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The Chevy Corvette E-Ray – starting at about $104,000 – may surprise some consumers, as it’s a step toward full electrification but a unicorn in GM’s lineup.
GM over the years has discontinued all hybrids, including plug-in hybrids, to focus investment on all-electric vehicles.
So why now release a Corvette hybrid? GM says it had already developed the technology ahead of its more aggressive EV ambitions.

DETROIT – General Motors’ future may be in all-electric vehicles, but it still needs its current models to pay the bills to allow it to invest in those new products.
That’s one of the reasons why the automaker on Tuesday revealed the 2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray – the first-ever “electrified,” or hybrid, version of the famed sports car. It also features all-wheel drive, another first for the eighth-generation, or C8, Corvette.

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The car – starting at about $104,000 when it will be released later this year – may surprise some consumers, as it’s a step toward full electrification but a unicorn in GM’s lineup. The Detroit automaker had discontinued all hybrids, including plug-in hybrids, to focus investment on all-electric vehicles.
So why make a hybrid Corvette? GM says there are several reasons but, in general, the automaker was already developing the technology ahead of its more aggressive EV ambitions. It’s also a new market that should help the company test the waters of electrification for the iconic car.
“It’s just a new market opportunity for us as a company to showcase our engineering and our development of the whole architecture of C8,” GM President Mark Reuss told CNBC’s Phil LeBeau. “General Motors and Chevrolet keep increasing what we’re delivering for the Corvette customer.”
Reuss last year confirmed an all-electric Corvette is coming, but GM has not announced timing for the EV version.

It’s a Corvette

The most obvious reason for the hybrid is it’s a Corvette, so GM does special things for it. The car has been a halo vehicle for the automaker for 70 years. It’s something the company has always considered to be in a class of its own, with the capability of attracting new buyers to the company overall.

The current eighth-generation car is especially notable because GM made it into a midengine sports car for better performance, moving the engine from under the hood to behind the two passenger seats of the car.

2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray hybrid sports car

The C8 features an exclusive Corvette engine and architecture. Almost every GM vehicle shares platforms, engines and other features. For example, all of GM’s full-size trucks and SUVs are on the same platform and largely feature the same engines.
“There’s just an incredible architecture beneath it, and the architecture was planned and engineered for quite a few variants,” Reuss said.
The last GM vehicle to use a modified Corvette architecture was the sixth-generation version, with the short-lived Cadillac XLR, which was discontinued in 2009.

Capital spent

Officials also say the hybrid was developed in conjunction with the regular C8 Corvette, which debuted in July 2019.
That means most, if not all, of the capital for research and development of the car was allocated before GM’s accelerated EV plans. The Corvette plant in Kentucky also will not need any additional investment or downtime for the change, according to a GM spokesman.

2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray hybrid sports car

“It’s just part of our journey to what we have talked about before that there are ‘electrified’ and then fully electric Corvettes, and we’re certainly on the road to that,” Steve Majoros, vice president of Chevrolet marketing, said during a media briefing. “But in the meantime, we have a lot of technology bandwidth that we can still unpack with Corvette.”
The hybrid system was specifically designed for the eighth-generation Corvette, according to Harlan Charles, Chevrolet Corvette product marketing manager. The battery system – a 1.9 kilowatt-hour battery pack that’s located between the seats – is charged mostly via regenerative energy from coasting and braking, as well as during normal driving.
The system allows the Corvette to start quietly instead of issuing the sound of the roaring V8, improves acceleration and, potentially, the vehicle’s fuel economy. GM declined to release mpg expectations, which for the regular C8 is 19 mpg combined.

Corvette family?

Future all-electric Corvettes may change more than just the vehicle’s powertrain. Automotive News, citing industry forecasters, last year reported GM is expected to debut an all-electric SUV version of the Corvette around 2025.
A Corvette SUV has been speculated about for years following the success of sports car manufacturers such as Porsche, Maserati and others successfully expanding into such vehicles. Ford Motor also has found success by utilizing naming, badging and characteristics of its Mustang for the all-electric Mustang Mach-E.

Ford has gone as far as saying the Mach-E is the reason the carmaker can continue to produce V-8 versions of the car. GM could do something similar.
The GM spokesman declined to speculate on expanding Corvette, citing the company has seen the reports and will “not engage in the speculation.”
In late 2019, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said a Corvette sub-brand could be worth $7 billion to $12 billion for the automaker.

