General Motors says its software business keeps roughly 70 cents of every dollar it brings in. That's a rare level of profitability in the auto industry, as many car sales generate just four to 10 cents per sales dollar. The automaker's OnStar business — which offers GPS and cellular safety services — brought in about $800 million during the second quarter, up more than 20% from a year earlier. GM expects to add about 1 million OnStar subscribers this year, bringing the total close to 13 million. Super Cruise, GM's hands-free, eyes-on driving system, is growing even faster. GM added about 70,000 subscribers during the quarter and expects to end the year with more than 850,000. Revenue from the service increased about 70% from a year earlier. And a lot of drivers are sticking around after the free period ends. GM said between 30% and 40% of eligible owners continue paying after their included three-year Super Cruise subscription expires. "We do think we have tremendous levers, multiple levers of growth," GM CEO Mary Barra said on the call. "We definitely think there's a lot of opportunity at GM to grow, improve margins, and become less cyclical." | Business Insider ($)

Glenn Mercer asks: Are new vehicles becoming unaffordable? He calculates the historic trend of new-car monthly payments in the U.S. as a percentage of average disposable income.| Glenn Mercer

Ford introduced a car almost 70 years ago widely viewed as the greatest automotive flop of all time. Tesla’s Cybertruck may well be on its way to claiming that title. Ford’s Edsel, unveiled in 1957, was pitched as an entirely new kind of car, with an oval-shaped front grille likened to a horse collar. The company predicted it would sell 200,000 units in the model’s first year on the market. Ford ended up selling less than one-third of that target, and the Edsel’s design became the butt of jokes. Tesla started delivering its unusually angular Cybertruck in 2023. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk called it the company’s best product ever and estimated the carmaker might build more than 250,000 annually, depending on demand. Tesla sold less than one-sixth of that number in its first year, and the truck’s blocky looks became a punchline. Edsel sales dropped each year the model was on the market, and Ford discontinued the car in 1959. Cybertruck sales are off to an even worse start. Only 7,133 have been registered in the US this year through May, according to Mobility Global data provided to Bloomberg News. That count is buoyed by Musk’s other companies, with SpaceX building out a fleet of Cybertrucks. | Bloomberg ($)

It doesn’t sell more cars than any other automaker. It isn’t more profitable than the competition, either. And now, it has fewer models in its lineup than it has in years. But to Wall Street, Tesla is still on top. Tesla has held the title of the world’s most valuable automaker for several years. That remains the case in 2026, even as its sales have cooled off and as new players from China and beyond challenge its electric-vehicle dominance. Investors continue to bet on Tesla’s ability to deliver truly self-driving vehicles and humanoid robots, however, giving it a market capitalization equal to the combined value of the next 37 largest automakers as of Tuesday’s close. Tesla reports its second-quarter earnings Wednesday evening, and some analysts expect the stock price to rise even higher. Meanwhile, Tesla has said that its future lies beyond being a traditional car company—focusing instead on autonomous taxis, humanoid robots and AI. Investors and analysts have also speculated that the company could merge with SpaceX. Whether it will be forever ranked against the likes of General Motors and Toyota Motor Corporation remains to be seen. For now at least, the bulk of its revenue—more than 70% last year—is made the old-fashioned way: selling electric cars. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

