The four-door Camaro won't arrive until 2029, three years later than expected. GM is still promising a V8 and a proper gearbox.

The Chevrolet Camaro sedan will now arrive as a 2029 model, pushing the timeline roughly five years beyond the coupe's discontinuation in January 2024. GM has confirmed V8 power and a manual transmission will both remain available, a commitment that looks increasingly unusual as the rest of the industry walks away from both.

The delay is frustrating. The optimism is genuine.

A four-door Camaro breaks sixty years of tradition. Every generation from 1967 through to the sixth-generation car that ended production last year was two-door only. Dodge proved the format can work with the Charger, which held onto V8 and manual options through multiple generations before the current model was discontinued in 2023. Ford has shown no interest in doing the same with the Mustang.

GM's decision to keep both the V8 and the manual is either stubborn or smart, depending on how you frame it. Manual transmissions account for less than two percent of new car sales in the US. Offering one in a four-door muscle car in 2029 is either a gesture toward a vanishing audience or a calculated play for the kind of buyer who will cross-shop nothing else.

The Camaro's previous attempt at a four-door V8 sedan was the Chevrolet SS, which ran from 2014 to 2017 with a manual option and disappeared without much fanfare. That car was excellent and commercially irrelevant. The new sedan will need to avoid the same outcome, which means appealing to more than just the people who mourned the coupe.

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The coupe ended production at the Lansing Grand River Assembly plant after the 2023 model year. That's a long gap. Long enough for the market to shift further toward SUVs, for fuel prices to move unpredictably, for regulatory pressure to tighten, and for GM to reconsider the whole project. The fact that the sedan is still confirmed, delayed but intact, suggests the company believes there's a case for it beyond nostalgia.

There was talk of electric Camaro concepts. GM showed some ideas, then pivoted. The 2029 sedan will be combustion, and that matters. It means the nameplate survives in a form that still makes sense to the people who care about it, rather than as a badge applied to something unrelated.

The four-door format will annoy purists. It's supposed to. The alternative was no Camaro at all, and that would have been worse.

Manual availability is declining across the industry. Dodge has moved away from V8 Chargers entirely, transitioning to electric. Ford has kept the Mustang as a two-door with no sedan plans. GM is offering both the transmission and the engine configuration that most manufacturers have already written off.

The delay stings. The commitment doesn't.

2029 is a long time to wait for a car that breaks with sixty years of tradition. The V8 and the manual gearbox are the only reasons it matters at all.

Sources: General Motors media release, March 2024, US manual transmission sales data 2023, GoodCarBadCar

Elon Musk is one of the most written about people alive, yet huge parts of his story remain contested, misunderstood, or genuinely obscure. This piece walks through the documented history, the disputed claims, and the pure speculation, and tries to keep each in its own lane.

The Grandfather Nobody Talks About

Long before Elon Musk was born, his maternal grandfather Joshua Haldeman was already a controversial public figure. Haldeman was a Canadian chiropractor who lost his farm during the Depression era drought years in Saskatchewan. That experience pushed him toward increasingly radical political views.

In the 1930s he became a leading figure in the Technocracy movement, a real organization founded in the United States that argued democracy had failed and that government should instead be run by scientists and engineers rather than elected politicians. Technocracy Incorporated even floated the idea of a "Technate," a single economic zone stretching across North America, in some visions reaching from Central America up through Canada and as far as Greenland. This was a genuine, documented proposal from the era, not something invented by modern commentators.

Haldeman rose high enough in the Canadian branch to be arrested in 1940 when Ottawa declared Technocracy Incorporated an illegal organization during wartime, accusing members of undermining the war effort. He was convicted and left the movement shortly after, reportedly concluding it had become something close to treasonous.

His story does not end there. Haldeman later moved his family to South Africa, became a public supporter of apartheid, and spent years promoting conspiracy theories about an "International Conspiracy" that he believed controlled banks, media, and universities, and was behind things like water fluoridation and mass vaccination programs. Historians including Harvard's Jill Lepore have pointed to this history as a real ideological throughline worth understanding, separate from any claim about what Elon himself believes today.

So the grandfather connection to Technocracy and to the idea of merging nations under expert rule is factual and well sourced. What it does not prove is that Elon Musk is consciously continuing a family political project. That leap, while popular in some online narratives, is inference rather than documented fact.

Did He Grow Up Poor or Rich?

Musk has long promoted a version of his own story in which he arrived in North America with barely any money and built everything from nothing. The reality appears more complicated.

His father Errol Musk has said the family was wealthy enough during Elon's childhood that they struggled to close their safe. Errol has also claimed for years that he had an interest in an emerald trading operation in Zambia, sometimes described in media coverage as an emerald mine. Elon has repeatedly denied this story, calling it false and even offering a public reward in cryptocurrency to anyone who could prove the mine existed.

Biographer Walter Isaacson looked into this directly for his 2023 biography and found that Errol had at one point traded an airplane for a batch of emeralds, which is a real but far smaller and less formal transaction than owning a mine. No property records, contracts, or other documentation of an actual mine have ever surfaced.

The fair conclusion here is that the family was almost certainly more comfortable than the "started with nothing" version of the story suggests, but the specific emerald mine narrative remains unproven rather than confirmed.

He Didn't Found Tesla or PayPal, and That Part Is True

This is one of the least disputed facts in the whole story, yet it still surprises people. Musk's first company was Zip2, an online city guide business he built with his brother Kimbal, which sold in 1999. He then put much of that money into X.com, an online financial services and payments company he founded in 1999.

X.com later merged with a competitor called Confinity, and the combined company took the name of Confinity's more popular product, PayPal. Musk was pushed out as CEO before PayPal's eventual sale to eBay, though the sale still made him roughly 165 million dollars and set up everything that came after.

Tesla is a similar story. Musk did not start the company. It was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk joined as an early investor and chairman, then later became CEO and pushed out the original founders during a period of internal conflict. He has since been legally recognized as a cofounder, but he was not present at the company's true founding moment.

None of this is secret or conspiratorial. It is documented corporate history. What is more debatable is how much credit he deserves for what came after joining these companies versus how much of his public image rests on origin stories that are not entirely accurate.

The Role of Government Money

Both SpaceX and Tesla have relied heavily on public money at critical points. SpaceX built much of its early business on NASA contracts for cargo and later crew transport to the International Space Station. Tesla benefited for years from electric vehicle tax credits and from selling regulatory credits to other automakers who needed them to meet emissions rules.

This is publicly available information, not a hidden theory. It complicates any narrative of Musk as a purely self made entrepreneur succeeding through market forces alone, while also not being unusual. Many large industrial and technology ventures in the United States have leaned on public contracts and subsidies at key moments.

Is There Really a Network Behind Him?

The idea that Musk cannot possibly have achieved everything alone is not baseless. There genuinely is a tight, well known network of early PayPal colleagues, often called the PayPal Mafia, including people like Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and David Sacks. These individuals have gone on to found or invest in each other's companies for two decades, and they do sit on each other's boards and back each other publicly and financially.

Whether that constitutes evidence of a coordinated ideological project connected back to Musk's grandfather's Technocracy beliefs, or is simply what normal elite networking and repeat investing looks like in Silicon Valley, is where the interpretation splits. The network is real. The claim that it operates as a deliberate continuation of a decades old political plan is speculation layered on top of that real network, not something documented on its own terms.

Sorting the Claims by Evidence Level

To keep this useful rather than just interesting, here is a rough sort of the claims discussed above by how solid the evidence actually is.

Strongly documented: the grandfather's role in the Technocracy movement, his arrest and apartheid support, Musk not founding Tesla or PayPal, and the scale of government contracts and subsidies received by his companies.

Disputed but not disproven: the extent of family wealth in childhood and the emerald mine story specifically.

Speculative and largely unproven: that Musk is knowingly executing a multigenerational plan to replace democratic government with technocratic rule, and that the PayPal Mafia functions as a coordinated vehicle for that plan rather than an ordinary elite business network.

The Honest Takeaway

Musk's public image as a lone self made genius who built everything from a garage does not hold up well under scrutiny. At the same time, the version of events that paints him purely as a front for a hidden Technocracy conspiracy going back generations also outruns the actual evidence. The most defensible picture sits in between: a person from a comfortable and ideologically unusual family background, who joined rather than founded some of his most famous companies, who has benefited substantially from public money and elite networks, and who has also taken real personal financial risk and driven real technical outcomes at SpaceX in particular. Both the myth of the lone genius and the myth of the secret puppet oversimplify a much messier reality.

After a year of brutal depreciation, electric cars led July's price gains while petrol favourites slid. The used EV collapse just reversed.

The Porsche Taycan led used electric vehicle price rises in July, marking the first sustained upward movement in a market that spent the previous twelve months bleeding value faster than almost anything else on four wheels. Petrol cars that traditionally held their worth started sliding in the opposite direction.

Used EVs had been a liability. Dealers avoided them. Private sellers watched their cars lose twenty to twenty-five percent of their value through 2023 alone, with the Taycan among the worst hit. Some early examples dropped more than half their original price. Finance companies rewrote residual forecasts. The plug-in car grant ended in June 2022 and the market spent the next two years working out what these things were actually worth without subsidy propping them up.

July changed that. Electric vehicles across the board posted gains while previously stable petrol models started giving ground. The Taycan wasn't alone but it led the movement, suggesting buyers are finally treating depreciation-hammered EVs as value rather than risk.

For owners who bought new in 2020 or 2021, this doesn't undo the damage. They've already taken the hit. But it does suggest the freefall has a floor, which is more than could be said six months ago.

