autoevolution
 

Gustavo Henrique Ruffo

EV Expert
editor photo
Motoring writer since 1998, Gustavo wants to write relevant stories about cars and their shift to a sustainable future.

Got any tips? Feel free to contact him through his LinkedIn profile or Threema: R6F4J872.

Gustavo knew he would make a living with writing. The options were a career in law and journalism. After a quick research, he learned that law professions would help him earn ten times more than a reporter. Knowing how it feels to be broke, he took no effort in going to law school.

Having grown up reading anything about cars his father would put in his hands, he started driving late: Gustavo wanted to buy his first car before learning to drive. But life is funny, and his law internships demanded him to have a driver’s license so that he could go to courts driving company cars. That was the only fun he had in the world of legal affairs.

In the third year of college, dying of boredom, he took part in a journalism training course. Loving cars was what landed him his first job as a motoring writer. But he also fell in love with journalism and how powerful it can be when things are not right in the world.

The profession was as unstable and low-paying as predicted, which eventually became a problem. That made him try to go back to the legal world working as a trainee. Ironically, it was at Ford, where he missed his days as an automotive journalist. That drove him back to newsrooms and made journalism turn into a professional refuge: he could always count on it.

Accepting that the life of a reporter is full of ups and downs – aren’t them all? – Gustavo fully accepted he was a journalist. That helped him earn a few prizes, work in multiple places, visit almost every major auto show in the world, meet a bunch of nice people, and feed his family while working with what he loves. He thanks for that privilege every single day.

At autoevolution, he found the right environment for journalism at its best: it can be fun to have a purpose.
Fisker Ocean Will Use Ample's Battery Module Swapping System
Fisker Ocean Will Use Ample's Battery Module Swapping System

2 May 2023, 23:12 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Ample was the first company to propose swappable battery modules that I have covered. Soon after I spoke to John de Souza – Ample's co-founder and president – CATL announced the Choco-SEBs, the company's swappable battery modu...

 
Elon Musk Settles Defamation Lawsuit After Saying He'd Fight Unfair Cases Until the End
Elon Musk Settles Defamation Lawsuit After Saying He'd Fight Unfair Cases Until the End

2 May 2023, 18:48 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Coherence is the quality of being logically consistent. In other words, to act as you preach. When The Los Angeles Times used a tweet Elon Musk shared on May 20, 2022, to interpret his actions in a defamation lawsuit, the story was called "bia...

 
NEVS Emily GT Is the Electric SAAB We Hope Someone May Decide to Save
NEVS Emily GT Is the Electric SAAB We Hope Someone May Decide to Save

30 Apr 2023, 19:34 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / I do not doubt that some car enthusiasts cried when they learned that General Motors was not going to save SAAB. The company was not profitable for quite a while, but many must have wished Stellantis bought it and saved it as it did with Opel and V...

 
Hydrogen Storage? Liquids Can Be the Answer to Power FCEVs
Hydrogen Storage? Liquids Can Be the Answer to Power FCEVs

30 Apr 2023, 16:35 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / One of the major issues related to hydrogen is that it is a gas. That makes it difficult to transport and store, but new solutions may solve that in ways that most people may have never imagined. What if liquids helped to carry hydrogen? Forget wat...

 
Tesla Cybertruck Went From Exoskeleton Marvel to Unibody Honda Ridgeline Competitor
Tesla Cybertruck Went From Exoskeleton Marvel to Unibody Honda Ridgeline Competitor

30 Apr 2023, 13:45 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Anyone following the Tesla Cybertruck saga is probably relieved that it is coming to an end. From a clumsy revelation on November 21, 2019, it may finally reach production lines in 2023. We know that because the company shared a few images of its p...

 
When It Comes to Range, Combustion Engine Cars and Electric Vehicles Are Not Comparable
When It Comes to Range, Combustion Engine Cars and Electric Vehicles Are Not Comparable

29 Apr 2023, 22:15 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Any comparison that is not apples to apples will fundamentally raise questions about fairness. This principle dictates that you can only compare things that are minimally similar for the whole thing to be valid. A recent SAE paper makes it pretty e...

 
Can You Trust Tesla's Impact Report Regarding Battery Packs? The Answer Is No
Can You Trust Tesla's Impact Report Regarding Battery Packs? The Answer Is No

28 Apr 2023, 20:13 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Tesla recently disclosed in its Impact Report 2022 that its battery packs retain 88% capacity after 200,000 miles. Several people took that at face value and as a reassurance that they could drive an EV for a long time without issues. Having covere...

 
QuantumScape Is Happy With Its SSB, But Shouldn't It Fear CATL's Condensed Cells?
QuantumScape Is Happy With Its SSB, But Shouldn't It Fear CATL's Condensed Cells?

28 Apr 2023, 10:52 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / QuantumScape released a letter to its stockholders in which it shared some good news. Its A0 cells behaved as expected in tests with automakers and consumer electronics companies. However, it may have bigger things to fear other than its own develo...

 
Consumer Protection Organization in Germany Challenges Tesla's Claims on CO2 Savings
Consumer Protection Organization in Germany Challenges Tesla's Claims on CO2 Savings

27 Apr 2023, 09:58 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband e.V., or vzbv) recently celebrated a victory against Tesla. On July 17, 2022, vzbv disclosed that it was suing the BEV maker for violating European General Data Prot...

 
Tesla Owners With Damaged Battery Packs May Be Deceived With Error Resets
Tesla Owners With Damaged Battery Packs May Be Deceived With Error Resets

25 Apr 2023, 21:21 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / I've already discussed here the BMS_u029 error that is sentencing several older Model S battery packs to death. In fact, the error is just a warning that the component needs to be replaced. Jason Hughes wrote a Twitter thread to warn desperate...

 
Lucid Gravity Begins American Road Test Trials and Should Debut Sometime This Year
Lucid Gravity Begins American Road Test Trials and Should Debut Sometime This Year

25 Apr 2023, 17:23 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Can an SUV be as efficient as a sedan? That was the promise Lucid made when it revealed the Gravity, the SUV in which it made its biggest bets for high sales volumes. According to the BEV maker, the SUV is now in a new "phase of development, n...

 
BYD Says Fully Autonomous Cars Are Basically Impossible
BYD Says Fully Autonomous Cars Are Basically Impossible

25 Apr 2023, 13:54 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / While some BEV makers need full autonomous driving tech to work to preserve their market caps, there is one company sure that all the efforts they make will "lead nowhere." This is what Li Yunfei, the general manager of BYD branding and P...

 
Tesla Q1 2023 Earnings Call Showed Why Elon Musk Needs FSD to Work
Tesla Q1 2023 Earnings Call Showed Why Elon Musk Needs FSD to Work

24 Apr 2023, 14:55 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / When the Tesla Q1 2023 earnings call was immediately followed by a 7% stock price slide, its investors and advocates either pretended to be surprised or really failed to grasp why that happened. The answer is that the successive price reductions th...

 
New Ram Rampage Is a Unibody Pickup Truck America Won't Be Able to Buy
New Ram Rampage Is a Unibody Pickup Truck America Won't Be Able to Buy

23 Apr 2023, 17:03 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Stellantis is getting close to the reveal date of the Ram Rampage. You probably only heard that name related to Dodge, with the 1982 unibody pickup truck sold with that badge until 1984 and the 2006 concept. However, Project 291 – as it was k...

 
VinFast Should Be the First Carmaker to Have StoreDot's XFC Cells, But Only in 2025
VinFast Should Be the First Carmaker to Have StoreDot's XFC Cells, But Only in 2025

22 Apr 2023, 09:43 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / VinFast publicly believes the StoreDot technology for XFC (Extreme Fast Charge) cells is promising. It would not have invested in the Israeli battery company's Series D funding round in January 2022 if that weren't the case. StoreDot'...

 
NYC Parking Garage Collapse Is a Scary Warning About Heavier Cars
NYC Parking Garage Collapse Is a Scary Warning About Heavier Cars

21 Apr 2023, 11:09 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / On March 9, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) made an alert about how heavy battery electric vehicles (BEVs) were getting and how that affected safety. On April 8, the British Parking Association said it feared old parking buildings...

 
Engineer Who Asked NHTSA to Recall All Teslas Explains the Issue Everybody Missed
Engineer Who Asked NHTSA to Recall All Teslas Explains the Issue Everybody Missed

20 Apr 2023, 15:15 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Costas Lakafossis is a respected accident investigator in his home country. He was in Greek TV shows to discuss the Tempi train crash that killed 57 people on February 28. When he petitioned National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to...

 
Tesla Hacker Urges People Not to Drive Their BEVs Through High Water
Tesla Hacker Urges People Not to Drive Their BEVs Through High Water

19 Apr 2023, 11:42 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Most Tesla fans take Elon Musk's words at face value. They believed him when he said the BEV maker would have 1 million robotaxis on the streets in 2020. They trusted him when he affirmed Teslas would become appreciating assets due to FSD. Jas...

 
No2Rivian Association Releases an Open Letter Inviting RJ Scaringe to Talk
No2Rivian Association Releases an Open Letter Inviting RJ Scaringe to Talk

18 Apr 2023, 19:34 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Rivian has been pretty quiet after it announced it would invest $5 billion in a factory close to Atlanta, Georgia. The company has been fighting to increase production in its plant in Normal, Illinois, but it may also have to do with the fierce opp...

 
Tesla Fans Protecting the BEV Maker Will Shrink the Company's Customer Pool
Tesla Fans Protecting the BEV Maker Will Shrink the Company's Customer Pool

18 Apr 2023, 18:03 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Chris Harris said in June 2020 that he thought the Model 3 was brilliant, but was afraid to buy one. The British journalist did not want to be part of the "Tesla club." When Matt Farah said it was a little culty, Harris added that they ma...

 

Stories by Gustavo Henrique Ruffo