When the federal government decided last month to ban electric-vehicle maker Polestar from selling future models in the U.S., the majority-Chinese-owned company wasn’t completely out of options. Polestar had a path to ask the U.S. Department of Commerce to reconsider, or it could have eventually taken the matter to court. Instead, Polestar is taking the exit ramp out of the U.S.—and American dealers and customers say they are left holding the bag. A spokesman for Polestar confirmed that the brand will not appeal the ban, which was issued over national-security concerns. “We will instead focus our investments on markets where we have a strong brand position and ability to achieve profitable growth, with a strong weighting towards Europe,” Polestar spokesman Mike Ofiara said. He added that the company had “significant dialogue” with U.S. authorities and didn’t believe an appeal would have succeeded. Polestar’s fledgling group of 32 U.S. auto dealers aren’t so resigned to the outcome, however. While most also sell cars from Volvo Cars, Polestar’s corporate cousin, those dealers say they invested significant capital into showrooms, sales training and more in hopes that the brand would be a contender in the highly competitive luxury auto space. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Lucid Motors pitched itself as a “post-luxury” pioneer as it laid out plans to list via Spac in 2021. The electric-car maker promised to deliver “California Cool” married to “Silicon Valley Tech”, alongside ambitious projections for profit and cash flow. Five years on, those financial forecasts have a dreamlike quality. Lucid had projected gross profit of $5.3bn for this year, alongside $1.5bn of free cash flow. Instead, the cost of producing vehicles still far exceeds what it can sell them for, and it will burn $3.6bn of cash after investments, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Unsurprisingly, its public performance has been a disaster, with shares down about 97 percent from when the reverse merger completed. Lucid is sub-scale and struggling to grow its way to profitability. Its debut vehicle, the Air, has drawn praise from critics, but commercial success is proving harder to attain. In a merciless market, it risks being outmanoeuvred by domestic rivals Tesla and Rivian in the U.S. and hemmed in elsewhere by fierce competition from Chinese manufacturers. The group does have a pathway to success, of sorts. It expects to turn free cash flow positive by the end of the decade: a new midsized car should increase volumes and cut unit costs. But it is expected to burn about $9bn of cash between 2026 and 2029, on S&P Capital IQ numbers. And such projections should already include the benefit from Uber’s commitment to purchase at least 35,000 vehicles for its nascent robotaxi fleet, a partnership due to begin operations later this year. | Financial Times ($)

Mavis Tire just bought Pep Boys from Carl Icahn’s holding company for $700 million—making one of the nation’s biggest tire retailers even bigger. But the more interesting thing isn’t that Mavis expanded. It’s who Mavis really is, and what it tells you about the shop on your corner. Earlier this month, we heard news that O'Reilly Auto Parts was looking to buy NAPA Auto Parts. (There are only four major auto parts retailers left in America, and two could merge.) There are six monolithic companies running almost every chain car repair place in the country. The automotive service industry, just like the aftermarket, is being rolled up by PE firms that keep the familiar regional signage precisely because the local brand equity is the asset. Mavis Tire is backed by BayPine/Goldman Sachs/TSG, Driven Brands Inc. is backed by Roark Capital, Jiffy Lube is now backed by Monomoy Capital Partners, Take 5 Oil Change is backed by Roark Capital, and Strickland Brothers 10 Minute Oil Change is backed by Roark Capital since 2024. | The Drive

More cars are auctioned online today than through in-person events. Prominent Bring a Trailer sellers say that transactions in the million-dollar range, like the bulk of sales on the site, are typically completed without the buyer ever having sat in or laid eyes on the car. A bidder can arrange for an independent inspection before the auction closes, but the basis for seriously considering any offering usually boils down to the description and photos. With habits developed during the restrictions of Covid’s darkest days, keyboard shopping is now an unexceptional routine. The vehicles that draw seven-figure bids largely reflect demographic changes and the shift in wealth distribution of recent years. | The New York Times ($)

No longer satisfied by regular parking garages, some drivers are upgrading their luxury vehicles’ homes. The status spot is now a “car condo,” which is essentially a pied-à-terre for wheels and the people who love them. It’s part garage and part club, and developments for these condos are now all over the country. If the car-condo business is booming, it’s because the car craze has never been hotter. According to a study released in December by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the U.S. luxury and exotic car market is expected to nearly double to up to $215 billion from $110 billion in the next decade. | The New York Times ($)

Surging interest in armored cars offers a window into American anxiety. Customers are concerned about carjackings, smash-and-grab thefts and road rage, which has become more prevalent in recent years, according to the Pew Research Center. But there is no doubt that, for some, an armored car is a status symbol — the ultimate luxury accessory for one-percenters who already own panic rooms, guard dogs and perhaps a desert bunker or two. Armoring packages generally start at around $50,000, in addition to the original cost of the vehicle itself. | The New York Times ($)

Ryan LaLone received a pardon this month for a conviction tied to tampering with diesel emissions systems. Just as importantly, so did his company. The twin reprieves from President Donald Trump enabled LaLone to clear his name and erase a $750,000 fine for his Michigan trucking-parts shop. They also made him the beneficiary of an unprecedented expansion of White House clemency power, a move tracing back to England’s King Charles II. Trump has granted clemency to nine companies, including LaLone’s Diesel Freak LLC, since the start of his second term. An outdoorsman and hunter who considers himself a friend of the environment, LaLone says he was flummoxed when dozens of armed federal agents showed up at his shop in November 2018 as part of a sprawling probe targeting diesel polluters. “We recycle, we compost, my wife was driving a Tesla on the day we were raided,” he said. “We love the environment.” Four and a half years later, LaLone and Diesel Freak were charged with conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act for deleting controls on vehicles that were meant to stem emissions. Many in his industry argue the controls are overly cumbersome and lead to costly and premature repairs for long-haul trucks, school buses and emergency vehicles. Environmental advocates say deleting emissions controls contributes to worsening air quality. | Bloomberg ($)

