Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | Mar 9 2026 | VIEW ONLINE

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Automotive

A war in Iran is causing a spike in gas prices, which could lead to a drop in U.S. auto sales.

Historically, oil crises have caused U.S. auto sales to fall by more than 10%, sometimes by as much as 40%. Factors like more fuel-efficient cars, remote work, and the availability of EVs may lessen the impact on sales. | Detroit Free Press ($)

An unusual buyer has quietly scooped up a half-dozen Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram dealerships across the country over the past year: Carvana, the online used car sales giant. Its most recent purchase of a CDJR store outside Boston closed last week. The other five locations — for which Carvana paid a combined $160 million — are in the Phoenix and Atlanta metro areas, Dallas, San Diego and Sacramento, Calif. The Tempe, Ariz.-based company advertises the new car offerings on its main website, alongside its used listings, to buyers living in broad geographic areas surrounding the dealerships. Prices are often discounted thousands of dollars below the manufacturer-suggested level. The new car shopping option isn't available in Michigan. The push into new car sales by Carvana — already known as an industry disruptor with its streamlined no-haggle online buying process and home delivery offerings — has rattled other members of Stellantis NV's 2,400-member dealer body. A heated question from one such dealer to Stellantis executives about the issue at a packed February meeting in Las Vegas brought the closed-door gathering to a close. Among their concerns: that Carvana will upend the existing dealer model by siphoning sales away from other stores, both by undercutting them on price and offering home delivery to a large region that would usually fall under the purview of several franchises. Online listings show the company is offering free shipping to locations that are sometimes hundreds of miles away from its nearest dealership. | The Detroit News ($)

Honda has warned of up to ¥2.5tn ($15.7bn) in losses over two years from an overhaul of its electrification strategy, becoming the industry’s latest casualty from a souring outlook for electric vehicle sales in the U.S. and fierce competition from China. The Japanese carmaker said on Thursday it expected to make a net loss of ¥360bn to ¥630bn in the full year ending this month, versus its previous forecast of a ¥360bn profit, after announcing it would scrap three EV models planned for production in North America. It will be the first time Honda has ever recorded an annual net loss since becoming a public company in the 1950s. The company is the latest global carmaker to be stung by a slowdown in the expansion of the U.S. EV market under the Trump administration, which has rolled back environmental regulations and subsidies supporting the uptake of battery-powered vehicles. | Financial Times ($)

The U.S. car business is grappling with a stubborn affordability problem, one that threatens to relegate more Americans to the used-car lot and leave automakers vulnerable to lower-priced rivals. Lawmakers have framed the issue around partisan lines. U.S. President Donald Trump and other Republicans blame environmental and safety regulations. Democrats blame Trump’s tariffs. But a Reuters review of industry sales data found a more market-based reason: ‌Automakers are offering relatively few budget models, while they’ve filled showrooms with bigger, more upscale models, raising the selling price of the average U.S. vehicle to around $47,000. The trend toward fancier vehicles on the new-car lot is a stark example of the so-called K-shaped U.S. economy: More affluent consumers are driving a larger share of spending, while middle- and lower-income people struggle. | Reuters ($)

Automotive suppliers are caught in a deepening profitability divide. Companies making semiconductors and batteries are thriving with double-digit growth, while makers of traditional components struggle with single-digit gains — a gap that threatens to reshape the supplier landscape, according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG). This comes as overall demand for automotive components is forecast to grow 3.5 percent a year between 2025 and 2035, according to the group’s 2026 Global Automotive Supplier Study, which looks at about 750 suppliers and 50 automakers across Europe, the U.S. and Asia. The slower-than-expected EV shift is creating “heightened uncertainty, utilization challenges and elevated costs for suppliers, which must balance continued exposure to ICE and hybrid technologies with an extended and capital-intensive ramp-up of EV components,” Boston Consulting Group said. Suppliers’ revenues are set to contract in 2025, with growth of 2 to 3 percent expected through 2027. Top suppliers will grow at mid- to high single-digit rates, while stragglers will stagnate, Boston Consulting Group said. | Automotive News ($)

