Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | Mar 30 2026 | VIEW ONLINE

Justin has asked me for two years to get our podcast launched. And I'm proud to say that we've finally got our first episode recorded!

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🚗

Automotive

U.S. new light-vehicle sales in March and the first quarter are expected to fall sharply from last year — when customers rushed to lock in pre-tariff deals — as elevated prices and concerns over the conflict with Iran may be keeping some shoppers home. A sharp drop in EV demand with the end of federal tax incentives is also serving as an ongoing drag on the overall market. Sales of new cars and light trucks are expected to fall 6.5 percent in the first quarter, while March deliveries are expected to plummet 15 percent, according to forecasts from Cox Automotive Inc., J.D. Power APAC and GlobalData Plc. Edmunds expects first-quarter sales will fall 6.3 percent. The seasonally adjusted annual selling rate for the first quarter is expected to be 15.5 million, down 6 percent from the same period a year ago, according to Cox. Cox said the March SAAR is expected to be 15.8 million, slightly higher than February’s rate of 15.7 million, while Edmunds forecasts a 15.9 million rate and J.D. Power and GlobalData project a March sales rate of 16 million. | Automotive News ($)

BYD is moving fast to establish a physical retail presence in Canada, with plans to open 20 branded dealerships within its first year in the market. The world’s largest EV maker is already scouting locations in the Greater Toronto Area. The push comes just two months after Canada slashed its 100% tariff on Chinese-built EVs to 6.1%, a dramatic policy reversal that has unlocked the Canadian market for Chinese automakers for the first time. According to The Globe and Mail, BYD has hired DSMA (Dealer Solutions Mergers & Acquisitions), a Markham, Ontario-based automotive retail consultancy, to find dealership locations across the country. The firm’s CEO, Farid Ahmad, confirmed that BYD is targeting approximately 20 stores within its first year of Canadian operations. “They’ve asked us to help them find as many of the 20 that they possibly can, but they’re out there doing that themselves, as well,” Ahmad told the newspaper. Three potential locations in the Greater Toronto Area are already under discussion. After establishing a GTA footprint, BYD plans to expand into Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary — covering Canada’s four largest metro areas. | Electrek

Sales were up for the third straight year and the number of cars up for sale at auto auctions reached a five-year high, according to the National Auto Auction Association’s 2025 NAAA Market Intelligence Report released Monday. There were more than 8 million vehicles sold through NAAA-member auctions last year, beating 2024 figures by 3%. There were 7.2 million vehicles sold inlane and 820,000 sold in digital-only channels, NAAA said. Of the inlane sales, 50% were sold to an online bidder. There were 12.3 million cars offered for sale through NAAA-member auctions last year, which beat 2024 figures by 4%. It was also the strongest volume since 2021, NAAA said. | Auto Remarketing ($)

Electric-vehicle startup Rivian just won a yearslong battle with car dealers in Washington state that threatens the model of how cars are sold. After fighting to sell its vehicles directly to buyers, Rivian threatened to take its case to voters with a ballot measure to permit direct sales. The dealers blinked. The state’s dealer lobby not only dropped its opposition to a sales loophole for Rivian and rival EV-maker Lucid Motors, but also encouraged lawmakers to approve one. The measure became law this month. The Washington compromise riled traditional automakers, including General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Toyota Motor Corporation, which lobbied against it, arguing it unfairly advantages startups. A trade group representing the automakers called it discriminatory and argued the exception could one day open the door to Chinese EV makers. Following the win, Rivian executives are eyeing other states that, like Washington, ban direct sales but also allow ballot initiatives: Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

CEO Koji Sato warned Toyota’s top suppliers to urgently boost productivity if they hope to survive in an industry under siege by new technologies and more competitive rivals. Toyota is falling behind faster, more cost-efficient competitors and reeling from global tariff turmoil, Sato said March 25 at the Toyota Supply Partners Convention. The world’s largest carmaker and its constellation of suppliers must double down on cost control, cooperate on innovative technologies and look outside the traditional auto industry for new partners, he told about 700 executives from 484 companies at the annual gathering. “Unless things change, we will not survive,” Sato said in a speech that was part pep talk and part four-bell fire alarm. “I want everyone to acknowledge this sense of crisis.” | Automotive News ($)

