BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | Oct 13 2025 | VIEW ONLINE

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Automotive

A Tesla owner captured what is quite possibly one of the most shocking accidents we've ever seen, as a runaway wheel from a nearby truck smashed into the Kia Soul at highway speed and catapulted the unfortunate compact crossover and its even more unfortunate driver into low Earth orbit. And amazingly, the world’s most unwitting astronaut walked away from the crash landing. | The Drive

One of the cylinders in the U.S. economic engine is causing some sputtering. Since the pandemic, buyers on auto-dealer lots have encountered surging sticker prices and smaller incentives from automakers to lessen the blow. To afford an automobile, more consumers, especially lower-income families, have resorted to buying used cars and taking out longer loans. Now, more are falling behind on their loans, signaling that lower-income consumers are struggling to afford payments as wages stagnate and unemployment ticks higher. While the economy has remained strong, and Wall Street has kept buying subprime auto loans, the auto market is evidence that not all is well under the hood. The percentage of new-car buyers with credit scores below 650 was nearly 14% in September, roughly one in seven people, J.D. Power said last month. That is the highest for the comparable period since 2016. And the portion of subprime auto loans that are 60 days or more overdue on their payments hit a record of more than 6% this year, according to Fitch Ratings, while delinquency rates for other borrowers have remained relatively steady. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

The Trump administration’s tariffs will cost the auto industry about 20% of its profit margin this year, according to new research from Moody's Ratings. That translates into a roughly $30 billion hit. The body blow comes as carmakers try to navigate a series of challenges, including stiff competition from China and the transition to electric vehicles. Carmakers also are adjusting to the end of federal tax credits and other financial assistance that was intended to spur American EV manufacturing. The full impact of the tariffs hasn’t been felt yet either, since the U.S. is still negotiating with major trade partners including Canada, Mexico and South Korea. Despite the headwinds, car sales have boomed this year. Most companies have avoided raising their vehicle prices since the tariffs took effect, but it's unclear how long they can keep it up. | Politico ($)

Ferrari's 2030 plan disclosed that it aims for a lineup made up of 40% internal combustion engine models, 40% hybrids, and 20% fully electric cars by 2030 — dialing down its 2022 ambitions for electrification, when the targets for EVs and ICE models were flipped. Though Ferrari has ramped up its hybrid production since 2022, shipments have plateaued in recent quarters. | Sherwood

Ferrari's shares fell more than 16% on Thursday on disappointment over the luxury carmaker's new long-term financial targets, taking the shine off the unveiling of the technology behind its first electric car. The share price drop wiped 13.5 billion euros ($15.67 billion) from Ferrari's market capitalization. The automaker set a revenue target of 9 billion euros for 2030, an increase on its 7.1 billion euro forecast for this year, but a less ambitious figure than the market had been hoping for. Company executives gathered at Ferrari's headquarters in Maranello in northern Italy also to unveil details of Ferrari's new EV called the Elettrica. Ferrari showed off its production-ready chassis - a car base, with battery pack and electric motors - but has not yet determined its price. | Reuters ($)

When Tesla directors offered Elon Musk the biggest executive pay package in corporate history in September, it reassured investors that he would have to achieve the equivalent of “Mars-shot milestones” to earn $878 billion in Tesla stock over 10 years. The board’s proposal said Musk would have to “completely transform Tesla and society as we know it” in robotics and autonomous driving as well as stock value and profits. Conversely, Musk would get “zero” unless he meets those “incredibly ambitious” goals. Yet Musk could reap tens of billions of dollars without meeting most of those targets, according to a Reuters analysis of his performance goals and more than a dozen experts in executive pay, company valuations, robotics and automotive trends including autonomous driving. He could collect more than $50 billion by hitting a handful of the board’s easier goals that won’t necessarily revolutionize Tesla’s products or business, the Reuters review found. Even hitting just two of the easiest targets, along with modest stock growth, would net Musk $26 billion, more than the lifetime pay of the next eight best-paid CEOs combined, a group that includes Meta Platforms Ltd' Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Apple's Tim Cook, and NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, according to an analysis for Reuters by research firm Equilar. | Reuters ($)

In many wealthy countries, cars are so pervasive and ingrained that it can be a struggle to conceive how life might improve with fewer of them. Three recent books give it a shot. They are part of a growing effort among activists and academics encouraging people around the world — especially in North America and Europe — to reconsider society’s relationship with the automobile. | Bloomberg ($)

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EVs

A newly released report by ChargerHelp! shows that while 64% of Americans now live within two miles of an electric vehicle charging station, nearly one-third of charging attempts fail. Despite charging infrastructure showing 98.7% to 99% uptime rates, only 71% of charging attempts actually succeed, according to the 2025 EV Charging Reliability Report. The report analyzed more than 100,000 sessions across 2,400 chargers. The report argues that instead of focusing on site uptime statistics, the first-time charge success rate (FTCSR) provides a more accurate measure of the driver experience. | Freightwaves

