Connexion
Broadcom has made controversial changes to VMware since closing its acquisition of the virtualization brand in late November. Broadcom executives are trying to convince VMware customers and partners that they'll eventually see the subscription-fueled light. But discontent remains, as illustrated by industry groups continuing to urge regulators to rein-in what they claim are unfair business practices.
Since Broadcom announced that it would no longer sell perpetual VMware licenses as of December 2023, there have been complaints about rising costs associated with this model. In March, a VMware User Group Town Hall saw attendees complaining of price jumps of up to 600 percent, The Register reported. Small managed service providers that had worked with VMware have reported seeing the price of business rising tenfold, per a February ServeTheHome report.
However, Sylvain Cazard, president of Broadcom Software for Asia-Pacific, reportedly told The Register that complaints about higher prices are unwarranted since customers using at least two components of VMware's flagship Cloud Foundation will end up paying less and because the new pricing includes support, which VMware didn't include before.
Broadcom has made sweeping changes to VMware's business since acquiring the company in November 2023, killing off the perpetually licensed versions of VMware's software and instituting large-scale layoffs. Broadcom executives have acknowledged the "unease" that all of these changes have created among VMware's customers and partners but so far haven't been interested in backtracking.
Among the casualties of the acquisition is the free version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi. ESXi is "bare-metal hypervisor" software, meaning that it allows users to run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware while still allowing those operating systems direct access to disks, GPUs, and other system resources.
One alternative to ESXi for home users and small organizations is Proxmox Virtual Environment, a Debian-based Linux operating system that provides broadly similar functionality and has the benefit of still being an actively developed product. To help jilted ESXi users, the Proxmox team has just added a new "integrated import wizard" to Proxmox that supports importing of ESXi VMs, easing the pain of migrating between platforms.
Enlarge / "Yes, we offer Internet at your address." (credit: Chev Wilkinson via Getty Images)
An Internet service provider that admitted lying to the Federal Communications Commission about where it offers broadband will pay a $10,000 fine and implement a compliance plan to prevent future violations.
Jefferson County Cable (JCC), a small ISP in Toronto, Ohio, admitted that it falsely claimed to offer fiber service in an area that it hadn't expanded to yet. A company executive also admitted that the firm submitted false coverage data to prevent other ISPs from obtaining government grants to serve the area. Ars helped expose the incident in a February 2023 article.
The FCC announced the outcome of its investigation on March 15, saying that Jefferson County Cable violated the Broadband Data Collection program requirements and the Broadband DATA Act, a US law, "in connection with reporting inaccurate information or data with respect to the Company's ability to provide broadband Internet access service."
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan )
Broadcom CEO and President Hock Tan has acknowledged the discomfort VMware customers and partners have experienced after the sweeping changes that Broadcom has instituted since it acquired the virtualization company 114 days ago.
In a blog post Thursday, Tan noted that Broadcom spent 18 months evaluating and buying VMware. He said that while there's still a lot of work to do, the company has made "substantial progress."
That so-called progress, though, has worried some of Broadcom's customers and partners.
Enlarge / A car's hazard warning lights will need a physical control to get a five-star EuroNCAP score in 2026.
Some progress in the automotive industry is laudable. Cars are safer than ever and more efficient, too. But there are other changes we'd happily leave by the side of the road. That glossy "piano black" trim that's been overused the last few years, for starters. And the industry's overreliance on touchscreens for functions that used to be discrete controls. Well, the automotive safety organization European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) feels the same way about that last one, and it says the controls ought to change in 2026.
"The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes," said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP's director of strategic development.
"New Euro NCAP tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate, physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving," he said.
Enlarge / The Tesla Model Y has earned an IIHS Top Safety Pick+ for 2024. (credit: IIHS)
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has toughened up the tests required to earn one of its coveted Top Safety Pick or Top Safety Pick+ awards. The institute has spent the past 65 years investigating automobile safety and putting pressure on manufacturers to concentrate more on implementing safety measures, and with this year's revision, it wants to see better protection for backseat passengers and better pedestrian detection, among other requirements.