Sony Honda Mobility is canceling the first and second Afeela electric vehicle models it had planned for North America, and the partners are reviewing the future of the joint venture. The partnership between Honda and Sony to develop and build EVs under the Afeela brand fell victim to the same market factors that forced Honda to cancel three EVs earlier this month, the Japanese carmaker said in a March 25 news release. The Afeela 1 sedan, slated for delivery late this year, and its successor crossover model were to be based on Honda’s next-generation 0 Series electric vehicle architecture and built in the U.S. Honda scrapped plans for two of its 0 Series EVs said it would book up to ¥2.5 trillion ($15.8 billion) in charges, citing U.S. tariffs, declining EV demand and lackluster product appeal in Asia. | Automotive News ($)

European automakers lost billions of euros to U.S. import duties last year, with some manufacturers warning they may no longer profit from certain models exported to the U.S. as they press President Trump for relief. Few European automakers have been willing to show investors the full costs to their businesses from the U.S. import taxes, making it hard to gauge the total impact. The visible cost to European automakers was probably more than $6 billion in 2025, according to financial documents, company statements, and analyst estimates. That figure likely understates the true burden because many companies have not fully quantified the hit. | Automotive News ($)

Way back in 1926, the U.S. Numbered Highway System was established, setting the groundwork for how the nation’s highways would be named and labeled. But it was the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that actually helped establish the interstate numbering system that we’re talking about here today. To cite any federal standards would be boring and confusing to take in all at once; thankfully, we have YouTuber CGP Grey to walk us through this. Let’s take a virtual trip across America to understand just how this all works. | The Drive

⚡️

EVs

History has shown that oil price shocks can lead to structural changes in consumer car-shopping habits. The 1970s ⁠energy crisis led U.S. car buyers to opt for smaller vehicles, which favored Japanese automakers and eroded their U.S. rivals' market share.

Analysts say the recent sharp increases in fuel prices likely will not significantly alter shopping patterns for new cars right away. It often takes a sustained period of elevated prices, or for them to eclipse a psychological milestone before car buyers shift their focus to more fuel-efficient choices, industry watchers said. | Reuters ($)

U.S. car buyers are showing a surge in interest in electric vehicles after President Trump’s decision to attack Iran helped cause a major jump in gasoline prices. The cost to refuel a vehicle in the US is at its highest level in nearly three years, with the average national price of gas standing at $3.90 a gallon on Friday. This increase has been driven by the rising global cost of oil in the wake of the U.S. and Israel’s bombing of Iran, a major oil producer. The conflict has resulted in the strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway that conveys around a fifth of the world’s oil, being shut off by Iran. Drivers in the US have responded to this situation with a surge of fresh interest in EVs, which do not require gas and do not emit the pollution that is dangerously overheating the planet. Searches for electric car models are up by 20% since the attack on Iran started three weeks ago, according to CarEdge, a car-buying platform. | The Guardian ($)

A wave of leased electric vehicles is returning to market with a problem: They’re each worth thousands of dollars less than expected and could create industry losses in the billions. That’s prompted automaker finance arms to adapt their operations to limit losses before off-lease EV volumes peak in 2028 at nearly 800,000 vehicles. And they will need dealers and wholesale auctions to resell the vehicles to help reduce the shortfalls. EVs will make up almost 15% of off-lease used vehicles by the end of this year, up from 7.7% in the first quarter. Credit reporting agency Experian estimates off-lease EV volume will peak in 2028 with nearly 800,000 EVs flooding the market. Industry experts project the resale value of those vehicles will be around $10,000 less than automaker finance arms expected, but could range anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. Using an average of $10,000, that could create an industry loss of about $8 billion for expected models coming off lease in 2028. | Automotive News ($)