The federal subsidy for electric cars has ended, which means EV sales will probably fall because of simple math: Electric cars are generally more expensive than comparable gas cars. (Some automakers are offering discounts to get around that.) But there’s one place where EVs are usually cheaper: the cost of filling up. Driving 100 miles in a typical gas car that gets 25 miles per gallon costs about $13 on average. In an EV you’d pay just $5, if you recharged at the average home electricity rate. (Stopping at a fast-charging station — if you couldn’t charge at home, or had to travel far — would cost quite a bit more.) | The New York Times ($)

Extravagantly powerful and noisy engines helped make Ferrari the ultimate sports-car brand. Now the company wants to persuade the superrich to buy a model with no engine at all. The Italian carmaker this week started lifting the hood on its first fully electric vehicle, a yearslong project that has cost the brand hundreds of millions of dollars and promises to set a benchmark for how battery-powered sports cars should look, sound and drive. The debut comes as the global auto industry adjusts to a slower transition to EVs than expected when Ferrari announced the project. Other sports-car makers, such as Porsche, Lamborghini, and McLaren, have delayed plans to build electric models, citing weak demand. While Ferrari is committed to launching its first EV on schedule, it has scaled back its wider bet on the technology. At an investor day Thursday, the company said EVs would account for 20% of its vehicle lineup in 2030, half the share previously indicated. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Americans just lost federal tax credits for buying an electric vehicle, but charging one has grown more convenient in recent months. About 780 public high-speed charging stations opened in the US in the third quarter, the largest such infrastructure boom on record, according to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) data. The nation’s charging infrastructure expanded by 19% in the first nine months of the year. Many of the new stations were likely given the green light before President Donald Trump took office. However, charging executives say the market for electrons is still underserved, even though EV sales are expected to slow without federal incentives. | Bloomberg ($)Cars and trucks store more energy than all the stationary batteries built to back up homes, businesses and utilities, combined. EV batteries are huge: The 1,800-pound battery in a Ford F-150 Lightning can store about as much energy as 10 Tesla Powerwall home batteries. That’s enough to power the average U.S. household for four-and-a-half days — or longer if residents use less energy during a blackout. Utilities would like to tap into EV batteries for emergency power in moments of crisis. They already pay customers to let them borrow energy from their home batteries or turn off their air conditioners and other appliances a few times a year. Cars and trucks are one more source of emergency power that utilities could quickly add to their toolkits, even as they slog through the years-long process of building new power plants to keep up with rising energy demand. | The Washington Post ($)Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026. Technology advances that have allowed electric vehicle battery makers to increase energy density, combined with a drop in green metal prices, will push battery prices lower than previously expected, according to Goldman Sachs research. Global average battery prices declined from $153 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in 2022 to $149 in 2023, and they’re projected by Goldman Sachs Research to fall to $111 by the close of this year. Our researchers forecast that average battery prices could fall towards $80/kWh by 2026, amounting to a drop of almost 50% from 2023, a level at which battery electric vehicles would achieve ownership cost parity with gasoline-fueled cars in the U.S. on an unsubsidized basis. | Goldman Sachs

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China

China’s car dealerships are in urgent need of financial assistance as a long-running price war and rapid increase in production capacity for electric vehicles leave them struggling to survive. The country’s transition to EVs has upended the traditional dealership model, where sales of gasoline cars from legacy manufacturers meant healthy profits, especially for the luxury segment, according to Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association. But the shift to electrification has brought overcapacity and intense competition that’s seen dealers slash prices — eating into the bottom line, he said. | Automotive News ($)

The Chinese government on Thursday announced that it was escalating its curbs on exports of rare earth metals, as Beijing claims broader jurisdiction over the global manufacture of semiconductors and other technology. The new rules, which are set to take effect Dec. 1, are the latest step by Beijing as it tightens the reins on rare earths to exploit China’s dominance in the sector. Hours later, Beijing announced that starting on Nov. 8, it will also restrict exports of many kinds of equipment needed to manufacture batteries for electric cars, in a bid to protect China’s competitive advantage in the car industry as well. The rare earth rules could scramble the supply chains of some of the world’s biggest companies, including NVIDIA and Apple. Rare earths are essential for the production of many computer chips, which are used in everything from smartphones to artificial intelligence systems. Rare earths are also used to make the magnets that power the electric motors in drones, factory robots and offshore wind turbines, as well as the brakes, seats and other systems in cars. | The New York Times ($)

China’s newest restrictions on rare-earth materials would mark a nearly unprecedented export control that stands to disrupt the global economy, giving Beijing more leverage in trade negotiations and ratcheting up pressure on the Trump administration to respond. The rule, put out Thursday by China’s Commerce Ministry, is viewed as an escalation in the U.S.-China trade fight because it threatens the supply chain for semiconductors. Chips are the lifeblood of the economy, powering phones, computers and data centers needed to train artificial-intelligence models. The rule also would affect cars, solar panels and the equipment for making chips and other products, limiting the ability of other countries to support their own industries. China produces roughly 90% of the world’s rare-earth materials. Global companies that sell goods with certain rare-earth materials sourced from China accounting for 0.1% or more of the product’s value would need permission from Beijing, under the new rule. Tech companies will probably find it extremely difficult to show that their chips, the equipment needed to make them and other components fall below the 0.1% threshold, industry experts said. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Glenn Mercer (with the help of Jeff Lick at Stephens) extrapolates the trendline of Chinese automaker market share in the UK. | Glenn Mercer

