Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | Mar 9 2026 | VIEW ONLINE

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What We're Reading:

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Automotive

Perhaps no business needs certainty more than the auto industry. It usually takes at least four years to design a new model and bring it to market, requiring carmakers to divine what buyers will find appealing by the time the vehicles reach showrooms. Yet industry veterans say they can’t remember a time when the biggest carmakers faced as much uncertainty as they do now. They have been whipsawed by tariffs. Chinese carmakers are breathing down their necks around the world. Self-driving taxi companies like Waymo are changing the very nature of transportation. Software has replaced horsepower as a key selling point. Sales are flat almost everywhere, and profits are declining. How U.S. carmakers cope with this pivotal moment will determine whether they survive as global players or slide into irrelevance, becoming niche manufacturers of pickups and sport utility vehicles that only Americans buy. The early indications are not promising. Many established U.S. and European carmakers have been stumped by electric vehicles at seemingly every turn. First, Tesla’s meteoric rise caught them unawares. They responded by investing in new factories but are now pulling back after the U.S. government repealed tax credits and other subsidies for those cars. | The New York Times ($)

Automotive CEOs are under increasing pressure as investors lose patience with unfulfilled electric vehicle promises and demand immediate profits over transformation narratives. Nine global automakers replaced their chief executives in just over a year. The shift in management comes as massive EV bets have flopped, costing the industry more than $50 billion in charges against their profits. Now, the survivors have to figure out how to keep their jobs. Many are hastily redrawing their blueprints to deal with the forces reshaping the industry. | Automotive News ($)

European suppliers face a “polycrisis” — a collision of slow electric vehicle adoption, intensifying Chinese competition, rising demands from automaker to reduce prices, and regulatory fragmentation. Those combined challenges threaten 350,000 jobs by 2030, according to the CLEPA - European Association of Automotive Suppliers. Between 2024 and 2025, automotive suppliers announced 104,000 job cuts, CLEPA Secretary General Benjamin Krieger said in a release. About 50 percent of suppliers plan to further reduce production capacity in Western Europe over the next five years due to weak profitability, according to CLEPA. This comes as more than 75 percent of suppliers expect profit margins below the 5 percent threshold needed for long-term sustainable investment, the supplier lobbyist group said. | Automotive News ($)

The head of Volkswagen’s Scout Motors unit insists legal actions by several dealers won’t thwart the automaker’s direct-to-consumer sales model. “We have our plan. We’re executing our plan now. Going to continue to execute our plan,” Scout president and CEO Scott Keogh told members of the Automotive Press Association on Wednesday at the company’s suburban Detroit Innovation Center. The company is currently accepting reservations through its website, but plans to eventually open its own stores. To date, 160,000 reservations have been entered, although, Keogh points out reservations don’t always convert to sales. The company is building a manufacturing facility in Blythewood, S.C., with an annual production capacity of about 200,000 vehicles, according to Keogh. The first production vehicles are expected to roll off the line in 2028 in the form of the Traveler SUV, Keogh revealed. | Forbes ($)

Taking a cue from Tesla, Scout Motors plans to sell its trucks and SUVs directly to customers, bypassing dealers entirely. While other electric newcomers such as Rivian and Lucid Motors have taken the same approach, dealers said that because Scout is a Volkswagen Group company, it must sell cars through independent, franchised dealerships. Scout remains undeterred, convinced that selling directly gives the company more insights in the artificial-intelligence age, while creating a better experience for its customers, Chief Executive Officer Scott Keogh said. Scout’s plan has drawn several lawsuits. The latest legal challenge, filed recently by two Volkswagen dealers in federal court in Virginia, is seeking class-action status. It aims to skip a gantlet of state-by-state fights and act on behalf of all the roughly 600 dealers in Volkswagen’s U.S. network. Dealers hope to force Scout to rethink its sales model before a single truck or SUV rolls off the line in early 2028. The question at the heart of this legal battle: Who has the right to sell you a new car in the U.S.? | The Wall Street Journal ($)