Ford CEO Jim Farley on the Ford Universal EV Production System, a total rethink that’s 40 percent faster than existing processes, with fewer workstations and parts. The resulting car is presided over by Ford’s chief EV, digital and design officer, former Apple and Tesla engineer Doug Field. (NB: Field began his career at Ford in 1987.) Farley lights up as he talks about the plan, which he’s famously described as a 21st century Model T moment. “In the US, we go down market, we put our most advanced level three, eyes off highways driving software into it, and we go for product appeal. So when people see it, they go, ‘it’s not a generic, affordable compliance vehicle for the government’, it’s actually an aspirational vehicle that kind of redoes what an EV can be as a mainstream vehicle. “To do that we’ve had to take a completely different approach, like Henry Ford did, on manufacturing, supply chain and engineering. So we had to radically simplify the vehicle. We kit the parts not on the side of the manufacturing system, we stuff them inside the vehicle. We make it in three separate parts, so the operator can actually be inside the car to make it." No pause. “It’s 30 per cent more efficient if you break the car up, the operator doesn’t have machines to put in the instrument panel or the seats, they’re actually inside it. We can radically shrink the footprint in the plant and reduce the cost. We have large unit castings in the front and rear, which massively changes the body shop. "You take massive amounts of stampings and welding out of the system. We use the battery as the floorpan, it’s a structural member, and we’ll have LFP [lithium iron phosphate] batteries. We have to attach the front of the vehicle in a way that no one has ever done before. No one’s ever built a car in high volume like this... a car every 50 seconds.” | TopGear

At the peak of electrification optimism several years ago, EVs were expected to make up 50 percent of new-vehicle sales in the U.S. by 2030, according to previous projections from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and BloombergNEF. Now, the outlook is less than 30 percent. Automakers and battery manufacturers built to the wrong projection and are looking for new outlets for their cell production, including battery energy storage systems, or BESS, expected to be a $20 billion market in the U.S. by 2030, according to research firm MarketsandMarkets. The pivot of EV battery plants to BESS and other uses is likely being viewed as a stopgap solution until the EV curve ramps the way it was initially envisioned. While that resulted in tens of billions of dollars in EV losses, there is at least some benefit to scaling more slowly. | Automotive News ($)

Donut Lab, a Finnish startup, claims to have created the first production-ready solid-state battery (SSB) for electric vehicle production. The talk of the CES 2026 in Las Vegas, in January, Donut Lab says its battery has an energy density of 400Wh per kilogram—roughly twice that of typical lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries in production. The Donut batt can charge to full in five minutes, says the company; has a practically unlimited lifespan (100,000 charging cycles); is unaffected by heat and cold (-30C to 100C); and contains no rare earth, precious metals or flammable liquid electrolytes. With all that, Donut Lab says it will be cheaper to produce than conventional lithium-ion batteries. China’s GAC Group, which produces the flagship M8, has targeted 2026 for testing its first all-solid-state battery vehicle. It’s fair to say the entire car-making world is deeply skeptical. How did an obscure startup in Finland beat Toyota Motor Corporation, Stellantis and the entire nation of China to the holy grail of energy storage? Early polling heavily favors they didn’t. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Lithium-ion battery packs have slumped permanently beneath $100, with grid electricity from four-hour batteries costing $78 per megawatt-hour at the end of last year. The cost of lithium-iron-phosphate batteries used in cars has dropped below $100, to $81 per kilowatt-hour, making electric vehicles more affordable to buy. The falling cost of battery storage is changing the energy landscape, making solar and wind power, as well as electric vehicles, more competitive with fossil fuels. | Bloomberg ($)

