Samsung’s next Galaxy Watch Ultra could bring the battery upgrade many users have been waiting for. The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is expected to launch in the coming weeks, and a new report suggests it may arrive with a much larger battery than the 2024 and 2025 models.

According to SamMobile, the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 will use a battery with a rated capacity of 784mAh. Samsung could market this as an 800mAh typical capacity, which would make it around 35% larger than the 590mAh battery used in the current Galaxy Watch Ultra models.

A bigger battery could push the Ultra closer to three days

Samsung currently claims up to two days of battery life on the Galaxy Watch Ultra when users rely on features such as GPS training mode. If the reported battery upgrade is accurate, the Watch Ultra 2 could get much closer to three days of regular use, depending on display settings, workout tracking, cellular use, and health monitoring.

The battery may not be the only efficiency upgrade. The smartwatch is also rumored to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite chip instead of Samsung’s Exynos W1000, which could help stretch runtime further.

5G support could complicate the battery gains

Another reported change is 5G support. Previous leaks have suggested that Samsung is preparing a 5G version of the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, though availability may initially be limited to markets such as the US and South Korea.

That upgrade could make the watch more capable away from a phone, but it may also affect battery life. Until Samsung announces the device, it is unclear how much of the larger battery will be used to offset 5G power demands. Samsung is also likely to base the Watch Ultra 2’s software on Wear OS 7, which Google recently unveiled at I/O 2026.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is expected to debut alongside Samsung’s next foldables, which are rumored to arrive in July 2026. So, it looks like we may not have to wait long to find out whether Samsung’s next Ultra watch really delivers the battery jump suggested by the latest reports.

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Senior reporter (and resident battery expert) Tim De Chant traveled to General Motors’ sprawling Warren Technical Center outside Detroit to learn more about the automaker’s plans to reduce the cost of its next slate of EVs. The upshot: GM is banking on LMR batteries and a new Battery Cell Development Center that is viewed as the bridge between its R&D efforts and full-scale production. 

Kurt Kelty, GM’s VP of battery and sustainability, provided fresh details about the company’s $900 million initiative and how this new chemistry will preserve range while slashing costs. For instance, the Chevrolet Silverado EV could be $6,000 cheaper. Read the story here.

As with most companies these days, AI also makes a cameo appearance. Although I should note that AI plays more than just a supporting role at GM. I recently interviewed Sterling Anderson, GM’s chief product officer, and Jason Fischer, who is executive director of virtual integration engineering, about some of the changes inside the company and how it’s using AI. That story is coming next week, but I’ll give you a bit of a teaser. 

GM is using a collection of outside AI models, as well as ones it has created in-house that can be used across large swaths of the business and that — here’s the punchline — will speed up its vehicle development cycle. I’ll have more details in my article, and don’t worry, if you miss it, I will highlight it in next week’s newsletter. 

Finally, last week I wrote about the Ferrari Luce EV and how it doesn’t matter that it has been so widely criticized. I got some wonderful emails from you all on the topic — thanks! The poll, however, showed that as much coverage as the Luce received, many of you really don’t care about it. 

In the poll I asked, ‘Do you love it, hate it, or indifferent to it?’ Most of you, about 44%, are indifferent, while the remainder are equally split between love and hate. 

The more I think about the future of the Luce EV, the more I think this might become a ragebait purchase among those who can afford it and are deemed worthy by Ferrari to buy it.

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Deals!

The looming SpaceX IPO is the deal of the decade, certainly for the bankers and for CEO Elon Musk. But it could also affect Tesla shareholders. 

As part of the IPO registration process, a company will often file numerous amendments before making its public markets debut. SpaceX has filed a few already. And our eagle-eyed senior reporter Sean O’Kane spotted a new sentence added to the S-1 document that has some big implications: “We may issue a significant amount of equity in connection with future transactions.”

While it is certainly possible that SpaceX will use the $75 billion it is expected to raise to snap up a variety of companies, the most likely M&A target is Tesla. This sentence was included in the risk factors and appears to be preparing future investors for the possibility of a major dilution event. Read the full story. 

There is another interesting deal spotted by O’Kane — this time involving Carvana and Slate Auto, the electric vehicle startup backed by Jeff Bezos. According to documents obtained by TechCrunch, Carvana has been granted the option to invest in Slate Auto. As O’Kane notes in his article, this could hint at a deeper partnership between the two companies.

