Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | July 28 2025 | VIEW ONLINE

We're back in Kazakhstan this week for their very first Automotive Dealership Conference, in partnership with the Kazakhstan Automobile Union (the equivalent of the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA))

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What We're Reading:

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Automotive

There's a secret repair shop near Philadelphia dedicated to servicing a single model from a single automaker: the McLaren F1, produced in England from 1992 to 1998. The shop handles everything from periodic maintenance — McLaren’s guidelines calls for service at nine-month and 18-month intervals — to precision repairs and factory-developed upgrades. Each visit may have the car staying for weeks, depending on what needs attention and whether parts need to come from England. The hourly rate is $395, and the waiting time for an appointment is about a month and a half. Owners of the limited-edition F1 model — just 106 were produced, of which only 64 were road cars to begin with — have a powerful incentive to bring their cars to this repair shop. This is one of only two McLaren-authorized service facilities in the world, the other being in Woking, England. And Kevin Hines is one of just two technicians trained by McLaren to work on the F1. | The New York Times ($)You cannot have a great civilization without the ability to make things. That ability—manufacturing—is the foundation of power. Every great power—the Dutch, the British, and then the Americans—rose to dominance by building the strongest industrial base of their time. That industrial strength produced unmatched military power and global economic influence. It also gave them the reserve currency of the world. It’s not trust alone that keeps the dollar dominant. It’s the belief that America can project power, produce what it needs, and manage a war or crisis. Lose that industrial edge, and we risk losing the dollar’s central place in the global system. That’s why the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency today—not only because of Wall Street, but because of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and the industrial base that made America indispensable. Remember: We won World War II because we had the strongest industrial base in the world. We didn’t have the best tanks; we had the strongest capacity for production. But roughly every 120 years, global leadership shifts hands. Why? Because success breeds complacency. Great societies, like great countries and companies, eventually get comfortable. They ride on the coattails of their success. They offshore everything to developing countries because they have the luxury of prioritizing returns and efficiency over resilience. It’s easy to chase lower costs abroad when the threats seem far away. But when it matters most, these societies find they’ve lost the capacity to build anything that counts. | The Free PressMuch of the history of the modern corporation could be written in terms of two slogans: Ford’s “from mine to finished car: one organization,” and Apple’s “designed in California, assembled in China.” And much of its history in the coming years will be determined by the fading of the second of these slogans and the reassertion of the first. In the century after 1870, corporations were shaped by vertical integration — the desire to bring as much of the production process as possible under the same umbrella. John D. Rockefeller not only owned a barrel-making factory (which, in 1888, saved him $1.25 a barrel at a time when he was using 3.5 million barrels a year) but also owned the forest that provided the wood. Ford’s giant River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, was designed to take raw materials in one end and churn out Model Ts at the other end. Ford even built a town in Brazil, modestly named Fordlandia, to provide him with a secure source of rubber for its tires. All this began to change in the 1970s with the cult of “focus” and “core competences.” Apple got its business model from Nike, which designed its shoes in Oregon and contracted everything else out to cheap workers in the emerging world. Management gurus sang the praises of “virtual corporations” that owned nothing and relied entirely on contract workers. The pendulum is swinging back to vertical integration once again. If Nike was the poster company of the 1980s, China’s BYD, a battery maker that now controls lithium mines, owns carrier ships and manufactures electric cars, is the poster child of the coming era. The obvious reason for this is political turmoil. The World Uncertainty Index shows that baseline uncertainty has more than doubled since 1990, and that “high uncertainty” events are getting more frequent and “uncertainty spikes” getting higher. | Bloomberg ($)U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest trade deal included a familiar, if not somewhat forgotten, demand for Japan to “open their country” to cars imported from the US, potentially breathing new life into a contentious issue from the 1980s and 1990s. For decades, Ford, General Motors and others have sought to sell their cars in the island nation, but their numbers remain minuscule. Japan exported nearly 1.4 million cars to the US in 2024, but imported just about 16,000 US-built automobiles. The arguments explaining the unpopularity of American cars are well known: they’re too fuel-inefficient, too big for Japan’s narrow roads and aren’t designed for domestic tastes. While US automakers have come up with models to address those criticisms, local car buyers seem to prefer German-made above others and that trend isn’t likely to change soon. | Bloomberg ($)American Honda Motor launched Honda Insurance Solutions, a licensed insurance agency offering coverage for auto, motorcycle, home and other products to Honda and Acura customers. The vehicle manufacturer announced the initiative Thursday, marking its entry into the insurance market through a partnership with omnichannel insurance brokerage VIU by HUB. Honda Insurance Solutions operates in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and provides comparative quotes from top insurance carriers through its website. | CollisionWeekEven for a moderately heavy NY subway user, the risk of being murdered underground is much less than that of being murdered elsewhere in the city, and orders of magnitude less than the risk of dying from a traffic accident elsewhere in the US. Cars are deadly, and any transportation policy that encourages their use over public transportation is pretty much by definition anti-safety. | Bloomberg ($)Glenn Mercer tracks the changes to the list of the top ten global automotive suppliers over the past 25 years. | Glenn Mercer