The automotive supplier industry has exited the acute crisis years, but it has not returned to normal. Instead, suppliers now find themselves in a structurally tougher environment in which higher interest rates, sticky input costs, labor shortages, and geopolitical tensions have become part of the baseline rather than temporary shocks. At the same time, the shift toward electrified, software-defined, and increasingly automated vehicles continues to reshape value pools and competitive dynamics. Demand adds another layer of complexity. When OEM product plans swing more than expected, suppliers can face underutilized assets on one platform and bottlenecks on another. Managing this volatility requires commercial agility, but also structural flexibility in footprints, contracts, and technology platforms—an essential capability on the path to rebuild and rise again. BCG’s 2026 Global Automotive Supplier Study takes a close look at how suppliers are navigating this landscape. | Boston Consulting Group

The Federal Trade Commission is warning 97 auto dealership groups their advertised prices must include “all required fees,” the vehicles advertised must be available and the price in the ad must be offered to all customers, the agency announced March 13. “The Trump-Vance FTC is committed to preventing auto dealers from misleading consumers with low advertised prices and then adding on mandatory fees at the end of the purchasing process,” Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “The FTC will remain focused on monitoring auto dealerships to ensure that the market functions efficiently and competitors are transparently competing on price.” | Automotive News ($)

The F&I market is “showing signs of deceleration,” Protective Asset Protection wrote in a January 2026 report discussing October 2025 dealer polling. “The overall growth figures for 2025 reveal a more challenging environment than the previous year, with the primary pressure coming from the persistent issue of vehicle affordability.” The industry averaged $1,923 in F&I gross profit per vehicle in 2025, up 7.8 percent from a year earlier, and 1.56 F&I products per deal, up from 1.52, according to F&I menu and analytics provider StoneEagle. Dealership finance offices continue to perform far better than they did in pre-pandemic 2019, when the average deal produced $1,327 in F&I gross profits and contained 1.31 F&I products. | Automotive News ($)

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EVs

The cost of four automakers’ electric vehicle restructuring is now approaching $70 billion, following Honda’s decision to cancel three planned models adding to the global financial hit. Honda, General Motors, Ford and Stellantis all in recent months have said they will write down billions of dollars in investments related to EV factory capacity, vehicle programs and battery manufacturing. As of February, the tally was closer to $50 billion, including roughly $26 billion for Stellantis and $21 billion for Ford. The losses reflect an EV market that has not developed to the degree that automakers anticipated years ago. | Automotive News ($)

Electric vehicle (EV) registrations fell 41% in January from a year earlier as gasoline and hybrid vehicles regained market share following the repeal of the federal EV tax credit last year. EV registrations totaled 59,802 in January out of a total light-vehicle market of just under 1.2 million, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. EV share fell to 5.1% in January from 8.3% a year earlier, the data showed. Gasoline vehicles rose 2.3 points to 76.6% of the market, while hybrids gained 1 point to reach 14.7%. | Automotive News ($)

Honda is canceling three electric vehicles planned for U.S. production, including two from its next-generation 0 Series lineup, and will book up to ¥2.5 trillion ($15.8 billion) in losses, citing factors including U.S. tariffs, declining EV demand and lackluster product appeal in Asia. Honda Motor Co. will cancel development and launch of the 0 Series SUV, 0 Series Saloon and the Acura RSX, the company said March 12. Honda has been retooling its U.S. production base to assemble the 0 Series vehicles and Acura, for delivery as early as this year. “Honda determined that starting production and sales of these three models in the current business environment where the demand for EVs is declining significantly would likely result in further losses over the long term,” Japan’s No. 2 automaker said in a news release. | Automotive News ($)

Honda expects to book up to $15.7 billion in expenses and losses related to the reassessment of its electric-vehicle strategy, and expects to swing to its first annual loss in decades as a result. Expenses and losses related to the re-evaluation could total as much as 2.500 trillion yen for the fiscal year ending March 31 and in the coming years, the Japanese automaker said Thursday, after its global rivals gave gloomy outlooks in recent months. Honda said it has decided to cancel the launches and development of certain models in response to a slowdown in the North American EV market. The company also expects to record impairment losses on investments in China due to intensified competition. The Japanese automaker’s re-evaluation of its EV strategy comes after similar moves by rival carmakers to pull back from EVs, which many Americans are still reluctant to buy. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Christopher Mims from The Wall Street Journal lists the potential challenges of buying an electric vehicle (EV): They’re harder to fix than they should be; The fuel-savings reality is complicated; Depreciation on new EVs has been brutal; Road trips aren’t always simple; Charging at home—especially someone else’s—can be tricky. But at the end of the day, he still wouldn’t hesitate to go electric. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