Other deals that got more attention …

Layup Parts, a startup trying to become the Amazon of composite parts, raised $42 million in a Series A funding round led by dual-use venture fund Marlinspike, with participation from new investors Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners, as well as existing backers Founders Fund and Lux Capital. 

Mach Industries, the three-year-old defense tech startup that now has five autonomous vehicles in development, raised a $300 million Series C at a $1.8 billion valuation. The round was led by Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital and includes backing from Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures.

Molfar Defence Technologies, a Polish-Ukrainian defense startup developing anti-drone radar systems, closed the first tranche of its €2 million funding round. Swedish investor Front Ventures committed €1.5 million, Tech.Eu reported.

Spiro, the African electric mobility startup, raised $215 million in a round that pushed its valuation close to $1 billion, Bloomberg reported. 

Notable reads and other tidbits

Avride CEO Dmitry Polishchuk shared a few stats about the autonomous vehicle startup on LinkedIn. The company has completed 60,000 trips for Uber riders in Dallas since launching in December. (Avride robotaxis show up on the Uber app in Dallas.) The company’s fleet of vehicles, which includes test cars and the Uber robotaxis, has driven more than 1.3 million miles, with a million of that covered in the first five months of 2026.

Lectric eBikes launched its third brand in six months — an initiative the company has sunk about $10 million into. How is this seven-year-old company expanding while so many others tanked? I dug into the company a bit and interviewed its co-founder to find out. Read the full story.

Uber’s annual Lost & Found Index has provided a rather quirky anthropological snapshot of its riders over the past decade. This year, the company also released a list of items left in robotaxis that are available via the Uber app. There are some odd items on the list! It also got me thinking about how Uber is clearly finding every way possible to push into — and make money from — the nascent autonomous vehicle industry. To my point: Uber is planning to put 500 data-collection vehicles on the road this year as part of its new AV Labs division. 

Waymo had a couple of interesting news items this week. One of its robotaxis was used in a burglary and the case sheds some light on how Waymo handles all that rider footage it collects. And the Alphabet-owned company announced a deal with B2U to use the batteries from its retired all-electric robotaxis to support electricity grids in California and Texas. 

Woven Capital, Toyota’s growth fund, promoted Jarek Khoilian and Manas Punhani as principals. Reminder: Woven Capital launched its $800 million fund II in September 2025.

One more thing …

With Subaru rolling out some new EVs, I thought it would be good to remind myself what the original was like. I’m talking about the Solterra, which was born out of a partnership between Toyota and Subaru to jointly develop a platform dedicated to battery electric vehicles.

I spent a week with a pearl-white 2026 Subaru Solterra premium trim model that starts at $38,495. Putting aside for a moment that my friend’s Ring camera identified the Solterra as a mini golf cart, this EV does have something to offer. Yeah, it’s basic. And sure, it’s not going to fire off the line like a Tesla, Lucid, or Porsche Taycan. But it doesn’t need to. 

The headline here is that the Solterra has gotten better — and it really needed it. 

The 2026 model has a bunch of notable updates that improve the power, range, and usability. 

The front and rear motors have been updated — along with a new controller that improves power distribution and control — and together produce an improved 233 horsepower (the XT trim pushes it up to 388 hp). Like most other EVs out there, the Solterra now has an integrated NACS charging port, the system developed by Tesla. The range has also improved to an EPA-estimated 288 miles, which is notable considering Subaru increased the battery capacity by only 2 kWh and managed to increase the range by more than 50 miles. There is also a preconditioning setting to prepare the battery for a charge, which greatly improves the charging time. 

Subaru revamped the tech inside as well, adding a 14-inch touchscreen with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and making wireless 15 W smartphone chargers for standard.

Subaru doesn’t offer true one-pedal driving in the Solterra, a standard bearer of EVs. Instead, the Subaru has paddles located on the back of the steering wheel that let you increase the regenerative braking if you want. But it won’t come to a complete stop like other popular EVs that have one-pedal driving. While longtime EV owners might be turned off by this, it could be more attractive to car buyers who want their EV to act like their old gas-powered car.

Hidden among the architectural landmarks of General Motors’ sprawling Warren Tech Center outside Detroit is a new cornerstone of the automaker’s $900 million bet on its electric future.