IIHS started crash-testing new vehicles at its facility in Virginia in 1995 after noticing that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's own tests did not best reflect the kinds of crashes happening on American roads. It continues to add new tests or adjust existing ones, in recent years adding a rollover protection test and increasing the speed of the side crash test.
For 2024, a vehicle has to earn either an acceptable or good rating in the moderate front overlap test to earn the Top Safety Pick+ award, and the test now includes a dummy behind the driver.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
American pedestrians were at slightly less risk of being killed by a car last year. The Governors Highway Safety Association has just published a preliminary analysis of road safety data for the first half of 2023, and it has found a "modest" reduction in pedestrian fatalities, which have been all too high in recent years.
As with last year's study, the GHSA found some states were much safer than others. In fact, 29 states and the District of Columbia recorded declines in the number of pedestrian traffic deaths for the first half of 2023, with Vermont recording no pedestrian deaths at all.
In total, the GHSA estimates that 3,373 pedestrians died on US roads between January and June 2023, which it says is a 4 percent decrease compared to the first six months of 2022. However, the report points out that even though this year saw a small decline, the number of pedestrian deaths for the first half of 2023 is 14 percent higher than the same time period in 2019.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Andrey Denisyuk)
Internet service providers are still providing false coverage information to the Federal Communications Commission, and the FCC process for challenging errors isn't good enough to handle all the false claims, the agency was told by several groups this week.
The latest complaints focus on fixed wireless providers that offer home Internet service via signals sent to antennas. ISPs that compete against these wireless providers say that exaggerated coverage data prevents them from obtaining government funding designed to subsidize the building of networks in areas with limited coverage.
The wireless company LTD Broadband (which has been renamed GigFire) came under particular scrutiny in an FCC filing submitted by the Accurate Broadband Data Alliance, a group of about 50 ISPs in the Midwest.
Broadcom has made a lot of changes to VMware since closing its acquisition of the company in November. On Wednesday, VMware admitted that these changes are worrying customers. With customers mulling alternatives and partners complaining, VMware is trying to do damage control and convince people that change is good.
Not surprisingly, the plea comes from a VMware marketing executive: Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product and technical marketing for the Cloud, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Solutions group at VMware. In Wednesday's announcement, Shenoy admitted that VMware "has been all about change" since being swooped up for $61 billion. This has resulted in "many questions and concerns" as customers "evaluate how to maximize value from" VMware products.
Among these changes is VMware ending perpetual license sales in favor of a subscription-based business model. VMware had a history of relying on perpetual licensing; VMware called the model its "most renowned" a year ago.
Enlarge (credit: VMware)
Since Broadcom's $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company's personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.
This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.
ESXi is what is known as a "bare-metal hypervisor," lightweight software that runs directly on hardware without requiring a separate operating system layer in between. ESXi allows you to split a PC's physical resources (CPUs and CPU cores, RAM, storage, networking components, and so on) among multiple virtual machines. ESXi also supports passthrough for PCI, SATA, and USB accessories, allowing guest operating systems direct access to components like graphics cards and hard drives.
Enlarge / US Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) speaks to the press on June 13, 2023, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Michael McCoy)
More than 65 Republican lawmakers this week introduced legislation to nullify rules that prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services.
The Federal Communications Commission approved the rules in November despite opposition from broadband providers. The FCC's two Republicans dissented in the 3-2 vote. While the FCC was required by Congress to issue anti-discrimination rules, Republicans argue that the agency's Democratic majority wrote rules that are too broad.
On Tuesday this week, US House Republications submitted a resolution of disapproval that would use Congressional Review Act authority to kill the anti-discrimination rules. "Under the guise of 'equity,' the Biden administration is attempting to radically expand the federal government's control of all Internet services and infrastructure," lead sponsor Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) said.
Enlarge / It actually feels intimidating standing next to a vehicle like this GMC Yukon Denali when the hood is level with your shoulder. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
It's hard to escape the fact that American trucks and SUVs have been on a steroid-infused diet for the last few years. The trend was all too apparent at the last auto show we went to—at Chicago in 2020, I felt physically threatened just standing next to some of the products on display by GMC and its competitors. Intuitively, the supersized hood heights on these pickups seem more dangerous to vulnerable road users, but now there's hard data to support that.
