Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | Nov 3 2025 | VIEW ONLINE

What We're Reading:

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Automotive

Toyota took a lot of crap in the early part of this decade for, among other things, being “too slow” on electric cars. Instead, Toyota was careful and cautious, and invested heavily in hybrids as a bridge technology. That was clearly the right move. | The Autopian

Automakers are running out of ways to raise prices without raising prices, and are stuck with only two levers to manipulate: the sticker price itself, and the destination fee. Unlike most bogus dealer “fees,” the manufacturer’s destination charge is non-negotiable. And you can only really nudge one or the other up for so long before people start to notice—like back in 2021, when (spoiler alert) everybody noticed. While cooling inflation slowed the creep in 2023 and 2024, 2025 has seen an about-face in the automotive sector, largely thanks to the cost pressures imposed by tariffs. So far, automakers have spread the increasing burden several ways. MSRPs have begun ticking up again, and many inexpensive trims have been eliminated outright, shifting the base cost of several models upward. But it appears that hiking destination fees is once again on the table—and not just for imports that are at the mercy of the heftiest tariffs. Industry-wide, destination fees have increased by an average of nearly 27% percent since 2021. | The Drive

Shareholders must vote to pay Tesla CEO Elon Musk almost $1 trillion, or he might not stay, Board Chair Robyn Denholm warned in a letter Monday. “Without Elon, Tesla could lose significant value, as our company may no longer be valued for what we aim to become,” Denholm wrote ahead of Tesla’s annual meeting on Nov. 6. Online shareholder votes regarding Musk’s new pay plan and other proposals must be received by Tesla by or before 11:59 p.m. ET on Nov. 5. Musk is key to the future of the EV maker as it moves beyond being “just another car company,” with a bigger focus on Full Self Driving and Optimus, Denholm argued. | CNBC

At the beginning of the year, Tesla investors pleaded with CEO Elon Musk to take a step back from his new role as the leader of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and give more attention to the ailing EV company. A new study from Yale University economists suggests those investors were right to worry. A working paper issued this month found Musk’s “polarizing and partisan actions” over the past three years cost Tesla between 1 million and 1.26 million vehicles in U.S. sales, while boosting the sales of its EV competitors by 17% to 22%. To accurately measure the impact Musk’s political and controversial decisions had on Tesla, researchers broke down sales between 2020 and 2025 by U.S. counties, looking at vehicle registration data in predominantly Democratic versus predominantly Republican areas of the country. In heavily Democratic areas of the country, Tesla sales rocketed from 2020 through most of 2022, up until Musk acquired X, at which point sales began decreasing. However, researchers found the sales of EVs and hybrid cars in these left-leaning parts of the U.S. continued to tick up, indicating the slowing purchase of Teslas wasn’t a result of poor EV demand, but rather a decision from Democrat-heavy areas not to purchase Tesla vehicles specifically. In Republican-leaning areas, EV sales were flat. Researchers were able to extrapolate sales data from those models. A study published in Nature Magazine in July supports this study’s findings. Surveying 633 U.S. adults about their intention to buy an EV, researchers from the Williams College–led study found that conservatives consistently did not favor buying EVs, Tesla or otherwise, regardless of how they felt about Musk. Meanwhile, liberals had lower purchase intentions for Tesla vehicles than for other EVs, with lower purchase intentions associated with negative perceptions of the Tesla CEO. | Fortune ($)

Tesla’s business revolves around three pillars:🚗 Automotive: Revenue from selling EVs (75% of revenue). 🌞 Energy Generation and Storage: Revenue from solar products and energy storage solutions, like Solar Roof and Powerwall (12% of revenue).🔌 Services and Other: Revenue from vehicle service, Supercharger network, and sales of auto parts and accessories (12% of revenue).

| App Economy Insights

North Carolina and South Carolina have vastly different costs of highway projects, with South Carolina's Department of Transportation spending an average of $375,500 per mile for repaving work begun in 2018 or 2019, more than twice as much as its northern neighbor. Research by Zachary Liscow, a professor at Yale Law School, found that personnel quality and retaining experienced employees are crucial in reducing the cost of highway projects, with higher-quality engineers able to reduce costs by 14%. Liscow's research suggests that shrinking the workforce of state DOTs may be counterproductive, as cost savings from reduced salaries and benefits would be dwarfed by inflated project costs due to poor management and lack of skilled workers. | Bloomberg ($)