🇨🇳

China

Chinese technocrats often spell out their vision of the future in impenetrable officialese. The 15th five-year plan, the latest blueprint for China’s economic development, adopted this month, talks drearily of “industrial upgrading”, “new quality productive forces” and the like. Yet in plain language, the document translates into something straight out of Elon Musk’s fever dream: skies dotted with delivery drones and flying taxis; fusion and hydrogen power plants fuelling factories manned by humanoid robots; unstoppable quantum computers; 6G mobile devices plugged directly into people’s brains. Similar exercises in the past also displayed gumption. In 2015 the most high-profile plan in many years, dubbed Made in China 2025, set the goal of catching up with America, the world’s pre-eminent economic power, and breaking away from dependence on foreign technology. But catching up, which China has pulled off in areas like electric cars, clean energy and, more or less, artificial intelligence, is one thing. Dominating technologies of the future is quite another. Can China pull it off? One reason for the latest plan’s breathtaking ambition is the desire of Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader, to declare the country a “modernised socialist state” by 2035. A modernised Chinese socialist is one generating between $20,000 and $30,000 in economic value per year, compared with less than $14,000 today (at nominal exchange rates). To meet that goal, itself a step towards China becoming a “modernised socialist world power” by 2049, the centennial of communist rule, GDP per person would need to grow by 4-8% a year over the next decade. With Chinese consumers in a dour mood and geopolitical rifts making the future of Chinese exports highly uncertain, the party believes that only world-beating technological breakthroughs and the resulting productivity gains can guarantee success. | The Economist ($)

For decades, carmakers measured themselves against German engineering, Detroit scale or Japanese reliability. Now executives from Michigan to Wolfsburg are confronting a new yardstick — one defined by rapid-fire development cycles, software-first design and relentless cost compression born of China’s EV boom. Just as Japan’s ascent in the 1970s reshaped the industry with lean production and ruthless efficiency, China’s rise — led by companies like BYD, GEELY and Leapmotor — is rewriting the rules again, with flatter development timelines, deep supply chain integration, bold ideas and cars that gain new features in real time through over-the-air updates. The result turns on its head the industry’s goal to sell perfect products, creating one where fixes can come later — though sometimes at a cost. The shift is no longer theoretical. Stellantis is weighing whether to use EV platforms and software from Leapmotor to underpin models for its European brands Fiat, Opel and Peugeot, and is separately talking with Xiaomi Technology and XPENG about investing in its European operations, Bloomberg has reported. It’s a striking admission that major legacy manufacturers may need Chinese engineering to compete on their own turf. The technology seep goes beyond the mass market, with luxury-car maker Mercedes-Benz Group AG holding early talks with Geely for possible cooperation on future EVs, Bloomberg has reported. | Bloomberg ($)

Chinese companies are redefining the rules of industrial competition. Their advantage is no longer limited to cost: across sectors, they have compressed product-development cycles from years into months while sustaining a cost edge of 20 to 30 percent. This combination has set a new global benchmark, leaving Western manufacturers exposed to a disruptive performance gap. Chinese competitors are now entering European and US markets with high-quality products and increasingly local value chains, including R&D and production. Western firms still lead in quality, trust and breakthrough innovation, but these strengths are under growing pressure as the cost and speed gap widens. Roland Berger examines how China has shifted the competitive dynamic – and what Western industry must do to close the gap. | Roland Berger

More than 15 years ago, China’s leaders designated the EV sector a “strategic emerging industry.” Under China’s statist model, the EV industry was lavished with at least $230 billion in government subsidies from 2009 until 2023. Government grants still account for an estimated 35 percent of BYD’s net profit. And most Chinese EV companies don’t look like BYD. China has around 200 EV companies, and that’s after hundreds went out of business. Very few of these make any meaningful contribution to advancing technology, eating up government subsidies until the trough runs dry. Chinese carmakers also benefit from a massive domestic car market, and a 9-9-6 work culture; factory workers toil from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m., six days a week. China’s state-led model is a challenge for the U.S., which has its own lighter version of the statist model. American politicians calibrate their industrial planning of the auto sector to maximize the number of jobs and the number of regulations, environmental and safety, it must comply with. But the U.S. market is at least responsive to consumer demand, unlike China, where cars nobody wants are rotting away. U.S. demand for EVs is weak, partly because of the end of federal subsidies last year. | The Washington Post ($)