An increasing number of new-vehicle buyers are underwater on their trade-ins, with the average red ink reaching a record $7,214 in the fourth quarter. That broke the high of $6,905 during the third quarter, according to Edmunds, which collects the data. These figures are more than $1,000 over what underwater buyers owed at the end of pre-pandemic 2019. Rising negative equity limits the number of consumers able to trade in to a new car, reducing sales. The proportion of new-vehicle buyers with negative equity on a trade reached 29% during the fourth quarter, up 4 points from a year earlier. While a recent high, it is lower than the 31% to 34% for the fourth quarters of 2016 to 2020, according to Edmunds. | Automotive News ($)

Buying a new car has become unaffordable for a growing number of Americans — and that is starting to become a problem for automakers. Sales at many car companies are trending down or rising only a little, and analysts and car dealers say they don’t expect things to get better soon. Car prices, interest rates on auto loans and insurance costs have all climbed in recent years, putting new vehicles out of reach for many people. So far this year, auto sales have been mixed. Sales rose modestly in January, but fell by more than 3 percent in February. Most analysts expect total U.S. sales to fall to about 16 million vehicles this year, from 16.3 million in 2025. The average interest rate on a 60-month new car loan from banks was 7.22 percent in November, according to the Federal Reserve. While that is down a little from early 2025, it is still much higher than in 2021 when the rate averaged 4.8 percent. Add to that the average price of new cars has reached nearly $50,000, up from $38,400 in 2019, according to Cox Automotive. | The New York Times ($)

Carvana on March 3 went a step further into the franchise automotive sector, buying its sixth new-car dealership in a move that deepens its relationship with Stellantis. The online used-car retailer purchased Colonial Dodge-Chrysler-Jeep-Ram in Hudson, Mass., from Colonial Automotive Group owned by Lawrence Gordon. The store, renamed Carvana Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram, is west of Boston. The purchase is its sixth since February 2025. It also has CDJR stores in Sacramento, Calif.; San Diego; Casa Grande, Ariz.; Union City, Ga.; and Dallas. The stores are branded with the Carvana name. Carvana paid $160 million for the five stores, according to a regulatory filing. The Massachusetts transaction comes nearly two months after Stellantis issued an updated policy, effective Jan. 6, saying “no person or entity may acquire more than one CDJR dealership within a rolling 12-month period,” according to a copy of a memo sent to dealers obtained by Automotive News. | Automotive News ($)

Consumers are encountering a new kind of sticker shock when buying a car. It is called the “destination charge” and is now running an average $1,600. The charge is supposed to cover the cost of shipping a new car or truck to its buyer. Automakers have been upping the fee by hundreds of dollars in recent years, as fuel and shipping costs have risen. Now higher tariff fees are likely contributing to the increases, car dealers and analysts say. Overall, car buyers spent more than $26 billion to cover destination charges in 2025, according to data from Edmunds, the online car-shopping resource. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

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EVs

Glenn Mercer tracks U.S. battery electric vehicle (BEV) market share by month. | Glenn Mercer

Despite the plunge in U.S. electric vehicle sales, it appears there’s a critical enough mass to sustain the companies building public charging infrastructure. There are now roughly 5.8 million EVs zipping along American roads. With drivers increasingly relying on public charging, companies are racing to install more stations. U.S. chargers have become more reliable and far faster, which encourages more people to use them, according to Paren, a data platform focused on EV infrastructure. Charging networks added about 11,300 ultra-fast cords across the U.S. last year, up 48% from 2024. And the high-speed buildout is only accelerating: In the fourth quarter, nearly one in four new chargers were capable of pumping at rates of 250 kilowatts or more, which can typically add 100 miles of driving range in less than 10 minutes. Despite the uptick in the number of chargers and their ability to sling electrons faster, the average U.S. charging station is still fairly busy most of the time. | Bloomberg ($)