No plug-in

GM’s Reuss has made it clear the company is not interested in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles since it discontinued the Chevrolet Volt in early 2019. He has described such vehicles as too costly to produce and as transitional in the push to all-electric cars and trucks.
“There is no plug-in piece of this,” Reuss said. “This is a truly performance-oriented electrified system.”

2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray hybrid sports car

Aside from the company giving up on PHEVs, officials said the extra weight of additional batteries and plug-in technologies would drag down the vehicle’s performance. An all-electric Corvette would be heavier but benefit from the nearly instantaneous torque and other EV driving dynamics to offset the weight gain.
“The mission of this vehicle was performance, performance, performance,” said Mike Kociba, lead Corvette development engineer. “Every kilogram or pound had to earn its way in from a mass standpoint. … It hurt performance, plain and simple.”
– CNBC’s Phil LeBeau contributed to this report.

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The Tennis Channel is diving deeper into America’s fastest growing sport, pickleball.
The channel will air the semi-finals and finals of Major League Pickleball’s Mesa, Arizona, tournament.
The league also announced the final two teams of MLP and their ownership groups.

Anna Bright of the Ranchers returns a shot during a group play Major League Pickleball match against Mad Drops Pickleball Club at Pickle & Chill on October 15, 2022 in Columbus, Ohio.
Emilee Chinn | Getty Images

The Tennis Channel is embracing pickleball.
Major League Pickleball announced Thursday the cable channel will broadcast the league’s premier level tournament semifinals and finals in Mesa, Arizona, and will make all matches of the tournament available for streaming. The partnership marks a deepening of the relationship between professional pickleball and the TV network.

Pickleball has soared in popularity, with more than 36 million Americans playing the sport last year. Now the Tennis Channel is poised to capitalize on that surge.
“We’ve gone from one pickleball event in 2021, we had a pretty full year of coverage in 2022 and that is going to escalate significantly in 2023,” Ken Solomon, CEO of the Tennis Channel, told CNBC. “We have big plans.”
Solomon said the network is uniquely positioned to broadcast pickleball after its 20 years of broadcasting tennis.
“We have all the infrastructure in place and all the human capital and the people who create the narrative to the engineers,” he said.
Solomon said the network can transition to pickleball “literally with a flip of a switch.” And, he said, the sport is “hot as hell.”

The longtime Tennis Channel executive said pickleball has already seen a very natural overlap with existing tennis sponsors. He doesn’t worry about pickleball cannibalizing the sport that’s been his bread and butter.
Brian Levine, Major League Pickleball’s interim CEO, agrees the two sports can be mutually beneficial.
“I think there’s this misperception that there’s a competition between tennis and pickleball,” Levine told CNBC. “I think that it’s actually a complement.”
The vast majority of MLP professionals come from a tennis background. Many current and former tennis players have invested in professional pickleball, including Naomi Osaka, James Blake, Kim Clijsters, Sam Querrey, Nick Kyrgios and Lindsay Davenport.
For the Tennis Channel audience, Levine thinks pickleball’s fast-paced action will help attract new fans of the sport. He noted that during MLP professional matches, the ball is in action about 40% of the time, compared with professional tennis matches at 16%.
The Tennis Channel, created in 2003 and owned by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, struck its first deal with the Professional Pickleball Association in 2021 to broadcast various events and tournaments.
The network has since broadcast a special pickleball celebrity exhibition in Dallas featuring sports legends like Tony Romo, Jordan Spieth and John Isner, as well as MLP’s first-ever draft in Las Vegas, where the league revealed team lineups.
Solomon said pickleball has already delivered strong ratings for his network.
“What we have seen consistently, is real attention, real appointment television type viewing for pickleball. It has rated very, very well,” he said.
The network has been making a push into streaming and making its product available internationally, with a subscription service called Tennis Channel International launching in 2020. Adding pickleball matches to its streaming offerings means beefing up content at a time when linear television is stagnant, at best.
MLP said it has not finalized broadcast agreements beyond the Mesa, Arizona, tournament but is actively in discussions.
Solomon would not comment on his network’s future plans with MLP but said, “We firmly believe that having dedicated destinations is a virtue. We’ve proven it.”
Also on Thursday, the pro pickleball circuit announced the final two teams of the league and their respective ownership groups for the 2023 season, which kicks off Jan. 26: The St. Louis Shock will be led by businessman Richard Chaifetz, with his son, Ross Chaifetz, leading team operations; and the Orlando Squeeze in Florida will be led by Ryan DeVos, whose family has more than 30 years of ownership experience with the NBA’s Orlando Magic.
NFL free agent Odell Beckham Jr. will join the ownership group of the Washington, D.C., team, the league said.