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China

With the successful release of the YU7—its second electric vehicle (EV) after the SU7, a sporty sedan launched in March last year—Xiaomi Technology has pulled off a feat that eluded Apple, which ditched plans to make its own EV after burning billions of dollars on the effort over a decade. Xiaomi, which announced its carmaking ambitions in 2021, has put more than 300,000 of its EVs on Chinese roads over the past 15 months, and has a backlog of orders that will take more than a year to fill. Although its EV division has lost money so far, CEO Lei Jun has said he thinks it will become profitable later this year, an impressive feat in China’s brutally competitive car market. Xiaomi now has its sights set on world domination. Over the coming years, it intends to open 10,000 shops abroad, up from just a few hundred last year, which it will use to show off its sleek new cars alongside its consumer electronics. Can anything stop its stunning ascent? | The Economist ($)If American and European gas-guzzling cars once dominated global tastes and trends, that era appears to be fast turning to China’s favor. Today, not only does China make and export more cars of all types than any other country in the world, Chinese firms dominate the global manufacture of battery-powered vehicles of the future. They also control the supply chain for virtually everything that goes into those cars. China’s EVs are among the most advanced in the world. Some today go as far on a single charge as top-of-the-line Tesla, at lower prices. One Chinese carmaker, BYD, short for Build Your Dreams, has developed technology that can deliver a full charge in just 5 minutes, roughly the time someone might spend at a pump fueling up a gas-burning car. Little wonder that Tesla sales in China are lagging, and that the United States, under both Presidents Biden and Trump, have essentially banned Chinese car imports. For China, that leaves the rest of the world. | The New York Times ($)China’s thirst for oil drove global demand for decades. Now a government campaign to curb that addiction is nearing a milestone, with national consumption expected to peak by 2027, then begin to fall. Chinese officials have long worried that the U.S. and its allies could hamstring the nation’s economy by choking off its supply of foreign oil. So China has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into weaning itself off the imported stuff by reviving domestic production and swiftly building the world’s leading electric-vehicle industry. “The energy rice bowl must be held in our own hands,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said. Across China, fleets of gas-guzzling Volkswagen and Hyundai Motor Company taxicabs are being replaced by electric models designed and produced locally. Last year, nearly half of passenger vehicles sold in the country were either all-electrics or plug-in hybrids, compared with 6% in 2020. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