Chinese battery manufacturers already account for well over 50% of the global market, but new battery types, including solid-state, are rolling out, promising to be safer, more efficient, and safer. Changan Automobile, one of China’s “Big Four” state-owned carmakers, will begin deploying solid-state batteries in vehicles over the next few months. The Chinese auto giant announced on Tuesday that it will begin trial installations before the end of the third quarter. After unveiling its “Golden Bell” all-solid-state EV battery in late 2023, Changan said it plans to launch eight self-developed battery cells, including liquid, semi-solid, and solid-state by 2030. At the time, Changan said it was developing new electrolytes and key processes for semi and all-solid-state EV batteries. The all-solid-state EV battery has an energy density of 400 Wh/kg, enabling over 1,500 km (932 miles) CLTC driving range, the automaker previously said. Using AI-powered diagnostics, Changan said it improved safety by 70%. | Electrek

Chinese scientists have developed a new EV battery capable of delivering over 1,000 km (620 miles) of driving range with an energy density above 700 Wh/kg. China is already dominating global electric vehicle battery sales, with Contemporary Amperex Technology Thuringia GmbH (CATL) and BYD accounting for over 55% of the market alone last year. To promote safer, more efficient, higher-energy-density batteries, Chinese scientists, automakers, and battery manufacturers are teaming up to pool their resources. The efforts are paying off, with another “breakthrough” EV battery announced on Thursday. A research paper was published in the science journal Nature Magazine detailing the latest development. According to Chen Jun, an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the battery development, the team created a new electrolyte system that replaces oxygen atoms with fluorine ones. Lab tests revealed that the battery could achieve an energy density exceeding 700 Wh/kg. | Electrek

BYD's T-shaped chargers can support vehicles that can charge at speeds of a full megawatt (1,000 kW). The brand wants to establish 4,000 charging units itself, with 15,000 more via third-party charging companies. Megawatt charging will start in China first, but BYD wants to bring it to Europe. | Inside EVs

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China

China on Thursday set out a five-year roadmap to turbocharge scientific breakthroughs and embed AI across its industrial economic machine, framing technological dominance as a core national security goal in its sharpening rivalry with the U.S. In its 15th strategic plan since adopting Soviet-style quinquennial policy cycles in the 1950s, Beijing has outlined ‌a bet that technology - not consumption - will drive its next phase of development despite growing structural pressures. The objectives reflect President Xi Jinping's vision of developing "new productive forces" to escape the middle-income trap, counter the demographic downturn, and enhance self-sufficiency to insulate China from U.S. export controls. At the opening of the annual parliament meeting, Premier Li Qiang praised China's ability to withstand U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff hikes, but said "multilateralism and free trade are under severe threat," announcing 7% increases in the defence budget, as well as in research and development. Li acknowledged an "acute" imbalance between strong supply and weak demand and risks from a worsening property sector crisis and high local government debt. | Reuters ($)

China pledged to double down on the production of high-end tech goods to bolster its status as a manufacturing powerhouse, even as Beijing’s ambition raises alarms in foreign capitals. China unveiled a series of steps to improve its manufacturing prowess in its 15th five-year plan draft released Thursday. To boost the country’s supply chains, China will continue investing in rare earths, rare metals and superhard materials to maintain a competitive edge, the report said. Critical minerals have become a key point of leverage for China as it flexed its muscles in tariff negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump. China has dominated the mining of rare earths, the essential raw materials in powerful magnets that are ubiquitous across modern manufacturing. The country controlled 90% of global market share in 2024, but that is poised to dip to 69% by 2030 as other countries seek to boost their own extraction and mining capabilities, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. China also seeks to invest more in foundational capabilities, including advanced ceramics, super-precision bearings, domestic software and high-end computer numerical control machine tools used in aerospace and automotive manufacturing. Beijing is further targeting several emerging technologies, including in advanced chips, robotics, batteries and brain-computer interface, according to the draft. | Bloomberg ($)

Politicians and auto industry leaders in the United States and Europe have long argued that state-sponsored subsidies for Chinese electric vehicle makers have distorted global competition. A new report from research firm Rhodium Group challenges that assessment, saying structural advantages — not subsidies — are a key factor giving Chinese EV manufacturers an edge over Western automakers. These structural efficiencies include vertical integration, larger production scale and lower overhead costs, which outweigh the effects of heavy state subsidies on the profit margins of Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers, according to Rhodium. Since 2009, Chinese authorities have disbursed more than $29 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to manufacturers of electric consumer vehicles, according to estimates from MIT Technology Review. China’s dominance in the EV industry suggests that Beijing’s approach has delivered results. These subsidies, along with an ethos of innovation and rapid development, have allowed Chinese EV manufacturers to pull ahead of legacy automakers from the West, Tu Le, founder of automotive consultancy Sino Auto Insights, said. | CNBC