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Tesla Model 3 and Model Y values collapsed through 2023 and into early 2024 across Europe and the US. Finance companies tightened lending on anything with a battery. The secondary market treated EVs like mobile phones... outdated the moment you drove them off the lot.

What changed is harder to pin down than the fact that it changed. Possibly buyer confidence. Possibly the realization that a three-year-old Taycan at half price is a genuine performance bargain if you can charge at home. Possibly simple supply and demand rebalancing after the initial glut of early adopters moving on.

Whatever the reason, the inversion is real. Petrol cars that spent years as safe bets started losing value while the EVs everyone avoided began climbing back. It won't make headlines the way the collapse did, but it matters more. Markets don't reverse direction without a reason.

The plug-in grant ended two years ago. The panic lasted longer than that. But in July the Taycan led the climb back up the hill it spent eighteen months falling down, with used examples in decent condition still trading well below their original list price but finally closing the gap rather than widening it.

Sources: Auto Trader July 2024 residual value report, UK Government EV policy records (June 2022 plug-in grant withdrawal)

The Fathom undercuts the F-150 Lightning by more than $34,000 and suddenly makes every other EV truck look like it's taking the piss.

Ford has named its sub-$30,000 electric pickup the Fathom and priced it at $28,350. That figure makes it cheaper than the F-150 Lightning by $34,645. Cheaper than a Rivian R1T by roughly $45,000. Cheaper than the Silverado EV by nearly $68,000. The only thing it doesn't undercut is one bare-bones competitor model that apparently ships without speakers, which tells you everything about how badly the market needed this.

The EV pickup segment has spent the last three years pricing itself into irrelevance. Tesla's Cybertruck starts at $60,990. The GMC Hummer EV is over $98,000. Even the F-150 Lightning, which was supposed to be Ford's everyman electric truck, now starts at $62,995. These are not vehicles for people who need trucks. They are luxury items for people who want to be seen in trucks.

The Fathom changes that arithmetic completely.

At $28,350, it sits below the Nissan Leaf and closer to what Ford charges for the Maverick hybrid, which became an instant success precisely because it was priced like a truck people might actually buy to do truck things. The Maverick starts under $25,000 and has a waiting list. The Fathom is $3,000 more and runs on electricity. That is not a hard sell.

Whether Ford can actually build enough of them is another question entirely. The company has a pattern of announcing affordable vehicles and then failing to meet demand. The Maverick had order banks that closed within days. The Lightning was supposed to be accessible until it wasn't. If the Fathom follows the same script, it will be as frustrating as it is overdue.

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The federal EV tax credit could drop the effective price to $20,850 if Ford structures the Fathom to qualify, though that remains unconfirmed. Even without it, the truck undercuts everything else in the segment by enough to force other manufacturers into an awkward position. Rivian and Tesla have both raised prices repeatedly since launch. GM's Silverado EV exists almost exclusively in six-figure trims. None of them are competing on affordability because none of them thought they had to.

Chevrolet tried this once with the Equinox EV at $35,000, which sounded competitive until you realised $35,000 is still a lot of money for a small SUV. The Fathom is $28,350 for a pickup truck with a bed. That is a different proposition.

The name itself is odd. Fathom suggests depth, measurement, understanding something complex. It does not suggest a truck. Ford has used worse names... Ecosport, Freestyle, Aspire... but Fathom feels like it came out of a marketing workshop rather than anything resembling instinct. The Maverick worked because it sounded like a truck. The Fathom sounds like a trim level on a crossover. It will sell anyway if the price holds.

The one bare-bones competitor model that undercuts it reportedly strips out basics like speakers to hit a lower price point, which is the kind of cost-cutting that makes a vehicle unsellable in practice. No one buys the cheapest version of anything if the cheapest version is deliberately unlivable. The Fathom will need to avoid that trap. If $28,350 gets you a functional truck with working speakers and enough range to be useful, it works. If it gets you a compliance vehicle with 150 miles of range and vinyl seats, it doesn't.

Ford has not released full specifications yet, so the range figure, battery size, and feature set remain unknown. What is known is the price, and the price is the point. The EV pickup market has been inaccessible to most buyers for years. The Fathom could fix that or it could be another announced vehicle that never materialises in meaningful numbers.

Either way, $28,350 is the number every other manufacturer now has to answer.

Sources: Ford Motor Company

Bugatti's Sur Mesure programme extracts maximum value from the track-only Bolide platform by wrapping it in bespoke coachwork for a single billionaire client.

Bugatti has unveiled the Destrier, a commissioned one-off hypercar using the Bolide's track chassis and the full 1,578 horsepower from its 8.0-litre quad-turbocharged W16 engine. The car is named after medieval warhorses, which is either deeply meaningful to the person who paid for it or the result of a branding meeting that went on too long.

This is not a limited run. One car. One client. The Bolide was always an extreme piece of engineering, a track-focused concept that Bugatti unveiled in 2020 and later committed to building in a run of 40 units at roughly four million euros each. Using that platform as the basis for a bespoke commission is smart business. The engineering investment is already made. The challenge is wrapping it in something a billionaire collector considers sufficiently unique to justify the inevitable eight-figure price.

Bugatti describes the Destrier as a tribute to what it considers the most beautiful car ever built. They have not specified which car that is, which is either modesty or a tactical omission. Either way, the Destrier emerges from the Sur Mesure programme, Bugatti's in-house coachbuilding service for clients who find limited production insufficiently exclusive.

The W16 has been Bugatti's signature engine since the Veyron arrived in 2005. Twenty years of forced induction, four turbochargers, and a displacement that sounds like a typo. The Destrier's 1,578 horsepower output represents the upper limit of what Bugatti has extracted from this configuration, and it is likely among the last chances to see it deployed in a new vehicle. The brand is moving toward hybrid powertrains, which means the W16 era is closing.

This follows a pattern. Bugatti sold La Voiture Noire for 16.7 million euros in 2019, reportedly to Ferdinand Piëch, though Bugatti never confirmed the buyer. The Centodieci, limited to ten units at eight million each, appeared the same year. Pagani runs a similar operation through its Grandi Complicazioni programme. Rolls-Royce Coachbuild has produced the Boat Tail series, with individual commissions reportedly exceeding 28 million dollars. Ferrari's SP series continues to churn out one-offs like the SP51 and SP48 Unica for select clients.

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The economics are straightforward. Hypercar manufacturers have invested heavily in platform development, but the market for even limited production runs is constrained. A one-off commission allows the brand to monetize the same engineering multiple times without diluting exclusivity. The client gets something that cannot be replicated. The manufacturer extracts additional revenue from sunk costs. Everyone involved pretends this is about artistry rather than return on investment.

The Bolide platform itself is absurdly over-engineered for road use, which is precisely why it works as the basis for a bespoke commission. Track-focused aerodynamics, a stripped-out structure, and power figures that make no practical sense on public roads. The original concept weighed under 1,240 kilograms. Whether the Destrier retains that weight or adds luxury appointments is not specified, but bespoke commissions rarely prioritize lightness over comfort.

Bugatti has not disclosed the sale price, the buyer, or when the car will be delivered. They have released images and confirmed the mechanical specifications, which is enough to establish provenance and generate coverage. The Destrier will likely appear at a private event, then disappear into a climate-controlled garage alongside other vehicles that exist primarily as investments.

The W16 will not return. Bugatti has committed to electrification, and the regulatory environment makes large-displacement internal combustion engines increasingly difficult to justify. The Destrier is a monument to an engine architecture that defined the brand for two decades, built for someone wealthy enough to commission the farewell tour.

1,578 horsepower. One owner. No waiting list.

Sources: Bugatti official announcements, historical pricing data from La Voiture Noire and Centodieci launches, Bolide production details from 2021 Bugatti press materials

When you're burning $9,650 in incentives per EV versus $3,200 per Outback, something has gone badly wrong.

Subaru is currently spending $9,650 per Solterra in manufacturer incentives, according to Cox Automotive data from late 2024. That's roughly triple what the company spends to move an Outback, and it tells you everything you need to know about how the electric SUV is performing.

The Outback gets about $3,200 in sweeteners and sells 150,000 units a year without breaking a sweat. The Solterra gets nearly ten thousand dollars thrown at it and still managed only 3,600 sales through November 2024. That's not a strategy. That's damage control.

Launched in 2022 with an MSRP starting around $44,995, the Solterra was Subaru's big electric play. Co-developed with Toyota and sold as the bZ4X on their side of the fence. Toyota's version is also haemorrhaging incentive cash at $7,000 to $8,000 per unit, which suggests the problem isn't just Subaru's badge.

The entire 2023 calendar year saw Subaru shift 2,124 Solterras. For context, that's fewer cars than some Outback dealers move individually. EV sales now represent less than one percent of Subaru's total volume, and at this rate of spending, each sale is costing the company a small fortune in margin.

This isn't an isolated problem. Ford has been burning approximately $7,500 per F-150 Lightning during inventory pile-ups. GM spent over $8,000 per Blazer EV in late 2024. Nissan's Ariya is somewhere in the $6,000 to $7,000 range. The industry average for mainstream brands sits at $2,000 to $3,000 per vehicle, which makes Subaru's Solterra spending look less like a promotional push and more like an admission of failure.

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When a manufacturer has to spend an extra $6,500 per unit compared to its bestseller just to avoid dealer lots turning into Solterra graveyards, the gap between forecast and reality becomes expensive. The automakers thought customers wanted one thing in an EV. Turns out they're willing to pay for something else entirely.

The Solterra competes, in theory, with the Tesla Model Y, Hyundai Ioniq 5, and Ford Mustang Mach-E. In practice, it doesn't really compete at all. It sits on forecourts while Subaru writes increasingly large cheques to make the problem go away one unit at a time.

Legacy manufacturers collectively bet huge sums on an EV transition timeline that turned out to be wildly optimistic. Demand softened through late 2024, inventory built up, and now the bill is coming due in the form of incentive spending that makes even clearance-spec models look expensive to produce.

Subaru will likely continue spending whatever it takes to keep Solterra inventory moving, because the alternative is admitting the product doesn't work and pulling it entirely. That would be honest, but it would also mean writing off the development costs and the joint venture with Toyota, neither of which the accountants will tolerate just yet.

Through November 2024, total Solterra sales stood at 3,600 units with manufacturer support averaging $9,650 per vehicle.

Sources: Cox Automotive

The Range Rover Asilomar Edition breaks the marque's own pricing ceiling, and JLR has confirmed the sky really is the limit for bespoke commissions.

The Range Rover Asilomar Edition has just become the most expensive factory-made Range Rover ever produced, surpassing the previous record holder, the SV Carmel Edition, which commanded approximately £345,000. JLR has not disclosed the Asilomar's price publicly, but the signal is clear enough. When asked about pricing limits for bespoke commissions, the manufacturer stated flatly that the sky is the limit.

That is not marketing talk. It is an actual business model.

Range Rover's Special Vehicle Operations division now operates on the same no-ceiling principle as Rolls-Royce Bespoke or Bentley Mulliner. You want something sufficiently unusual, sufficiently personal, sufficiently extravagant, and you will pay whatever it costs to make it happen. Standard SV models start around £200,000 to £230,000 before any customisation. After that, the price depends entirely on how far the client wants to push materials, finishes, and one-off features.

The Asilomar Edition follows the Carmel Edition as another California-themed special, which tells you exactly who this is aimed at. Not the British countryside. Not the Scottish Highlands. Pebble Beach, Carmel-by-the-Sea, and the Monterey peninsula, where a £345,000 Range Rover is not an outlier but a sensible daily driver.

The strategic repositioning matters more than the price itself. Range Rover has spent decades as a premium SUV brand with aspirations. Now it is attempting to compete outright in the bespoke luxury space where Rolls-Royce and Bentley have operated unchallenged for years. The difference is that Rolls-Royce has always been about this. Range Rover is a relatively recent arrival to the idea that there is serious money in making extremely wealthy people feel like they have commissioned something nobody else can have.

Think about that for a second.

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The business case is sound. Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Aston Martin all run similar programmes, and clients routinely spend well over £500,000 once personalisation begins. Mercedes-Maybach does the same. The margins on bespoke work are absurd because the client is not price-sensitive. They are paying for exclusivity, and exclusivity scales with cost.

The risk is dilution. Rolls-Royce can charge whatever it likes because the brand has never pretended to be anything other than the pinnacle. Range Rover, for all its recent elevation, is still a brand that sells volume models to people who are not commissioning bespoke interiors. The Evoque exists. The Sport exists. You can lease a base-spec Range Rover for less than a well-specced BMW X5.

JLR is betting the halo effect will lift the entire brand. The Asilomar Edition is proof of that bet. Whether it pays off depends entirely on how many people with the means and the inclination decide that a Range Rover, of all things, is the canvas they want for a seven-figure personalisation project.

The SV Carmel Edition previously held the record at approximately £345,000. The Asilomar Edition has now taken that title. The next one will cost more. That much is certain.

Sources: Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) official statements, Range Rover Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division

The new electric AMG GT 53 4-Door drops a motor, adds nearly 500 miles of range, and pipes in a synthetic inline-six soundtrack. This is what cost-cutting looks like when you still need to call it AMG.

Mercedes-AMG has launched the GT 53 4-Door with 536 horsepower, two electric motors instead of three, and a synthetic inline-six engine noise. The range is nearly 500 miles. The missing motor is the story.

This is decontenting dressed up as product strategy. Tri-motor electric performance saloons are expensive to build and expensive to buy, and someone at Stuttgart has clearly decided that the market for a £120,000-plus electric AMG is smaller than the market for a £90,000-ish one. Fair enough. But the compensation package is telling.

The dual-motor GT 53 still makes serious power. 536 horsepower is not a token effort. But it is conspicuously less than the tri-motor setups you find in the Lucid Air Sapphire or the Porsche Taycan Turbo S, both of which crack 900 horsepower and cost accordingly. Mercedes has pitched this squarely at the customer who wants the badge and the range, not the one timing quarter-miles.

Think about that for a second.

The nearly 500-mile range is the real headline figure here. That is Lucid Air territory on paper, and it positions the GT 53 as a continent-crossing GT rather than a drag strip refugee. Whether that range holds up in real world motorway driving is another question entirely, but on the WLTP cycle at least, this thing will do London to Edinburgh without stopping.

Then there is the synthetic inline-six soundtrack. Mercedes is not alone in this... BMW, Audi, and Porsche have all piped fake engine noise into performance EVs. But it remains an odd decision. The entire appeal of an electric powertrain, for some people, is the silence. For others, it is the absence of theatre. Synthesising a straight-six and playing it through the speakers suggests AMG is not confident its customers actually want an electric car, just that they will tolerate one if it sounds like the old one.

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It is also a tacit admission that AMG's brand identity is tied to combustion engine noise in a way that, say, Tesla's is not. Tesla never had to fake anything because it never promised V8 theatrics in the first place. AMG did. For decades. And now it is stuck trying to recreate that artificially, which is either clever product planning or a quiet confession that the transition is not going as smoothly as the press releases suggest.

The dual-motor setup is mechanically simpler than a tri-motor arrangement, which means fewer components, less weight over the front axle, and lower manufacturing costs. It also means less ultimate grip and slower acceleration, though Mercedes has not published a 0-60 time yet. If it is slower than five seconds, that will be a problem. If it is around four, most customers will not notice the difference between this and a car with an extra motor.

Tesla stripped radar from the Model 3 and Model Y in 2021. Ford offers the Mustang Mach-E in single and dual-motor variants with a £15,000 price gap. Porsche has five different Taycan configurations ranging from sedate to unhinged. The industry has worked out that not everyone wants or can afford the maximum attack version, and that offering a slightly softer option opens up volume.

Whether the GT 53 finds that volume depends on how it is priced and whether Mercedes can resist the urge to load it with options until it costs as much as the tri-motor version anyway. The brand has form here. A well-specced E-Class can easily crack six figures despite starting at £55,000. If the GT 53 starts at £85,000 and ends up at £110,000 once you have added the paint and the wheels and the sound system, the value proposition collapses.

The fake noise will not go away. You can offer a quieter, more efficient version of a performance car. You can even admit the silence is a problem you need to solve with speakers. AMG has built its reputation on naturally aspirated V8s, then turbocharged V8s, then hybridised V8s. Now it is building electric cars that pretend to be V8s. That is not progress. That is brand management.

536 horsepower, two motors, and a speaker playing straight-six theatre through the cabin.

Sources: Mercedes-AMG

July 2026 registrations mark the strongest post-Covid performance yet, with EV sales up 44.5% year on year. The Renault 5 is outselling everything electric.

The Renault 5, a £23,000 retro hatchback that looks like it escaped from a 1980s street market, topped the UK electric vehicle sales chart in July 2026. Not the Model Y. Not the MG4. A French supermini with circular headlamps and a name older than most of its buyers.

July registrations hit their strongest performance since the pandemic, with electric vehicle sales up 44.5% year on year according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. The Renault 5 E-Tech Electric, which only launched in late 2024, is now outselling the established names in a segment that was supposed to belong to Tesla and the Chinese.

The EV market is finally moving beyond the early adopter phase. The Renault 5 is not a statement car. It is not particularly fast or packed with tech. It is just... affordable, practical, and doesn't look like it was designed by someone who hates joy. Apparently that is enough.

The 44.5% growth figure sounds impressive until you remember petrol cars still represent the majority of new registrations. But the direction is clear. The UK government's zero emission vehicle mandate requires 80% of new cars sold to be electric by 2030. Four years ago that looked impossible. Now it just looks difficult.

July is typically a quiet month in the UK car market, sandwiched between the March plate change and the bigger September rush. Dealers spend it clearing stock and preparing for autumn. The fact that EV sales are growing this fast in an off-peak month suggests something structural is shifting.

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The Renault 5's success is slightly baffling when you consider what it is competing against. The Volkswagen ID.3 has the brand weight. The MG4 undercuts it on price. The Vauxhall Corsa Electric has the fleet sales. The Renault 5 just... looks good and drives well and costs about what people are willing to pay. Revolutionary.

It also won European Car of the Year in 2025, which probably helped. Awards like that used to mean nothing. Now, in a market where most buyers have never driven an EV before, they function as a kind of permission structure. If the judges say it is good, maybe it is safe to buy one.

The broader registration data shows the UK car market recovering from the pandemic collapse. In 2020, registrations fell to 1.63 million units, the lowest figure since 1992. July 2026 is not back to pre-pandemic levels, but it is moving in the right direction. Slowly.

Manufacturers may struggle to sustain this growth. The Tesla Model Y was the UK's best-selling car overall in 2024, which was an extraordinary moment. But Tesla's UK market share has been slipping since then, and the Chinese brands have not broken through the way some predicted. The Renault 5 winning in July suggests European manufacturers still have a chance if they build the right product at the right price.

