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Gustavo Henrique Ruffo

EV Expert
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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.
Boeing and Mercedes-Benz Share More Than One Aspect in Their Descent Into Mediocrity
Boeing and Mercedes-Benz Share More Than One Aspect in Their Descent Into Mediocrity

24 Nov 2024, 21:50 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Kelly Ortberg said Boeing can't afford another mistake. The company's CEO was referring to the multiple issues it has had with the 737 Max, the 777X, and its Starliner space program, among others. These reputation blows were massive, lead...

 
2025 (European) Car of the Year Shows How Lost the Automotive Industry Is
2025 (European) Car of the Year Shows How Lost the Automotive Industry Is

19 Nov 2024, 19:37 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / It is inevitable to feel like a grumpy old man when the only thing that pushes you to write an article is the sad situation in which the automotive industry is. Not even hypercars move the enthusiasm needle anymore, so it is not worth mentioning co...

 
Maruti Suzuki Proves Affordable Cars Can Be Safe With 2024 Dzire
Maruti Suzuki Proves Affordable Cars Can Be Safe With 2024 Dzire

14 Nov 2024, 10:49 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Affordable cars do not have to be dangerous. While that seems obvious, the automotive industry has insisted for ages that any model is either cheap or safe. For automakers, they can't be both. Just check crash tests to see how cheap cars have ...

 
No One Will Ever Convince Me that AUDI Can Be an Audi Sub-Brand
No One Will Ever Convince Me that AUDI Can Be an Audi Sub-Brand

9 Nov 2024, 10:17 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / The automotive industry is lost. I have written about this several times, and I sadly gather more and more evidence that this is the case as time goes by. The latest example comes from Audi, which decided to have a sub-brand in China called AUDI. R...

 
Ferrari and Land Rover Show What Current BEVs Will Never Achieve
Ferrari and Land Rover Show What Current BEVs Will Never Achieve

7 Nov 2024, 14:15 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Land Rover once said that 75% of all Series Land Rovers and Defenders it had ever produced were still on the road. That was pretty remarkable. After all, the first of these vehicles was released in 1948, 76 years ago. Ferrari came up with an even m...

 
Hydrogen Has a Future in the Automotive Industry, But We Have to Decide What It Is
Hydrogen Has a Future in the Automotive Industry, But We Have to Decide What It Is

5 Nov 2024, 11:01 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Luca de Meo told Autocar something that should guide all automotive industry executives. In his interview with the British magazine, the Renault Group CEO said that "EV is the future," "no matter the short-term bumps and hurdles.&quo...

 
Box Eclectic Shows the Joy of the Right to Repair By Bringing an E-Bike Back to Life
Box Eclectic Shows the Joy of the Right to Repair By Bringing an E-Bike Back to Life

31 Oct 2024, 18:43 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Volcon makes a fat tire electric motorcycle called Grunt. It currently costs between $5,999 ($6,000, let's face it) and $7,999 ($8,000). One of these bikes remained in a salvage lot for years before Steven Salowsky decided to rescue it. If he ...

 
Tackling Industrial Capacity - The World Changed, but the Automotive Industry Did Not
Tackling Industrial Capacity - The World Changed, but the Automotive Industry Did Not

30 Oct 2024, 22:02 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Most of the models that gave the automotive industry a true industrial capacity are in the past. That means most cars for sale nowadays do not help plants increase production numbers, leading to idle capacity. Nobody can say automakers did not real...

 
Tackling Industrial Capacity - The Automotive Industry Once Made What Buyers Wanted
Tackling Industrial Capacity - The Automotive Industry Once Made What Buyers Wanted

29 Oct 2024, 22:30 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / I could not resist writing about how underwhelming the McLaren W1 was. When Ferrari showed the F80, everything I wrote about its competitor applied to it, but I did not even bother to say "meh." The automotive industry does not seem able ...

 
Tackling Industrial Capacity - Politics Only Made Automakers' Lives More Difficult
Tackling Industrial Capacity - Politics Only Made Automakers' Lives More Difficult

28 Oct 2024, 22:02 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / In my first text about how the automotive industry lost its industrial capacity, I defended this argument through a more encompassing sense of the expression. If you think about it, we have manufacturers complaining about idle capacity and also hav...