The nondescript 500,000-square-foot pair of off-white boxes, which house GM’s new Battery Cell Development Center, might not look like much. But locked inside is the key to GM’s plan to slash the cost of its EVs by nearly 10%. 

At a time when some car companies are pulling back on EVs, GM’s new Battery Cell Development Center is part of a reboot. And it’s one that GM told TechCrunch will allow it to bring a new slate of lower-cost batteries to market a year faster than planned.

GM hasn’t been immune to the malaise in the U.S. EV market. Last year, the automaker took a $1.6 billion charge as it reconfigured its EV production capacity, laying off thousands of workers in the process. It has also reportedly shelved, if temporarily, a refresh of its full-size EV trucks and SUVs.

To get its EV strategy back on track, Kurt Kelty, vice president of battery and sustainability at GM, is pinning the company’s success on a new battery chemistry known as LMR. Kelty, who previously led battery technology at Tesla, has made it his signature product in the two years he’s been with the company.

“That is really going to be our bread and butter,” Kelty told TechCrunch. “That is going to be our main product line.”

Battery reboot

GM’s halting rollout of EVs has mirrored the wider battery industry in the U.S., which over the last couple of decades has developed in fits and starts. Early startups haven’t lived up to their promise, and more recently, intense competition from Chinese companies has pushed automakers and battery manufacturers to rethink the plans they made five years ago.

At GM, that pressure led to the shortened life of Ultium, the branded battery platform that underpins its current EVs. Like much of the industry, the automaker had bet heavily on a pricey yet powerful battery chemistry known as NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt). Rising materials costs and China’s dominance of key critical minerals have kept EV prices higher than expected. NMC won’t disappear, but at GM, it’ll be restricted to GM’s high-end vehicles.

In its place, GM has been developing LMR (lithium-manganese-rich), which it says is almost as energy dense as NMC but at a cost that’s comparable to cheaper chemistries like LFP (lithium-iron-phosphate) that power low-end models like the Chevrolet Bolt.

When GM introduced LMR last year, it said that, in a truck like the Chevrolet Silverado EV, the new chemistry should preserve most of the vehicle’s more than 400-mile range while slashing costs by at least $6,000. For a mid-range model, that would bring it within spitting distance of the gas version.

Discovering a new battery chemistry is one thing. Manufacturing gigawatt-hours’ worth of it is another, especially at the pace the EV industry is moving. Facing pressure from automotive giants like BYD and battery titans like CATL, GM says it wants to get LMR vehicles on the road by 2028. GM needs the new Battery Cell Development Center to deliver if it wants to hit that deadline.

The new building serves as the keystone of GM’s battery strategy. The company opened its Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center and its first gigafactory in 2022. What was missing was a way to connect the breakthroughs that emerged from Wallace to the factory floors in Tennessee and Ohio.

The BCDC, as insiders call the facility, is something like a pilot line, but bigger. When fully operational, it will be capable of producing about 2,500 cells per day, or about half a gigawatt-hour per year. It will take batteries developed in small batches — about 30 to 50 per day — at the Wallace Battery Cell Research Center next door and determine if they’re ready for production. 

Mastering the battery recipe

Many recipes for new batteries fail to deliver when they’re spun up to commercial scale, and companies don’t have years to work out the kinks. If a new chemistry can’t hit 85% yield within 18 months on a production line, it shouldn’t be considered commercially viable, according to a McKinsey report.

The challenges are similar to using a recipe intended for a family of four and scaling it up to a wedding reception with 400 guests. It’s not just the sheer throughput of the factory, either. Batteries that emerge from the research center are small coin cells, but the cells in an EV pack look more like a small cutting board.

“Once you learn how to make the recipe in Wallace, then you’ve got to figure out, well, how do you make this in high volume?” Kelty said. “You really learn a lot going from that coin cell to the large format because it doesn’t transfer perfectly.”

The BCDC is intended to make that step less painful. 

A test run at the facility costs about $200,000, which is far less than at the full-size Ultium plant. When the BCDC team is confident it has the process nailed down, the transition to full production should be easier, Kelty said. “The equipment is almost the same between them, and so it shouldn’t be as hard of a handoff.”

