Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | June 16 2025 | VIEW ONLINE

What We're Reading:

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Automotive

The volume of cars getting shipped to the U.S. via sea routes has plunged as a result of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported vehicles. Maritime import volume for motor vehicles dropped by 72.3% in May compared with the same month a year earlier, according to Descartes Datamyne, a trade database. | Automotive News ($)

President Donald Trump moved to sever California’s US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) waivers by signing a series of joint resolutions Thursday, rolling back the Golden State’s strict truck and automotive emissions policies. The president’s signing of joint resolutions under the Congressional Review Act reverses the Biden administration’s approval of California’s Advanced Clean Trucks rule. That earlier rule called for requiring 75% of Class 8 trucks sold in the state to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. Another resolution also prevents the state’s low-nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions rule for heavy-duty trucks from being implemented, per a statement by the president. The NOx rule intended to regulate emissions from manufacturers by cutting heavy-duty NOx emissions by 90% and overhaul engine testing procedures. Trump’s actions also reverses the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of a waiver to California and several states that banned sales of gas-powered passenger vehicles by 2035, which was viewed as a welcome move by the automotive industry. | Automotive Dive

Stamp collectors are called philatelists. People who save coins are numismatists. License plate collecting is so arcane that there isn’t a word for it. But there are thousands of people who so covet tags that they are willing to travel to remote corners of the globe—sometimes at great expense and personal risk—to score a rare find. Some collectors focus on geographic regions. Others target tags based on design or color. Numbers are big draws, too, namely low ones, birth dates, the devilish 666 and the code for marijuana, 420. Some seek out diplomatic tags or presidential inaugural ones. Others pursue early porcelain plates or those from countries at war. Tags from Vatican City are a holy grail for plate collectors. For enthusiasts of early American plates, it doesn’t get much better than a 1921 Alaska tag, one of which is rumored to have changed hands for $60,000. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

⚡️ EVs

New U.S. electric vehicle registrations fell in April for the first time in 14 months as consumers remained cool to the technology despite automaker promotions and the continued availability of the $7,500 federal tax credit, according to S&P Global Mobility. The 4.4% decline in April EV registrations, compared with the same month last year, was the first year-over-year drop since February 2024, S&P Global Mobility said. April’s 97,833 EV registrations represented a 6.6% share of the light-vehicle market, a significant slide from the 7.4% share EVs had a year earlier. | Automotive News ($)

BYD plans to roll out an ultrafast charging network across Europe to boost its goal of gaining market share in the region. The initiative includes “megawatt flash chargers” capable of delivering charging power of up to 1,000 kilowatts. The system is designed to enable recharge times of just five minutes for up to 400 to 470 kilometers (250 to 292 miles) of range, depending on battery compatibility and vehicle generation. | Automotive News ($)

Germany is the most expensive country in Europe to run an electric vehicle (EV) while Turkey is the cheapest, according to research from Switcher.ie. as charging costs diverge dramatically across Europe. In 2024, it cost an average of €13.83 to fully charge an EV at home in Europe, up by an average of 0.5 percent, while a 100-km journey cost €3.79, according to research by price comparison service Switcher.ie, which used data from Eurostat for the 25 top-selling battery-electric vehicles. EVs are still about 70 percent cheaper to run than gasoline or diesel vehicles, the study said. | Automotive News ($)

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China

Chinese carmakers’ price war is putting the industry’s balance sheet under strain, a Financial Times analysis has revealed, as Beijing demands more action to protect suppliers in the world’s largest car market. Current liabilities exceeded current assets at more than a third of publicly listed car manufacturers at the end of last year, according to Financial Times calculations based on their most recent financial reports. The weakening liquidity picture highlights how China’s leading carmakers are being forced to squeeze suppliers to maintain working capital and fund their fight for market share amid heavy discounting. | Financial Times ($)

In late May, Ford's executive leadership team went to China with an agenda: To study every aspect of how Chinese auto companies operate, then apply those learnings across Ford in its other markets. The Dearborn-based automaker has been studying China's car companies for years now; that's not new. But in recent years, Ford's leaders have intensified their examination of its Chinese rivals viewing Chinese automakers as the top competition to learn from — and beat. Ford CEO Jim Farley started taking his leadership team to Shanghai and other big markets in China a couple times a year starting about two years ago. The sojourns last about a week, said Mark Truby, Ford's chief communications officer who has been on a couple of the trips. | Detroit Free Press

The price war engulfing China’s electric vehicle industry has already sent share prices tumbling and prompted an unusual level of intervention from Beijing. The shakeout may just be getting started. For all the Chinese government’s efforts to prevent price cuts by market leader BYD from turning into a vicious spiral, analysts say a combination of weaker demand and extreme overcapacity will slice into profits at the strongest brands and force feebler competitors to fold. Even after the number of EV makers started shrinking for the first time last year, the industry is still using less than half its production capacity. Chinese authorities are trying to minimize the fallout, chiding the sector for “rat race competition” and summoning the heads of major brands to Beijing last week. Yet previous attempts to intervene have had little success. For the short term at least, investors are betting few automakers will escape unscathed: BYD, arguably the biggest winner from industry consolidation, has lost $21.5 billion in market value since its shares peaked in late May. “What you’re seeing in China is disturbing, because there’s a lack of demand and extreme price cutting,” said John Murphy, a senior automotive analyst at Bank of America. Eventually, there will be “massive consolidation” to soak up the excess capacity, Murphy said. | Automotive News ($)