An estimated 1.73 million vehicles were repossessed last year, the most since recession-wracked 2009, according to Cox Automotive. There are signs the surge continues: This year’s repo volume at Manheim by Cox Automotive auctions unit was up 12% through the end of September compared with the same period last year. “It’s like history repeating itself,” said Detroit repossessor George Badeen, president of Allied Finance Adjusters, a trade group. Pandemic-era consumer protections left the repossession industry idling. Now, he said, companies are “making money because of the volume, it’s so big. You’re in a target-rich environment.” The catch? Volume is more crucial than ever. Middlemen, known as forwarders, are increasingly hired by lenders to oversee the repossession process, pushing the companies that actually find and recover cars farther down the food chain, shrinking their profit margins. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

An expensive course correction at subsidiary Porsche AG dealt Volkswagen Group a hefty blow in the third quarter, resulting in a 1.3-billion-euro ($1.5 billion) operating loss and piling billions more in costs on top of pressure from U.S. tariffs. Volkswagen booked 4.7 billion euros in charges due to Porsche's strategy reversal on electric vehicles announced in September, while U.S. import tariffs and subsequent lower sales were expected to cost Europe's biggest carmaker up to 5 billion euros this year, the company said on Thursday. Volkswagen's finance chief, Arno Antlitz, said at least 4 billion euros of the tariff costs were direct, with the rest linked to lost margins due to countermeasures. | Reuters ($)

The share of auto retailers that own five or fewer franchised light-vehicle dealerships continues to decline, while those operating six or more stores is on the rise — a trend for more than a decade, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA). | Automotive News ($)

China has agreed to delay the introduction of its latest round of rare earth export controls as part of a deal agreed between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, but earlier restrictions on the critical minerals that have upended global trade remain. Rare earths, 17 elements that play tiny but vital roles in cars, planes and weapons, have emerged from obscurity to become China’s most potent source of negotiating leverage thanks to export restrictions introduced this year which allow Beijing to cut off foreign customers dependent on Chinese supply. Trump and Xi met in South Korea for a nearly two-hour summit earlier on Oct. 30, after which the U.S. president said China had agreed to keep rare earth exports flowing and the issue was “settled.” Shortly afterwards China announced it would pause for one year export controls introduced on October 9, when Beijing expanded its rare earth export regime to include new materials and rules, according to a release from the Ministry of Commerce. However, the pause appears to leave in place restrictions introduced in April that control exports of seven rare earths and, notably, the rare earth magnets crucial to automakers, defence companies and chipmakers. | Automotive News ($)

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EVs

New electric vehicle deliveries are forecast to fall 43% in October from a year earlier following the termination of the federal EV tax credit for U.S. consumers, J.D. Power said, citing early data. “The automotive industry is experiencing a significant recalibration in the electric vehicle segment,” said J.D. Power data analyst Tyson Jominy. “The recent EV market correction underscores a critical lesson: Consumers prefer having access to a range of powertrain options.” The research firm projected EV retail sales at 54,673 in October following the Sept. 30 tax-break cutoff. It estimated October EV share of the light-vehicle market at 5.2% compared with 8.5% a year earlier. EV share surged to 12.9% in September because of last-minute buying, J.D. Power said. | Automotive News ($)

As the EV transition gets pricier and demand remains uneven, it’s becoming more common for automakers to share platforms, batteries, software and charging access to spread risk and speed time to market. The Hyundai–General Motors tie-up fits that playbook. | Automotive News ($)

As global demand for rechargeable batteries grows, recycling plants can become an important source of raw materials — potentially displacing mines known for dire worker conditions, polluting the water and air and creating geopolitical tensions. Those mines are the dirty underbelly of the renewable energy transition. But once a hunk of metal is pried from the earth, it can be reused basically forever. Enthusiasts dream of a world in which new batteries are made almost entirely from the scraps of their discarded predecessors. China is furthest along in trying to realize that vision. It has more than 50 recycling plants the size of the Redwood Materials facility in Nevada, and recyclers provide a tenth of the Chinese battery industry’s lithium and nearly a fifth of its nickel and cobalt, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a firm that analyzes battery supply chains. Robin Zeng Yuqun, the founder of China’s biggest battery maker, predicts that the country would have “no need” for new battery materials by 2042 because of recycling. Globally, recyclers could supply about a third of the lithium, nickel and cobalt needed for batteries by 2040, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. | The Washington Post ($)