The BCDC is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than the 2.8 million-square-foot Ultium battery factory in Tennessee. The Ultium plant makes about 300,000 cells per year, or 45 gigawatt-hours’ worth. The BCDC has fewer production lines, makes about a hundredth the number of cells, and its mixing tanks, where battery materials are blended, hold 40 liters instead of 2,000. Though smaller, the BCDC is still an order of magnitude larger than the Wallace Center next door. 

“The BCDC is intended to bridge the gap,” Mo Gallegos, head of BCDC at GM, told TechCrunch. 

Turning to AI models

To cut costs further, GM has been working to simulate as many processes as possible using a variety of AI models. The company has invested heavily in computing power, and while no one would put a number on it, I’m told it’s “national lab-scale.”

The automaker has developed physics-based models to simulate how changes to a chemistry or production process will affect the performance of a battery cell. 

“On LMR, we’ve logged over 150 million CPU hours,” Radu Theyyunni, director of global virtual electrification and powertrain at GM, told TechCrunch. “Most engine programs do not use that many core hours.” 

There’s also a digital twin of the entire BCDC, including equipment control boards, wiring, and even the blades in the mixing tanks. Before I set foot in the BCDC, the team had me don a VR headset and walked me through the digital twin, where I was able to follow the production line from start to finish.

As the BCDC has taken shape, the digital twin has been used for a range of tasks. In one instance, the team used it to determine if the plans left enough clearance around equipment for regular operations and repairs. In another, they simulated the equipments’ control systems to ensure everything would behave as intended. 

“Does the equipment run how it’s supposed to? Does it run safely? Is it doing all the things we think this control system is going to do? That shortens our debug and ramp up time,” Gallegos said. Altogether, GM says the simulations have saved it millions of dollars.

GM needs all the speed it can get. 

While the EV market in the U.S. has softened recently, globally, it grew 20% last year. The looming specter of high oil prices coupled with declining battery costs suggests the transition away from fossil fuels will happen eventually, if not sooner. 

If LMR is ready in time, it could help GM offer cost-competitive EVs with enough range to placate anxious Americans. But first LMR needs to pass through the BCDC. Gallegos expects the first batches to roll off the line later this year.

In the coming decade, battery development will be as important to automakers as engine development was over the last century. GM’s EV future hinges on its ability to shepherd new chemistries from R&D through to production. 

Kelty is fond of saying that GM is developing “the right battery for the right application,” perhaps echoing an old company slogan, “a car for every purse and purpose.” 

LMR might be the BCDC’s first test, but it’s unlikely to be its last.

The Apple Watch already has one of the best displays on any smartwatch, but the company is reportedly working on something that could make it meaningfully better. 

According to industry sources cited by The Elec, LG Display is currently developing and validating a new display backplane technology. It is called high-mobility oxide, or HMO, and the company is making it on its sixth-generation OLED production lines. 

How does HMO matter for Apple Watch battery life?

Every OLED display needs a backplane, which is the layer of transistors that controls each pixel. 

The current gold standard for Apple Watch panels is LTPO, which improves battery life by allowing the screen to dynamically drop its refresh rate to 1Hz when not being used actively.  

HMO, on the other hand, takes a different approach. It maximizes the inherent low-power advantages of oxide transistor technology without the complex manufacturing steps involved in making LTPO.

The new technology doesn’t require laser crystallization or ion implantation, which, in theory, should result in a display that draws even less power while costing less to produce. In simple words, the Apple Watch models using the technology could last substantially longer than the ones that rely on LTPO technology. 

Apple is evaluating HMO as a potential successor to its LTPO technology for Apple Watch displays. If everything pans out well, we might see the same technology on future iPhone displays. 

When could HMO reach an actual Apple Watch?

The challenge comes down to how quickly the transistors inside the display can switch on and off. 

Today’s mass-produced oxide panels aren’t fast enough for the kind of high-resolution, high-refresh-rate displays Apple demands, and LG Display needs to close that gap significantly before HMO is ready for production at scale. Getting there consistently across a full-sized panel, without sacrificing reliability, is the challenging part.

The report suggests that LG Display could supply the technology for smartwatch applications as early as next year, putting an optimistic timeline for an Apple Watch with an HMO display at 2027 or later. However, I won’t be surprised if it is delayed to 2028.

Keep in mind that everything here comes from industry sources cited by The Elec, and nothing has been confirmed by either Apple or LG Display.