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By Jennifer Conrad | 11.22.21   | Half a million used electric vehicles may be sold in the US by the end of the year, according to one estimate. That's more than double the sales of three years ago—and Congress could spur even more demand, write Aarian Marshall and Gregory Barber. The Build Back Better Bill now on its way to the Senate could for the first time pave the way for federal incentives that encourage people to buy used electric cars. The version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives on Friday gives low- and middle-income buyers a credit of $2,500 for an EV that's at least two years old and costs no more than $25,000. Why Go Electric? Just a few years ago, used EVs were a hard sell in the US. Today there are more options, greater familiarity with the tech, fewer fears about batteries and range, and an ever-increasing number of public chargers. Spiking gas prices are causing some buyers to give EVs another look. Meanwhile, a nationwide car shortage has left everyone scrambling for anything with wheels, pushing prices higher. Read why used EVs are so in demand right now. |  | While the US debates ways to encourage more people to buy electric vehicles, Norway is a world leader in EV sales. In September, battery-powered electric vehicles accounted for 77.5 percent of all new cars sold in the country. Norway's EV adoption has been credited to a series of tax breaks and other financial carrots that mean companies like Tesla can compete on price with combustion engines. These efforts date back to the 1980s, when the rock band A-ha campaigned to make EVs exempt from tolls, a measure that passed in 1997. But as Morgan Meaker reports, the success of these incentives has created a unique predicament: Norway is running out of dirty cars to tax. By one estimate, the popularity of EVs is creating a 19.2 billion Norwegian krone ($2.32 billion) hole in the country's annual revenue. End of the Road Toll charges were reintroduced for EVs in 2017. Now leaders are considering increasing taxes on EVs, especially luxury cars over a certain value and plug-in hybrids. Critics say the measures are premature and could stall EV adoption. Despite the incentives, EVs still only account for 15 percent of the cars on Norwegian roads. Read about the debate over continued incentives for EVs. |  | At least as recently as 2018, Amazon's vast empire of customer data—what you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa, and who's at your front door—had become so sprawling, fragmented, and promiscuously shared within the company that the security division couldn't even map all of it, much less adequately defend its borders. As Will Evans writes in an investigation by WIRED and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, internal documents and interviews with former employees suggest low-level workers used their data privileges to snoop on the purchases of their exes and celebrities like Kanye West. Others took bribes to help shady sellers sabotage competitors' businesses, doctor Amazon's review system, and sell knockoff products. The names and American Express card numbers of up to 24 million customers sat exposed on Amazon's internal network for years, with the security team unable to establish definitively whether they'd been unduly accessed. And a program that allowed sellers to extract their own metrics became a backdoor for third-party developers to amass Amazon customer data. "Free-for-All" Amazon's former VP of information security said it seemed like everyone on the network had access to nearly everything, including customer information—and yet there was no insider threat program dedicated to preventing rogue employees from abusing their access while he was there. Read about Amazon's failures to protect consumer data. |  |
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