Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | June 1 2026 | VIEW ONLINE

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Automotive

The U.S. auto industry faces sobering new math: Some one million prospective buyers have defected from the new-car market since the start of the decade—and they aren’t expected back soon. Until recently, auto executives, analysts and economists believed that U.S. new-car sales were on a steady climb back to volumes last seen before the pandemic closed factories and scrambled global supply chains. That’s no longer the case. General Motors, Ford, Toyota and other automakers have said they are planning for sales of new cars to shrink or stagnate this year after consumers—stung by persistent inflation, rising fuel prices and high interest rates—are balking at prices that have risen to around $50,000 on average. Americans were buying around 17 million cars and trucks a year before 2020; industry analysts don’t expect the market to return to that level until the end of the decade or later. They now forecast total annual sales of about 16 million vehicles or fewer this year, and that outlook has grown even dimmer as the conflict in Iran keeps gas prices high. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

The speed and complexity of the Trump administration’s quickly changing tariff policies confounded and overwhelmed global automakers. Within weeks of their implementation a year ago, the tariffs left stunned automakers scrambling to maintain profitability. The tariff turmoil has been all-consuming for the global auto industry — and it’s cost automakers billions. | Automotive News ($)

What do Italy's right-wing Transport Minister Matteo Salvini, former Ferrari boss Luca Cordero di Montezemolo and opposition lawmaker Carlo Calenda have in common? They all hate the design of the new fully electric Ferrari "Luce" unveiled on Tuesday. "Electric, extremely expensive (550,000 euros!), and, aesthetically speaking, it speaks for itself … It looks like anything but a [Ferrari] car. And is that supposed to be 'innovation'? I wonder what Enzo Ferrari would say ... ?" Transport Minister Matteo Salvini wrote in a social media post, slamming Ferrari's latest model. The controversial Luce — the first Ferrari model to be fully electric and to have five seats — immediately sparked outrage among purists in Italy. | Politico

Ferrari executives knew there would be haters of their first-ever electric car. They might not have expected the critics to come at them so hard. The Ferrari Luce has endured a full frontal assault since the company unveiled the long-awaited addition to its lineup this week. The spacious, glass-roof design, imagined by the minds behind Apple’s biggest products, has been ridiculed for its 550,000 euros ($640,000) price tag and its similarities to other, much cheaper, electric vehicles, including the mass-market, Nissan Leaf. An avalanche of memes online made fun of its design, and likened it to Jaguar’s widely lamented rebranding from late 2024. Ferrari owners and lifelong fans who for years have been mocking up their own designs of what the EV might look like lambasted the design on chat forums dedicated to the carmaker. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Everyone seems to be mad about Ferrari’s first electric vehicle. The vehicle is called Luce and was revealed on Monday. The design of the five-seater (gasp!) was led in large part by Jony Ive and the design firm he runs with Marc Newson, LoveFrom. While it ticks a lot of spec sheet boxes — it boasts 1,000 horsepower and the ability to hit 60 miles per hour in just over two seconds — it’s tracking to be the most mocked new vehicle since the Cybertruck. This widespread rejection of the wedge-shaped, Nissan-esque car covers seemingly the whole spectrum, too, from the typical flimsy knee-jerk reactions to the positively vitriolic. The company’s stock price is down, and even some of the most down-the-middle news outlets are admitting it in their own ways. (Bloomberg said the Luce is “quite a stretch.”) The question underneath all of this immediate backlash is singular: Who is the Luce for? | TechCrunch ($)Ian Austen from The New York Times has looked into how tariffs are accelerating a long and precipitous decline in production and employment at auto plants in Canada owned by the three carmakers based in Detroit. There are growing concerns that if the tariffs persist, they may doom the auto-making business in Canada, which depends on exporting vehicles to the United States. One proposed solution is creating an all-Canadian car built for Canadians. The idea hasn’t gained traction, and such companies haven’t existed for about a century. But during the 1970s, Canada came close with the Bricklin. A futuristic sports car with gull-wing doors and pop-up headlights in a brightly colored fiberglass and plastic body, the Bricklin was made in a factory in Saint John, New Brunswick, that was owned by the provincial government. Dimitry Anastakis, an economy historian at the University of Toronto, has written a book about the Bricklin’s improbable creation. It’s a quintessential 1970s tale of the combined dreams of Malcolm Bricklin, an automobile promoter, and Richard Hatfield, the New Brunswick premier at the time who was also known for partying at New York’s Studio 54. | The New York Times ($)