 
Tackling Industrial Capacity - Why the Automotive Industry Has Lost It
Tackling Industrial Capacity - Why the Automotive Industry Has Lost It

28 Oct 2024, 10:07 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / I have recently read a text that made me think about something I had never considered from this perspective. It talks about war and its strategies, but it applies really well to a series of other subjects. Thanks to it, I realized that the automoti...

 
European CEOs Share Different Ideas to Face Chinese Competitors; They Could All Be Right
European CEOs Share Different Ideas to Face Chinese Competitors; They Could All Be Right

17 Oct 2024, 14:00 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / The 2024 edition of the Paris Motor Show proved these events still deserve to happen, unlike what car detractors wanted us to believe. Not only do they present new vehicles, but they also work as important stages for crucial discussions involving t...

 
GM's New Strategy for Batteries Shows NMC Cells Are Not an Asset. They're a Liability
GM's New Strategy for Batteries Shows NMC Cells Are Not an Asset. They're a Liability

15 Oct 2024, 21:02 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / I read that GM decided to ditch the Ultium name with some surprise. After all, the company has been promoting it for years. The articles about that suggest that it has something to do with the choice of another chemistry for the lithium-ion cells t...

 
Media Images and Press Releases Show How Even Carmakers Gave Up on What Made Them Special
Media Images and Press Releases Show How Even Carmakers Gave Up on What Made Them Special

15 Oct 2024, 08:29 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / It was not that long ago that some car enthusiasts could recognize a brand or even a specific model just by hearing its engine notes. Some of them still do that, but only with classic vehicles. Don't ask them to do that with modern machines be...

 
Another Study Says Lithium-Ion Cells Will Get Cheaper, But That's Wishful Thinking
Another Study Says Lithium-Ion Cells Will Get Cheaper, But That's Wishful Thinking

14 Oct 2024, 12:17 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Battery electric vehicle (BEV) advocates frequently rejoice with studies and statistics. They show these cars are less prone to fires, but they never take into account that BEVs are much newer than the old internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles ...

 
Dacia Bigster SUV Debuts As Brand's Most Powerful Car to Date, Towers Over the Duster
Dacia Bigster SUV Debuts As Brand's Most Powerful Car to Date, Towers Over the Duster

9 Oct 2024, 11:38 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / Dacia became a world-famous brand when it introduced the Logan. This car was a revolution because it offered a C-segment body for the price of a B-segment vehicle. In other words, it was all about roominess. Being robust and easy to keep were evide...

 
Automated Driving Tech Is a Celebration of Human Ineptitude
Automated Driving Tech Is a Celebration of Human Ineptitude

8 Oct 2024, 11:24 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / The Ford Expedition has reached its fifth generation, and I wrote about its official presentation. The first thing that caught my attention was how much the Blue Oval praised software and comfort solutions over the automobile itself. It was as if c...

 
The McLaren W1 Is Said to Be a Technological Masterpiece. Nobody Cares
The McLaren W1 Is Said to Be a Technological Masterpiece. Nobody Cares

7 Oct 2024, 20:27 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / When I wrote that the Audi A6 E-Tron showed how disappointed we are by current battery electric vehicles (BEVs), only one or two readers protested. The car was a marvel in its concept form, but the changes it suffered to reach production lines, alt...

 
European Union Approves Permanent Extra Duties on Chinese BEVs
European Union Approves Permanent Extra Duties on Chinese BEVs

4 Oct 2024, 21:51 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / The latest episode in the feud between the European Union (EU) and China happened when the European Commission conducted a vote to decide about the extra tariffs on battery electric vehicles (BEV) made in the Asian giant. These cars had to pay &quo...

 
Renault Emblème Updates the Only EV I'd Consider Buying if It Was Already for Sale
Renault Emblème Updates the Only EV I'd Consider Buying if It Was Already for Sale

4 Oct 2024, 11:42 UTC · By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo / On May 30, 2022, I shared my thoughts about the only electric vehicle I'd consider buying if it was available. The Renault Scénic Vision was an electric SUV concept powered by a 40-kWh battery pack. It fed a 160 kW (215 hp) electric mot...

 

Stories by Gustavo Henrique Ruffo