Lebanon Launches First Electric Car Despite Crisis

The car has a golden logo of the Dome of the Rock, the shrine in Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site. (AFP)
The car has a golden logo of the Dome of the Rock, the shrine in Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site. (AFP)
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Lebanon Launches First Electric Car Despite Crisis

The car has a golden logo of the Dome of the Rock, the shrine in Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site. (AFP)
The car has a golden logo of the Dome of the Rock, the shrine in Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site. (AFP)

A Lebanon-made electric car made its debut Saturday, the first time the Mediterranean country has manufactured an automobile, despite struggling amid a dire economic crisis with frequent power cuts.

The red sports car -- named "Quds Rise", using the Arabic name of Jerusalem -- is the project of Lebanese-born Palestinian businessman Jihad Mohammad.

It's the "first automobile to be made locally," Mohammad told reporters, at the unveiling in a parking lot south of Beirut.

It was built in Lebanon "from start to finish", he said of the prototype, emblazoned at the front with a golden logo of the Dome of the Rock, the shrine in Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site.

The car is to cost $30,000.

Production of up to 10,000 vehicles is hoped to start later this year in Lebanon, with cars to hit the market in a year's time, said Mohammad, the director of Lebanon-based firm EV Electra.

Mohammad, 50, said he set up the company four years ago after years abroad, employing Lebanese and Palestinian engineers among 300 members of staff.

He says his long-term goal is to compete on the international market for hybrid and electric cars, as well as to make sales in Lebanon.

But the unveiling comes as Lebanon struggles amid its worst economic crisis in decades, and imported car sales are at a record low, in part due to capital controls and drastic devaluation on the black market.

'Step in the right direction'?
Dealers sold just 62 new cars in the first two months of 2021, almost 97 percent less than the same period a year before, figures released by the Association of Automobile Importers in Lebanon showed.

The economic crunch since late 2019 has plunged more than half the population into poverty.

But Mohammad said potential Lebanese buyers would be offered the opportunity to pay for half the new electric car in dollars, with the rest paid in Lebanese pounds at an exchange rate better than the black market one, to be paid over five years without interest.

Lebanon also relies on fossil fuels for power generation, already insufficient for a population of around six million who suffer daily power cuts.

To power its new electric cars, the firm plans to set up around 100 recharging stations across the country connected to generators.

These could then be fueled by solar and wind power generation, Mohammad said.

Independent energy analyst Jessica Obeid welcomed the innovation, but said the vehicles would only be environmentally friendly if the power sector underwent serious reform.

"The energy sector is the biggest contributor to Lebanon's greenhouse gas emissions," and already under pressure due a shortage in dollars to import fuel, she told AFP.

But, she added, "if the electric vehicles have solar charging stations, then this would be a step in the right direction."



Musk Launches ‘Scary Smart’ AI Chatbot 

The xAI Grok logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
The xAI Grok logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
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Musk Launches ‘Scary Smart’ AI Chatbot 

The xAI Grok logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
The xAI Grok logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company unveiled on Monday the latest version of its chatbot, Grok 3, which the billionaire hopes will find traction in a highly competitive sector contested by the likes of ChatGPT and China's DeepSeek.

The launch comes as the world's richest man is deploying the enormous powers granted him by US President Donald Trump to restructure and dismantle federal agencies.

The unprecedented cost-cutting drive has raised conflict-of-interest questions, given that many of those agencies have regulatory oversight on elements of Musk's sprawling business empire.

"Grok is to understand the universe," Musk said at the start of the Grok 3 launch presentation.

"We're driven by curiosity about the nature of the universe -- that's also what causes us to be a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct."

Musk has promoted Grok 3 as "scary smart," with 10 times the computational resources of its predecessor that was released in August last year.

The flagship product of his xAI company was trained on synthetic data and employs self-correction mechanisms that avoid errors -- known as "hallucinations" -- that plague some AI chatbots and lead them to process false or misleading data as fact.

"Grok 3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities, so in the tests that we've done thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that's been released, that we're aware of, so that's a good sign," Musk said in a video call last week with the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

Grok 3 will be made available first to Premium+ paid subscribers of X -- formerly Twitter, which Musk acquired in 2022 -- before rolling out to other users.

The upgraded chatbot enters a crowded field with countries racing to introduce more sophisticated -- and cost-effective -- AI products.

Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the global AI industry last month with the launch of its low-cost, high-quality R1 chatbot -- a direct challenge to US ambitions to lead the world in developing the technology.

Grok 3 is also going up against OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT - pitting Musk against collaborator-turned-arch rival Sam Altman.

Musk and Altman were among the 11-person team that founded OpenAI in 2015. Created as a counterweight to Google's dominance in artificial intelligence, the project got its initial funding from Musk, who invested $45 million to get it started.

Musk left three years later, and then in 2022 OpenAI's release of ChatGPT created a global technology sensation -- one that did not feature Musk at its center and which made Altman a star.

Their relationship has become increasingly toxic and litigious ever since, with Open AI's board last week rejecting a Musk-led offer to buy out the company for close to $100 billion.

- Trump and tech -

Trump has put technology front and center of his new administration. Tech billionaires featured prominently at his inauguration and he has announced a number of major AI infrastructure initiatives from the White House.

Musk has become a key figure in the administration, as one of Trump's closest advisers and the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has begun a radical overhaul of the US government bureaucracy.

Critics warn that Musk's proximity to the president poses a major conflict of interest as he guides Trump on laws and regulations around artificial intelligence -- just one sector in which he has a substantial commercial stake.

According to Bloomberg, xAI has been canvassing potential investors for a roughly $10 billion funding round that would value the company at about $75 billion.

Musk, who also acts as boss of SpaceX and Tesla, launched the xAI company in July 2023, shortly after he signed an open letter calling for a pause in the development of powerful AI models.