The car of the future is an EV golf cart

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Quadricycles. I'm your friend David Pierce. And today on the show, we're gonna talk about EVs. But not EVs like we normally talk about EVs. There's this new kind of burgeoning trend of these cars that are essentially golf carts that are trying to become everybody's second vehicle. Sure. Own your pickup. Own your giant SUV. But maybe instead of buying a second car, you might buy one of these. It's a new kind of car. It's a new kind of electric car, and I think there's something big happening here. Verge's Andy Hawkins is gonna come on and talk about it. We'll get right to that. But first, here's everything else happening on the Verge today. This is ninety seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, 07/21/2026. Lite, the company that you might have heard of that's made minimalist phones over the last decade or so, announced its first flip phone, the Lite Flip. It's roughly what you think. It's a Lite phone in flip phone form. But I keep thinking about one thing Lite's cofounder told me, that they made a flip phone specifically because people actively didn't want to be seen using a smartphone. Something big is changing in our relationship with technology, and this phone is right out in front of it. I'm gonna buy one of these, and then I'm gonna buy whatever insanely expensive foldable Samsung launches tomorrow and just live in full on phone extremes. I'm very excited about it. Meanwhile, a judge officially approved a settlement that will see Anthropic pay $1,500,000,000 to a group of authors who accused it of using more than 7,000,000 of their books to train AI models. That is a big number, obviously, but there's a bigger story here too. There are a lot of copyright lawsuits out there just like this one, accusing AI companies of stealing data to train LLMs. This one is a settlement, not a guilty verdict, and the specifics of the case were actually kind of messy. It's about how the books were copied and stored, not that they were used specifically in LLMs. But it still sets a high price for settlement, and it sets an important precedent for all of those other suits and the many, many, many ones still to come. Finally, The Verge's Justine Karma has a big story out today about the real environmental cost of data centers or even of one single GPU. I I feel like it's often hard to understand how much energy, water, and other resources are being gobbled up by the AI industry, but also by our technology everywhere, including, like, the phone in our pockets. You should check it out and see what it really costs. You can see more on all of this at theverge.com. That's ninety seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 21. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in The US gets hit …