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China

BYD is considering building a plant in Canada and is studying the Canadian market for a potential manufacturing facility. The company is open to acquiring a more established global automaker, with Executive Vice President Stella Li saying, "We're open to every opportunity we have." BYD is shelving ambitions to enter the U.S. market, which Li called a "complicated environment", and is instead focusing on markets where it can apply its "Brazil model". | Bloomberg ($)

Hundreds of Chinese workers were brought into Brazil to build Latin America’s largest electric car factory for the world’s biggest electric automaker, China’s BYD. Constructed on Camaçari’s Henry Ford Avenue, on land formerly used by the Ford Motor Company, the plant represented one of China’s boldest bets yet in its bid to control the future of automaking. But government inspectors found that the workers enlisted by BYD to build its keystone factory in the Americas had been forced into conditions that recalled “slavery.” The dispute has offered a rare glimpse into labor practices that advocates and scholars say Chinese firms often impose on migrant workers in far-flung locations, but which are normally obscured by patchy law enforcement, corporate secrecy, cultural misunderstanding, byzantine employment structures, and fear of Beijing’s rising power. | The Washington Post ($)

Stellantis is exploring deals with Chinese automakers through which they would invest in its struggling European operations, as the company focuses its own investments on the Americas, according to people familiar with the matter. Company executives have met with China’s Xiaomi and Xpeng to discuss options for an overhaul of Stellantis in Europe, including acquiring stakes in Maserati or other brands, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. The talks have also covered access to automaking capacity as Chinese groups seek to grow in Europe, the people said. | Automotive News ($)

Three Chinese automakers are laying the groundwork to expand into the Canadian market by the end of 2026, according to buy-sell and advisory firm DSMA - Dealer Solutions Mergers & Acquisitions, which is brokering discussions between Chinese automakers and Canadian car dealers. BYD, Chery Automobile and Geely Holding are each actively working on vehicle certification, retail network development and local financial partnerships to begin sales, said Jason Zhao, director of Asian market development at DSMA. “We expect the vehicles will start landing by the end of this year.” None of the automakers responded to multiple requests for comment, but there are signals that each is circling the Canadian market as Ottawa lifts its de facto ban on China-made electric vehicles. | Automotive News ($)

Mercedes-Benz has initiated development of a new electric vehicle platform in China using GEELY‘s electrical architecture, according to exclusive information obtained by Chinese media 36kr.com. For the first time in Mercedes-Benz’s 130-year history, the company has handed independent development authority for a new vehicle platform to a research centre outside Germany. The German luxury automaker’s Chinese R&D centre will now serve as the global headquarters for compact vehicle development, while the German development centre will focus on mid-size and large vehicles. Industry sources quoted by 36kr reveal that Mercedes-Benz has launched a new platform codenamed “Phoenix,” which will support entry-level electric vehicles globally. This platform, initially planned to enter production around 2030, will incorporate Geely’s GEEA electrical architecture. When completed, it will replace Mercedes’ current MMA platform and produce compact models, including A-Class, B-Class, GLA, GLB, and CLA vehicles for worldwide markets. | Car News China

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Autonomy & Robotics

Tesla’s first new vehicle in years rolled off its Austin production line last month, swarmed by workers in hard hats and safety vests—the first, the company hopes, of potentially millions. Tesla has celebrated moments like this before. But never with a car like this. It is called the Cybercab, and it doesn’t have a steering wheel or pedals. When it begins mass production in April, as company officials claim, it will be a test of Tesla’s make-or-break plan to move beyond being a traditional car company—and a test of U.S. safety regulations that were never meant for something like this. The Cybercab is specially designed to be driven autonomously by Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software. Tesla has said it would use the Cybercab for its driverless ride-hailing service and sell it to taxi fleet operators and everyday people, who will also one day have the option to add their personal vehicles to the company’s ride-hailing app. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has said the vehicle could cost less than $30,000. While Tesla has broken new ground with its electric vehicles before, selling a vehicle that lacks standard controls is without precedent in the auto industry. Musk has said that the Cybercab—and the wider deployment of its Full Self-Driving software—will be crucial to the company’s planned shift to autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. Musk has prioritized the Cybercab over making new models and even canceled two of its cars as it seeks to become an artificial intelligence and robotics powerhouse. Competing with traditional carmakers like Volkswagen and China’s BYD is no longer its business plan. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Amazon-owned Zoox plans to make its robotaxis available to hail on the Uber app in Las Vegas later this year, the two companies announced Wednesday. Before that happens, though, Zoox still needs approval from the federal government to commercially deploy its robotaxis, which don’t have a steering wheel or pedals. That requires exemptions from the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). On Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NHTSA began taking public comment on Zoox’s application for those exemptions. (Zoox currently has an exemption that allows the custom-built robotaxis to operate as a demonstration, and not commercially.) If and when Zoox gets approval, the company plans to launch its own commercial robotaxi service first, and before making the vehicles available on Uber in Las Vegas, it told TechCrunch. Zoox currently offers free rides in Las Vegas and in San Francisco. It’s also mapping and building up a presence in eight other U.S. cities, including Dallas and Phoenix, which were announced earlier this week. | TechCrunch ($)