If drivers of gasoline cars refrained from speeding, they would collectively save an average of 57,000 metric tons of carbon emissions every day in the United States—while spending less than a minute more behind the wheel, a new study reveals. “We are presenting a somewhat obvious, but impactful, way to reduce energy and emissions that doesn’t require a new vehicle or new technology, just backing off the accelerator pedal,” says study team member William Northro, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota. The analysis proceeds from a simple and well-known proposition: driving fast is disproportionately energy intensive, as drag force increases exponentially with speed and the engine burns more and more fuel. “That’s physics,” Northrop says. But no one had ever added up the impact at a national scale before. | Anthropocene

Just three automakers control the majority of one of the hottest segments in the U.S. car market — and none of them are American companies. In the first half of 2026, sales of hybrid cars — not long ago considered a bridge to fully electric vehicles — have risen nearly 20% year over year to a record market share of 15.4%, according to the Center for Automotive Research, almost three times the share of pure EVs. It has been a boon to the few automakers that invested heavily in the hybrid vehicle market. Toyota, Hyundai and Honda together control 86% of it, according to automotive market analysis firm Baum Associates Ltd. | CNBC

The U.S. ‌Senate Commerce Committee approved legislation to toughen a U.S. government ban on Chinese automakers entering the American market that could bar German automaker Mercedes-Benz from selling vehicles in the United States. Senator Ted Cruz, the committee chair and a Texas Republican, warned the bill's provision ​that would ban companies with more than 15% ownership by Chinese entities would bar Mercedes-Benz from selling vehicles ​in the United States because of its nearly 20% passive Chinese investment. He said the bill ⁠required changes before becoming law. Senator Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, said Mercedes-Benz would have until 2030 to comply and could ​get waivers if needed from the ownership requirement. Cruz said General Motors was pushing for the provision to get Mercedes-Benz out ​of the market and make its Cadillac brand more competitive. He said "we would never consider" banning Mercedes-Benz sales in the United States. | Reuters ($)

There’s plenty of motion in government right now to lock out vehicles with China ties, either through investment or tech, out of the U.S. market. Last week, a Senate committee approved a bill to ban manufacturers that are more than 15% owned by Chinese entities. Meanwhile, a different measure seeks to eliminate components made in China from cars sold here. That’s the reason why Polestar is packing up and leaving. Unfortunately, it figures to make the cars that remain even more expensive. A new report from Reuters explores the efforts at one automotive electronics startup, based in Ohio, to scale up quickly enough to fill the demand that’s sure to be coming its way when carmakers can’t turn to China for as many parts. They’re called Eagle Wireless, and companies like them are going to become increasingly valuable if the government holds to its plans to cut out certain China-built hardware from U.S.-sold cars beginning in 2030. (A separate ban on software, which comes into effect next year, is the reason for Polestar’s exit and Volvo Cars’s waiver.) Eagle recognizes the opportunity facing it, but there’s plenty of work to do—not simply to scale up manufacturing, but also, to reach some semblance of cost parity. Per the company, its modules still cost 5% to 15% more than the equivalent parts from China. The components that the law will target mostly pertain to communications and location tracking. One former Detroit auto executive told Reuters, “My jaw dropped when I looked at the price increase” when comparing the invoice for an ADAS system produced outside China with one imported from China. | The Drive

The connected-vehicle rules were adopted in January 2025 under U.S. President Joe Biden, based on national security concerns around ​data privacy, and have been kept in place under the Trump administration. They prohibit the use of Chinese connectivity software starting in the 2027 model year, and hardware from model-year 2030. Though those deadlines may seem far off, automakers plan ​vehicle programs years in advance, meaning compliant suppliers must be locked in now. Amid heightened geopolitical tensions and unpredictable trade wars, auto companies are in the middle of a disruptive uncoupling from China, ⁠on everything from inexpensive components to battery materials and essential rare earth minerals. Industry concerns around complying with the regulations were heightened after electric-vehicle maker Polestar, which is majority owned by China’s GEELY Holding, was banned last month from new-vehicle sales in ​the U.S. under the rule. | Reuters ($)