As the average price of a new car in the U.S. approaches $50,000, more of the car-buying public is open to buying cheaper Chinese cars, despite resistance from the industry and both major U.S. political parties. While Chinese autos hit the highways of Europe, Latin America and even Canada, the U.S. government has effectively banned the cars with tariffs exceeding 100%, out of concerns over data security and protecting American jobs. In places like Europe, a number of Chinese EVs sell at ⁠prices under $30,000. Some of those cars include amenities like advanced driving assistance software, a built-in mini fridge, and the option to sing karaoke with your fellow passengers. | Reuters ($)

More than half of China’s car dealerships became unprofitable last year amid the market’s cutthroat price war and sliding domestic sales. Some 56 percent of dealerships booked losses in 2025, up from 42 percent the year before, the China Automobile Dealers Association reported March 18. Only 24 percent of retailers turned a profit last year, down from an already meager 39 percent in 2024, according to the group’s most recent survey. The share of dealerships breaking even was just under 21 percent, from around 19 percent the year before. China’s ongoing new-car price war further undermined retailer financial results as vehicle sales fall in the world’s biggest auto market. Intensifying competition forced 82 percent of dealerships to retail new cars at prices below wholesale, the group said. The race to undercut rivals pushed down average gross margin of new-car sales across dealerships to a negative 26 percent in 2025, from negative 18 percent a year earlier, according to the survey. | Automotive News ($)

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made waves in January when he dropped the country’s 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, breaking with the United States. Starting this year, Canada will allow a limited quota of imported Chinese EVs, and is actively courting Chinese automakers to set up factories in the country. At the time, critics warned Canada to brace for blowback from Washington. Instead, as the U.S. and China prepare for Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing, Ottawa faces a specter of a different kind: competition. The U.S. has not yet agreed to drop its own 100 percent tariff on Chinese autos. But the automotive industry is on tenterhooks over whether the two governments will strike a deal to bring a Chinese auto factory to the U.S. when Trump eventually visits Beijing. The president has previously expressed enthusiasm about the prospect. And a trickle of rumors suggests that U.S. automakers are already in talks about partnerships with Chinese rivals. For Chinese automakers like BYD and GEELY, such an agreement would reshape the North American landscape, opening up a market four and a half times larger by vehicles sold annually than Canada and Mexico combined. An arrangement that obliges them to set up a factory in America in exchange for market access may be hard to resist. But analysts say a series of practical questions remain. Among them: will Chinese automakers be forced to enter into joint ventures? How much manufacturing would actually happen on North American soil? And will Chinese automakers be willing — or required — or work with powerful automotive unions? | The Wire China

China became Australia’s No. 1 source for new vehicles in February, capping a rapid rise and offering a glimpse of what could transpire in Canada if Ottawa does more than crack open the door to electrified vehicles from China. Japan had been the sales leader in Australia for nearly three decades. China vehicles — including internal combustion and electrified — accounted for nearly 25 percent of the Australia market in February. About 12 percent of February sales were electric vehicles and China brands captured about 80 percent of that. While Australia is no stranger to new entrants, with successive waves of arrivals bringing big players from Japan and South Korea, among others, over the past 50 years, the speed that China has gained ground puts the latest wave of imports in a separate category, Weber said. “That is what really differentiates it. The Chinese have gone from essentially zero to a much bigger share of the market very quickly.” From less than two-per-cent market share just before the COVID-19 pandemic, imports from China will capture 43 percent of the country’s vehicle market by 2035, the Australian Automotive Dealer Association (AADA) forecasts. | Automotive News ($)

Ford is importing a low-cost electric van into Europe from China to take on rising competition in Europe’s commercial vehicle market. The Transit City is positioned as a lower-range, more affordable alternative to the Turkish-built E-Transit Custom, targeting urban delivery operators. It is built by Jiangling Motors Co. (JMC) at its Xiaolan plant in Jiangxi province and is based on JMC’s Touring EV. By importing its own model from China, Ford is getting ahead of what it expects will a concerted push from Chinese manufacturers into the European electric van market. “The Chinese will be in every segment,” CEO Jim Farley said in December at an event in Paris. “We feel that competition in Ford’s case in South America, in Thailand, and Southeast Asia with body-on-frame pickups.” | Automotive News ($)

