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BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | Jan 12 2026 | VIEW ONLINE

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Sales of new cars in the United States rose about 2% in 2025, defying extraordinary disruptions all year in an industry where "black swan" events have become routine. Automakers sold 16.2 million vehicles in the U.S. last year, a 2.4% increase from 2024, according to research firm Omdia. Analysts warn that sustaining this growth in 2026 may prove difficult as economic uncertainty and tariff-related costs weigh on consumers. | Reuters ($)

The top 10 vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2025, according to Automotive News.

U.S. new-vehicle sales in 2025 defied expectations that they would buckle under higher prices, import tariffs and regulatory uncertainty, instead achieving their best year since 2019 as consumers rushed to buy before the vehicle they wanted got more expensive. But 2026 isn’t likely to see the same level of demand, analysts said, and continued pressure on pricing and monthly payments have some concerned that fewer consumers will be able to afford a new vehicle. Light-vehicle sales rose 2.3 percent in 2025 to 16.3 million, according to a preliminary report from GlobalData Plc. That includes a 4.3 percent drop in the fourth quarter, when electric vehicle sales plunged. | Automotive News ($)

Whether it’s new or used, landing a vehicle with a manageable monthly payment is increasingly difficult. According to the car-shopping site Edmunds, more than 20 percent of new-car buyers are locked into monthly payments of $1,000 or more. That’s 1 in 5 and an all-time high. But here is the truly troubling part: Holding down car ownership costs used to be a relatively simple call — buy used, not new — but that advice is losing utility as prices for pre-owned vehicles soar. According to Edmunds, 6.3 percent of used-car buyers face monthly payments of at least $1,000 based on fourth-quarter data. Shoppers, on average, are financing nearly $30,000 of that purchase, stretching those payments out over 70 months. For most Americans, a car isn’t a luxury; it’s a requirement to get to work and keep the lights on, food on the table and a roof over their heads. But these numbers show that buying a car — new or used — has become a debt trap for many. The average monthly payment in the fourth quarter was $772 for new and $570 on used with interest rates of 6.7 percent and 10.6 percent, respectively. | The Washington Post ($)

General Motors and several rivals reported year-end sales slumps, an ominous sign that U.S. auto sales will slow this year as consumers push back on higher prices. GM, the biggest automaker in the U.S. by sales and a bellwether for the U.S. industry, said Monday that sales fell 7% in the final quarter of 2025. Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, and Nissan also said on Monday that their U.S. sales fell toward the end of the year. The slowdown is expected to extend into this year. Analysts and automakers predict U.S. annual sales will fall in 2026 following three straight years of gains as belt-tightening American car buyers collide with tariff costs that companies probably won’t keep absorbing. Executives at Toyota Motor Corporation, which notched an 8% increase in U.S. sales during the fourth quarter, said they are preparing for a bruising year ahead. Toyota was able to maintain sales momentum at the end of last year by absorbing the costs of U.S. tariffs, and because car buyers gravitated toward the company’s entry-level models like the Corolla sedan. Yet executives said companies won’t be able to keep footing the bill for tariffs. Last year’s U.S. auto sales defied the industry’s worst-case scenarios, triggered by the Trump administration’s initial tariff plans. Instead, the administration eased the tariffs, and consumers rushed to buy electric vehicles ahead of the end of federal tax credits in September. Overall U.S. auto sales rose about 2% from 2024, to about 16.3 million, according to J.D. Power. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung has warned of a tough year ahead for the global auto industry, and said the South Korean automaker needs to upgrade its AI capability. In his New Year remarks, Chung warned that global trade tensions and intensifying competition would curb industry profitability, while geopolitical conflicts may impact operations in some regions, potentially leading to a suspension of business. “This will be the year when the crisis factors we have long worried about become reality,” Chung said. | Automotive News ($)