Uber has added another company’s autonomous vehicles to its growing robotaxi network. Hyundai-owned Motional’s self-driving version of the Ioniq 5 is now available to be hailed for rides to and from five areas around the city — with a safety monitor in the car, for now. Starting Friday, the vehicles will do pickup and drop-offs in the rideshare zones at Resorts World Las Vegas and Encore hotel casinos on the Strip, along with the Westgate, which is next to the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Motional AVs will also handle rides to and from the Town Square shopping center near the city’s airport, and curbside in Downtown Las Vegas. Uber and Motional said Friday that they plan to expand the operating area in the future, but did not offer specifics. As in other cities, there is no way to specifically request a robotaxi ride. Customers will increase the chance of getting matched with one by enabling autonomous vehicle pickup within the Uber app. The companies said they expect to be able to run a fully driverless service in Las Vegas by the end of this year. | TechCrunch ($)

Highly automated vehicles were once described by researchers, technologists, and policymakers as a rare technology that could bring everyone together. The promise was simple: safer roads, greater mobility, lower emissions, smarter cities. For years, it felt bipartisan. Almost inevitable. That sense of consensus is fading. The risks of automated vehicles are now drawing increased attention on Capitol Hill. It may not be long before the technology becomes as politically charged as electric vehicles. Not because of campaign rhetoric, but because questions about safety, job losses, investment pressure, and national security are colliding. The debate is shifting from whether the technology works to whether the public and policymakers are willing to trust it. The fault lines are already visible. | Junko Yoshida

Former Uber CEO and cofounder Travis Kalanick is preparing to launch a new robotics and self-driving car company with major backing from the ride-hailing giant, according to several people familiar with the matter. Kalanick has also been discussing acquiring the startup founded by Anthony Levandowski, a former Uber engineer who has developing autonomous software for mining and other industrial use cases with Pronto.ai. Kalanick and Levandowski have quite the history. More than a decade ago, Kalanick and Levandowski developed self-driving car technology at Uber after Kalanick wooed him from Google, where he was a co-founder of the self-driving car program that became Waymo. Google later sued Uber for stealing trade secrets. Uber settled the case but Levandowski was later criminally charged with trade secret theft, pled guilty, and was sentenced to 18 months to prison. He was eventually pardoned by President Donald Trump. | The Information ($)

Applied Intuition’s cofounders are building software that can drive everything from planes to tanks to automobiles. But to expand beyond its $800 million business selling tech for cars, they will have to take on Tesla, Google, NVIDIA and a host of other startups jostling for pole position in the autonomy race. | Forbes ($)

Mind Robotics, an industrial robotics lab spun out of the electric vehicle maker Rivian, has raised $500 million in a Series A funding round co-led by venture firms Accel and Andreessen Horowitz. The financing, announced Wednesday, follows a $115 million seed round that was led by Eclipse in late 2025, bringing Mind Robotics’ total fundraising to $615 million in the few months since its founding. This round brings the startup’s valuation to around $2 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Mind Robotics was created by Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe. It was spun out of Rivian in November 2025, with Scaringe serving as chairman. The general idea is that Scaringe wants to use data from Rivian’s electric vehicle factory to train industrial robots to be more dexterous and adaptable, as well as a venue to prove out those robots’ usefulness. | TechCrunch ($)