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Autonomy, Robotics & AI

Waymo’s fake city with training roads, traffic circles, driveways, railroads, etc. in Atwater, California — Google leased 60 acres here in January 2014, likely used in the early Waymo days. Waymo is still reported to lease & maintain over 100 acres in the area, separate from this location. | Reddit

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation into Tesla’s Full Self-Driving tech after receiving reports that the software caused vehicles to run red lights or cross into wrong lanes. The probe, which identified more than 50 reports of these kinds of violations (four of which led to injuries), is one of the first specifically targeted at Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver assistance software. The NHTSA previously opened an investigation into FSD in October 2024 after receiving reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions. The federal safety agency in April 2024 closed an investigation into Tesla’s less-capable Autopilot system after identifying 13 fatal crashes related to the misuse of that software. A separate investigation into the efficacy of the fix Tesla issued to Autopilot remains open. The new investigation was opened the same week that Tesla released the latest version of the software, which CEO Elon Musk has spent months hyping up. This new version is supposed to incorporate training data that Tesla acquired during its limited robotaxi pilot, currently underway in Austin, Texas. | TechCrunch ($)The number of U.S. companies that make physical things reached a low point in 2014 and has grown since then. Yet they are trapped in a never-ending labor shortage as skilled workers age out, and young people fail to take their place. China has become the de facto manufacturer of the world’s goods, owing not only to its enormous population of engineers, technicians and machinists but also its 2-million-plus army of industrial robots. Now the U.S. is attempting to claw back some of those contracts—a process called “reshoring”—and robots can in some cases quadruple worker output. In small factories across America, agile automatons are making everything from parts for AI supercomputers to the hulls of America’s future autonomous naval weapons. Once a luxury reserved for big manufacturers, smaller, smarter, more flexible and less expensive “cobots”—collaborative robots—are bringing automation to every fabricator, no matter the size. These robots aren’t just nice to have. The slow, fragile recovery of American goods production wouldn’t be possible without them. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Robot dogs. Humanoid helpers. Entirely automated dark factories without human workers. These might seem straight out of a sci-fi novel, but they are arriving full force in China as we speak. After years of patient investment, China is on the cusp of a robotics revolution. If embodied intelligence — think AI-powered robots that can navigate the real world — is the next frontier of AI, then China appears poised to dominate. Though the United States still has distinct advantages in software, advanced AI chips and foundational research, China leads in robot hardware, deployment and policy support. Last year, China installed nearly 300,000 robots in its factories, more than the rest of the world combined, according to a September report by the International Federation of Robotics . More than half were made domestically. The United States installed only 34,000 robots, with most of these imported from Japan and Europe. | The Washington Post ($)

Don't think that the migration of search traffic to AI chatbots is going to impact the traffic patterns to your website? Cloudflare measures their "Crawl-to-Refer Ratio," defined as the "ratio of HTML page crawl requests to HTML page referrals by platform. | Cloudflare

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Vehicle Connectivity

Just two years ago Volkswagen staff feared the death of their internal software unit CARIAD, with its struggles denounced by group chief executive Oliver Blume as “one of the most pressing issues” at Europe’s largest carmaker. But after a “complete reset” of its software strategy with new partners and a restructured internal team, the German group is betting it can be nimble enough to take on Tesla and newer players from China with affordable electric vehicles that will get smarter and better over time. The new strategy comes as software and computer systems displace the engine as the defining feature of modern vehicles — and a key source of revenues. | Financial Times ($)

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Aviation & Space

Airlines, airports and campaigners disagree profoundly on whether the best way to decarbonise aviation is through cleaner fuels, some form of carbon offsetting mechanism or reversing the growth in passenger numbers. But they agree on the need for a radical reinvention of government policy on aviation. While tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks can be eliminated by batteries or reduced by hybrid propulsion, the physics of flight make replacing energy-dense jet fuel difficult. The main solution proposed by airlines is SAF. In Europe this must be added to jet fuel to make up at least 2% of the final mix, a level that will rise to 22% in the UK and 70% in the EU and Switzerland by 2040. | Financial Times ($)

Great insights from Jackie DiMonte at Grid Capital. We launched the first Automotive Ventures fund in January of 2021. | Jackie DiMonte

Our Automotive Ventures "Car of the Week": a 1932 Auburn Twelve Dassault Douze Special. | Hyman Ltd.

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield

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Jim Roche from WarrCloud was on Car Dealership Guy. | Car Dealership Guy

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 Congratulations to Automotive Ventures portfolio company Privacy4Cars for being named among America's Top Small Businesses and recognized as this year's Global Stars honoree on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce CO—100: America's Top 100 Small Businesses list

. | Privacy4Cars

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Very cool to see Privacy4Cars featured in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce magazine. | U.S. Chamber of Commerce

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On this week's "Future of Automotive" segment on CBT News, we ask: If ChatGPT makes Google sneeze, will the rest of the industry catch a cold?  | CBT News ($)

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