Inside a headquarters shaped like a giant battery cell, the billionaire who runs the world’s largest battery company is confident the Americans will eventually come calling. Washington has spent the past few years ghosting Robin Zeng, China’s fourth-richest man. To the U.S. government, Chinese battery maker CATL is a geopolitical threat to be warded off with tariffs and national-security curbs. Yet Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) has grown to become the world’s largest electric-vehicle battery manufacturer thanks to its technology and low costs. It posted record profit of more than $10 billion last year, and an estimated one in three EVs sold around the world carries its batteries. That is even without the U.S. market, where electric adoption lags behind that in China and Europe and where CATL’s presence is limited. Zeng sees that as temporary. The EV market in the U.S. will remain small “for several years. But after that, it’ll have to be booming, because it is the trend. It is the future,” said Zeng, who turned 58 on Friday, in an interview. And building that future without CATL, he said, “is difficult and the cost [is] too high.” | The Wall Street Journal ($)

🚖

Autonomy & Robotics

Research and common sense suggest that autonomous vehicles will cause car use to spike, resulting in logjams that would be calamitous for cities' quality of life and economic health. Autonomous vehicles offer superior car trips, which can lead to people taking more and longer car trips, and workers tolerating longer car commutes, catalyzing sprawl and creating more miles driven. Road pricing during peak times can mitigate gridlock by encouraging flexible travel plans and forcing AV companies and customers to consider the delays they impose on others, and setting up a policy apparatus that leverages road pricing can help keep traffic flowing. | Bloomberg ($)

Waymo is now providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across 10 U.S. cities, the company shared in a post on X this week. The eye-popping figure is reflective of the Alphabet-owned company’s accelerated commercial expansion. But it’s Waymo’s rate of growth in ridership and markets that offers a more compelling story. In less than two years, the company’s average weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today. Over that same two-year timespan, Waymo has expanded within its initial markets of Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — and beyond them to Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. Those seven cities in the Sun Belt were all added in just the past year. | TechCrunch ($)

In the utopia proposed by Elon Musk, billions of robots perform all necessary work. A network of autonomous vehicles and humanoids, fueled by solar energy, provide boundless resources. Poverty is eliminated. Work is optional. And the world’s richest person would become the first trillionaire in the process. While Musk has a well-documented penchant for overpromising, he has recast his companies to chase this future. He pivoted Tesla this year to prioritize building robots, phasing out car models including its popular luxury sedan to stand up a new production line of Optimus humanoids. Tesla has aggressively recruited workers from other parts of the tech industry, seizing on specific areas of expertise — and development targets — such as mimicking the capabilities and range of motion of the human hand. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, which is expected to debut on the stock market this year, acquired his artificial intelligence startup xAI, which will build software with Tesla. The army of robots forms the basis of Tesla’s push “to build a world of amazing abundance,” its new mission. | The Washington Post ($)

🤖

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Bots are taking over the web, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. In an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin this week, he said that with the speed at which artificial intelligence is growing, AI bot traffic will exceed the amount of human traffic that’s online by 2027. Prince explained that bots’ web usage has been increasing alongside the growth of generative AI technology because bots are capable of visiting far more sites to get answers for users’ chatbot queries. “If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.” Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors. | TechCrunch ($)Reid Hoffman asks the question: "Is SaaS Dead?" The short answer: No, SaaS isn’t dead. The players are still at the table. Though the old playbook is fading, and those who can’t keep up will as well. That’s an important distinction. | X

