50 million VWs, Faraday Future exodus Tesla Track Mode: Today’s Car News50 million VWs, Faraday Future exodus Tesla Track Mode: Today’s Car News

VW announced plans to build almost as many electric cars as it did diesels. Faraday Future’s last founding executive steps away. Tesla introduces Track Mode on Model 3 Performance cars. And we hear which electric car our Twitter followers would buy in our latest poll results. All this and more on Green Car Reports.
Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess revealed plans for the company to buy batteries for 50 million electric cars in coming years. That’s five times as many as the company previously announced, and far more electric cars than the number of illegal diesels the company sold.
The last of Faraday Future’s five founding executives stepped down last week, citing legal liabilities of staying with the sinking company. Most of the rest of the company’s employees have been furloughed or laid off, leaving only a skeleton crew at the company’s factory.
Tesla has begun releasing Track Mode software for the Model 3 Performance, which adds capability to conventional track modes from internal combustion cars by controlling power individually at each axle. It also boosts cooling to prevent the shutdowns that affected Model S Performance cars on the track.
Our Twitter followers made the same choice as our editors for Best Car To Buy for 2019: the Tesla Model 3—perhaps unsurprisingly.
Waymo, Google’s self-driving service, is scheduled to launch driverless taxis in Phoenix in early December, Bloomberg reports. The Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid vans and Jaguar I-Pace electric SUVs will only service select customers in a small area of the city. Mercedes-Benz and German auto-parts supplier Bosch will also launch a new self-driving service in San Jose, California. Their service, however, will still rely on backup “safety drivers.” 
Finally, in a boon to family grocery-shoppers everywhere, a new feature in VW’s Car-Net system will let Apple iPhone users unlock their cars using the Siri voice assistant.
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