Stand in a surface parking lot in Phoenix on a July afternoon and you are standing on one of the hottest surfaces a human body can approach without being burned. Phoenix has 12.2 million of these spaces. The asphalt beneath your feet absorbs approximately 95 percent of the solar radiation hitting it. Its surface temperature is somewhere between 150 and 170 degrees Fahrenheit — the upper range hot enough to cause a second-degree burn in under 30 seconds. NASA’s thermal imaging of Phoenix on a June day in 2024, when the air temperature was 106, showed roads and parking lots glowing between 120 and 160 degrees across the metro. The cars sitting in those lots are ovens. The air rising off the pavement is a wall. The number is hard to feel from inside a car, which is where most people in Phoenix experience the city. The parking lot is invisible infrastructure — noticed only when it is full, which it rarely is, because the system was designed around the assumption of peak demand and routinely runs at a fraction of capacity. Most spaces sit empty most of the time. Their vacancy is not experienced as waste. It is experienced as availability, which is to say, as comfort, which is to say, as the whole point. Asphalt radiates 46 percent more heat than natural landscape during the afternoon. It emits 37 percent more sensible heat than bare ground. And it does not cool quickly. Unlike vegetation or even bare soil, pavement stores the day’s heat and releases it slowly through the night — keeping nighttime temperatures elevated long after sunset. | Streets Blog USA

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China

China’s electric vehicle giants are suddenly suffering in their own backyard, as EV sales plunge nationwide and slam earnings at such leaders as BYD and Geely. A new-vehicle tax, reduced subsidies and lackluster economy have forced Chinese EV players to focus on fast charging and autonomous driving technologies. The downturn underscores Chinese brands’ vulnerability at home even as they challenge global rivals overseas. It also highlights how domestic competition is fueling innovation and making them stronger internationally. Ten-minute recharging, ultracold battery endurance, artificial intelligence-powered autonomous driving — Chinese customers now expect these as baseline features. And they preview products eventually bound for Europe, Canada and other international markets as China’s EV makers increasingly try to export their way out of the slump at home. The sales downturn has only intensified competition, forcing Chinese EV players to roll out new technologies and features at an ever-faster pace, said Yale Zhang, managing director of Automotive Foresight, a Shanghai-based research firm. | Automotive News ($)

China's auto industry has likely moved past its "golden era," NIO Chief Executive William Li said on Thursday, as a downturn in domestic car sales ‌extended into May. A rebound in the world’s largest auto market has yet to materialise, despite the sector’s continued export strength, Li told reporters in Beijing. NIO, known for its battery-swapping technology, currently sells only pure EVs. The company is among a group of Chinese EV makers betting that advanced driver-assistance systems, in-house software and broader model lineups can help them ‌navigate ⁠intensifying domestic competition. As part of that push, NIO plans to increase spending on computing resources for smart-driving development fivefold this year compared with 2025, according to Li. Industry data showed China's domestic car sales were expected to stagnate in 2026, while growth in electric and plug-in hybrid ⁠sales was forecast to slow after years of rapid expansion. In April, China's domestic car sales fell for a seventh straight month, though exports remained strong. China's automobile ownership hit 370 million vehicles, meaning ⁠it's "no longer a growth market, but rather a saturated market," Li said. | Reuters ($)

“Made in China” is becoming “made by China”—all over the world. Faced with higher Western tariffs and weak demand at home, many Chinese factories are moving abroad, making everything from appliances to automobiles everywhere from North and South America to Eastern Europe. More Chinese companies could be coming to the U.S., after President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping reached a deal in Beijing this month to establish a new bilateral “board of investment.” Yet many leaders, especially in the U.S. and Europe, worry the Chinese businesses are bringing China’s brutal rat-race competition with them, potentially crushing local incumbents and curbing salaries. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

International carmakers, struggling for survival amid an expensive transition to electric vehicles, are turning to China’s technologically advanced and cost-efficient factories as manufacturing bases for their global businesses. Volkswagen, BMW, Nissan, Hyundai and others are increasing exports from Chinese factories with spare capacity to markets other than Europe and the US. Western auto executives maintain that using the world’s largest car market as an export base will benefit their other businesses through lower costs and more advanced technology, helping legacy manufacturers become more competitive and win back consumers. Critics depict the move as a desperate measure from European manufacturers struggling with plummeting sales and idle capacity both at home and in China, as well as contending with a wave of Chinese imports into their domestic markets. | Financial Times ($)

Chinese automakers are facing a growing challenge in Germany as weak resale values undermine the appeal of their electric vehicles and raise risks for leasing companies. Residual values for Chinese plug-in hybrid and battery-electric vehicles dropped to 47 percent of original list prices in April, down from 61 percent at the start of 2024, and twice as steep as the broader EV market, according to Germany’s DAT Deutsche Automobil Treuhand. The slide partly reflects a normalization in used-car prices after the pandemic-era supply shortages. But while residual values for the broader PHEV and BEV market also declined, they fell by only 7 percentage points compared with nearly 14 percentage points for Chinese models. Initially, limited volumes and distinctive models kept Chinese resale values high. But as more brands arrived with similar products, residuals fell. | Automotive News ($)

The Trump administration reached an agreement with Volvo Cars that will allow the automaker to avoid a U.S. ban on connected vehicles tied to China. Volvo, which is majority-owned by China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, received a specific authorization from the U.S. Department of Commerce allowing it to continue importing and selling connected passenger vehicles in the U.S., the automaker said Tuesday, confirming an earlier report by Bloomberg News. The agreement spares Volvo from one of the US barriers that have effectively walled off the American market from Chinese cars over national and economic security concerns. Along with the Commerce Department’s ban on Chinese connected vehicle technology, Chinese cars also face punitive tariffs, including a 100% import tax on electric vehicles from the country. Those measures have blocked companies such as Geely and BYD from selling in the U.S., even as Chinese cars make inroads elsewhere in the world, including Canada and Mexico. | Bloomberg ($)

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Autonomy & Robotics

Harry Campbell from The Driverless Digest compares Waymo's new Zeekr Ojai to their Jaguar I-PACE. | The Driverless Digest

Tesla says its Full Self-Driving software is up to 10 times safer than human drivers. But the figures the company uses to support its claims don't withstand scrutiny – and staffers who trained the technology say it isn't close to safely delivering autonomous vehicles at scale. Tesla CEO Elon Musk says FSD will soon make all Teslas fully autonomous. But interviews with nine former labelers and a former Tesla self-driving engineer show that the technology continued to struggle in recent months to execute basic maneuvers – such as avoiding emergency vehicles or stopping for school buses loading or unloading students. | Reuters ($)

This was supposed to be the year that robotaxis hit Main Street across the U.S., as companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, Tesla and Amazon.com’s Zoox launch AI-powered autonomous rides in dozens of cities. But as hundreds of robot cars collide with humans, both literally and figuratively, tensions are rising. The problems cropping up in police reports and viral social-media posts range from the concerning to the comical. Now, criticism is mounting from drivers, law enforcement and local governments from California to New York—and as the companies attempt to scale, robotaxis face more scrutiny than ever before. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

The robotaxi industry is adamant that the only type of metric that matters for safety is severe crashes per mile. And, while they’re at it, crashes they can blame on someone else shouldn’t count. While that argument can be superficially appealing, it leaves out of the picture all the other relevant safety concerns that folks have been having. Passing by stopped school buses, stranding a passenger in flood waters, taking a wild ride through a construction zone, interfering with emergency responders, and other issues are relevant to safety as well, even if there is no crash and nobody happened to get hurt (this time). The reality is that there is more to societally acceptable safety than crashes/mile. Moreover, public opinion is likely to hinge more on stories than statistical abstractions, which might explain the significant negative public sentiment that shows up in surveys regarding robotaxi safety. | Phil Koopman

Tesla ‘Robotaxi’ fleet is actually shrinking, not growing, new data shows. The number of active unsupervised Tesla “Robotaxis” has dropped to just 20 vehicles — down from the 25 cumulative vehicles we reported in late April — and the total active fleet across all Tesla ride-hailing operations has collapsed to just 34 vehicles. The latest data from Robotaxi Tracker shows the unsupervised fleet now has only 20 active vehicles (seen in the last seven days): 14 in Austin, 3 in Dallas, and 3 in Houston. The chart paints an even clearer picture — the unsupervised fleet peaked in late March/early April and has been declining since. Tesla hasn’t explained why active vehicle counts are declining, but the likely culprit is what Electrek has been reporting for months: safety is the bottleneck. As they reported in May, the “convenience issues” plaguing Tesla’s “Robotaxi” service, long wait times, surface-street-only routing, and tiny geofences, are really safety constraints in disguise. Elon Musk himself told investors that safety validation is the limiting factor, and Tesla’s crash rate with unsupervised vehicles has been reported at roughly four times worse than human drivers. | Electrek