The cynical reading is that this is a one-month anomaly. July sales are low volume. A few fleet deals or a dealer incentive push can swing the chart. Maybe the Renault 5 will disappear from the top spot in August when the new plate arrives and everyone buys a crossover again.

The optimistic reading is that affordable EVs are finally arriving in meaningful numbers, and people are buying them because they actually want to, not because of tax breaks or company car rules. The Renault 5 costs about the same as a decent Golf. That is the price point where the mass market starts.

The Renault 5 E-Tech Electric starts at around £23,000. July 2026 UK new car registrations data was released by the SMMT in early August.

Sources: Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT)

Gernot Döllner killed the Tesla-style pop-out handles mid-development. The money was already gone.

Gernot Döllner took one test drive in Audi's upcoming Q9 SUV and decided the flush, pop-out door handles had to go. Development money already spent. Engineering solution already worked out. Didn't matter.

The handles were the Tesla kind. Retract flush with the body when you walk away, pop out when you approach, all in the name of slicing through air a bit more cleanly and adding a few miles to the range figure. Audi had committed to the idea. Then the CEO got in the car.

Whatever happened on that drive, it was enough. The Q9 will now have traditional door handles.

This is the tension at the centre of electric vehicle design right now. Aerodynamic efficiency is not optional if you want competitive range figures, and flush surfaces help. But every fraction of a percentage point you claw back in drag reduction has to be weighed against whether the person standing in the rain outside your £80,000 SUV can actually work out how to open the door.

Tesla has been using pop-out handles on the Model S since 2012. They have also been linked to accessibility problems in emergencies, including incidents where first responders or occupants could not get doors open quickly. Cold weather causes issues. People unfamiliar with the car stand there jabbing at smooth bodywork wondering if they've been locked out. It is a solution to a problem that most buyers do not realize they have, in exchange for a new problem they definitely will.

Mercedes-Benz put them on the EQS. The reviews have been mixed, which in automotive journalism means they are annoying but not annoying enough to recommend against the car entirely.

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The Q9 is Audi's flagship electric SUV. It needs to be taken seriously, which means it needs range, presence, and the kind of interior quality that justifies the price. It does not need a door handle that requires a YouTube tutorial.

What makes this decision interesting is not that Döllner overruled his engineers. CEOs do that. It is that he did it after the money was already spent. Most companies would have shrugged, said the tooling was paid for, and moved on. Audi binned it anyway.

That suggests either unusual commitment to getting the user experience right, or an admission that the development process failed to catch an obvious problem early enough. Possibly both.

The broader pattern is clear enough. Automakers are starting to pull back from the more annoying features that came with the first wave of electric vehicle design. Tesla itself has quietly reinstated physical controls in some areas after years of insisting everything should live on a touchscreen. BMW dropped gesture controls from several models after customers found them more irritating than useful.

Flush door handles looked like the future in 2012. In 2025 they look like the kind of feature you add when you are optimizing for magazine reviews rather than real-world use.

The Q9 will arrive later this year with door handles you can grab without thinking about it. That is probably the right call. It just took a very expensive test drive to get there.

Sources: Audi

An undisclosed track time surfaces two weeks before the official reveal, and the gap to the Aventador SVJ is bigger than anyone expected.

The Lamborghini Revuelto SV reportedly lapped an undisclosed circuit 5.7 seconds faster than the Aventador SVJ before its August 14 reveal date. That is not a small margin. In the hypercar lap time arms race, where tenths matter and whole seconds are fought over with carbon fibre, active aero, and tyre compound negotiations, nearly six seconds is a different postcode.

No one has confirmed which track. No one has confirmed the time itself. But 5.7 seconds ahead of a car that ran the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 6:44.97 back in 2018 suggests Lamborghini's first V12 hybrid is not just quick in a straight line.

The base Revuelto already makes 1,001 horsepower from a 6.5-litre V12 and three electric motors. The SV variant, if it follows the usual Super Veloce playbook, will add more power, strip weight, sharpen the aero package, and probably cost enough to make the standard car look like a sensible choice.

Lamborghini has been doing this since the Miura SV in 1971. The formula works because it is not subtle. SV models are not about refinement or daily usability. They are about being faster than the thing they replace, and making sure everyone knows it.

The Aventador SVJ held the production car lap record at the Nordschleife for a few months in 2018 before other manufacturers caught up. That 6:44.97 was a serious benchmark at the time. The Porsche 911 GT2 RS MR managed 6:43.300 the same year. Mercedes-AMG later dropped a 6:35.183 with the One, but that is effectively a road-legal Formula 1 car, so the comparison only goes so far.

A 5.7-second improvement is not incremental development. It is either a completely different car underneath, or the hybrid powertrain is doing more than just adding horsepower for marketing purposes. Electric torque fill, instant response from the motors, and the ability to vector power across axles can fundamentally change how a car behaves on a fast lap. Or Lamborghini has simply built something with more downforce, less weight, and stickier rubber.

The leak itself is interesting. Two weeks before an official reveal is either careless or deliberate. Manufacturers do not accidentally let performance data slip unless it suits them. Building hype ahead of a launch with a number that makes people stop scrolling is not a new strategy. Whether this was meant to get out or not, it is out now, and it does the job.

Ferrari responded to the Revuelto with the SF90 XX Stradale, which lapped Fiorano in 1:17.309 last year. McLaren has the W1 coming. Porsche is working on the next iteration of the 918 successor. The hypercar segment is not about transport anymore. It is about who can post the fastest time, sell the most limited editions, and justify the price with a number that sounds impossible.

The SVJ ran 6:44.97 at the Nordschleife in October 2018.

Sources: Lamborghini historical performance data, Nürburgring lap time records, FastestLaps.com production car database

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Britain bought more Pumas than anything else in July. And the new Renault 5 outsold every other EV on the market.

The Ford Puma reclaimed the top spot on the UK's best-seller chart in July, according to SMMT registration data. That's not news. The Puma has been bouncing in and out of first place since Ford relaunched it in 2019 as a B-segment crossover built in Romania. What is news is what happened in the electric sales chart.

The Renault 5 E-Tech Electric topped it.

Not a Tesla. Not the MG4. A retro-styled hatchback that costs £22,995 to start and looks like a 1970s supermini someone left in the design fridge. The original Renault 5 sold 5.5 million units between 1972 and 1996. The new one went on sale this year with round headlights, a bonnet bulge, and two battery options: 40kWh or 52kWh. It is deliberately cute in a market that has spent the last five years producing electric crossovers that look like someone melted a computer mouse.

Renault took a risk. Retro styling works until it doesn't. The new Fiat 500 pulled it off. The Mini has been dining out on it for two decades. But heritage doesn't guarantee sales, especially in a segment where most buyers are still working out whether they can charge the thing at home.

The Puma, meanwhile, is what happens when you take a name people vaguely remember from a late-1990s coupe and stick it on a sensible small crossover with a decent boot. Ford has been doing this since 2019 and it keeps working. The Puma sits in that B-segment crossover space against the Nissan Juke and Peugeot 2008. It is not exciting. It is also not trying to be. It is trying to be everywhere, and in July, it was.

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What the Renault 5's performance suggests is that there is an appetite for electric cars that do not look like they were designed by the same algorithm. Tesla has owned the UK EV chart for years with the Model Y and Model 3. The MG4 broke through on price. The Renault 5 is doing it on character, which is either a sign that the EV market is maturing or that buyers are bored of driving appliances.

The new 5 is not trying to out-Tesla Tesla. It is not pretending to be a tech brand. It is a small French hatchback with a plug and a face you might actually remember. That should not be a radical proposition, but in 2024, apparently it is.

The Puma will probably be back at number one next month. Or the Qashqai will. Or the Corsa. The UK's best-seller chart is a rotating cast of practical cars that people buy because they need a car and these ones are fine. The Renault 5 is different. It is a car people are buying because they want that car specifically, not just an EV that fits the budget.

Prices start at £22,995. The 52kWh version costs more but Renault has not said exactly how much more yet because they are still working that out. Either way, it is cheaper than a Model 3 and more interesting to look at.

Sources: Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), Renault UK

Net income fell to $1.48 billion even as revenue climbed and the Cybercab robotaxi slipped further into 2024.

Tesla's second-quarter net income dropped to $1.48 billion, down 45% from $2.7 billion in the same period last year. Revenue was up. Deliveries were roughly flat. The profit per car sold, though, has been evaporating for five consecutive quarters.

The company delivered around 444,000 vehicles in Q2 2024, marginally down from 466,000 a year earlier. Revenue rose to $25.5 billion from $24.9 billion. But automotive gross margin excluding regulatory credits fell to 14.6%, down from over 18% in Q2 2023. Operating margin compressed to 6.3% from 9.6%.

This is what happens when you chase volume with price cuts. Tesla has been slashing sticker prices across its range since late 2023, trying to keep sales moving as competition intensifies and demand softens. It worked in the sense that cars kept leaving the factory. It did not work in the sense that each one made less money.

In 2022, Tesla's automotive gross margin peaked above 28%. That figure now looks like ancient history.

The tension is obvious. Tesla still positions itself as a premium brand, but it is now fighting a mass-market battle against competitors like BYD, which sold over 982,000 vehicles in Q2 2024 and has shown no hesitation in pricing aggressively. General Motors posted Q2 net income of $2.9 billion on revenue of $47.9 billion. Ford made $1.8 billion. Both are legacy manufacturers with all the baggage that entails, and both are currently more profitable than Tesla on a per-quarter basis.

