstom, Flex, and Whirlpool use it to catch cost and design problems early and negotiate with suppliers from data rather than guesswork.
Invisible AI
Invisible AI builds edge-based computer vision systems for manufacturing floors. Its self-contained camera devices - each pairing an Intel RealSense 3D depth camera with an NVIDIA AI chipset and on-board storage - mount to existing factory infrastructure and turn manual assembly work into structured, cycle-level data without sending video to the cloud. Founded in 2018 by veterans of the autonomous-vehicle world, the company helps automakers and aerospace manufacturers such as Toyota spot cycle-time variation, ergonomic risk, and quality defects in real time. In 2026 it launched what it calls the world's first Vision Execution System, built on NVIDIA Metropolis and Cosmos Reason models, to run AI agents that analyze every production cycle at the edge.
Euler Motors
Euler Motors is a New Delhi-based electric commercial vehicle maker building cargo three-wheelers and light four-wheeler trucks for India's last-mile logistics. Founded in 2018 by Saurav Kumar, the company designs its own powertrains and batteries in-house, manufactures at a Palwal, Haryana facility, and sells flagship products like the HiLoad EV three-wheeler and the Storm EV light truck to e-commerce, hyperlocal delivery, and logistics fleets. Backed by Hero MotoCorp, GIC, British International Investment and Lightrock, it has put more than 15,000 vehicles on Indian roads.
Saurav Kumar
Saurav Kumar is the founder and CEO of Euler Motors, a New Delhi commercial-EV maker building electric three- and four-wheelers for India's last-mile logistics. A computer-vision engineer trained at Delhi College of Engineering and Cornell, he worked on driverless-car research at INRIA in France, co-founded Cube26 (acquired by Paytm), then started Euler in 2018 on a contrarian thesis: beat diesel on performance, not just price. His flagship HiLoad EV is pitched as India's most powerful electric three-wheeler, and the company has raised hundreds of millions across rounds led by investors including Hero MotoCorp and British International Investment.