General Motors said it will take more than $7 billion in charges against its fourth-quarter earnings as the automaker scales back its electric vehicle production capacity in a slowing U.S. market. GM in a Jan. 8 regulatory filing said $6 billion of the charges are tied to reworking its EV production footprint, while $1.1 billion is related to the restructuring of its China joint venture with SAIC Motor. About $1.8 billion of the EV-related charges are non-cash impairments and other items. The $4.2 billion in cash account for canceled contracts and commercial settlements with suppliers, GM said in the filing. Those amounts are on top of the $1.6 billion charge GM took in the third quarter related to overhauling its EV production plans. | Automotive News ($)

Ford is designing what it claims will be the cheapest electric motors in the world to power its next-generation electric pickup that will go on sale in 2027. Doug Field, Ford’s head of EVs, told MotorTrend Group that the Ford-built motors will cost less than any motor his team could find, including those made in China where immense economies of scale, cheap labor, and highly automated manufacturing have given carmakers an advantage that Western companies have struggled to match. The low-cost motors are one of several engineering efforts Ford has undertaken to unlock a $30,000 starting price for its so-called "Universal EV." | MotorTrend

Sony Honda Mobility premiered a prototype SUV that will serve as the inspiration for its second model and said it would begin delivering its first electric vehicle, the Afeela 1, to customers in late 2026. Details about the Afeela Prototype 2026 were scarce, but it has a significantly larger footprint than the Afeela 1 and shares major exterior design elements with it. The SUV is an “early-stage concept,” Sony Honda Mobility CEO Yasuhide Mizuno said here at CES, the giant Las Vegas technology conference. “We aim to deliver a new model based on this prototype to American customers as early as 2028,” Mizuno said. The prototype comes as Sony Honda prepares to enter the U.S. market in a limited fashion later this year. Sony Honda Mobility said it began production of the Afeela 1 at Honda’s assembly plant in East Liberty, Ohio, in the fall of 2025 in preparation for delivery to customers starting in late 2026. | Automotive News ($)

Sony Honda Mobility has begun preproduction on the Afeela 1, its first vehicle set to debut around midyear. Even though the company has largely been quiet over the past year, it says s it's still on track with its production plans. | Inside EVs

Growth in global sales of electric vehicles is expected to slow this year as China winds down some subsidies, Europe wavers on its phase-out of combustion engines, and U.S. producers and policymakers make a U-turn from the segment. BloombergNEF expects drivers to buy 24.3 million passenger EVs this year, an increase of only 12% on 2025 and weaker than the 23% growth in sales last year. The US EV market is forecast to contract 15% in 2026, according to BNEF, due in part to the withdrawal of up to $7,500 consumer tax credits and hollowing out of fuel-economy standards. | Bloomberg ($)

Electric vehicle sales are set for their slowest annual growth since the pandemic upended the global economy in 2020, as the shift away from the internal combustion engine confronts new hurdles. A cooling in red-hot Chinese demand, weaker growth in Europe and a contraction in the US market will see EV sales rise 13 percent to 24mn in 2026, down from an estimated 22 percent increase last year, according to research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The Trump administration’s ditching of tax incentives for EVs, the EU’s watering down of a ban on petrol cars that was due to take effect in 2035 and a slowing in China’s breakneck pace of growth will shape the fortunes of the industry this year, say executives and analysts. The more moderate outlook follows several years of explosive China-led demand that had appeared to herald the rapid demise of petrol-based cars, which have powered the auto industry’s profits for more than a century. | Financial Times ($)

More than 30 companies across the automotive supply chain have agreed to collaborate on open-source software to develop next-generation cars and cut costs, the German industry lobby behind the initiative said on Wednesday. Germany's VDA announced the expansion of the initiative at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, where carmakers and suppliers are betting on AI and software to revive an industry struggling with slow progress and high costs. The initiative aims to reduce development and maintenance efforts by up to 40% and speed time to market by up to 30%, the VDA said. | Reuters ($)