Making electric vehicles and their batteries is a dirty process that uses a lot of energy. But a new study says that EVs quickly make up for that with less overall emissions through two years of use than a gas-powered vehicle. The study also estimated that gas-powered vehicles cause at least twice as much environmental damage over their lifetimes as EVs, and said the benefits of EVs can be expected to increase in coming decades as clean sources of power, such as solar and wind, are brought onto the grid. The work by researchers from Northern Arizona University and Duke University, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS Climate, offers insight into a transportation sector that makes up a big part of U.S. emissions. It also comes as some EV skeptics have raised concerns about whether the environmental impact of battery production, including mining, makes it worthwhile to switch to electric. | Associated Press

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China

How did non-Chinese automakers cede so much share of the world's largest market? "Automakers lost ground because China treated autos and batteries as strategically vital industries," says Usha Haley, PhD, a professor whose research lies in technology development and the Chinese auto industry. Arguably, it was a 1979 Chinese law on equity and joint ventures that led this charge. The law opened the country's new-car market to external investors. But it required foreign automakers to enter joint ventures with local producers, and China later limited foreign investment to no more than 50 percent of each collaboration. Where legacy automakers saw an opportunity for short-term financial gain, China saw long-term benefits for its own automotive industry, as technology transfer from the West would ultimately fall into the hands of the country's domestic automakers. The fruits of this protectionist policy bore China more than just simple technological know-how in assembling a vehicle; it also netted the country's auto industry insights into electric-vehicle technologies. In 2009, China began incentivizing domestic production of battery-electric, fuel-cell electric, and plug-in hybrid vehicles as part of a plan to lessen dependence on foreign oil. Though manufacturers such as General Motors and Nissan Motor Corporation initially protested the transfer of their plug-in hybrid and EV technology into China, they eventually caved in the name of profits, transferring some related tech to their Chinese partners to take advantage of the government stimulus and keep their balance sheets in the black. | Car and Driver

China’s automotive industry is charting an ambitious course for the future with the release of the “Energy-Saving and New Energy Vehicle Technology Roadmap 3.0” by the China Society of Automotive Engineers (CSAE). This latest iteration, building upon versions 1.0 (2016) and 2.0 (2020), emphasizes a global perspective, focusing on the sustainable development of energy-saving vehicles, the iterative upgrade of new energy vehicles, and the evolution of intelligent connected vehicles. | CarNewsChina.com

The cure for Trumpian instability, as China's leader, Xi Jinping sees it, is an alternative order that draws the rest of the world closer into China’s orbit. Enter the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Not so long ago, some analysts wondered whether China might wind down this colossal infrastructure-building scheme, to which most of the 130 or so poor or developing countries collectively known as the global south have signed up. Mr Xi launched the scheme in 2013, aiming to boost growth and trade by building ports, railways, power plants and so on (and to land big deals for Chinese state firms, which got many of the contracts). The BRI was soon beset by claims that it was crippling countries with debt and damaging the environment. China began scaling back its loans. Yet though BRI activity ebbed during the pandemic, it has picked up sharply since 2023, reaching record levels. It is also helping to stimulate trade between China and the global south, expanding markets for Chinese goods that Mr Trump’s tariffs are pricing out of America. | The Economist ($)

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Autonomy, Robotics & AI

Tony Han, founder and CEO of autonomous driving technology company WeRide, likened the development of self-driving cars to the Wright brothers’ successful first flight of a powered aircraft. This four-year development process culminated in 12 seconds of being airborne. The iterative invention process made headlines for crashes, not unlike the ones autonomous vehicles are making now, with 3,979 incidents involving autonomous vehicles from 2019 to 2024, 10% of which resulted in injuries. While the accident rate for traditional cars was 4.1 accidents per million miles driven in 2021, the rate for autonomous vehicles was more than twice that at 9.1 per million miles, according to The National Law Review. Han said it is all part of what it takes to make technology better for future generations. “If you just dig into the old news, old papers, one airplane just invented by the Wright brothers—a crash of an airplane will make it to the headline anytime, even [if] nobody got injured,” Han said at the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh on Sunday. “It’s just like that. It’s our human civilization, history. “As entrepreneurs, as inventors, we should be really fearless enough,” he continued. “We should be brave enough to push forward for innovation, because we live in the AI era. Think about our offspring, our kids. If we can make this a reality, they will appreciate us.” | Fortune ($)

The U.S. autonomous robotaxi testing footprint is widening. Waymo is rolling out in Denver, expanding its 1P operations from California into a high-altitude, four-season environment. Zoox and Waymo are both scaling in Seattle, a key testbed for lidar performance in rain and low-light conditions. The Waymo × Lyft partnership in Nashville aims for 2026, and Zoox has announced launches and testing in Austin, Miami, and DC as it transitions from validation to early commercial service. Taken together, these deployments underscore a broader shift: the autonomous race is no longer about who perfects the robotaxi first, but who builds the connective tissue between AI models, carmakers, and consumer demand. Uber’s alignment with NVIDIA and Stellantis may quietly be the most durable architecture in that ecosystem. | Platform AeronautAmazon is developing innovative smart glasses technology designed to transform the delivery experience for its drivers. This wearable system serves as a driver’s companion throughout the delivery journey, allowing drivers to work hands-free while keeping their focus on their safety and surroundings. The smart glasses display essential information directly in the driver's field of vision, enabling them to scan packages, follow turn-by-turn walking directions, and capture proof of delivery without needing to reference a smartphone. Designed with input from hundreds of Delivery Associates, the system enhances safety by keeping drivers' eyes forward while making deliveries more seamless. The glasses also leverage AI and computer vision to detect potential hazards like pets or uneven walkways, sharing that information to benefit future deliveries. | AmazonResearchers at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence(BAAI) have trained a humanoid robot to pull a car weighing 3,086 pounds (1,400 kg) over a flat surface. The feat appears remarkable, given that the Unitree’s G1 weighs just 77 pounds (35 kgs) and stands 132 cms (4.3 ft) tall. | Interesting Engineering

ChatGPT Referrals to E-Commerce Websites: Do LLMs Outperform Traditional Channels? Results contradict widespread expectations of LLM superiority. Organic LLM (oLLM) traffic underperforms all traditional channels except paid social media across key financial metrics. While oLLM achieves favorable bounce rates, indicating relevance, it generates lower conversion rates and revenue per session than Google's paid and organic search channels. | SSRN

According to the Ramp AI Index, the share of businesses paying for AI models and services was at 43.8% in September. | Ramp

If you know how to use artificial intelligence, it can save you a lot of time and money. Leasing a new car? Be sure to upload a photograph of the contract to ChatGPT first. Need help with a leaky tap? AI often understands the issue—and at a lower cost than a handyman. Parents with a fussy baby can now use chatbots to answer questions in seconds, rather than waiting for a doctor’s appointment. Giving Claude a PDF of a wine list is a great way to find the best-value bottles. These examples add up to something bigger. As AI goes mainstream, it will remove one of the most enduring distortions in modern capitalism: the information advantages that sellers, service providers and intermediaries enjoy over consumers. When everyone has a genius in their pocket, they will be less vulnerable to mis-selling—benefiting them and improving overall economic efficiency. The “rip-off economy”, in which firms profit from opacity, confusion or inertia, is meeting its match. | The Economist ($)

AI tools (like ChatGPT) account for just 3.3% of U.S. online discovery time. | EMARKETER

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Aviation & Space

A real-time view of the Starlink low-earth-orbit satellite constellation. Each dot is a Starlink satellite. You can see how many are over any particular country or region. There are some strings of dots. Those are recent launches that still have to move to their final positions. | Satellitemap.space

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": a 1961 Aston Martin DB4 Series III 4.0L. | Bring A Trailer

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield

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👀 In the News

📢 Automotive Ventures is very excited to announce our investment in EPIC | EPIC📢 Steve caught up with Dan Carrigan from the Virginia Automobile Dealers Association (VADA) to discuss the outlook for the automotive industry in Q4 and into 2026. | VADA📢 Automotive Ventures portfolio company Kinetic, an automotive infrastructure company that delivers digital repair and servicing for modern vehicles, has introduced Kinetic Vision, an AI-powered imaging system designed to generate fast, accurate, and transparent collision repair estimates, according to a press release. Built for auto shops, dealerships, and fleet centers, Kinetic Vision streamlines the repair process by quickly and comprehensively assessing vehicles, allowing shops to increase capacity and revenue while also validating that every repair has been completed correctly. | Kinetic

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