Car executives have once again been driven into their war rooms, concerned that China's tight export controls on rare-earth magnets – crucially needed to make cars – could cripple production. U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to let rare earths minerals and magnets flow to the United States. A U.S. trade team is scheduled to meet Chinese counterparts for talks in London on Monday. The industry worries that the rare-earths situation could cascade into the third massive supply chain shock in five years. A semiconductor shortage wiped away millions of cars from automakers' production plans, from roughly 2021 to 2023. Before that, the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 shut factories for weeks. Those crises prompted the industry to fortify supply chain strategies. Executives have prioritized backup supplies for key components and reexamined the use of just-in-time inventories, which save money but can leave them without stockpiles when a crisis unfurls. | Reuters ($)

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Autonomy, Robotics & AI

A central premise of robotaxis is that high usage and lower labor costs will ultimately make it a cheap transportation option. That is still far from true, but now there’s some data that gives us an idea of by how much. Obi, an app that aggregates real-time pricing and pick-up times across multiple ride-hailing services, has just published what it’s calling the “first in-depth examination of Waymo’s pricing strategy.” The company found Waymo’s self-driving car rides to be consistently more expensive than comparative offerings from Uber and Lyft — and it doesn’t seem to matter. | TechCrunch ($)

Tesla tentatively plans to begin offering rides on its self-driving robotaxis to the public on June 22, CEO Elon Musk said on Tuesday, as investors and fans of the electric vehicle maker eagerly await rollout of the long-promised service. Musk also said starting June 28, Tesla vehicles will drive themselves to a customer’s house from the end of the factory line. Musk has promised a paid robotaxi service in Austin starting with about 10 to 20 of its Model Y SUVs that will operate in a limited area and under remote human supervision. | Automotive News ($)Tesla has been real-world testing driverless Model Y’s in Austin, Texas for a few weeks, but on Tuesday one was seen operating on South Congress Avenue without a person in the driver’s seat, making it the first publicly spotted Tesla robotaxi. The sighting suggests Tesla is entering the next stage of development for its autonomous ride-hailing plans. The test vehicle is a Model Y equipped with the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software and ‘Robotaxi’ logo on the side of the vehicle. | Drive Tesla ($)

Two decades ago, the U.S. military kicked off the race to build self-driving cars by sending a fleet of fledgling robot vehicles across the Mojave Desert in its seminal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenge. By 2015, autonomous vehicle technology was being widely pursued, and the industry was abuzz with predictions that driverless cars would soon be everywhere. It didn’t happen. Some legacy carmakers and startups abandoned their efforts, citing excessive costs and complexity. Regulators stepped up scrutiny of the emerging technology after crashes involving cars equipped with partial-automation systems. The companies still making progress are proceeding with caution, aware of the heavy reputational damage when someone is injured or killed by a self-driving car. Waymo, a venture of Google parent Alphabet Inc., introduced its driverless taxi service to a fourth major US city in March through a partnership with Uber. Tesla is planning a long-delayed robotaxi service confined to Austin, Texas, in June. It aims to start with roughly 10 or 20 Model Y cars operating under remote supervision — a far cry from what Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk pledged in 2019, when he said the carmaker was a year away from putting 1 million robotaxis on the road. | Bloomberg ($)

Philip Koopman provides thoughts on safety considerations for the impending Tesla robotaxi deployment in Austin: "The reality is nobody outside Tesla can know whether the robotaxis will be safe at the time of launch. Moreover, things Tesla is saying leave a lot of room for interpretation, so everyone is just guessing at this point. Even National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NHTSA has a lot of good questions to ask, with Tesla having picked a launch date before their response is even due." | Phil Koopman

The Trump administration is taking steps that would make it easier for automakers to deploy-self driving cars without driver controls, a potential boon to the ambitions of Tesla and rivals looking to put robotaxis on U.S. roads in the near future. Current rules require automakers that want to deploy self-driving cars designed without a steering wheel or brake pedals to seek an exemption from federal safety standards that effectively require that new cars have human driving controls. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NHTSA will “streamline” that exemption process, which under current policy has resulted in lengthy processing times that can last years, the agency said in a letter posted to its website on Friday. | Bloomberg ($)