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Autonomy & Robotics

Elon Musk says humanoid robots will be the future of Tesla. The company has a long way to go. Tesla is well behind the pace necessary to meet Musk’s publicly stated goal of producing at least 5,000 of its Optimus humanoid robots this year, according to two people with knowledge of the program. So far, the number of robots it has made is in the hundreds, one of the people said—implying that Tesla will have to dramatically increase its output of robots during the second half of the year to hit Musk’s target. Musk has a history of falling short of the ambitious timelines he has promised for delivering new products and technical breakthroughs. But the stakes for Tesla of blowing through a key milestone for Optimus could be especially high. | The Information ($)Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk is telling investors the carmaker’s future is closer than ever—and it doesn’t depend on selling electric vehicles. Musk glided past Tesla’s falling sales and loss of profits from car sales and EV credits on a call with Wall Street Wednesday evening as he described Tesla as a company in transition. He encouraged investors to look past Tesla’s poor financials and focus on its recent achievements with autonomous robotaxis and robots, which he said could make the shrinking EV maker into “the most valuable company in the world.” | The Wall Street Journal ($)Unitree Robotics is marketing one of the world’s first humanoid robots for under $6,000, drastically reducing the entry price for what’s expected to grow into a whole wave of versatile AI machines for the workplace and home. The startup, among the frontrunners in Chinese robotics, on Friday announced its R1 bot with a starting price of 39,900 yuan (or $5,900). The machine weighs just 25kg and has 26 joints, the company said in a video posted to WeChat. It’s equipped with multimodal artificial intelligence that includes voice and image recognition. | Bloomberg ($)

✈️ Aviation & Space

Billions of dollars in investment and years of research are going into efforts to fix a modern convenience: food delivery. Restaurants in the U.S. receive around 4 billion food-delivery orders a year through apps alone, according to data-insights company Consumer Edge. But hungry customers often end up disappointed. Couriers juggle multiple deliveries, resulting in cold burritos. Drinks are spilled, fries are shorted. Delivery charges grow ever higher, as do suggested tips and menu prices. Enter robotics companies, which have received around $3.5 billion in investment since 2019 in an effort to make food delivery better, faster and cheaper, according to research provider PitchBook. | The Wall Street Journal ($)Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning an insider share sale that would value the company at about $400 billion. The deal marks a rapidly climbing value for Musk’s rocket and satellite maker, and cements SpaceX’s status as the most valuable private startup in the world. | Bloomberg ($)China’s two biggest networks have deployed less than 1 percent of their planned satellites, records show, a measure of how far they are falling behind Elon Musk’s company SpaceX for dominance in space communications. Satellites in low Earth orbit, up to 1,200 miles above the planet, are increasingly seen as essential for driverless cars, drone warfare and military surveillance. China regards STARLINK as a military threat, and Chinese companies have invested heavily in two huge networks, with nearly 27,000 satellites planned between them. One reason for the unexpectedly slow pace is that the Chinese companies have not cleared a key engineering hurdle. | The New York Times ($)