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“How long is your runway before takeoff?” That is how venture capitalists (vcs) begin meetings in India these days, says Ananth Narayanan, founder of Mensa, one of the country’s newest unicorns (companies worth in excess of $1bn). Until recently the main question that mattered for India’s startup scene was valuation. But the mood has changed. Plunging share prices at companies that have gone public have made vc firms much warier about investing. Prizing unrealistic valuations has given way to worrying about how quickly startups might begin to make money. So far Mensa, which buys stakes in digital brands, is one of a handful of such firms that makes a profit.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Casting blame is natural: it is tempting to fault someone else for a snafu rather than taking responsibility yourself. But blame is also corrosive. Pointing fingers saps team cohesion. It makes it less likely that people will own up to mistakes, and thus less likely that organisations can learn from them. Research published in 2015 suggests that a Shaggy culture (“It wasn’t me”) shows up in share prices. Firms whose managers pointed to external factors to explain their failings underperformed companies that blamed themselves. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

China’s clampdown on its best and brightest tech companies came quickly in late 2020. Two years later authorities in Beijing are swerving rapidly back towards more predictable policymaking. On January 16th DiDi Global, a ride-hailing firm, said it would soon be allowed to resume taking on new customers after an 18-month pause during which regulators banned it from growing. A week earlier Ant Group, China’s payments and fintech giant, revealed that Jack Ma, the country’s most prominent entrepreneur, no longer held controlling rights in the company which he co-founded. Mr Ma’s ceding of control was rumoured to be one of the final steps toward political approval of the company. Shortly afterwards a senior Chinese technocrat said the tech crackdown was drawing to a close.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Job adverts hint at its imminent arrival but Tesla is yet to confirm recent reports that it will set up a new electric vehicle (ev) “gigafactory” in Monterrey, a Mexican city close to the American frontier. The rumours have nonetheless set wheels in motion. Noah Itech, a Chinese supplier of automation equipment to the American car company, is building a $100m plant in the city. If Elon Musk’s firm sets up in Mexico it will be the latest in a long list of companies that have chosen to build vehicles in a country that borders the world’s second-largest car market.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Procter & Gamble reported falling revenue and profit on Thursday, as higher prices struggled to offset declining sales volumes.
All of the company’s divisions reported declining sales volume in the quarter.
The company lifted its outlook for 2023 sales growth to a range of 4% to 5%

In this photo illustration a Procter and Gamble logo seen displayed on a smartphone with stock market percentages in the background.
Omar Marques | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Procter & Gamble reported year-over-year declines in revenue and profit on Thursday, as higher prices struggled to offset declining sales volumes.
Shares of P&G fell about 2% in premarket trading.

Here’s how P&G performed in its fiscal second quarter of 2023 compared with what Wall Street anticipated, based on an average of analyst’s estimates compiled by Refinitiv:

Adjusted earnings per share: $1.59 versus an expected $1.59
Total revenue: $20.77 billion versus expected $20.73 billion

For the three-month period ended Dec. 31, the company reported net income of $3.9 billion, or $1.59 per share, excluding items, down from $4.22 billion, or $1.66 per share, a year earlier.
Net sales fell 1% to $20.77 billion, topping analyst’s projections of $20.73 billion.
The company’s organic revenue, which excludes the impact of foreign currency, acquisitions and divestitures, increased 5% during the fiscal second quarter. That increase was a result of higher pricing, which outweighed shrinking consumer demand.
All of the company’s divisions reported declining sales volume in the quarter, despite seeing increases in organic sales as a result of higher pricing. Its grooming division, which houses brands like Gillette and The Art of Shaving, and which has historically underperformed for the company, reported no sales growth — its volume declines completely cancelled out its higher prices.

The Cincinnati-based consumer goods giant, which owns brands like Crest toothpaste, Tide laundry detergent, and Pampers diapers, warned in its first quarter report of a $3.9 billion hit to its fiscal year 2023 due to “unfavorable” foreign exchange rates and pricier raw materials, commodities and freight. As a result, the company lowered its guidance, despite posting a solid first quarter.
The company now anticipates headwinds of $3.7 billion for the remainder of its fiscal year, marking a slight improvement. But it warned those headwinds would continue to squeeze P&G’s gross margins, which saw a 160-basis-point decrease during the second quarter versus a year ago.
Still, the company lifted its outlook for 2023 sales growth to a range of 4% to 5% from a prior range of 3% to 5%. The company lowered its estimated impact of foreign exchange to 5% from 6%.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

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