⚓️ Marine

The journey from Shanghai to Rotterdam takes a container ship a month. Setting out at night, the vessel—a shadow amid glowing pleasure boats—begins by sliding past the Chinese city’s banks. Over the following fortnight it snakes through the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, threads the Strait of Malacca and crosses the Indian Ocean. Next come the Bab al-Mandab and the Suez Canal. Then the ship passes Gibraltar. After 30-odd days, it coasts through the English Channel, approaching its destination. Since the 1960s these waterways have been taken for granted. Now that the Strait of Hormuz is closed and the Red Sea hostage to the whims of Yemeni militias, it is clear that even a superpower with America’s might cannot guarantee safe passage in the face of drones, speedboats and mines. Shipping firms and world leaders are waking up to the fact that freedom of navigation is breaking down. Where, then, is international commerce most vulnerable? And where would be the most painful place for the next blockage? The importance of a single passage depends not just on the trade it carries, but on the available alternatives. For some passages—such as the Red Sea, where attacks by the Houthis have sent insurance rates rocketing—disruption is already priced in. We have, therefore, built a model to account for both how trade is conducted at present and where ships would go if access was cut off. It suggests that the closure of Hormuz, although extraordinarily expensive, is far from the worst scenario. | The Economist ($)

✈️

Aviation & Space

The economy cabin is losing the turf war on airplanes. Airlines are retrofitting their passenger jets or buying new ones that have a larger share of premium seats. Their goal is to squeeze more revenue out of each seat flown, catering to travelers willing to pay up for lie-flat and extra legroom seats. Carriers with first-class sections like Delta Air Lines and United Airlines have increased premium seating on flights over the past decade. Now, low-frills flying pioneer Southwest Airlines, and low-cost carriers like Spirit Airlines and Frontier Airlines are adding seats that give passengers perks like a few extra inches of leg space. Since January 2020, the number of scheduled business and first-class seats on domestic flights has grown 27%, according to research from aviation data firm Visual Approach Analytics. That is nearly three times higher than scheduled economy seats, which rose just 10% over the same span. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

SpaceX is aiming to file its initial public offering prospectus with regulators later this week or next week, according to a person with direct knowledge of the plans. The confidential filing will formalize the IPO plans for Elon Musk’s rocket and telecom company as it targets a June public listing. The offering will test investor appetite for what is gearing up to be the biggest U.S. IPO of all time—by a wide measure. Advisers involved in the preparation predict the company could try to raise more than $75 billion in the IPO, higher than a previously reported estimate of $50 billion, according to the person. The company, last valued at $1.25 trillion, won’t decide the actual size of the offering and a valuation until a few weeks before the IPO. | The Information ($)

Elon Musk is cooking up a memorable stock-market debut for SpaceX, and not just because it is expected to be the biggest one ever. The 54-year-old billionaire is writing his own playbook for the blockbuster initial public offering, which is being timed for mid-June before his birthday. While most executives are expected to travel to pitch their companies, Musk wants to have investors come to SpaceX, where they can visit manufacturing facilities and possibly witness rocket launches, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk and his team are betting fund managers and analysts will leave wanting to put in big orders for the IPO, which is expected to raise between $40 billion and $80 billion, according to people familiar with the deal. The rocket-and-satellite company is expected to file confidentially with regulators for its IPO in coming days, people familiar with the matter said. A public filing typically occurs a couple of months after the initial submission, depending on how many questions regulators have. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

German plans for a 10 billion euro ($11.6 billion) military satellite network independent of a parallel European program are raising red flags among some EU lawmakers over potential duplication, fragmentation of efforts and cost. Germany's proposed collaboration with Rheinmetall and Airbus is in addition to the bloc's 10.6 billion euro ($12.3 billion) IRIS system, which is a central plank ‌in its quest for strategic defence autonomy. European Union lawmakers told Reuters that Germany's solo initiative risks undermining attempts to bolster collective defence capabilities as the bloc adapts to the relative decline of the U.S. defence umbrella under President Donald Trump. | Reuters ($)

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": a 1966 Ferrari 275 GTB/6C by Scaglietti. | RM Sotheby's

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 how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the car buying experience. As AI agents become capable of browsing inventory, comparing specifications, and negotiating terms, we discuss implications for traditional dealerships and the automotive market. | CBT News ($)

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