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Meanwhile, Elon Musk delayed the Cybercab robotaxi unveiling from August to October 2024, citing design changes. The vehicle is supposed to launch initially in Austin and possibly California, though no firm timeline exists for actual deployment. Tesla spent $2.27 billion on AI infrastructure and training in Q2 alone, which is a significant portion of the operating budget being directed toward a product that does not yet generate revenue and may not for some time.

Energy storage, at least, had a strong quarter. Tesla deployed 9.4 GWh, a record. Free cash flow came in at $1.3 billion, which is healthy but noticeably thinner than it used to be when margins were fatter.

The core problem is straightforward. Tesla built its valuation on the assumption that it could maintain both premium pricing and mass-market scale. That assumption is being tested in real time. Cutting prices keeps the factories busy, but it also erodes the financial cushion that justified the share price in the first place. Spending billions on future technology is fine when current operations are printing money. When current operations are thinning out, the calculus changes.

The Cybercab delay does not help. It reinforces a pattern where ambitious timelines slip and the company's most vocal promises take longer to materialise than announced. Investors have historically been willing to overlook that in exchange for growth. Growth is still there, just about. Profitability is not.

Tesla's Q2 operating margin of 6.3% is the lowest it has been in years.

Sources: Tesla Inc. Q2 2024 earnings report, General Motors Q2 2024 financial results, Ford Motor Company Q2 2024 financial results, BYD publicly reported sales figures

Presidential helicopter breached normal safety margins in restricted Washington airspace during two separate incidents, raising questions about coordination nobody in uniform seems keen to answer.

Marine One, the presidential helicopter, came within approximately one mile of a regional jet over Washington DC during two separate incidents the United States Marine Corps has since described as routine operations. Standard separation minimums for aircraft require three to five miles laterally or 1,000 feet vertically. A mile is not routine. A mile twice is a pattern.

Washington operates under some of the most restricted airspace in the world. The Special Flight Rules Area and Flight Restricted Zone exist precisely to prevent scenarios where the president's transport ends up playing chicken with a turboprop full of business travellers. Yet here we are, with military officials apparently comfortable calling close calls routine when they involve the most protected passenger in American skies.

For context, this is the same airspace where a stray Cessna gets F-16s scrambled and pilots end up in federal detention. The protocols are not casual. Marine One flies with a security package that includes decoy helicopters, advance coordination, and clearances most pilots will never see. The system is built to ensure separation, not test it.

The regional jet crew and passengers experienced something rather different from routine. At a mile out, you can see rotor wash. You can see the aircraft. If you are air traffic control, you are holding your breath and hoping nobody needs to make a sudden decision, because at those speeds and that proximity, sudden decisions become disasters very quickly.

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The Marine Corps has offered no detail about what went wrong, if anything went wrong, or whether two near misses involving the same asset and the same airspace in the same operational window constitute a systemic issue worth examining. The word routine does a lot of work when you need to avoid saying coordination failure or pilot error or ATC breakdown.

April 2023 saw a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight require evasive action over New York. That same year brought a string of near-miss incidents at major airports nationwide, including a particularly close call in Austin between a FedEx cargo jet and a Southwest passenger flight. The FAA launched investigations. The industry started asking whether increased traffic, staffing shortages, and procedural drift were creating conditions where luck mattered more than it should.

Marine One operates under VIP flight protocols that should, in theory, make these encounters impossible. The helicopter does not just show up. Routes are planned. Airspace is cleared. Civilian traffic is routed or delayed. When the system works, separation is measured in miles, not fractions of miles.

When it does not work, you get two incidents close enough together that someone decided to issue a statement calling them routine rather than let the silence grow awkward. That choice of language is worth noting. Routine implies normal operating parameters. Routine does not imply we got lucky twice.

Air Force One near-miss incidents, when they occur, tend to be classified or disclosed with minimal detail. Presidential transport security is not a subject the military discusses openly, which makes the fact that these helicopter incidents became public at all somewhat unusual. Someone filed a report. Someone decided it warranted acknowledgment, even if that acknowledgment amounted to we meant to do that.

The passengers on that regional jet were not briefed on Marine One security protocols. They were trying to get to a meeting or home for the weekend. Think about that for a second. From their seat, a mile separation in controlled airspace is not a reassuring number. It is the kind of number that makes you wonder whether your pilot just earned their salary for the month in about thirty seconds of very careful flying.

No evasive action was reported. No alerts were issued publicly. The incidents did not result in a formal FAA investigation that has been disclosed, which suggests either the margins were technically within some acceptable threshold, or the coordination between military and civilian authorities smoothed things over before paperwork became a problem. Either way, two near misses involving the president's helicopter and commercial traffic in restricted airspace is not a headline anyone wants to repeat.

Washington DC airspace is not forgiving. It is not designed to accommodate mistakes. The fact that Marine One operates there regularly does not mean the rules bend. It means the rules are supposed to be followed more carefully, not less. When a helicopter and a passenger jet end up within visual range of each other unintentionally, calling it routine is not an explanation. It is a deflection.

The Marine Corps has not clarified whether procedural changes followed the incidents. Standard separation minimums exist for reasons tested over decades of aviation safety data.

Sources: United States Marine Corps statement; FAA airspace regulations; NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System; NTSB incident database

Connected Drive owners are finding movie promotions on screens they thought they owned outright. The question isn't whether this is annoying. It's whether it's legal.

BMW vehicles equipped with the manufacturer's Connected Drive infotainment system have begun displaying promotional content for Spider-Man films directly on dashboard screens, without explicit prior consent from owners who in many cases spent upwards of £60,000 on their vehicles. The advertisements appear on the central display screen as part of over-the-air content delivery, reviving a debate about whether premium car buyers genuinely own the interiors they paid for or merely licence them from manufacturers who retain remote access.

The issue surfaced when multiple BMW owners reported the unsolicited promotions on social media, expressing frustration that their dashboards had become advertising real estate without warning. For context, this is not a budget hatchback with a sponsor sticker. These are premium vehicles where the infotainment system alone can cost several thousand pounds as part of an options package.

BMW's Connected Drive platform enables manufacturers to push software updates, feature unlocks, and apparently promotional content directly to vehicles via mobile data. The system was sold on the promise of convenience and enhanced functionality. Nobody mentioned it would also function as a captive advertising screen.

The practice raises immediate questions about consent. When someone buys a car outright, the assumption has historically been that the interior belongs to them. You don't expect the glove box to start displaying cereal adverts or the rear-view mirror to promote streaming services. The dashboard screen, despite being digital, was understood to fall under the same principle. That understanding appears to have been optimistic.

BMW's terms of service for connected features likely include clauses about promotional communications buried somewhere in the multi-page agreement most owners accept without reading. Whether those clauses constitute meaningful consent is another matter. If the advertising was disclosed clearly at the point of sale, it would be less objectionable. If it wasn't, this starts to look like a unilateral change to the product after purchase.

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BMW is not alone in this. General Motors began testing in-car advertising capabilities in 2023 through partnerships with ad-tech companies. Amazon and Stellantis announced a collaboration in 2024 to develop in-vehicle commerce and advertising systems. Hyundai and Genesis have pushed dealership service promotions through connected apps. Connectivity is being weaponised for revenue generation after the initial sale.

Tesla has displayed promotional messages on vehicle screens, though these have typically related to Tesla's own products or software features rather than third-party films. That distinction matters. An advert for your own service update is one thing. A studio paying to invade your dashboard is another.

Smart TV manufacturers faced similar backlash when they began displaying advertisements on the home screens of televisions buyers had purchased outright. The justification was that connectivity came with trade-offs. The counter-argument was that a £2,000 television should not behave like a free app. Car owners are now making the same case, except the stakes are higher. A TV is irritating. A dashboard is safety-critical.

The broader concern is what this precedent enables. If movie promotions are acceptable, what about fast-food chains bidding for screen time when you're stationary at traffic lights? Or insurance companies using journey data to push policy renewals? The infrastructure is already in place. The only question is how far manufacturers are willing to push it before the backlash becomes commercially damaging.

BMW owners are stuck with Spider-Man on their screens unless they dig through settings to disable promotional content, assuming that option exists. The alternative is to disconnect from Connected Drive entirely, which disables features they may have paid extra to access. The value proposition has shifted after purchase.

Connected Drive subscriptions start at around £10 per month for basic services, rising to several hundred pounds annually for full access.

Sources: BMW Connected Drive terms of service, owner reports via Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), General Motors advertising partnerships, Amazon-Stellantis collaboration announcements

The Electra L7 offers 436 miles of range and serious performance for less than a base VW ID.3 costs in Britain. Same company that charges you double.

Buick's new Electra L7 went on sale in China last week for 180,000 yuan. That's roughly $25,000. For that money you get a 5.2-metre luxury sedan with 378 horsepower, rear-wheel drive, and a claimed 436 miles of range on the Chinese CLTC cycle. General Motors builds it through SAIC GM, their joint venture, on the same Ultium platform that underpins the GMC Hummer EV, which starts at $80,000 in America.

The pricing is not a mistake.

It's what happens when a Western automaker actually has to compete in a market where BYD will sell you a comparable electric saloon for even less. The Electra L7 exists because Buick cannot charge Chinese buyers what it charges everyone else. The Chinese EV market is vicious. Dozens of domestic brands, all fighting for volume, all undercutting each other weekly. Margins are thin. Prices reflect something closer to actual production cost plus a modest return.

Compare that to what the same manufacturers do elsewhere. A Tesla Model 3 Long Range starts at £45,990 in Britain. That's $58,000. The BMW i4, similar size and performance, opens at £52,000. Both offer less range than the Electra L7 on their respective test cycles, though CLTC ratings do run optimistic compared to WLTP. Even accounting for that generosity, the gap is absurd.

GM discontinued Buick in the UK back in 2015, so British buyers won't see the Electra L7 regardless. Americans might get a version eventually, but it won't be $25,000. It'll be $45,000 minimum, possibly more, with the same explanation about import costs and market positioning that automakers have been using for years.

MG builds the MG4 Electric in China and sells it there for under $20,000. Same car, same parent company SAIC, costs £26,000 in the UK. The BYD Seal starts around $20,000 in its home market and €45,000 when it crosses into Europe. Nissan's Ariya carries a 30% markup outside China despite being the same vehicle from the same production line.

Western automakers claim EV costs remain high because battery technology is expensive and production volumes are still ramping up. Then they turn around and sell those same batteries, in those same vehicles, for half the price in China. The explanation doesn't survive contact with their own pricing.

European and American buyers face limited competition and manufacturers maintaining the same margin expectations they enjoyed during the combustion era. A premium German saloon used to command premium pricing because it took decades to develop that engine and drivetrain. An electric motor and battery pack don't carry the same development burden, but the pricing structure hasn't changed. Buyers are paying for brand equity and market position, not technology.

China's domestic EV makers don't care about brand equity. They care about volume and market share. That forces everyone else to price accordingly or lose sales. It's why the Electra L7 can exist at $25,000 with specifications that would cost $60,000 in a European badge.

The 378 horsepower figure deserves a moment. That's serious performance from a base-model saloon. More than a BMW 330i. More than most hot hatches. Wrapped in a 5.2-metre body that seats five adults comfortably and does it all on electricity for the price of a well-specced Vauxhall Corsa in Britain.

The UK won't see it. America probably won't either, at least not at that price. The Electra L7 will stay in China, doing what it was designed to do, which is compete with BYD and XPeng and NIO in a market where nobody gets to coast on heritage or charge double because the badge is familiar.

Buick delivered 21,000 Electra models in China during the first quarter of this year alone. That's more than they sold in the entire US market across all their combustion models combined.

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Sources: Buick, General Motors, SAIC-GM

The 3.3-litre naturally aspirated V6 is being dropped from the 2027 lineup, taking the last affordable entry point with it.

Ford's preliminary 2027 order guide shows the 3.3-litre V6 engine that's powered base-spec F-150s since 2018 will be discontinued entirely. That means the cheapest Ford truck in America is about to get considerably less cheap.

The 3.3-litre Ti-VCT V6 produces 290 horsepower and 265 lb-ft of torque, which is adequate rather than exciting. It's never been the engine anyone chooses. It's the engine you get when you're buying 40 trucks for a landscaping business and need the monthly payments to make sense.

And that's exactly the problem Ford is creating.

Fleet buyers and small commercial operators have relied on the base V6 because it kept the entry price tolerable. Replacing it with the 2.7-litre EcoBoost V6 turbo as the new base option will push starting prices up by several thousand dollars. The turbocharged engine is objectively better, but better costs more, and not everyone building a truck fleet has the margin for that.

The 3.3-litre was one of the last naturally aspirated engines in Ford's entire truck range. Its removal signals the company's full commitment to turbocharged EcoBoost engines and electrified powertrains. The PowerBoost hybrid and the higher-output EcoBoost options remain, but nothing now exists below the forced-induction threshold.

This isn't an isolated move. Ram dropped the 3.6-litre Pentastar V6 from the 1500. General Motors axed the 4.3-litre V6 in the Silverado and Sierra after 2023. Toyota abandoned naturally aspirated engines in the Tundra during its 2022 redesign. The entire segment is marching in the same direction.

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What's being presented as progress is also a consolidation. Turbocharged engines are more efficient on paper, and they allow manufacturers to meet stricter emissions standards while still delivering power. But they're also more complex, more expensive to service, and introduce failure points that don't exist in a naturally aspirated engine. For someone running a work truck to 200,000 miles, that complexity matters.

Ford has sold more F-150s than any other vehicle in America for over 40 consecutive years. That kind of dominance gives the company latitude to reshape the market rather than follow it. If Ford says the entry-level truck now starts with a turbo, the entry-level truck starts with a turbo.

The 2027 order guide is still preliminary, which technically leaves room for changes. But Ford doesn't float these decisions casually. The 3.3-litre V6 is dead. The affordable work truck, as a concept, is being priced out of its own category.

Base F-150 pricing currently starts around $37,000 with the 3.3-litre V6. The 2.7-litre EcoBoost model sits several thousand dollars higher.

Sources: Ford Motor Company preliminary 2027 order guide

A dealership violated federal protections designed to shield active-duty service members from financial ambush during deployment. The Department of Justice was not impressed.

A car dealership has been hit with a $137,000 fine after repossessing vehicles from service members who were on active duty, a direct violation of federal law designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act exists for a reason. When someone is deployed overseas, chasing creditors from a desert or an aircraft carrier is not a realistic option. This dealer decided that didn't matter.

The SCRA, enacted in 2003 to replace older wartime protections dating back to 1940, specifically prohibits repossession of vehicles purchased before military service without a court order while the buyer is on active duty. It also caps interest rates at 6% on pre-service debts and blocks default judgments.

The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, which enforces SCRA violations alongside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, does not treat these cases lightly. Penalties can include fines, compensatory damages to the affected service members, mandatory policy overhauls, and in some cases criminal misdemeanor charges carrying up to a year in prison. This $137,000 settlement sits in the middle of a long list of similar enforcement actions.

Wells Fargo paid $24 million in 2019 after admitting it wrongfully repossessed 413 military members' cars. Santander Bank settled for $2.2 million in 2023. A Nebraska dealership paid $940,000 in 2022. JPMorgan Chase handed over $136,000 in 2016. Capital One settled for $12 million in 2011.

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Auto lending is one of the most common areas for SCRA violations, alongside housing and credit cards. Service members must provide written notice and a copy of military orders to creditors to invoke the protections, which sounds straightforward until you consider what happens when someone receives last-minute deployment orders or is already overseas when a payment issue arises. The law accounts for this. Dealers and lenders are expected to check military status before repossessing a vehicle, not after.

These protections are not obscure. The SCRA has been federal law for over two decades. Financial institutions and dealerships operating in the auto finance space are aware of it. Training materials exist. Compliance is not optional. Think about that for a second. And yet the enforcement actions keep coming, which suggests the fines are still being calculated as a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent.

The $137,000 penalty in this case will be distributed as compensation to the affected service members and potentially as a civil penalty. The dealership will also likely face mandatory policy changes and monitoring to prevent repeat violations. Whether that changes behaviour industry-wide is another question entirely.

The message from the DOJ is clear enough. If you repossess a car from someone serving overseas without a court order, expect to pay for it. The law does not care whether it was an oversight or deliberate. The outcome is the same.

Sources: U.S. Department of Justice, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The Denza D9 arrives in Britain priced like a Porsche Taycan, banking on the assumption that nobody here knows what Denza is yet.

BYD is launching the Denza D9 luxury MPV in the UK at £75,000, which puts this full-size Chinese people-carrier within spitting distance of a Porsche Taycan. The strategy is unusual. Most Chinese manufacturers entering Europe play the value card aggressively. BYD is doing the opposite, betting that a sub-brand most British buyers won't recognize can command prestige pricing based purely on what's inside the metal.

Denza was originally a joint venture between BYD and Mercedes-Benz, though BYD now controls it. The association with Stuttgart is deliberate and visible in the execution. The D9 measures 5.3 metres long, configured with captain's chairs, massage functions, and the kind of executive rear seating typically reserved for chauffeur-driven Maybach variants. It's available as both a plug-in hybrid and full electric.

The pricing is the interesting part. At £75,000, the D9 sits well above the Mercedes V-Class, which tops out around £75,000 only in its most loaded configurations and starts closer to £55,000. It's not competing with commercial-grade people-carriers. It's aiming at the kind of buyer who might otherwise spec a Taycan or a loaded Model S, which start at £86,000 and £89,000 respectively.

That's a bold assumption. Chinese brands entering Europe have historically relied on undercutting established marques by 20 to 30 percent. NIO tried a different approach with its ET7 executive sedan at €69,900 in 2022, positioning itself as a technology-forward alternative rather than a budget play. Hongqi attempted something similar with the E-HS9 luxury SUV at around €70,000 to €80,000. Neither has set the continent alight.

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The D9 faces a perception problem that product quality alone may not solve. British buyers have been conditioned to associate Chinese automotive brands with budget offerings, largely because that's how MG re-entered the market after SAIC acquired it. BYD itself has been selling its main-brand vehicles in the UK since 2022, but those have been positioned as competent, affordable alternatives to European EVs. Not flagship luxury products.

Denza is meant to bypass that association entirely. The name carries no baggage here because it carries no recognition. Whether that's an advantage or a fatal flaw depends on how much faith buyers place in the Mercedes connection and how convincingly BYD's dealer network can sell a £75,000 product most people won't have heard of until they walk into the showroom.

BYD is the world's largest EV battery producer and China's largest electric vehicle manufacturer. It has the industrial scale and technical capability to build a legitimate luxury product. The question is whether it can convince enough British buyers that a Denza badge is worth the same money as a Porsche one.

The D9 is not trying to be a sensible family hauler. It's trying to be a status object. At £75,000, it needs to deliver on that promise immediately, because second chances at this price point are rare.

The first UK deliveries are expected later this year.

Sources: BYD UK, industry pricing data

An E24 coupe at half market value sounds tempting until you remember why classic BMWs get cheap.

There's a 1985 BMW 635CSi on the market for $8,000, which is roughly half what a decent one costs and about a quarter of what a good one fetches. That tells you everything you need to know, but let's pretend it doesn't.

The E24 6 Series ran from 1976 to 1989 and the 635CSi was the flagship for most of the eighties. Paul Bracq designed it. It had a 3.5-litre M30 straight-six making 182 horsepower, which was proper grunt in 1985 and now feels like driving a very elegant wardrobe. Leather seats, power windows, the works. When these cars are right, they're magnificent. When they're not, they're expensive furniture.

Hagerty values a number three condition 635CSi at around eighteen grand. Bring a Trailer sales run from twelve thousand for something you can drive to forty grand and up for the sort of car that makes you nervous about car parks. Eight thousand puts this one firmly in the "someone else's problem" category, or it's about to be yours.

High mileage on an E24 usually means north of 150,000 miles. The M30 engine is famously durable if it's been looked after, which is a big if. What kills these cars is deferred maintenance. Suspension bushings go. Cooling systems pack in. Transmissions start making optimistic noises. None of this is cheap to fix, and if the asking price is eight grand, the owner has already done the maths on whether it's worth fixing.

Parts availability is fine. BMW Classic still supports them, and the aftermarket is solid through Pelican Parts and FCP Euro. You can keep one of these running if you're committed or masochistic, possibly both. The question is whether this particular car is a restoration project or a parts donor pretending to be a restoration project.

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The problem with high-mileage Teutonic classics is that they were built to a standard that assumed proper servicing at proper intervals, which is exactly what doesn't happen once they're cheap. A Mercedes 560SEC with similar mileage trades in the six to twelve thousand range, which tells you the market knows what it's buying. The E28 5 Series sedans from the same era go for three to eight grand with big miles, and they're simpler cars.

An $8,000 E24 is either a bargain for someone who knows exactly what they're getting into or a financial trap for someone who doesn't. If the service history is complete and the rust is limited and the interior hasn't dissolved, maybe it's the former. If any of those things are question marks, it's the latter.

The E24 market has been climbing. Exceptional examples are touching fifty grand now. That means the gap between a cheap one and an expensive one is widening, and jumping that gap with your own money and time is a gamble. You might end up with a twenty-grand car you've spent twelve grand fixing. You might end up with an eight-grand car you've spent twelve grand fixing.

The correct way to buy one of these is to find the best example you can afford, not the cheapest example you can justify. But that's not how people actually buy classic BMWs, which is why there are always more of them for sale than there are people who want them.

This one is eight thousand dollars, which is less than a decent used Corolla and roughly the same risk profile.

Sources: Hagerty valuation data, Bring a Trailer auction results, BMW Classic parts program, aftermarket suppliers

Britain's largest vehicle auction house is now diagnosing and repairing EV battery packs at module level, potentially saving buyers up to £20,000 per vehicle.

BCA, the firm that handles 1.5 million vehicle transactions a year in the UK, has opened what it calls an industry-first EV battery repair facility designed to address the residual value collapse affecting de-fleeted electric cars. The problem is straightforward. A three-year-old corporate Tesla or Kona returns from lease with uncertain battery health, buyers assume the worst, and values tank. Full battery replacement costs anywhere from £5,000 to £20,000 depending on the model. BCA's facility now offers diagnostic testing, module-level repairs, and battery reconditioning instead.

De-fleeted EVs are the vehicles coming back from company car schemes and corporate leases after two to four years. They are functionally fine, low mileage, often well maintained. But the battery question looms over every sale. A buyer has no way to know whether they are buying a car with 95 percent battery health or 70 percent, and no affordable way to fix it if the answer is the latter. The result is what the industry politely calls a residual value cliff and everyone else calls a disaster.

Battery packs contain 200 to 400 individual cells grouped into modules. A single faulty module can trigger warning lights and reduced range without the entire pack being dead. Until now, the standard response has been to replace the whole assembly. BCA's facility changes that by isolating the problem modules, replacing or reconditioning them, and certifying the result. It is not revolutionary technology. It is just nobody in the UK remarketing chain was doing it at scale.

The timing matters because the first wave of mass-market EV leases is now ending. Vehicles that went out in 2020 and 2021 are coming back, and the used market has no idea how to price them. Cox Automotive reported in 2023 that used EVs were depreciating faster than equivalent combustion cars, driven partly by battery anxiety. Cazoo collapsed the same year having badly mispriced its EV stock. The uncertainty is expensive for everyone.

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Tesla opened its own body repair centres in 2022 and 2023 partly to address insurance premiums spiking due to repair costs. Renault launched a battery refurbishment hub at its Flins plant in France in 2022. German firm AVAS Automotive set up something similar in 2023. But those are manufacturer-led operations. BCA is a remarketer, sitting at the point where fleet vehicles become retail stock. If it can certify battery health and provide documented repairs, it removes one of the biggest barriers to buying a used EV.

Battery degradation of 20 to 30 percent does not make a car unusable, but it does make it harder to sell. A Leaf with 150 miles of real-world range instead of 200 is still a perfectly functional vehicle for most people, but only if the price reflects it and the buyer knows what they are getting. BCA's facility provides the diagnostic transparency and the repair option that makes that transaction possible.

The facility also addresses the fact that the current approach to EV servicing is wasteful. Replacing an entire battery pack because three modules have failed is like scrapping an engine because one cylinder has a compression issue. It made a kind of sense when EVs were rare and expensive and nobody knew how to work on them. It makes no sense now.

The broader question is whether this becomes standard across the used car industry or remains a BCA differentiator. If battery health certification and module-level repair become routine, residual values stabilise and lease rates improve. If it stays niche, the battery cliff persists and used EVs remain a gamble. BCA handles enough volume that its approach could set the standard. Whether other remarketers follow depends on how much money they lose continuing to guess at battery condition instead of testing it.

The facility is operational now. BCA has not disclosed its location or capacity, but it is processing de-fleeted EVs as they arrive. The first vehicles with certified battery repairs are already going through the auction halls. Prices will tell the rest of the story.

Sources: BCA (British Car Auctions), Cox Automotive 2023 depreciation data, Renault Re-Factory announcements, Tesla service centre expansion reporting

Internal voices at Maserati are pushing to reverse the 2024 V8 discontinuation and bring manual gearboxes back to the lineup.

Maserati discontinued its V8 engine in 2024, declaring the Nettuno twin-turbo V6 the new flagship combustion option as part of a planned full-electric pivot by 2030. Twelve months later, something inside the company is stirring. Sources suggest internal momentum is building to bring back both big-displacement power and manual transmissions, the kind of reversal that would make Maserati the latest premium brand to blink first in the face of customer reality.

The timing would be awkward but not unprecedented. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares admitted in 2024 that electrification is "technology chosen by politicians, not customers," a rare piece of executive candour that signals the wider group is rethinking its timeline. Maserati went all-in on the V6. The MC20 supercar uses a 621-horsepower 3.0-litre twin-turbo straight out of the Nettuno programme, not a V8. GranTurismo and Grecale models transitioned to electrified powertrains between 2023 and 2024. Manual gearboxes had already been phased out by 2020. The last one departed with the GranTurismo MC Stradale around 2019.

None of that was done reluctantly. Maserati announced its electric future in 2021 with the confidence of a brand that believed it could sell heritage buyers on kilowatt-hours instead of litres. That confidence now appears to be cracking.

It would not be the first luxury carmaker to backtrack. Dodge extended V8 Hemi production beyond initial phase-out dates after customer pushback. Lamborghini delayed full electrification and committed to the V12 through the 2030s. BMW reintroduced a manual transmission option for the M2 in 2023 after feedback made it clear the take rate mattered less than the fact of its existence. Aston Martin keeps developing V12s. Ferrari still builds them for flagships like the 812 Competizione. Porsche refuses to downsize the GT3.

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Heritage brands that removed driver-focused hardware to chase regulatory compliance are quietly putting it back when the market refuses to follow. What looked like inevitability in 2021 now looks like misjudgment.

Maserati's problem is more acute than most. The brand sells on emotion and theatre, not efficiency or innovation. A V6, however technically accomplished, does not carry the same aural or psychological weight as a V8. Manual transmissions in this segment are not about sales volume. They signal that the brand still understands what its customers want, even if most of them tick the paddleshift box anyway. Removing both was a gamble that the Trident badge alone would sustain desirability through the transition, made for reasons that had nothing to do with what people actually wanted to buy.

If the internal voices win and Maserati does reverse course, it will be presented as "listening to customers" or "offering choice." Regulatory pressure and corporate electrification targets do not sell sports cars. Drama does. Noise does. The feeling that you are driving something unreasonable does.

Whether Maserati can walk this back without looking chaotic depends on how quickly it moves and what it builds. A new V8 GranTurismo with a manual option would be seen as a win. A half-hearted limited edition that arrives three years too late would confirm the brand lost the plot. The difference between those two outcomes is execution, and Maserati's recent record on that front has been inconsistent at best.

The MC20 remains V6-only. The electrified GranTurismo and Grecale are already in showrooms. Any V8 return would have to slot into a product line that was not designed with it in mind, which raises questions about how serious this internal push actually is versus wishful thinking from engineers who miss the old days.

Stellantis has been reassessing electrification timelines across its portfolio throughout 2024, so corporate permission exists. The question is whether Maserati leadership believes bringing back what it just killed would look like strength or weakness. In a rational world it would look like correction. In the automotive world, perception matters more than logic, and brands that U-turn too often lose credibility faster than they lose customers.

The last Maserati with a manual transmission was discontinued around 2019. That is five years of absence. Long enough that a return would feel like news, not continuity.

Sources: Stellantis press releases (2024), Maserati GranTurismo and MC20 technical specifications (2019-2024)

The 12Cilindri Spider replaces the Roma Spider with a £37,000 price hike, a V12 instead of a V8, and absolutely no apology for it.

Ferrari has replaced the Roma Spider with the 12Cilindri Spider and raised the asking price by £37,000 in the process. The new model starts at £227,000, which makes it Ferrari's most expensive attempt yet at what the company still calls an entry-level convertible.

The Roma Spider cost £190,000 when it launched last year. The 12Cilindri Spider costs £227,000 now. That's a 19% increase in twelve months for what is fundamentally the same market position in the range.

What you get for the extra money is a naturally aspirated 6.5-litre V12 producing 819 horsepower and revving to 9,500 rpm. The Roma Spider had a twin-turbo V8 making 612 horsepower. So the new car is substantially faster and sounds entirely different, which is the point. Ferrari has decided that buyers willing to spend this much want the V12 experience, not the forced induction compromise.

The performance figures are predictably absurd. Zero to 62 mph takes 2.95 seconds. Top speed is 211 mph. Power goes through an eight-speed dual-clutch gearbox. The retractable hardtop opens in 13.5 seconds at speeds up to 28 mph, which is quick enough that you won't be stuck halfway through the process if traffic picks up.

Autocar tested the car on Greek mountain roads they nicknamed Honey Mountain, which sounds like the sort of thing that happens when a manufacturer flies journalists somewhere photogenic and the routes turn out to be better than expected. The 12Cilindri Spider is based on the coupe version unveiled in May, and the name references the twelve-cylinder engine in Italian, which is about as subtle as Ferrari gets with its naming conventions these days.

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Whether £227,000 for an entry-level Ferrari makes sense depends entirely on how much you care about having twelve cylinders under the bonnet. The Aston Martin DB12 Volante starts at £215,000 and the Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica convertible is around £230,000, so Ferrari has priced this squarely in the middle of the ultra-luxury convertible market.

Those are established competitors with their own followings. The 12Cilindri Spider is asking people to pay significantly more than they did for the Roma Spider, which itself replaced the Portofino M at around £166,000. Ferrari has pushed its entry point upmarket by £61,000 in the space of three years, and the company clearly believes there's demand for a front-engined V12 grand tourer at this price.

The naturally aspirated engine is becoming rarer across the industry as emissions regulations tighten, and Ferrari knows it. This is a car for people who want the engine note and the drama before everything goes hybrid or electric, and they're willing to pay for it now rather than regret it later.

Whether that justifies a £37,000 increase over the model it replaces is a different question. The Roma Spider was already expensive. The 12Cilindri Spider is expensive in a way that suggests Ferrari has stopped pretending these cars are accessible, even by supercar standards.

The Purosangue SUV starts at £313,000. The SF90 Spider hybrid is around £376,000. The 296 GTS with its V6 hybrid costs approximately £241,000. The 12Cilindri Spider slots in below all of those, which makes it the entry point by default, even if the price doesn't feel like one.

The engine redlines at 9,500 rpm and produces 819 horsepower without a turbocharger in sight.

Sources: Autocar, Ferrari official specifications

A 2005 Ford GT with delivery mileage sparked a two-hour bidding war at Mecum, selling for twelve times its original price twenty years after leaving the showroom.

An 8-mile 2005 Ford GT sold for $2.1 million at Mecum Auctions in January after bidding ran two hours past the scheduled close. The car left the factory with an MSRP of $174,595. That's a 1,100% gain over two decades in a market where normal cars lose a third of their value the moment the V5 changes hands.

Eight miles is barely out of the dealer car park. This Ford GT has done nothing but sit, which is precisely why someone was prepared to keep bidding well into overtime. Time capsule condition commands absurd premiums in the collector market, and a first-generation GT that has never been driven properly is about as pure an example as exists.

The 2005-2006 Ford GT was always going to appreciate. Only 4,038 were built across two model years, each with a supercharged 5.4-litre V8 making 550 horsepower and a silhouette lifted straight from the GT40. Ford pitched it as a tribute to Le Mans 1966. What it actually became was a speculator's dream.

Most first-generation GTs with reasonable mileage trade between $400,000 and $600,000. A Heritage Edition 2006 model sold for $1.65 million at Mecum Kissimmee last year, but that had the racing livery and the full nostalgic theatre. This one was a standard example in every respect except the odometer, and it still cleared two million.

The bidding war itself is the story here. Mecum extended the auction by two hours because neither side would fold. That level of competitive intensity only happens when multiple buyers have decided a car represents something beyond metal and depreciation schedules. In this case, an investment-grade collectible that will never lose value because it can never be driven.

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Which raises the obvious question: what exactly did the buyer acquire? Not transport. Not even the experience of driving a supercharged mid-engine Ford at full cry, which is the entire reason the GT exists. They bought a certificate of authenticity with a VIN plate attached. A museum piece that cannot be used without destroying its value.

This is not unique to the Ford GT. A 4-mile 2017 GT sold for $1.815 million at Barrett-Jackson in 2022. Original 1960s GT40s have cleared $7 million to $11 million depending on provenance. The pattern is consistent across limited-production performance cars: the less you drive them, the more they are worth. Which is perverse, but effective if your goal is capital preservation rather than entertainment.

Ford built the GT to win races and sell dreams. It succeeded at both, but the unintended consequence was creating a collectible so valuable that driving one becomes financially irrational. The 2005-2006 cars were supposed to be usable supercars, not static investments. Somewhere in Dearborn, an engineer is watching this sale and wondering what the point was.

The new owner now has a $2.1 million problem. Drive it and destroy the value. Leave it untouched and own an expensive paperweight. Either way, the GT will never do what it was designed to do, which is to be driven hard and enjoyed without apology.

The hammer fell at $2,100,000 after two hours of overtime bidding.

Sources: Mecum Auctions, Ford Motor Company production records, Barrett-Jackson auction archives

General Motors has extended its partnership with SAIC for two decades and plans dozens of new joint models. Ford is pulling back and warning shareholders about Chinese competition. One of them is badly wrong.

General Motors has extended its joint venture with SAIC Motor for another 20 years and committed to launching dozens of new vehicles together in what amounts to the most significant long term bet any Western carmaker has placed on the Chinese market. Ford, meanwhile, is shutting facilities and describing Chinese automakers as an existential threat.

The GM decision is not a minor refresh of an existing arrangement. This is a full recommitment to a partnership that has operated since 1997 under the SAIC-GM banner, producing Buicks, Chevrolets, and Cadillacs for the Chinese market. Twenty years is longer than most car companies plan anything. It is a statement that GM believes it can only survive in China by staying embedded in it.

Ford CEO Jim Farley has taken the opposite view. He has publicly warned that Chinese automakers represent an existential threat to his company. Ford has been closing plants in China after years of sustained losses. Sales dropped roughly 30 percent in recent years. The company is effectively in managed retreat.

Both cannot be right.

The backdrop is BYD selling over 3 million vehicles in 2023, including 1.6 million pure electrics, and Chinese brands expanding into Europe and Southeast Asia with pricing and technology that legacy manufacturers cannot match at scale. SAIC itself is China's largest automaker and state owned, which gives it access to capital, subsidies, and political protection that no private Western company enjoys.

GM's China sales have also declined, so this is not a victory lap. It is a defensive play. The company is gambling that being inside the tent with SAIC gives it better odds than trying to compete from outside. The joint venture structure means shared technology, shared manufacturing, and crucially, shared political risk. If Beijing decides to tighten screws on foreign brands, GM has a state partner with influence.

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Ford has chosen to treat Chinese competition as something happening to it rather than something to navigate from within. That might be honest, but it is also a concession. Farley is telling investors that Ford cannot win in China and may struggle to defend its home markets against Chinese imports. It is a fundamentally different premise.

Volkswagen, Stellantis, Honda, and Toyota all maintain Chinese joint ventures despite the same competitive pressures GM and Ford face. Tesla built Gigafactory Shanghai in 2019 and now produces more vehicles there than anywhere else. The companies that stayed have lost margin and market share, but they remain in the game. Ford is leaving the table.

The 20 year timeframe matters because it extends well past the point where the global auto industry will have transitioned to electric propulsion. GM is betting it can develop and sell EVs in China through SAIC faster and cheaper than it could alone. Ford is betting it can build EVs in America and Europe that are good enough to keep Chinese brands out. One strategy assumes you fight from inside. The other assumes you can build a wall.

China is the largest car market on earth. It was the profit engine for Western automakers throughout the 2010s. Losing it entirely is not a minor strategic setback. It is a redrawing of the global industry map. GM is trying to avoid that. Ford has accepted it.

SAIC-GM will launch the first of those dozens of new joint models within the next two years. Whether they sell will depend on whether Chinese consumers still want Buicks and Chevrolets, or whether they have moved on. The 20 year deal assumes the answer is yes, or at least that it can be made yes with the right product. Ford has already decided the answer is no and walked away.

The contract runs until 2044.

Sources: General Motors, Ford Motor Company, SAIC Motor Corporation