Inside a Schaeffler auto-parts factory, a most unusual worker toils away. Stepping gingerly across the metal floor, it holds its four-fingered hands at chest level until it reaches its objective: a 25-pound basket of bearing components fresh from a stamping press. The worker uncurls its claw-like fingers, daintily grips the basket by its edges and walks it over to a conveyor that will send it through an industrial washing machine. About a minute after it grabbed the first basket off a pallet, it returns to grab another. So it goes for eight hours a day, basket after basket, pallet after pallet. A year ago, a person did this job. Now it belongs to a humanoid robot called Digit that was built for grunt work. Its legs angle backward like an ostrich’s, increasing its stability and lifting power. Its LED eyes blink to signal to human co-workers where it is directing its attention. Schaeffler, a global manufacturer that makes parts for cars and airplanes, said it plans to deploy more of the robots in the coming months. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Embodied AI (eAI) uses artificial intelligence based on machine learning to interact with the physical world. We are already seeing eAI deployed in the real world in robotaxis, smart medical devices, household robots, and other applications. However, everyone is struggling with the safety of these devices: how to design for safety, how to evaluate safety, and how to think about whether any particular eAI system is acceptably safe. This talk provides an overview of a new book on this topic (Philip Koopman, 2025), with robotaxi safety as a concrete example. Anyone working in this area needs a basic understanding of four core areas: safety engineering, cybersecurity engineering, machine learning technology, and human/computer interaction. A basic understanding of the legal principle of tort negligence is also essential. The talk also discusses eAI safety issues in the wild, the complexities of establishing what risks might be acceptable, and open challenges in eAI safety. The talk finishes with a call to build justifiable trust in eAI safety. | Phil Koopman

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

As firms increasingly incentivize employees to build and oversee complex teams of agents—for example, by measuring and rewarding token consumption as a proxy for performance—people are finding themselves pushed to their cognitive limits. Participants in a recent study described a “buzzing” feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches. The authors call this phenomenon “AI brain fry,” defined as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity. This AI-associated mental strain carries significant costs in the form of increased employee errors, decision fatigue, and intention to quit. The findings also show how AI-driven workflows can be designed to diminish burnout and point toward specific manager, team, and organizational practices to avoid mental fatigue even as AI work intensifies. | Harvard Business Review

AI agents are making a difference in manufacturing by overseeing operations, predicting maintenance, enhancing quality control and optimizing the supply chain, write Ford Motor Company's Dr. Sanjay Ahire, a data scientist, and Nagadithya Nookala, a technical product manager. Ford has reduced unplanned downtime by up to 40% and defect rates by up to 50% since introducing the agents, which also improve energy efficiency, support sustainability and enhance workplace safety by monitoring environmental factors and triggering safety protocols. | Industry Week

Companies that make memory chips have always had to deal with periods of oversupply and undersupply. These manufacturers plan years in advance for expected demand and, inevitably, they sometimes bet wrong. What’s happening in the industry today, though, goes far beyond the usual whiplash. With the AI boom pressuring supply, the memory chip crunch is “a crisis like no other,” the market research firm IDC said. And the AI buildout is only accelerating; big tech companies are on track to spend a staggering $650 billion in 2026, up about 80% from last year’s record. So even if chipmakers ramp up production, potential relief from the shortage is more than a year away — if not longer. Already, leaders at tech companies including Apple, Alphabet Inc., and Tesla have been speaking about the impact of the shortage on profitability and even timelines for AI progress. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis called it a “choke point” for the industry. On Tesla’s earnings call in late January, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk even raised the idea of producing his own memory chips. But production of the chips that are especially needed for AI use requires skills only three companies have. | Bloomberg ($)

In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird. | The New York Times ($)

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Aviation

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has forced the cancellation of tens of thousands of flights across the Middle East. In the days after the initial strikes, airlines that once relied on airspace over Iran and nearby countries have been scrambling to find alternatives. The result is that planes burn more fuel as they travel longer distances with higher passenger fares — if passengers can fly at all. Airspace restrictions have become an increasingly common challenge for airlines navigating a world shaped by geopolitical conflict. Flights must regularly avoid regions deemed unsafe for civilian aircraft, from conflict zones to areas where other military activity poses risks. | The New York Times ($)

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved eight pilot programs that will allow a handful of companies, including Archer, BETA TECHNOLOGIES, Joby Aviation, and Wisk to start widespread electric aircraft testing as early as this summer. The three-year program, which will span 26 states, is designed to ensure U.S. companies lead the way in next-gen aircraft used for personal travel, regional transportation, cargo logistics, and emergency medicine, Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in remarks Monday. The pilot program, known as the Advanced Air Mobility and Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing Integration Pilot Program, was announced last year through an executive order by President Donald Trump in an effort to speed up development of the futuristic aircraft. | TechCrunch ($)

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": a 1990 Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer - DLS Turbo. | RM Sotheby's

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield

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