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Aviation & Space

The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you. The biggest public offering ever is financial nihilism’s final form. | The Verge ($)

A post-IPO merger between SpaceX and Tesla is inevitable and only a question of timing, because Elon Musk will want to consolidate control across his companies, according to early SpaceX investor Peter Diamandis. The combination makes sense because it would give Musk the super voting rights he has at Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — where he had 85.1% control before the filing for an initial public offering — but lacks at publicly held Tesla, Diamandis said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “I put it not as a matter of if but only a matter of when those companies come together,” said Diamandis, a founder of the XPrize Foundation and a podcast host who has spoken with Musk this year. Musk and representatives for SpaceX and Tesla didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. A combined entity would unite Tesla’s ground-based vehicle fleet with SpaceX’s space infrastructure, including the Starship program. Musk’s super voting rights at SpaceX give him significantly more control than his stake at Tesla, where he has faced shareholder challenges over governance and compensation. SpaceX is headed for an IPO in June, likely the biggest ever. | Bloomberg ($)

As U.S. kamikaze drones guided by Elon Musk’s Starlink network began to make visible gains in the war against Iran, senior SpaceX officials reached a conclusion: The Pentagon should be paying more for access to their satellite Wi-Fi network. Within weeks of the United States launching its bombing campaign, SpaceX executives met Pentagon officials and argued the military had been paying about $5,000 for connection per terminal while effectively using a higher tier of service worth closer to $25,000, according to two sources familiar with the matter and Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters. The disagreement over Starlink’s use on ‌LUCAS suicide drones - a cheap U.S. model comparable to Iran’s Shahed that can circle over a target area before diving to detonate on impact - is part of increasing tensions between SpaceX and the Pentagon over Starlink pricing in recent months, according to interviews with five people familiar with the matter and the documents. | Reuters ($)Nobody said the billionaire space race was going to be easy. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk each had his own difficulties this past week in their renewed rivalry over outer space. These underscored just how challenging their sci-fi dreams will be to make real. For Bezos, merely getting off this planet remains one of his biggest challenges—evident by the Blue Origin rocket’s spectacular explosion on the launchpad Thursday evening. For Musk, the tension was more nuanced. It played out on social media when he dropped confusing information about SpaceX’s data-center business. This muddied the waters for the company’s coming IPO that aims to raise tens of billions of dollars to fund his multiplanetary goals. While their lists of problems are different, they are both chasing something similar: building the Galaxy’s Everything Store. Both Musk and Bezos see space as the perfect home for remote servers, partly because of the vast energy that can be harnessed from the sun. The two are using their business empires to put the pieces together to compete there, although significant technical and scientific challenges remain. Though approached differently, the two camps are assembling an ecosystem of capabilities: rockets to reach space, data centers among the stars and satellites to beam data between heaven and earth. | The Wall Street Journal ($)NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency will begin building a moon base with near-monthly robotic landings starting in 2027, with astronauts potentially living on the lunar surface for months at a time by the early 2030s. By the time Artemis 4 astronauts land in 2028, “they’re going to already have some infrastructure of the moon base waiting for them,” Isaacman said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview. NASA has tapped Blue Origin and other contractors to deliver landers and rovers as part of a three-phase strategy to lay the groundwork for crewed missions. The approach marks a return to the strategy NASA used during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs of the 1960s, Isaacman said. Rather than locking in designs for lunar infrastructure today, the agency will use the initial wave of landings to inform decisions about what hardware works best. The focus in this phase will be the “science of survival,” he said. | Bloomberg ($)

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": a 1976 Alfa Romeo 1900 Speciale by Autotecnica del Lario. | RM Sotheby's

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield

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📢 Should Rolex produce digital watches? Then why on earth is Ferrari interested in selling a $650k (uninspired) EV? | CBT News ($)

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