This website uses cookies

Read our Privacy policy and Terms of use for more information.

Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | Apr 27 2026 | VIEW ONLINE

“Graduation Rates” are the probability that any one of our investments will successfully raise their next round. 

This math really matters to VCs, and our hope is for this blog post to provide founders with additional insights about how VCs think. |

What We're Reading:

🚗

 

Automotive

Ford CEO Jim Farley says carmakers are facing three “perfect-storm moments” that could prove existential: the three-fold challenges of the Chinese, increasing vehicle complexity, and government regulations represent a “come to Jesus” moment for the industry, and they will have to either meet each of the challenges or face the consequences. | Rolling Stone ($)

More Americans turning in their cars to buy new ones are encountering a difficult reality: Their vehicles aren’t worth what they owe. About 30% of borrowers in the first quarter who traded in a car to buy a new one had negative equity, whereby they owe more on their loan than their car is worth, according to car-shopping website Edmunds. Those borrowers owed about $7,200 on average before getting a new loan, a 42% jump compared with the same period five years prior. About a third of Americans trading in an older car have negative equity, which has been typical in the industry for years. But the average amount Americans are underwater has skyrocketed, Edmunds said, as buyers try to unload cars bought during the pandemic at high prices. The increased level of negative equity represents another strain on an auto market already under pressure from pricey vehicles and elevated interest rates. | The New York Times ($)

Automakers have seen their warranty and recall costs explode over the last decade. It’s a global issue, affecting all automakers in the U.S., Europe and Asia, and it looks like it’s getting worse. Based on information gleaned from their 10-K and 20-F financial reports, twelve of the top global automakers spent over $67 billion on warranty and recalls last year. According to a 2024 report by Warranty Week, automakers worldwide set aside $140 billion in warranty reserves for 2023 alone. Those numbers correlate with U.S. data that the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) collects every year on the amount of warranty and recall work dealers perform. In 2025, U.S. dealers billed automakers more than $30 billion in warranty work. The impact on earnings is profound. Warranty claims now account for 3% to 4% of total revenue of most OEMs. That is money that isn’t going into developing solid-state batteries, autonomous software, or next-generation electronic architectures. It’s money getting torched to correct past mistakes. So, what’s driving the spike? There doesn’t seem to be any one culprit, but the top suspect is complexity. | Wards Auto

Carvana on April 21 bought its seventh Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram dealership, strengthening its foothold in the new-vehicle market as a Stellantis dealer. Carvana bought Avon Lake Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram, in Ohio, near Cleveland, from sellers Elliot Schor and Scott Zuckerman of Catskill Automotive Partners. Stellantis on Jan. 6 updated a policy that “no person or entity may acquire more than one CDJR dealership within a rolling 12-month period,” according to a copy of a memo sent to dealers obtained by Automotive News. The Avon Lake store is Carvana’s second CDJR purchase since that memo was issued, though buy-sell deals can be in the works and under contract for months before closing. Stellantis in March said Carvana’s acquisitions weren’t behind its policy change. | Automotive News ($)

Nissan CEO Ivan Espinosa unveiled a long-term vision this month to revive the struggling automaker through lineup cuts, powertrain diversification and new body-on-frame trucks. But in a wide-ranging interview, he revealed he’s equally focused on an industrywide challenge: preparing Japan’s seven major automakers for consolidation he sees as inevitable: "I think we will see a lot more collaboration among Japanese OEMs. We are really talking about what we can do together, because we do see that other industries in other countries or other parts of the world are better organized than us." | Automotive News ($)

Dealers should report competitors who violate Federal Trade Commission vehicle advertising rules to help the agency catch industry “bad apples,” an FTC official said April 17. Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said at a webinar that the agency wants to help honest dealers “compete on an even playing field.” The FTC’s call for industry self-policing follows warning letters the agency sent to 97 dealership groups in March about potential price advertising violations. The move signals the agency’s effort to enlist compliant dealers in enforcement against what it calls deceptive advertising practices. Dealers can work with the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) — which helped arrange the webinar — to get any complaints over to the FTC or they can file a report on the agency’s website, Mufarrige said. When dealerships are dishonest about the real price of the car, it can hurt other stores in the area that are following the rules, he said. Bait and switch price tactics are “diverting traffic away from honest dealers who are engaging” up-front advertising, Mufarrige said. | Automotive News ($)

The Afeela 1 and Afeela SUV Prototype were both killed recently before ever reaching production due to Honda’s decision to massively pull back on its EV aspirations, but that doesn’t mean the Sony-Honda partnership is finished. Japan’s Nikkei reported that the two companies are looking for new ways to keep the joint venture alive. The obvious one suggested in the report is a new focus on in-car technology. Specifically, the two would partner on creating a new artificial intelligence assistant and audio systems. Sony will aim to expand its entertainment experiences into Honda vehicles, where we could see “a portion of the onboard software and services from Sony Honda Mobility” installed, Nikkei reports. What this means, practically speaking, would likely be that a derivative of the interface we saw previewed in the Afeela 1 could actually end up in Honda vehicles. That’s exciting considering the digital experience offered by the Afeela was likely going to be one of its stronger selling points. The Sony-Honda Mobility team currently consists of about 400 workers, and this new direction will see many of those absorbed in other parts of each company. It’s unclear if Sony will try to offer its newfound automotive services to companies other than Honda, but the thought doesn’t seem out of the question, now that the two are no longer building a car together. | Road & Track

Volkswagen, Stellantis and Mercedes-Benz models may feature touchscreens able to test blood alcohol levels for drivers. The cockpit feature uses miniature near-infrared light pulses to sense how much alcohol is in the body's system, delivering results in seconds using a touchscreen sensor and AI-based analysis. The system's technology has been scientifically validated and is part of a clinical study registered with the German Clinical Trials Register, taking place in November. | Bloomberg ($)

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced its latest safety action plan on Tuesday, focused on reducing traffic fatalities across the nation—and a portion of its eight-prong approach is raising some eyebrows. Beyond the usual law enforcement-centric strategy, federal safety regulators are considering curbing super-speeders with intelligent speed assistance devices. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says it is exploring the use of active speed limiter technology for a driver population it calls "worst of the worst." The technology works by actively identifying speed limits and providing alerts or even actively limiting acceleration when the speed limit is exceeded. "NHTSA is prioritizing the 'worst of the worst'—those driving excessively fast. The agency is increasing support for heavy fines, jail time, and the exploration of intelligent speed assistance devices for repeat offenders," NHTSA's Pathways to Safer Streets plan reads. | Road & Track ($)

⚡️

 

EVs

Anyone care to bet how many of these new EVs that Ferrari ends up selling? | Automotive News ($)

Early signs of a shift toward electric vehicles have emerged for U.S. car rental companies as customers ‌become wary of paying more at the pump due to the conflict in the Middle East. At Hertz, which rents cars to Uber and Lyft, drivers on a longer-term basis than traditional rentals, requests for EV reservations increased nearly 25% in March compared with February. The strongest uptick in demand for EV ​rentals has occurred on the West Coast, where gas prices tend to run highest. At Turo, a peer-to-peer car-rental service similar to property-rental site Airbnb, EV bookings ⁠increased by 11% in the last three weeks of March compared with the prior three-week period. On March 31, the day U.S. gas ​prices eclipsed $4 per gallon for the first time since 2022, EV bookings on Turo were 47% higher than on the same day ​in 2025, the company said. | Reuters ($)

Sales of electric cars soared 51% in continental Europe last month, amid a rise in petrol and diesel costs driven by the Iran war. Data shows that 224,000 new electric vehicles (EVs) were registered in March, and 500,000 across the first three months of the year – a 33.5% increase on a year earlier, according to analysis of national sales data in 15 countries by New AutoMotive and E-Mobility Europe, a trade body. Buyers’ interest in electric cars has risen across Europe since the start of the war in Iran in late February, as the rising cost of petrol highlights the cheaper power available from a plug. As President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized Europe’s “windmills” and push towards greater use of renewable energy, the figures suggest the U.S.-Israel war on Iran is accelerating the move away from combustion engines.  | The Guardian

Electric vehicle ownership has reached a “tipping point” that signals an irreversible shift away from petrol cars, not only in China but parts of south-east Asia and Europe despite stalling in the U.S., expert research finds. EVs accounted for a quarter of new car sales globally in 2025 and the pace of growth has continued into the first quarter of 2026. | Financial Times ($)

Contemporary Amperex Technology Li

mited (CATL) has developed a battery capable of allowing an electric vehicle to drive 1,500km on a single charge, the Chinese group claimed on Tuesday, as it challenges BYD for supremacy on range and charging speed. The company’s latest version of its condensed Qilin battery has a greater range than the distance by road from London to Barcelona and marks a leap from the 1,000km limit of its previous edition. CATL also released an upgrade to its Shenxing, which can charge from 10 percent to 98 percent in six-and-a-half minutes, an improvement from the previous edition which charged from 5 percent to 80 percent in 15 minutes. It is also considerably faster than the nine minutes taken for BYD’s latest Blade battery, which was unveiled last month, to charge from 10 to 97 percent. CATL and BYD, which together account for more than half of the global EV battery market, are pouring billions of dollars into research and development, targeting innovations in cell chemistry and manufacturing. | Financial Times ($)

In just over 6 minutes, Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited (CATL)’s new lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery can be fully recharged, beating out BYD’s Blade Battery 2.0. Recent battery breakthroughs, like BYD’s Blade Battery 2.0, launched last month, are enabling EVs to charge up in less than 10 minutes, or essentially as quickly as filling up a gas tank. CATL’s third-generation Shenxing battery can charge from 10% to 98% in 6 minutes and 27 seconds. In just 1 minute, the battery charges from 10% to 35%, while charging from 10% to 80% takes 3 minutes and 44 seconds. | Electrek

China controls much of the global electric vehicle battery supply chain—from raw materials to the finished cars built around them. It’s the end result of years of state-directed investment and research that has placed the nation at the forefront of one of the most important technologies of the 21st century. Now, the landscape might be beginning to shift. Domestic overcapacity and price wars are pushing Chinese companies to expand overseas. At the same time, rivals in other countries are scrambling to compete, developing new battery chemistries and building their own supply chains in a bid to somehow challenge its dominance. | Bloomberg ($)

Global clean power output grew faster than electricity demand last year, according to new figures which analysts argue represent a structural shift away from fossil fuels that will persist beyond the Middle East war. The rapid growth of solar power in particular contributed to a small annual decrease in output from fossil fuel power stations, according to the analysis by independent think-tank Ember. It marked the first time fossil fuel output had fallen since 2020 pandemic year, Ember said, highlighting the enormous impact that solar and wind power are having on electricity systems. The report also covered clean energy sources including nuclear, geothermal and biofuels. Renewable energy sources also generated more electricity than coal-fired power stations in 2025, Ember said, “for the first time in the modern power system”, extending a trend first seen in the first half of last year. The ability of renewable sources to meet electricity demand growth, if sustained, is significant because it suggests they are on course to eat into fossil-fuel supplies rather than just add to them. | Financial Times ($)

🇨🇳

 

China

Ford and Chinese automaker Geely held talks as recently as this year exploring whether the European tie-up they are negotiating could extend into the U.S., a prospect Geely sees as a launchpad into the world’s second-largest vehicle market. Discussions, which involved Ford potentially licensing Geely’s technology in the U.S., have stalled in recent months, according to people familiar with the talks. The two sides instead are focused on hammering out a deal to share technology and manufacturing capacity in Europe. Geely, China’s second-largest automaker behind BYD, is eager to expand in the profitable U.S. market, where Chinese automakers are effectively banned. But it faces major hurdles to doing so. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Ford denied a news report that it has held talks with GEELY Automobile Holdings Ltd. about bringing Chinese car technology to the US market. A Ford spokesperson said no such talks have happened or are happening with any Chinese carmaker about technology sharing or platform sharing in the U.S. Ford Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley said allowing China's automakers to sell their vehicles in the US would be "devastating" to domestic manufacturing. | Bloomberg ($)

Ford CEO Jim Farley says there's a reason why he picked a Chinese EV to drive instead of a Tesla. He said Tesla, unlike Chinese companies like BYD or Xiaomi, did not have an "updated vehicle." Farley famously drove a Xiaomi SU7 for six months in 2024 and said he did not want to give it up. | Business Insider ($)

Commerce Secretary Howard W. Lutnick ruled out the possibility of Chinese investment in the U.S. auto industry, saying there's no need for companies like BYD in America. Lutnick stated "We're not going to have them here" and "Not cars, not cars" when asked about Chinese companies investing in the U.S. U.S. automakers have warned that Chinese cars pose a threat to America's global competitiveness, national security, and automotive industrial base, despite President Donald Trump saying he's open to Chinese investments in the U.S. auto industry. | Bloomberg ($)China's newest electric vehicles are not for sale in the U.S. due to tariffs, national security rules, and automotive regulations. Chinese brands have made headway with U.S. consumers, with one-third of U.S. new-vehicle buyers saying they'd consider purchasing a vehicle built in China, and social media influencers like Marques Brownlee and Forrest Jones generating millions of views with their reviews of Chinese cars. Despite the interest, it's unclear whether Chinese electric vehicles will be allowed in the U.S., with President Donald Trump's comments on foreign auto investment and a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping sparking concern among U.S. auto lobby groups and senators. | Bloomberg ($)

Western carmakers are fighting to stay relevant in the world’s largest car market with new electric vehicles made with Chinese technology that they also want to bring to other international markets. Two years after brands including Volkswagen and Toyota North America outlined plans to regain market share via cars made with local know-how under an “in China for China” strategy, executives are hoping to win over consumers with a slew of new products displayed at the annual auto show in Beijing this week. Foreign carmakers have significantly lost sales in China in recent years with the rise of domestic rivals and new players such as BYD, GEELY and Xiaomi Technology in a market where EVs and plug-in hybrids now account for more than half of new car sales. Their share in China has halved to 32 percent this year from 64 percent in 2020, according to data from Shanghai consultancy Automobility Ltd. After decades of Chinese brands learning car manufacturing from their western rivals through their local joint ventures, the tables have turned, forcing VW, Toyota and others to rely on Chinese partners and supply chains to build cars faster and with advanced software. | Financial Times ($)

China's automakers have a message for premium German brands Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and BMW: We're coming for ​your customers. After years of churning out the world's most technologically advanced, low-cost electric vehicles, Chinese companies like Geely and NIO are now unleashing a number of ‌premium models that are packed with features and priced significantly lower than those offered by German rivals. It is a major change for an industry that spent the last three years mired in a bitter electric vehicle price war and poses a huge threat to legacy premium automakers - both in China, the world's largest auto market - and abroad. | Reuters ($)

Changan Automobile is considering opening a plant in Spain, according to people familiar with the matter, following other Chinese automakers that have located production in the European nation. The factory would likely be in northern Spain, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing private deliberations. Two of the people said the region of Aragon was under consideration. The people, who didn’t specify the scope of the planned operation, cautioned that no decision has been made. European production would help Changan avoid European Union tariffs on battery-electric cars imported from China. The automaker’s Deepal S05 and S07 midsize electric SUVs are charged an extra 20 percent duty on top of the EU’s standard 10 percent tariff. Changan, a partner of Ford Motor Company and Mazda in China, plans to launch eight new models in Europe in the next three years and invest €2 billion in the region by 2030. | Automotive News ($)A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world’s most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China – and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics. A Chinese deep-sea mission has successfully tested an advanced device capable of cutting through underwater structures such as submarine cable at a depth of thousands of metres. The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting critical undersea networks. The expedition included a cutting test of a deep-sea electro-hydrostatic actuator at a depth of 3,500 metres (11,483 feet), using technology that has drawn attention for its potential military use. | South China Morning Post ($)

🛜  Connectivity

These days, it seems virtually impossible to avoid being tracked, whether it’s through your phone, computer, various “smart” gadgets, or even your car. Some may take solace in the fact that it’s still possible to buy a car without features like navigation or a GPS-based SOS feature, but the reality is that many modern cars (and by that, we mean virtually everything built in the past two decades) has some sort of on-board data recorders—like a digital version of the “black box” found in passenger airlines—and some of them are capable of storing a lifetime’s worth of tracking data. Modern vehicles are equipped with telematics modules that handle communication between the car and various networks, and they also typically include a GPS receiver. These modules can store incredibly granular data about the car, including its mechanical condition and its physical location. That data can persist after the module has been removed from the car. In many cases, that data remains unencrypted, meaning that if somebody can get physical access to one of the car’s modules, they can work backward to reconstruct every mile the car has ever traveled. And a group of white hat hackers proved it using the telematics unit (the module that handles anything related to telephonic/internet connectivity) obtained from a wrecked BYD Seal. They bought the module used, virtually guaranteeing that it would have customer data on it (a new car would not have any trips to log, after all). Lacking the proper adapter to read the data stored in its memory, they had to wire up their own harness to let it talk to a USB flash tool—picture the tuner you use to change fuel maps in your modified car, only without the whole OBDII interface. | The Drive

🚖

  

Autonomy & Robotics

Data from Morgan Stanley Research shows that the cost per mile for Waymo and Tesla Robotaxis is already cheaper than traditional ride-hailing costs. For example, Morgan Stanley Research estimates that Waymos cost about $1.36 per mile to operate versus $0.74 for Tesla, when factoring in depreciation, cleaning, maintenance, charging, mobile operators, insurance, and parking. Meanwhile, new pricing data shared with Sherwood from ride-share comparison app Obi shows that Waymo is charging about $9.58 per mile while Tesla is charging $4.35. So it seems the companies are charging a premium over their costs. | Sherwood

San Francisco adopted Vision Zero in 2014, promising zero fatalities by 2024. Instead, 43 people were killed in 2024 — the highest toll since 2005, exceeding that year’s homicides. Police traffic citations have collapsed by 95% over the past decade. Since Vision Zero began, 369 people have died on San Francisco’s roads. The city replaced the plan, then suspended its residential traffic-calming program due to budget cuts. It’s against this backdrop that local leaders continue to fixate on autonomous vehicles. We are applying maximum scrutiny to a system demonstrating measurable safety gains, while applying minimal accountability to the status quo system that continues to produce predictable, preventable deaths. We are debating hypothetical risks while ignoring empirical outcomes; regulating performance at the margins while tolerating failure at the core. If San Francisco were serious about safety, the focus would not be on constraining technologies that reduce harm. It would be on aggressively addressing the dominant source of that harm: human driving behavior, weak enforcement and an underbuilt street infrastructure that fails to support pedestrians and cyclists. | San Francisco Chronicle ($)

Recent lawsuits allege that Elon Musk and Tesla have made repeated claims that were false about the self-driving capabilities of Tesla vehicles and misled consumers who paid extra because they believed the company’s marketing. Several ongoing lawsuits are efforts by Tesla owners looking to hold the company accountable for overpromising and under-delivering on its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) product. In the Netherlands, a Tesla owner launched a campaign last week to organize European buyers, some who paid thousands for automated-driving technology but still lack access because of local regulations. A law firm in Australia has also assembled a class-action case accusing the company of misleading customers about the cars’ capabilities. The matter calls into question Musk’s decade-long marketing pitch that Tesla’s autonomous vehicles were just around the corner. That promise kept Tesla’s stock near all-time highs—and with a market cap that exceeds most other automakers combined—even as its share of the electric-vehicle market has eroded. Tesla and its lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment. The issue of Hardware 3, as the outdated hardware is known, has taken on a life of its own online, with owners taking to Reddit and Facebook to complain about Tesla’s inaction. Investors also frequently ask Tesla executives about the matter on quarterly earnings calls. The lawsuits and European campaign represent just thousands of Tesla customers. Wall Street analysts, however, estimate that there are millions of Teslas on the road with the outdated hardware no longer capable of running the most sophisticated version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software. | The Wall Street Journal ($)Dozens of Chinese-made humanoid robots showed off their fast-improving athleticism and autonomous navigation skills as they whizzed past ​human runners in a half-marathon race in Beijing on Sunday, highlighting the sector's rapid technical advances. The race's inaugural edition last year was riddled with ‌mishaps, and most robots were unable to finish. Last year's champion robot recorded a time of 2 hours 40 minutes, more than double the time of the human winner of the conventional race. This year's contrast was stark. Not only had the number of participating teams increased from 20 to more than 100, but several robot frontrunners were noticeably faster than professional athletes, beating the ​human winners by more than 10 minutes. The winning ⁠robot, developed by Chinese smartphone brand Honor, finished the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, several minutes faster than the half-marathon world record set by Ugandan ​runner Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon last month. | Reuters ($)

The delivery robots rolling down your sidewalk have cameras, sensors, and a constant need to dodge whatever is in their path. Think fallen e-scooters, construction zones, and tricky curbs. That data gets stored so that other robots know what lies ahead of them—and it’s now going to the world’s most widely used GPS app for blind people so they can better navigate city streets. Coco Robotics, the Los Angeles–based startup operating roughly 1,000 delivery bots across the United States and Europe, is partnering with BlindSquare to remit real-time sidewalk hazard data directly to visually impaired pedestrians. The partnership, announced today, will go live across all six of Coco’s operating markets: Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and Jersey City in the U.S. and Helsinki and Turku in Finland. As Coco’s robots make food deliveries for local restaurants, they continuously log every obstacle they encounter. That data feeds into Coco’s sidewalk map, updated to the minute, and under the new partnership, it will also flow to BlindSquare. The self-voicing app converts the information into spoken alerts delivered in 26 languages, warning users roughly 10 meters before they reach a hazard. In effect, thousands of delivery robots become on-the-ground eyes for people who cannot see what’s ahead. | Fortune ($)

🤖  Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The enterprise software industry has crossed a permanent threshold. Salesforce’s rollout of its Headless 360 architecture marks the defining pivot to “service as software” (SaS). By eliminating the graphical user interface (GUI) from its products, Salesforce is acknowledging that the future of enterprise relies on AI agents operating natively via APIs, model context protocols (MCP), and command-line interfaces (CLI). The dashboard is officially a legacy artifact, and over time, no browser will be required. Salesforce’s aggressive move validates that the transition from a passive software model to an active intelligence partner is the only path forward for enterprise incumbents. Though it is counterintuitive, the software market has begun to merge with the human labor market, transforming systems of record like Salesforce into a data and functionality layer that allows both Salesforce and third parties to build invisible, programmable systems of action on top. This allows human capital to transform from task workers to accelerated human platforms capable of orchestrating fleets of agents. The removal of the GUI, however, eliminates the visual safety net of human oversight. Consequently, the rapid deployment of autonomous AI demands an unprecedented acceleration in AgentOps innovation to manage, secure, and govern the digital workforce. | Pitchbook

✈️

  

Aviation & Space

More than 40% of America’s aviation mechanics are over 60 and fast approaching retirement, according to a report from Oliver Wyman management consultants and the Aviation Technician Education Council, or ATEC. And because airlines face a massive backlog of new plane orders, these air mechanics are maintaining some of the oldest passenger and cargo fleets in decades. That means the work is steadily mounting. It’s a perfect storm that has made recruits highly sought after. Next year, the labor shortage is projected to hit nearly 7,000 certificated mechanics in North America, 12% fewer than the industry actually needs, according to the industry report. That doesn’t include an estimated shortfall of 15,000 noncertificated maintenance personnel. As a result of the squeeze, entry-level salaries have soared about 50% since 2020. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that. Yet that is essentially what the United States has attempted with its tactical air fleet. The F-35 program’s total lifetime cost is projected to exceed two trillion dollars, the most expensive Major Defense Acquisition Program in history. The United States plans to purchase thousands of them. Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this. The problems fall into two categories. The first is the physical problem of operating in the Pacific. The second is the sustainability problem of fighting there for more than a few nights. Both problems point to the same solution: a balanced force that has the unique capabilities of the F-35, while hedging against its limitations by shifting more procurement dollars to unmanned systems. That would result in a force with fewer F-35s than projected, but positioned for what the decades to come will demand. | War on the Rocks

🚘  Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": a 2004 Ferrari Enzo.

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield

 

Forwarded this email and not yet a subscriber? 

📰 In The News

📢

  Great interview from Jim Roche at WarrCloud, who describes how automotive dealerships have been processing warranty claims the exact same way for 80 years. He asks whether dealership fixed ops departments are leaving massive amounts of money on the table. | VADA Live

📢

  On this week's Future of Automotive segment on CBT News, we discuss how autonomous vehicles could reshape transportation economics. This economic shift could fundamentally change vehicle ownership patterns, particularly in dense urban areas where ride-hailing becomes more cost-effective than owning a second car. | CBT News ($)

Enjoying this newsletter? Please share with others!

👀 Automotive Ventures Company to Watch

SellMyRide - Work with the team that has helped dealers acquire over $1bn+ worth of used car inventory, direct from consumers. | SellMyRide

🎪 Upcoming Industry Events

Fixed Ops RoundtableMay 11-15 | Virtual EventSpeaker(Link)FIS Emerald VelocityMay 4-7 | Orlando, FLSpeaker(Link)ASOTU-CONMay 12-14 | Hanover, MDSpeaker(Link)Automotive Body Parts AssociationMay 18-20  | Indian Wells, CASpeaker(Link)IBIS Global Summit 2026June 16-18  | Vienna, AustriaSpeaker(Link)Ai4 2026Aug 4-6 | Las Vegas, NVSpeaker(Link) 

Aug 10-11 | Carlsbad, CA

Speaker

(

)

Sep 28-30 | Detroit, MI

Speaker

(

)

Sep 29 - Oct 1 | San Antonio, TX

Speaker

(

)

Oct 4-6 | Dallas, TX

Speaker

(

)

Oct 19-20 | Nashville, TN

Speaker

(

)

Nov 10 | Florham Park, NJ

Speaker

(

)

Are you an entrepreneur looking for funding?

📚 Resources

🏎️

Early-stage AutoTech or Mobility founder? We'd love to hear from you.

🚀

Check out Automotive Ventures' portfolio companies. (Link)

📚

Looking for past editions of the Intel Report? (Link)

Reply

Avatar

or to participate

Keep Reading