Every executive in the auto industry is familiar with the late Sergio Marchionne’s manifesto “Confessions of a Capital Junkie.” The former CEO of FCA Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (now part of Stellantis) pointed out that the Detroit Three all make engines that are virtually identical. They’re almost exactly the same size, generate the same horsepower and deliver the same fuel economy. Yet each automaker spends a fortune developing its own family of engines and tooling up its own engine plants. Here’s the kicker: Ninety percent of the car-buying public really doesn’t know or care what’s under the hood. That’s even more true of transmissions. Who buys a car because of its transmission? The answer, of course, is nobody. That’s why Marchionne suggested that General Motors, Ford Motor Company and (then-) FCA Fiat Chrysler Automobiles should merge their powertrain operations and save a boatload of money in the process. That was in 2015 and of course nothing has happened — in fact, Ford and GM both rebuffed the idea — because spinning off the powertrain operations of a car company would be considered one of the gravest sacrileges a “car guy” could ever commit. | Wards Auto ($)

Europe’s automakers are embracing a cheaper manufacturing alternative to gigacasting amid the industry’s costly shift to electrification and increasing competition from China. Gigacasting grabbed the spotlight after Tesla started using the technology to press whole floor sections of its Model 3 and Model Y electric cars, but the method is a very expensive process, said Gestamp CEO Francisco Riberas. “It’s not a trend that is really growing,” Riberas said. “What we see instead is a use for gigastampings: stamping a big part in one single stroke and substituting 20 or 25 different parts.” | Automotive News ($)

The automotive industry has faced a shortage of mechanics for decades, and Ford Motor Company Chief Executive Jim Farley put the issue back in focus in November. Speaking on a podcast, Farley said Ford dealerships have 5,000 open jobs. “We are in trouble in our country,” Farley said. “A bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it.” Farley said the jobs can pay $120,000 a year, but they take five years to learn. Only a small sliver of mechanics stick around long enough to get to that level of pay. The work is physically grueling. It is costly to start because mechanics need tens of thousands of dollars worth of tools. And the starting pay is closer to fast-food wages than to six figures. The 2024 median pay for a dealership mechanic or technician in the U.S. was $58,580, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

The Democratic Republic of Congo has been called the “Saudi Arabia of Cobalt”. Its huge reserves of the metal, at least half of the world’s supply, are as indispensable for the modern electric vehicle industry as its rubber once was for the tyres of cars powered by internal combustion engines. Modern-day companies may not be lopping off the limbs of Congolese as happened in the era of Belgium’s King Leopold II. But in the age of batteries, it is still the Congolese who suffer environmental degradation and back-breaking toil at the wrong end of the global supply chain. In a new book from Nicolas Niarchos, three strong themes emerge. One is that of displaced morality, or the separation of governments and consumers in wealthier countries pursuing supposedly green ambitions from the costs unfolding someplace else. The second theme is the way in which China, through its control of mines, refining and battery technology, has come to dominate the 21st century’s energy ecosystem as convincingly as the US dominated that of the 20th century. The third theme is what the author calls “the revenge of the miners”. Companies that were considered anachronistic by many in the 2000s are now roaring back as demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel, phosphate, graphite (and gold) soars. | Financial Times ($)

About 40,000 Americans die in crashes every year, with hundreds of thousands more injured. For young people, cars are right up there with guns and drugs as a cause of death. Globally, road collisions are responsible for 1.2 million lost lives and the #1 killer of people aged 5 to 29. We had been making remarkable social progress on this problem, year in and year out, for decades. Seatbelts, crumple zones, airbags, drunk-driving enforcement, just plain better driving standards—year after year, per-mile deaths went down. But then something happened. A new, competing social technology arrived; and for all its benefits to the world, it was not good for driving safety at all. That technology was the smartphone. The smartphone has arrested and reversed our decade-long social accomplishment of safer driving. It is a competing social technology. It competes for your attention, for your eyes, and for your focus. Even when your phone is face down in your cupholder, it’s still in your head: email, messaging, social media, remains distracting even when kept at distance. We’ve wired our entire economy and social lives into a little slab of glass, and then we tell people to completely ignore it when they pilot two tons of metal on the highway. | A16Z

New York City’s public buses and taxis are traveling at faster speeds after the start of a controversial congestion-pricing program that charges motorists to drive on Manhattan’s busiest streets, according to a report from the Regional Plan Association. The tolling initiative, the first of its kind in the US, reached its one-year anniversary on Monday. Most passenger vehicles pay $9 during peak hours to drive south of 60th Street, while trucks pay more, depending on their size. The toll has helped reduce traffic by about 11%, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s transit network and implemented the fee. About 27 million fewer vehicles drove south of 60th Street. Taxi trips starting or ending south of 60th Street traveled at an average of 7.3 miles per hour from January through October of last year, that’s a 1.4% increase from the same period in 2024, before the toll began, according to the RPA report released on Monday. It’s a reversal from recent years as average taxi speeds decreased since 2021. | Bloomberg ($)

One year after the start of congestion pricing, traffic jams are less severe, streets are safer, and commute times are improving for travelers from well beyond Manhattan. Though these changes aren’t noticeable to many, and others feel the tolls are a financial burden, the fees have generated hundreds of millions of dollars for public transportation projects. And it has probably contributed to rising transit ridership. The program, which on Jan. 5, 2025, began charging most drivers $9 during peak travel times to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, has quickly left its mark. | The New York Times ($)

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China

China auto giant Geely is eyeing an expansion to the U.S., in what would be a watershed moment for domestic carmakers that view Chinese brands as an existential threat. Zhejiang Geely Holding Group is likely to make an announcement about a U.S. expansion within the next 24 to 36 months, said Ash Sutcliffe, Geely’s global communications chief. “The big question for us is when and where will we go to the U.S.A.,” Sutcliffe said in an interview this week with Autoline Network at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Geely controls a broad portfolio of brands that make popular electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and gas-powered cars. Unlike other Chinese competitors, Geely already has a small foothold in the U.S. market, as the majority-owner of Sweden’s Volvo Cars, which it acquired from Ford Motor Company in 2010. Waymo, the Alphabet-owned self-driving car company, is also deploying on U.S. streets an outfitted robotaxi made by Zeekr Europe, another Chinese brand controlled by Geely. Sutcliffe said in the interview that Geely’s Zeekr and Lynk & Co. could be good fits for the U.S. market. “We would look at these brands,” he said. Geely hasn’t yet sought out a production site in the U.S., Sutcliffe said, but suggested that Volvo’s assembly plant in South Carolina could be a prospective location. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

John McElroy from Autoline Network posted a video interviewing Ash Sutcliffe, head of global communications for Geely. Geely is a massive Chinese conglomerate, with several brands around the world. Some of those brands are Western brands, such as Volvo Cars, Polestar, smart Europe GmbH and Lotus. It also owns its own homegrown brands, Zeekr and Lynk & Co. Sutcliffe mentioned that CES has become a primary show for high tech vehicles in the US, so Geely wanted to bring its cars here to let U.S. media have a good look at them. Sutcliffe continued and said Geely is “looking at all global markets where we can expand… the big question for us is when and where will we go to the USA? I think we will have an announcement on that in the next 24-36 months. So, I think its exciting times for Geely Holding Group.” Notably, Sutcliffe said that an announcement will come within 2-3 years, not that cars would be on the road by then. He specifically brought up Zeekr and Lynk & Co. as potential brands to bring to the US. When pressed on tariffs, Sutcliffe brushed them aside, stating that Geely is a global company and understands how to work around or work with trade restrictions. He did point out that since Geely is a major shareholder in Volvo cars, its facility in South Carolina would be a natural option for local production. After all, Volvo and Polestar are already producing cars in the US, so bringing Geely cars wouldn’t be a big jump (Lotus also sells in the US, but doesn’t produce here). | Electrek