It hasn't been a great few years to be a pedestrian in the United States. These most vulnerable road users started being killed by drivers more frequently in 2020, and while some states were able to reverse that trend, others went the other way, making 2022—the last year for which there is full data—the most deadly year on record for US pedestrians.
The problem has multiple causes. For decades, urban planners have prioritized car traffic above everything else, and our built environment favors speeding vehicles at the cost of people trying to cross roads or cycle. But it's not all just the fault of those planners, as the vehicles we drive play a large role, too.
Enlarge (credit: Mercedes-Benz)
Most car crashes begin and end in a few seconds. That's plenty of time to get in a tiny micro-nap while driving. The famous asleep-at-the-wheel film scene in National Lampoon's Vacation, where Clark Griswold goes off to slumberland for 72 seconds while piloting the Wagon Queen Family Truckster (a paragon of automotive virtue but lacking any advanced driver safety systems), might be a comical look at this prospect. But if Clark were in the real world, he and his family would likely have been injured or killed—or they could have caused similar un-funny consequences for other motorists or pedestrians.
There's plenty of real-world news on the topic right now. Early in 2023, the Automobile Association of America's Foundation for Traffic Safety published a study estimating that 16–21 percent of all fatal vehicle crashes reported to police involve drowsy driving.
With the road fatality numbers in the US hovering close to 38,000 over the past few years, that means between 6,080 and 7,980 road deaths are linked to drowsy drivers. Further research by the AAA's Foundation finds that drivers likely under-report drowsiness in all car crashes. Nodding off while driving is as dangerous as—and potentially more dangerous than—driving drunk. And while drunk-driving figures have decreased between 1991 and 2021, the opposite is true for drowsy driving.
Enlarge / I normally prefer my performance cars on race circuits, but the Lightning Switchgear impressed this off-road racing novice. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
CONCORD, NC—The venerable pickup truck can play a multitude of roles these days. For some, it's nothing more than a work vehicle, something to carry around lumber or tools or tow a trailer full of equipment. For others, it's the new American family car. But some truck owners like to leave the tarmac behind to have a little fun in the wilderness. Mostly, that involves low-speed rock crawling, perhaps up the side of a steep mountain. But it doesn't have to be slow—vehicles like Ford's range of Raptors are designed to do highway speeds across expanses of desert wilderness, largely thanks to very clever dampers and plenty of suspension travel to munch up those bumps and bounces.
Ford is yet to make a Raptor version of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup, but we got an idea of what one could be capable of this week thanks to a ride in the Blue Oval's latest electric demonstrator, the F-150 Lightning Switchgear. It's the result of a collaboration between Ford Performance and RTR Vehicles, a tuning company founded and run by drifting champion and off-road racer Vaughn Gittin Jr., and while it's just a one-off for now, the Lightning Switchgear is a testbed for pushing the boundaries of what we can expect from electric trucks, Ford says. (You may remember RTR previously worked with Ford to create a 1,400-hp Mustang Mach-E in 2020.)
"This is going to focus on chassis and suspension. So to that end, just like you do with any good racing vehicle, you start with the tires," explained Sriram Pakkam, head of F1 and EV demonstrators at Ford.
VMware's new owner is ending the virtualization and cloud computing company's partner programs. It's unclear who or how many current partners will be able to sell VMware-related offerings after April 2024, leaving the potential for tens of thousands of businesses to be disrupted.
Broadcom, which closed its VMware acquisition in November, told The Register in late December that “effective February 5, 2024, Broadcom will be transitioning VMware’s partner programs to the invitation-only Broadcom Advantage Partner Program.” This signaled the end of VMware's partnerships with solution providers, resellers, and distributors. But today’s news reportedly reveals a final closure date for the cloud services provider partner program, which debuted in 2019.
Today, The Register reported that Broadcom recently shared an end-of-partnership date specifically for VMware cloud service provider partners that work with VMware through the VMware Partner Connect Program that launched in 2020.
Enlarge / Extreme E travels to remote locations by boat and brings its own energy infrastructure with it. Currently, it makes its own hydrogen on site and uses that to charge EV batteries, but in 2025, the cars will switch to hydrogen fuel cells. (credit: Colin McMaster / LAT Images)
ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the most remote locations on Earth, Alejandro Agag is holding court.
"Welcome to the edge of the world," he laughs, gesturing toward the vast desert around him. A gust of wind kicks a cloud of sand and dust across the table. "It's amazing, this place."
The 53-year-old Spanish entrepreneur is taking in the sights and sounds of the season 3 finale of Extreme E, the off-road electric racing series he launched in 2021. Part of the series' ethos is that it races exclusively in regions of the globe that are heavily impacted by climate change (such as the Atacama Desert—the driest, non-polar region on Earth), typically with no spectators present.
Broadcom has moved forward with plans to transition VMware, a virtualization and cloud computing company, into a subscription-based business. As of December 11, it no longer sells perpetual licenses with VMware products. VMware, whose $61 billion acquisition by Broadcom closed in November, also announced on Monday that it will no longer sell support and subscription (SnS) for VMware products with perpetual licenses. Moving forward, VMware will only offer term licenses or subscriptions, according to its VMware blog post.
VMware customers with perpetual licenses and active support contracts can continue using them. VMware "will continue to provide support as defined in contractual commitments," Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for VMware's Cloud Foundation Division, wrote. But when customers' SnS terms end, they won't have any support.
Broadcom hopes this will force customers into subscriptions, and it's offering "upgrade pricing incentives" that weren't detailed in the blog for customers who switch from perpetual licensing to a subscription.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | imagedepotpro)
The US broadband industry is protesting a Federal Communications Commission plan to measure the affordability of Internet service.
The FCC has been evaluating US-wide broadband deployment progress on a near-annual basis for almost three decades but hasn't factored affordability into these regular reviews. The broadband industry is afraid that a thorough examination of prices will lead to more regulation of ISPs.
An FCC Notice of Inquiry issued on November 1 proposes to analyze the affordability of Internet service in the agency's next congressionally required review of broadband deployment. That could include examining not just monthly prices but also data overage charges and various other fees.
Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel during a House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee hearing on March 31, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch )
A federal program that provides $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes is expected to run out of money in April 2024, potentially taking affordable Internet service plans away from well over 20 million households.
For months, supporters of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) have been pushing Congress to give the Federal Communications Commission more funding for the program. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel urged lawmakers to act yesterday during a House Communications and Technology Subcommittee hearing.
In an opening statement, Rosenworcel said the ACP is providing discounts for over 22 million households. The FCC expects that number to reach 25 million by April, when the program would run out of money.
Enlarge (credit: VMWare)
Broadcom announced back in May of 2022 that it would buy VMware for $61 billion and take on an additional $8 billion of the company's debt, and on November 22 of 2023 Broadcom said that it had completed the acquisition. And it looks like Broadcom's first big move is going to be layoffs: according to WARN notices filed with multiple states (catalogued here by Channel Futures), Broadcom will be laying off at least 2,837 employees across multiple states, including 1,267 at its Palo Alto campus in California.
As Channel Futures notes, the actual number of layoffs could be higher, since not all layoffs require WARN notices. We've contacted Broadcom for more information about the total number of layoffs and the kinds of positions that are being affected and will update if we receive a response. VMware has around 38,300 employees worldwide.
The WARN notices list the reason for the layoffs as "economic," but provide no further explanation or justification.
Enlarge / Alfa Romeo has a new crossover called the Tonale. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
I don't believe that Jeremy Clarkson was right when he said that you could only be a true petrolhead once you'd owned an Alfa Romeo, but the oafish TV presenter wasn't entirely off-base. I've just spent a week with Alfa's latest creation, the unfortunately named Tonale, and it has left me scratching my head. Beset by gremlins and not exactly cheap, it nonetheless charmed me in a way that I really don't think would have happened if I'd been driving, say, a Dodge.