Nissan was suffering its biggest financial crisis since former boss Carlos Ghosn rescued it from near bankruptcy in the late 1990s. Its decades-old capital alliance with France’s Renault had failed to live up to the ambitions the two companies initially had to dominate the global automotive industry. Talks last year to merge with rival Honda rapidly unravelled. And, although Nissan was once a pioneer in electric vehicles with the launch of the first Leaf in 2010, BYD and other Chinese competitors were quickly starting to take market share from it and other legacy carmakers. The industry is grappling with unprecedented disruption brought by the transition to electric vehicles and frequently evolving climate policies in the U.S. and Europe. Carmakers are at the centre of President Donald Trump’s trade war that has unleashed higher tariffs on vehicles made outside the U.S. Meanwhile, Chinese rivals have made rapid inroads into Europe and other international markets with affordable EVs and hybrids that are equipped with advanced software. | Financial Times ($)

Western carmakers’ share of China’s EV market fell to just over a third last year from two-thirds in 2020, according to a study by New York-based independent research firm Rhodium Group. During this period, Chinese original equipment manufacturers were able to bring down prices drastically. State subsidies are perceived as the big advantage but that’s not all that sets Chinese manufacturers apart. The February 19 report found Chinese state subsidies account for just 5% of BYD’s $4,700 per-vehicle cost gap with Tesla, with scale, cheaper talent, and in-house manufacturing making up the rest. Most foreign brands already manufacture locally in China, yet still can’t compete on price. The gap stems from deeper vertical integration, greater scale, and lower overheads that Western rivals would struggle to match without clashing with their own governments’ industrial policies, the report found. | Rest of World

Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD recorded the biggest fall in global sales in six years last month against a backdrop of fierce competition in the world's largest auto market. BYD's February sales dropped 41.1% from a year earlier, the sixth consecutive month of decline, according to a stock market filing on Sunday. The fall last month was the biggest since February 2020 when the economy was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. | Reuters ($)BYD has unveiled its next-generation blade battery, setting a new record for charging speeds. The Chinese new energy vehicle (NEV) giant officially released the second-generation blade battery on Thursday. It takes only five minutes to charge from 10% to 70%, and just nine minutes from 10% to 97%. BYD dubbed this extreme charging experience "flash charging," emphasizing that only a nine-minute full charge qualifies for the title.BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu explained at a launch event that stopping the charge at 97% is a deliberate energy-saving measure. The remaining 3% capacity is reserved for regenerative braking, which helps reduce the vehicle's overall energy consumption. In extreme cold, the battery resolves the industry-wide challenge of slow low-temperature charging. After being frozen at minus 30 degrees Celsius for 24 hours, it takes only 12 minutes to charge from 20% to 97%. This extreme cold charging time is only three minutes longer than at room temperature. BYD claims this makes the persistent challenges of using EVs in China's freezing north a thing of the past. The flash charging technology boasts high compatibility. Vehicles equipped with the new battery can utilize roughly 4.8 million existing public charging piles, achieving overall speeds 30% to 50% faster than other models. | CNEV Post

Chinese automaker BYD unveiled a new battery pack Thursday that the company says is capable of charging from 10% to 70% in five minutes. Taking it to almost 100% takes about four minutes more. Recharge times like those would nullify concerns about electric vehicles’ charging times — one of the few places where internal combustion engines retain an advantage. Even in bitter cold weather (–4°F or –20°C), the pack can charge from 20% to 97% in under 12 minutes, according to BYD. The battery pack, known as the Blade Battery 2.0 system, is slated to debut in the Yangwang U7, a full-size luxury sedan. There is a critical caveat to this eye-popping figure. The Yangwang U7 sedan, or any other future BYD vehicle equipped with this next-generation battery pack, can only reach this ultra-fast charging time when paired with one of the company’s new Flash Charging EV chargers, which is capable of delivering 1.5 megawatts of electricity. | TechCrunch ($)