BYD has done it again: outselling Tesla globally for 2025. But even now, critics dismiss its rise as a China-only story, crediting its success to its vast home market and generous subsidies. But that argument will not hold much longer. The Chinese electric vehicle maker’s sales growth in its home market, long considered a core growth driver, is now slowing. Total sales fell 18.3 percent in December as price competition intensified and rivals narrowed the technological gap. Full-year sales growth slowed to 7.7 percent. The stock market is already reflecting that outlook. BYD shares have fallen a quarter from its May peak and trade at 17 times forward earnings, compared with Tesla’s valuation of over 200 times earnings, reflecting expectations beyond car sales. But while growth in China has cooled, BYD’s overseas sales have surged, rising more than 150 percent last year to over 1mn vehicles. Europe has been at the centre of that expansion, with BYD increasingly outpacing Tesla in several markets, most notably the UK. The UK is a small EV market in absolute global volume terms, with a few hundred thousand battery electric registrations a year against China’s millions. Even BYD’s sixfold surge in sales here last year and its rise to become the UK’s sixth biggest carmaker in December cannot explain why it delivered 620,000 more EVs globally than Tesla last year. Yet the UK’s importance lies in being a diagnostic market for carmakers. It has no politically protected mass-market domestic manufacturer, high price transparency and a fleet dominated buying structure. Electric car demand has been growing rapidly in recent months with EV sales reaching a record 473,000 units last year, or 23.4 percent of the overall market, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). Around half of all new cars are bought by fleets which care most about residual values and depreciation risk. | Financial Times ($)

China cemented its global lead in electric vehicles in 2025 with local brands grabbing further share from foreign carmakers in the world’s biggest car market. Nearly 13 million full EVs and plug-in hybrids were sold in China last year, accounting for 54% of the market. Because the leading EV makers—apart from Tesla—are Chinese companies such as BYD and Geely, the electrification trend helped Chinese brands take nearly two-thirds of the passenger-car market. Sales of EVs and plug-ins collectively rose 18% in China, marking a contrast with the U.S. and Europe where the transition away from gasoline-powered cars has slowed. Chinese brands tend to be strong in intelligent-vehicle features and faster when it comes to updating products, said Cui Dongshu, the secretary-general of China Passenger Car Association, which released the 2025 sales data Friday. “Overall, Chinese companies will continue to have a relatively clear advantage” over many foreign brands, he said. Xiao Feng, an analyst at CLSA, said he expected the share of electric and plug-in cars to rise in coming years to around three-fourths of the Chinese market. That could mostly push foreign carmakers out of the Chinese market by 2030 or later, save for a handful of leading players such as Tesla, Toyota and Volkswagen, he said. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Automobile imports to China for last year are projected to fall 30% from 2024, with fewer than 600,000 vehicles entering the country for the first time in 16 years as low-priced domestic electric vehicles squeeze out luxury vehicles from Europe and the U.S. | Nikkei Asia ($)

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Autonomy, Robotics & AI

Autonomous driving technology dominated the CES trade show in Las Vegas this week as investors bet that artificial intelligence will invigorate an industry beset by slow progress, high costs, safety incidents and regulatory scrutiny. Just as automakers have hit the brakes on electric vehicle (EV) plans and look for their next money maker, a slew of auto suppliers and start ups are lining up to show off their latest autonomous vehicle hardware and software. Partnerships and deals that promise to take away much of a driver's responsibilities, or remove the need for a human driver completely, are expected to be announced. | Reuters ($)

Lucid Motors and robotaxi partners Uber and Nuro showed a production-intent version of the Gravity crossover at CES with a roof-mounted sensor array as autonomous road testing begins. The three-row Lucid Gravity robotaxi, with seating for up to six people, features interactive screens for passengers as part of an “Uber-designed in-cabin rider experience,” the companies said Jan. 5. A next-generation sensor suite — using cameras, radar and lidar — will be integrated into the Gravity robotaxi at Lucid’s Arizona factory when production begins this year, the companies said. The Gravity, which starts at $81,550 with shipping, will be the industry’s “most luxurious robotaxi,” according to a joint press release. Nuro is providing the autonomous driving technology, and Uber will operate the robotaxis through its ride-hailing service. | Automotive News ($)

If a chorus of wide-eyed boosters and enthralled journalists are to be believed, self-driving cars from companies like Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox can bring about road safety nirvana — if only US regulators would get out of their way. Waymo has said that the for-hire autonomous vehicles it operates in several cities are “already making roads safer,” an assertion echoed by many media outlets. Since “robotaxis have fewer accidents than human drivers,” The Economist concluded, “they are almost certainly saving lives.” By implication, regulations that hinder AV deployments are effectively killing people. A neurosurgeon made a similar argument in a recent The New York Times op-ed, writing that “there is a public health imperative” to expand robotaxis as quickly as possible. A deus ex machina solution for crashes is a tantalizing prospect in the US, where residents are several times more likely to die in a collision than those in other rich countries. But don’t pop the champagne just yet. In fact, don’t even take the bottle out of the fridge. | Bloomberg ($)

Last year, Tesla defied its critics by boldly launching a robotaxi service that, by the end of the year, required no human supervision and was available to over 50 percent of the U.S. population. At least that’s what Tesla CEO Elon Musk told us would happen by the end of 2025. The reality, of course, was much different. Tesla’s “robotaxi” service, as it stands today in Austin and San Francisco, is still not available to anyone who wants to use it. It is still supervised by an employee who sits in either the driver or front passenger seat with access to a “kill switch” if anything goes wrong. (There have been some unsupervised tests, but its unclear how many.) And those two cities don’t comprise 50 percent of the population of the U.S. In other words, Musk’s predictions about self-driving cars have yet again failed to come true. | The Verge ($)

Hyundai Motor Company doesn’t just want to build your car. It wants to build the robot that builds your car, and the ones that deliver your packages, too. Almost five years after acquiring U.S. robotics giant Boston Dynamics, the Korean automaker announced plans to build 30,000 robots annually starting in 2028. And some of them will even look like humans. That puts it in a direct race with Tesla, which has been developing its “Optimus” humanoid for years, and other automotive players like XPENG. Just like Tesla, the company also says its humanoid robots’ first job will be at its own car factories, where engineers can keep the clankers under a watchful eye. | Inside EVs

✈️

Aviation & Space

Climate-heating emissions from aviation could be slashed in half – without reducing passenger journeys – by getting rid of premium seats, ensuring flights are near full and using the most efficient aircraft, according to analysis. These efficiency measures could be far more effective in tackling the fast-growing carbon footprint of flying than pledges to use “sustainable” fuels or controversial carbon offsets, the researchers said. They believe their study, which analysed more than 27m commercial flights out of approximately 35m in 2023, is the first to assess the variation in operational efficiency of flights across the globe. The amount of carbon dioxide per kilometre flown has been falling as aircraft become gradually more fuel efficient. However, the growth in the number of flights has far outstripped this, meaning the emissions helping to fuel the climate crisis are rising. Aviation’s carbon dioxide emissions could double or even triple by 2050, according to experts. | The Guardian ($)

Around a decade ago, Xi Jinping said he dreamed of making China a “space power”. Since then, the country has put a rover on Mars and built one of the two operational space stations orbiting Earth. No,w its private space industry aims to make an even bigger impact. China’s companies may, for the first time in their histories, successfully recover the first stage of a rocket—a vital step for slashing launch costs—opening a galaxy of opportunity. Meanwhile, new private launchpads will be completed, new satellite factories will ramp up production and a new government department will funnel more state resources into the industry. China’s space firms still lag rivals abroad. None of the 600 companies in the sector towers over it like Elon Musk’s SpaceX does in America, though a clutch of entrepreneurs have emerged who hope to. | The Economist ($)

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": the 1992 Benetton B192 Formula One. Winner of the 1992 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, Michael Schumacher's first Formula One victory. | Broad Arrow

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield

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On this week's "Future of Automotive" segment on CBT News, we were at CES in Las Vegas. There was a lot of buzz around AI and humanoid robotics, but most surprising was the lack of automakers at this year’s show. | CBT News ($)

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