🦾 Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Until 1700, the world economy did not really grow—it just stagnated. Over the previous 17 centuries global output had expanded by 0.1% a year on average, a rate at which it takes nearly a millennium for production to double. Then spinning jennies started whirring and steam engines began to puff. Global growth quintupled to 0.5% a year between 1700 and 1820. By the end of the 19th century it had reached 1.9%. In the 20th century it averaged 2.8%, a rate at which production doubles every 25 years. Growth has not just become the norm; it has accelerated. If the evangelists of Silicon Valley are to be believed, this bang is about to get bigger. They maintain that artificial general intelligence (AGI), capable of outperforming most people at most desk jobs, will soon lift annual GDP growth to 20-30% a year, or more. That may sound preposterous, but for most of human history, they point out, so was the idea that the economy would grow at all. The likelihood that AI may soon make lots of workers redundant is well known. What is much less discussed is the hope that AI can set the world on a path of explosive growth. That would have profound consequences. Markets not just for labor, but also for goods, services and financial assets would be upended. Economists have been trying to think through how AGI could reshape the world. The picture that is emerging is perhaps counterintuitive and certainly mind-boggling. | The Economist ($)AI upstarts were supposed to lay siege to Google’s search-engine dominance. So far, the defense is winning. Google’s ubiquitous search tool has proven surprisingly resilient to competition from the likes of OpenAI, which is hoping people will skip the search box and ask its chatbot for answers instead. One of Google’s lines of defense has been its “AI Overview” tool, whereby users can see answers generated by its Gemini AI model hovering above their traditional search results. Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said Wednesday that this tool now has over 2 billion monthly users, up from 1.5 billion users in its last quarterly update. Google is also rolling out an “AI Mode” that competes more directly with chatbots. “We see AI powering an expansion in how people are searching for and accessing information,” Pichai said in a call with analysts, adding that AI features “cause users to search more as they learn that Search can meet more of their needs.” Independent analyses suggest Google’s AI search strategy is indeed having an impact. Search impressions—the number of advertiser links that show up in searches, even if they aren’t clicked—grew by 49% in the year since the overviews were launched, according to a May report from BrightEdge, a search-engine-optimization firm. | The Wall Street Journal ($)The proliferation of AI agents is likely to disrupt online commerce massively. On July 9, Perplexity launched Comet to browse and buy products on behalf of users, and last week Shopify began to power OpenAI’s in-app checkout. Now that traffic associated with generative AI is surging across retail sites, the era of agentic commerce is upon us. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a new internet layer powering this shift. Much like https standardized secure communication between browsers and websites in the early days of the internet, MCP is creating a framework for AI agent interaction with APIs, databases, and user interfaces, equipping agents with the context necessary to understand, navigate, and transact across the web precisely and reliably. MCP’s impact on online commerce could be profound. Today, retailers manage a messy tangle of one-off integrations with sales channels like social media, ad networks, and marketplaces. MCP servers simplify those processes by allowing retailers to connect their back-end systems, providing a clearinghouse for commercial data like pricing, availability, and delivery windows. As a result, large language models (LLMs) can query and interpret real-time data and relay information to consumers through interfaces like voice assistants, search agents, smart TVs, and smart glasses, as depicted below. Importantly, this shift is creating a new paradigm of Agent-Oriented Optimization (AOO). In the internet era, search engine optimization (SEO) was necessary for relevance online. In the agentic era, MCP compatibility is key. AI agents will surface only products that they can access and understand. Retailers without MCP-compatible data could be out of luck. | ARK Investment ManagementHuman traffic—monetized with ads—is the economic fuel of much of the internet. A steady flow of traffic is also needed to build online communities. One of the most important effects of artificial intelligence (AI) so far is surely on how information is spread online. Instead of typing their questions into search engines, people increasingly pose them to chatbots. Wikipedia, whose visitor numbers have fallen by 8% in the past year by one measure, warns that AI summaries without attribution could deter people from contributing. Stack Overflow, a coding community whose traffic has more than halved, reports that fewer questions are being asked on its chat boards. Reddit, Inc., another giant forum, saw its share price fall by half earlier this year over concerns about bumpy search referrals. As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for AI to summarize than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with AI companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. | The Economist ($)Tomasz Tunguz at Theory Ventures wonders if the internet is about to look a whole lot more like the online advertising world. He wonders if instead of bidding to show you ads, publishers vie to inform AI responses. How this would work: the AI uses quality metrics, not money, to determine winners. Publishers compete on relevance, accuracy, freshness, and authority. The signals that make content useful. This is PageRank for real-time AI responses—algorithmic evaluation operating in milliseconds rather than batch processing. | Tomasz TunguzThe Trump administration published its much-anticipated AI Action Plan on Wednesday, a document that takes a sharp shift away from former President Biden’s cautious approach to addressing the risks of AI, and instead barrels ahead with plans to build out AI infrastructure, cut red tape for tech companies, shore up national security, and compete with China. The downstream effects of this shift will likely ripple throughout various industries and may even be felt by the average American consumer. For instance, the AI Action Plan downplays efforts to mitigate possible harms of AI and instead prioritizes building out data centers to power the AI industry, even if it means using federal lands or keeping them powered during critical energy grid periods. Much of its effects, however, will depend on how the AI Action Plan is executed, and many of those details have yet to be sorted. The AI Action Plan is more blueprint for action than a step-by-step instruction book. But the direction is clear: Progress is king. | TechCrunch ($)Before 1700, the world economy grew, on average, by 8% a century. Anyone who forecast what happened next would have seemed deranged. Over the following 300 years, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, growth averaged 350% a century. That brought lower mortality and higher fertility. Bigger populations produced more ideas, leading to yet faster expansion. Because of the need to add human talent, the loop was slow. Eventually, greater riches led people to have fewer children. That boosted living standards, which grew at a steady pace of about 2% a year. AI faces no such demographic constraint. Technologists promise that it will rapidly hasten the pace at which discoveries are made. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, expects AI to be capable of generating “novel insights” next year. AIs already help program better AI models. By 2028, some say, they will be overseeing their own improvement. Hence the possibility of a second explosion of economic growth. If computing power brings about technological advances without human input, and enough of the payoff is reinvested in building still more powerful machines, wealth could accumulate at unprecedented speed. Economists have long been alive to the relentless mathematical logic of automating the discovery of ideas. According to a recent projection by Epoch AI, a bullish think-tank, once AI can carry out 30% of tasks, annual growth will exceed 20%. True believers, including Elon Musk, conclude that self-improving AI will create a superintelligence. Humanity would gain access to every idea to be had—including for building the best robots, rockets and reactors. Access to energy and human lifespans would no longer impose limits. The only constraint on the economy would be the laws of physics. | The Economist ($)It is common enough for new technology to spark a moral panic: think of the Victorians who thought the telegraph would lead to social isolation or Socrates, who worried that writing would erode brain power. But it is unusual for the innovators themselves to be the ones panicking. And it is more peculiar still for those same anguished inventors to be pressing ahead despite their misgivings. Yet that, more or less, is what is happening with the tech world’s pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI), meaning an AI capable enough to replace more or less anyone with a desk job, or even superintelligence, meaning an AI so smart no human can understand it. Geoffrey Hinton, an AI pioneer, argues there is a 10-20% chance that the technology will end in human extinction. A former colleague, Yoshua Bengio, puts the risk at the high end of that range. Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, two of hundreds of people working in AI who signed an open letter in 2023 warning of its perils, will soon publish a book about superintelligence entitled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. In private, grandees from big AI labs express similar qualms, albeit not always so apocalyptically. Qualms notwithstanding, however, both Western tech firms and their Chinese counterparts are, if anything, accelerating their pursuit of AGI. The logic is simple. They are all convinced that even if their firm or country were to pause or slow down, others would press ahead, so they might as well push on, too. The belief that the benefits of attaining AGI or superintelligence are likely to accrue chiefly to those who make the initial breakthrough provides even more reason to rush. All this leaves relatively little time and capacity to meditate on matters of safety. | The Economist ($)Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink expects to put its chips in 20,000 people a year by 2031, generating at least $1 billion in annual revenue, in a major ramp-up of its work to treat disease and gain unprecedented access to the human mind, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Within six years, the company also plans to have about five large clinics in operation, with at least three versions of its device available, according to a recent presentation shown to investors. One version, Telepathy, is for enabling communication between the brain and machines; another, Blindsight, is aimed at giving vision to blind people; and a third, Deep, would treat tremors and Parkinson’s disease. | Bloomberg ($)

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": a 1980 BMW M1 Procar. | Broad Arrow

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield

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📺 In The News

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On this week's "Future of Automotive" segment on CBT News, we discuss the role of the dealership if your next vehicle is negotiated not by you — but by your AI agent? | CBT News ($)

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This was a fun segment for Steve to reminisce about the old days with Chip Perry. Thanks the VINCUE team for making it happen!

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🌟 LoanBridge provides comprehensive & continuous nationwide vehicle tracking. | LoanBridge.ai

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