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Autonomy & Robotics

Phil Koopman's 2nd article on Embodied AI accountability for remote assistants: The big deal with remote assistant safety accountability has to do with the distinction between tort negligence liability and product liability. If a person (a natural person or a legal person such as a corporation) acts in a negligent manner and someone is harmed as a result, they can be held accountable under tort negligence law. For example, if a human driver runs a red light and that results in a crash, that person (and, critically, the company they work for if driving as an employee) can be held accountable. Our insurance system and the court system have robust policies and mechanisms in place to cover those situations. When someone says “insurance will cover the crash” caused by a human driver mistake that severely injures a pedestrian, they are appealing to the effects of tort negligence law to motivate an insurance company to settle for a high enough amount to avoid fighting a court battle. But if there is no person driving, tort negligence for unreasonably dangerous driving behavior does not apply, at least as things stand now. Even if insurance does pay out for a crash, there is no court battle to be avoided via a settlement for the usual tort negligence reasons. | Phil Koopman

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

“Vibe coding,” a term coined a year ago by the artificial intelligence expert Andrej Karpathy. To vibe code is to make software with prompts sent to a specialized chatbot — not coding, but telling — and letting the bot work out the bugs. Claude Code earned $1 billion for Anthropic in its first six months. November was, for many in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. Recently, software stocks — monday.com, Salesforce, Adobe and many others — plummeted all at once; the Nasdaq 100 lost half a trillion dollars in two days. Legal software company stocks slumped recently because Anthropic released tools to automate some legal work. Financial services firms and real estate services — the market keeps devaluing them because traders expect there to be less need for humans at desks in an A.I.-automated future. Why will anyone need all that legacy software when A.I. can code anything up for you in two shakes of a robotic lamb’s tail? Personally, this all feels premature, but markets aren’t subtle thinkers. And I get it. When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. | The New York Times ($)

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla predicts that within 15 years, AI will completely redefine life as we know it, driving down the cost of living, freeing young people from a future of work, and shifting society from survival to true fulfillment. Within four years, “80% of all jobs will be capable of being done by an AI.” But his utopian vision hinges on one critical safeguard: governments getting their policies right. | Fortune ($)

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Micromobility

In January, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed the most restrictive e-bike bill in the country into law. Every e-bike rider in the Garden State — including those on pedal-assisted models — now needs a license, registration and insurance. Riders must be at least 15 years old. The law was rushed through the legislature and signed on Murphy’s last full day in office, over the objections of cycling and transportation groups. The justification for New Jersey’s legislation is safety. A 13-year-old boy was killed on an e-bike when he collided with a landscaping truck in September, and there are real safety concerns for riders and pedestrians when it comes to faster and more powerful e-bikes. E-bikes that hit high speeds can be a problem. But the law doesn’t distinguish between different kinds of e-bikes when it comes to licenses, registration and age limits. A 70-year-old on a pedal-assist bike riding to the grocery store is treated identically to a teenager on a powerful e-bike doing 40 mph. The proposed regulations are a blunt instrument that restricts transportation options and increases cost for people. New Jersey isn’t alone. Cities across the country are debating new regulations, and not just for e-bikes. After Murphy signed the bill into law, New Hampshire introduced a bill requiring a $50 annual registration fee on all bicycles that operate on paths, roads or trails funded by state or local government, including children’s bikes. In California, progressive Bay Area communities have moved to ban or restrict e-bikes on paths and in public parks — the same communities that spent years and millions promoting alternatives to cars, now cracking down on the most effective alternative. | The Washington Post ($)

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": a 1986 Lotus 98T. Winner of the 1986 Spanish Grand Prix and 1986 United States Grand Prix, driven by future three-time Formula One World Champion, Ayrton Senna. Raced eight times by Senna during the 1986 Formula One season, scoring two victories, five pole positions, and a further three podium finishes. | RM Sotheby's

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield