February is upon us, and with it a familiar but unwelcome theme for the auto industry: uncertainty.

That’s thanks to President Trump’s rapidly evolving move to implement 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, aka some of the US auto industry’s most important trade partners.

Several automakers turned in strong sales reports for January, boosted by growing sales of EVs and hybrids. But the industry at large, including the EV sector, has its attention squarely set on trade policy and how it’ll affect their bottom lines.

Electric numbers: Hyundai reported its best-ever January sales in the US, up 15% YoY, fueled by a 41% gain for electrified models. The brand’s hybrid sales jumped 74%, while sales of battery-electric vehicles grew 15%.

Sister brand Kia also posted record January sales, up 12% YoY. The brand’s electric EV6 posted 27% sales growth from a year ago, though EV9 sales were down 14%.

The Honda brand reported record electrified vehicle sales of 29,762 units, primarily driven by the success of hybrid models like the Accord and CR-V. And although Ford’s sales dropped 6.3% in January, its EV and hybrid sales were up 21% and 19%, respectively.

Analysts forecast a relatively strong sales month, with plenty of asterisks due to uncertainty about federal policy.

Keep reading here.—JG

In a field with formulaic text documents galore, it’s no surprise the legal profession is seen as ripe for specialized generative AI tools—and companies have been racing to build them.

One of those companies is LexisNexis, which has been rolling out LLM products to better navigate and draft documents on a research platform already widely used by lawyers. Now LexisNexis is taking those AI offerings further into the personalized legal assistant realm, with the new general availability of a tool called Protégé.

The tool can act autonomously to draft fuller legal documents of all kinds and suggest next steps in a legal workflow, while “reviewing its own work and identifying areas where it can improve its own output,” according to the company’s breakdown. Its output is grounded in uploaded documents as well as the research platform’s troves of data.

The rollout is part of a bigger trend in which enterprise companies have been moving from building chatbots and conversational search to AI agents that can automate certain routine tasks.

Keep reading here.—PK

It was trillions of dollars invested in established renewable technology, it was mere billions invested in emerging clean tech—OK, enough Dickensian allusions.

In its latest report on energy transition investment trends, BloombergNEF found that what it calls a “two-speed” energy transition is occurring, meaning that investment in more mature sectors like energy storage and power grids is rapidly outpacing investment in newer green tech, like hydrogen energy, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear energy. In fact, investment in established green tech grew almost 15% last year, while investment in emerging green tech fell 23%.

The report states that the stark difference is due to governments and the private sector not doing enough to “de-risk” emerging tech by bringing prices down or driving innovation. As Tech Brew previously reported, the Inflation Reduction Act drove down prices for established renewables like solar and wind power and newer innovations like nuclear and hydrogen power. But Whit Irvin, CEO of QHydrogen, told Tech Brew last year that the private sector needs to innovate further to really bring down hydrogen prices.

“It’s going to be industry innovation and people working together to solve big problems that will solve it,” Irvin said. “It’s not going to be governments.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

You’re not gonna reach my telephone: Sick and tired of routine phone calls from “Potential Spam”? A new feature from AT&T and TransUnion aims to reduce some of the mystery of why someone (or something) is blowing up your phone.

“Branded Call Display” will let brands display their logo and the reason they’re calling—think “appointment reminder” or “customer inquiry.”

It’s available, for now, “for most Android users on incoming calls from participating businesses and organizations,” per a press release from the companies.

Let’s look into it: OpenAI earlier this week released a tool called Deep Research, which “can gather information from across the internet and synthesize it in concise reports,” the New York Times reported.

“OpenAI said that the tool might struggle to distinguish authoritative information from rumors and that it often failed to accurately convey when it was uncertain about the information it was delivering,” the NYT’s Cade Metz wrote.

As proponents of information literacy and millennials who once learned the Dewey Decimal System, we’re hanging onto tools that don’t hallucinate for now.