Once upon a time, Alfa Romeo was Ferrari before there really was a Ferrari, building Grand Prix-winning race cars and drop-dead gorgeous road cars. That feels like a very long time ago now. A planned resurgence, set in motion while the brand was under the control of the late Sergio Marchionne, has fallen far short of its original ambitious sales targets—100,000 Guilias a year, we were told at the time.
But the brand lives on, and it has an all-new model out. The Tonale is a smaller crossover than the Stelvio, and here in the US it is only available with a plug-in hybrid powertrain. It pairs a 180 hp (135 kW), 1.3 L four-cylinder gasoline engine that drives the front wheels via a six-speed automatic transmission with a 121 hp (90 kW) electric motor that drives the rear wheels, fed by a 15.5 kWh lithium-ion battery.
Enlarge / The regular Hyundai Ioniq 5 is one of our favorite EVs. Now there's a hot hatch variant, and it's great. (credit: Hyundai)
SEOUL, South Korea—EV drivers either seem to love or hate the fake powertrain sounds that accompany their cars. Some fully embrace the spaceship or video-game-like noises, while others can't turn them off fast enough. I'm firmly in the latter group, long believing that the best thing about an EV is its dead-silent operation. Or, at least, I was until I drove the new Hyundai Ioniq 5 N earlier this month.
When you put the Ioniq 5 in N mode, it calls up a few different sound profiles—everything from your typical spaceship-y wooh-ahh tones to something attempting to re-create the aural quality of a turbocharged hot hatch. I say “attempting” because, well, none of the soundtracks are particularly good or high-quality. I've heard better stuff in Gran Turismo. Like, the first Gran Turismo.
In any case, when you activate N mode, the 12.3-inch digital gauge cluster also displays a tachometer in the middle, complete with a needle that rests at an imaginary idle. The regenerative braking paddles mounted to the steering wheel suddenly become gear shifters, and the sound of the "engine" rises and lowers as you move through each "gear." (Read all these as air quotes—it helps.)
Enlarge / The Waze crash history alerts look like this. (credit: Waze)
Traffic navigation app Waze is adding a new feature to its toolbox today. It's called crash history alerts, and it's meant to warn drivers about dangerous hotspots, based on a combination of historical data plus road and traffic data.
Originally an independent startup, in 2013 Google purchased the Israeli company for $1.15 billion, perhaps beating Apple to the punch. Even before the purchase, Waze was becoming an Ars reader favorite thanks to more advanced traffic rerouting than either Google Maps or Apple Maps.
It has not been entirely smooth sailingdriving; for a while the app was infamous for asking drivers to make difficult left turns across busy multi-lane roads and routing cars through once-quiet neighborhoods as shortcuts, aggravating the people who live in those neighborhoods.
Enlarge (credit: Mercedes-Benz)
Something unexpected happened as I looked down to watch two Mercedes-Benz EVs crash into each other: I felt… scared.
It was the culmination of a day spent with Mercedes-Benz discussing the company's plans to fully prevent serious injuries in its vehicles and the first time an automaker publicly conducted a crash test between two EVs, in this case with a select group of journalists in attendance. Witnessing two cars smash into each other would be, at the very least, very exciting.
But I didn't expect to feel my stomach drop in the moment of impact and the dread that lingered after. The experience hammered home the importance of all the safety measures automakers implement in the cars we spend our lives with and how much work goes into engineering the successful outcomes we hope we never have to experience firsthand.
Enlarge / FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr arrive to testify during a House committee hearing on March 31, 2022 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch )
The Federal Communications Commission today voted to move ahead with a plan that would restore net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation of Internet service providers.
In a 3-2 party-line vote, the FCC approved Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which seeks public comment on the broadband regulation plan. The comment period will officially open after the proposal is published in the Federal Register, but the docket is already active and can be found here.
The proposal would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, a designation that allows the FCC to regulate ISPs under the common-carrier provisions in Title II of the Communications Act. The plan is essentially the same as what the FCC did in 2015 when it used Title II to prohibit fixed and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment.
Enlarge / The Porsche Museum brought plenty of its toys to Laguna Seca for Rennsport Reunion 7 in September 2023. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
MONTEREY, Calif.—Few car brands have managed to stake out the kind of mindshare occupied by Porsche. Celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, the company just held its seventh Rennsport Reunion, a car show crossed with a race meet at the Laguna Seca racetrack in Northern California. It drew a crowd of more than 90,000 Porschephiles at the end of September.
From its start in the aftermath of World War II, Porsche has concentrated on using clever engineering to make cars for people who like to drive. Much of that clever engineering was first proven at the racetrack before making the jump to something a bit more road-legal. And almost all of it was on display at Rennsport Reunion, from early engines with twin spark plugs and early experiments with aerodynamics through turbocharging, hybrids, and now extremely high-performance EVs.
The first Porsche-designed racing cars predate the family firm and date back to 1934 and the fearsome Auto Union V16. But the first factory-built Porsche racing car took five years to follow the company's first road car, which appeared in 1948. When Porsche started building 356s, customers started racing them in sprints, hill climbs, and long-distance races, complete with pleas to the factory to see if it couldn't deliver a little more power, particularly from American owners.
Enlarge / FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel speaks during the US Chamber of Commerce's Global Aerospace Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)
With the Federal Communications Commission preparing to reimpose net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation on Internet service providers, the broadband industry is almost certain to sue the FCC once the decision is made.
The Democratic-majority FCC is expected to define broadband as a telecommunications service, which means it would face common-carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act. Industry trade groups that represent Internet service providers will likely argue, as they have unsuccessfully argued before, that the FCC does not have authority to classify broadband as a telecommunications service.
Federal appeals courts upheld previous FCC decisions on whether to apply common carrier rules to broadband, a fact that current agency officials point to in their plan to revive Obama-era regulation of ISPs under Title II. But some legal commentators claim the FCC is doomed to fail this time because of the Supreme Court's evolving approach on whether federal agencies can decide "major questions" without explicit instructions from Congress.
Enlarge / Mass-produced in the 1960s with a not-very special engine, the MGB is a rather good candidate for an electric conversion. (credit: Frontline Developments)
Electrifying classic sports cars is swiftly becoming big business. Battery-powered 911s, E-Types, Triumphs, and more have been around for a while, but the humble MGB has thus far been overlooked… until now. UK-based MG specialists Frontline Developments has a rich history of restoring, modifying, and generally sprucing up MGBs, and has decided that now is the time to inject a cleaner, greener heart into what was once a British sportscar staple.
The MG BEE EV is a neat little thing. Currently in prototype form, it's packing a 40 kWh battery attached to a 114 hp (85 kW) 162 lb ft (220 Nm) Hyper9 motor that sends power to the rear wheels via a five-speed Mazda Miata gearbox. Range is about 140 miles (225 km) if you drive sensibly, and charging takes about five hours. Frontline will build you one as a BEE GT (coupe), or Roadster should you wish to feel the wind in your beard as you roll along.
Frontline Developments is well known in the MG world. Founded in 1991 by Tim Fenna, it started with gearbox swaps, then widened its business with suspension, brake, and even engine upgrades for customers wanting a little more go. The company offers full restorations, as well as its own special editions from time to time. Its LE50 and Abingdon editions came with beautiful aesthetics, twinned with more modern (and powerful) internal combustion engines. It's launching a V8-powered LE60 alongside the BEE for those who fancy old-school thrills.
Enlarge / It meant spending most of the week on the road, but who would say no to a chance to drive Porsche's very first car? Not I. (credit: Tangent Vector/Porsche)
CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, Calif.—Every few years, Porsche holds a big celebration of its racing heritage at the Laguna Seca racetrack in Monterey, California. Called Rennsport Reunion, it's a big deal, drawing a far bigger attendance than when racing series like IndyCar or IMSA visit. And attendees are a passionate crowd, prepared to wait in line for an hour or more just to visit the official merch store.
Rennsport Reunion 7 took place last week, and it was a special one, as this year is Porsche's 75th anniversary. Among the cars brought over from the company museum was the very first to ever bear the Porsche name, the prototype 356/1 roadster.
And Porsche let us drive this priceless artifact.
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