Chinese electric vehicle makers led by BYD have beaten Tesla in the competition to produce affordable electric vehicles. Now, many of those same fierce competitors are surging ahead in the global race to produce self-driving cars. BYD shook up China’s smart-EV industry earlier this year by offering its “God’s Eye” driver-assistance package for free, undercutting the technology Tesla sells for nearly $9,000 in China. It’s not just BYD. Other Chinese auto and tech companies are offering affordable EVs with FSD-like technology for a very little money. China’s Leapmotor and XPENG, for instance, offer systems capable of highway and urban driving in $20,000 vehicles. A slew of Chinese companies are chasing the same technology, an industry push backed by China’s government. BYD’s assisted-driving hardware costs are far lower than Tesla’s, according to analyses performed for Reuters by companies that dismantle and analyze vehicles for automakers. The comparisons, which have not been previously reported, show that BYD’s costs to procure components and build a system with radar and lidar are about the same as Tesla’s FSD, which does not have such sensors. That undercuts Tesla’s unusual technological approach, which aims to save costs by removing such sensors and relying solely on cameras and artificial intelligence. | Automotive News ($)

The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers: Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting. Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at The Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb. Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.” Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb. At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of The Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Mary Meeker, managing partner at Bond Capital, describes OpenAI’s ChatGPT as “history’s biggest ‘overnight’ success.” Notably, ChatGPT’s time to hitting 365 billion annual searches has been 5.5 times faster than Google’s. And its user growth has been particularly phenomenal outside of the US, Meeker said. | Pitchbook

✈️ Aviation & Space

For more than a decade, the United States has failed to develop an alternative to China’s supply of a specific kind of rare earth crucial for the manufacture of magnets for missiles, fighter jets, smart bombs, and a lot of other military gear. Rare earth minerals are a central issue in the trade talks between the United States and China now underway in London. China produces the entire world’s supply of samarium, a particularly obscure rare earth metal used almost entirely in military applications. Samarium magnets can withstand temperatures hot enough to melt lead without losing their magnetic force. They are essential for withstanding the heat of fast-moving electric motors in cramped spaces like the nose cones of missiles. | The New York Times ($)In an age of digital inserts, screens within screens and other ways for sponsors to reach viewers, The Goodyear Blimp technology is quaint. The blimps, which are slightly longer than a Boeing 747, hover about 1,000 feet off the ground and rarely move faster than 50 miles per hour. But their ability to capture a skyline, a stadium or the flight of a golf ball down a fairway has made them an indispensable part of broadcasts. Goodyear’s four blimps, which travel to about 120 events a year, are more visible than usual as the company celebrates the centennial of the blimp’s debut on June 3, 1925. The company plans to fly its helium-filled airships to more than 100 cities this year, and attend concerts, hot air balloon festivals and other cultural events. | The New York Times ($)

Even if Elon Musk deserves credit for his part in SpaceX’s domination in both rocket launches and satellite communications, with 80% market share in the former and over 8,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, the Trump/Musk feud’s weaponization of space suggests innovation has taken a backseat to favoritism. SpaceX’s successes this year have not been on the launchpad but rather inside the corridors of power, where its market share looks like a lever for rent extraction instead of exploration. Rule changes to high-speed internet subsidies have opened the door to STARLINK awards, as has the prospect of a defense “Golden Dome.” Trump’s tariff bullying against other countries has been reportedly accompanied by a push for regulatory approvals for Starlink. And putting a Musk ally atop NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration appears to have been a last straw for the MAGA movement. While NASA and the Pentagon remain heavily reliant on SpaceX, the silver lining to all this is that Musk’s competitors must get the message and step up their game. U.S. commercial space companies including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have been contacted by government officials about rocket readiness, according to The Washington Post (owned by Bezos). Over in the EU, which is desperately trying to not miss another technological revolution, governments are getting serious about reenergizing legacy players like Eutelsat Group, which is in talks to raise €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) that would double the French state’s stake to 30%. The continent is also eyeing its first “hop” test of a reusable booster project called Themis. | Bloomberg ($)

🌡️ Climate

The U.S. produced more energy last year than ever before, reaching a nationwide total of more than 103 quadrillion British thermal units, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration published Monday. This marks a 1% increase from the previous all-time high set in 2023. The EIA report found that domestic production records were broken across a number of major primary energy sources, including biofuels, solar, wind, crude oil, and the largest source of energy in the US since 2011, natural gas. While natural gas still accounted for ~38% of total energy production in the US last year, there was no significant increase in production from 2023. Though America remains the world’s top producer of crude oil, hitting a record 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024, this was only up 2% from the year before. | Sherwood

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": a 1976 Lancia Stratos HF Stradale. | Broad Arrow

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield

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📺 In The News

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Privacy4Cars, the first privacy-tech company focused on solving the privacy and security issues posed by vehicle data to protect consumers and automotive businesses, has been awarded a new patent for its system and method for generating dynamically variable multi-dimensional privacy ratings for vehicles, by the U.S. Patent Office. This marks the first AI method on record to score privacy in vehicles and is Privacy4Cars' 10th awarded patent. | Privacy4Cars

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On this week's "Future of Automotive" segment on CBT News, we explore how Rivian’s next-generation software platform (the one set to debut in their upcoming R2 SUV) will become the technological backbone of all future electric vehicles made by Volkswagen. | CBT News ($)

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