China-based electric vehicle and technology startup Xpeng is prepared to enter the lucrative U.S. market when the political situation allows. That’s the message from its billionaire CEO and co-founder, Xiaopeng He, who spoke to WardsAuto during the European launch of the brand’s first global electric vehicle, the L03 compact coupe SUV. He fully accepts the current U.S. position with regard to imports from China, but should the political situation change, the CEO said that Xpeng is happy to expand into the market. “Well, I think that if the U.S. policy allows for companies like us to stay or enter the market and build factories there, definitely we’ll embrace that decision,” He told WardsAuto in an interview. | Wards Auto

Barely two years after launching its car business, China’s largest smartphone maker Xiaomi Technology is seeking to become one of Europe’s top five premium brands. The company has chosen Germany, one of the region’s most fiercely competitive markets, to launch in Europe next year. Looking to crack the region’s premium market by 2030, it has recruited engineers and designers from BMW, Porsche and Tesla. The new wave of China’s tech-led EV companies comes as the country’s leading carmakers, led by BYD, are fast becoming household names globally in a space of just two years. With a wide range of offerings covering EVs, plug-in hybrids and even petrol engine models, the Chinese brands have together grabbed a 9 percent share of new car sales in Europe and 15 percent in the UK during the first six months of the year. In May alone, one in 10 new vehicles sold in Europe was Chinese for the first time. Consultancy AlixPartners estimates that the Chinese share in the EU could rise to 16 percent by 2030 as competition increases with the arrival of Xiaomi and other newer brands. That would almost be on a par with the combined forecast share of the Japanese and Korean brands. | Financial Times ($)

Mexican sales of Chinese-brand vehicles jumped nearly 30% in the first six months of the year despite steep ‌tariffs imposed in January that were intended to slow the rise of Asian imports, according to a sales report obtained by Reuters. The undated report from the Mexican Association of Automobile Distributors showed Chinese brands accounted for 17% of new vehicle sales in Mexico during the first half of the year, up from ​14% a year earlier, with sales climbing to 137,525 from 107,712. Chinese brands’ rapid expansion in Mexico has transformed the country’s auto ​market and alarmed U.S. officials, who fear the country could become a springboard for Chinese companies seeking ⁠to enter the U.S. and upend an industry that contributes $1.2 trillion to the economy annually. | Reuters ($)

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is now demanding a Tesla internal document titled “Radar Saves Us” as part of its investigation into “Full Self-Driving” crashes in low-visibility conditions. The request is buried in a new 24-part information demand sent to Tesla on July 2, and it points the probe straight at the decision that started all of this: Tesla removing radar from its cars. The investigation covers roughly 3.2 million Tesla vehicles that have ever run FSD in the US. It’s tied to nine crashes where FSD was engaged in reduced visibility, including one fatality and one injury. The conditions are always the same: sun glare, fog, and airborne dust degrading the cameras that FSD relies on entirely. Request No. 4 is the one that jumps off the page. NHTSA says Tesla submitted an internal document titled “Radar Saves Us” in response to the earlier preliminary investigation, PE24031-01. The agency now wants everything around it: all internal communications, technical documentation, test records, and any data the document was built from. Here’s how ODI describes why it wants the file: This document appears particularly relevant to related design changes to the degradation detection system and Tesla’s understanding of the limitations imposed by a vision-only OEDR system and how they relate to the reduced visibility conditions that the Subject Vehicles encountered in each of the nine (9) countable crashes. | Electrek

We demand machines that function flawlessly, while accepting human-caused deaths and injuries as the cost of our daily travel. That double standard allows people to die by slowing the adoption of things that would save them. Nearly every driver believes they are above average. Psychologists call this illusory superiority, a hardwired tendency that shows up across countries and decades. We measure the safety of new technology against an idealized version of ourselves, so the evidence must be better than the driver we imagine ourselves to be. The autonomous vehicle industry’s biggest adoption problem is that strong safety data hasn’t led to more public trust. Making a safer machine feel safe is a different discipline. Healthcare spent 30 years learning to manage the gap between being safe and feeling safe. That objective performance and how people perceive it are different problems; improving one doesn’t necessarily improve the other. But in the areas where these autonomous vehicles operate, they really are safer. Across more than 220 million miles of driving, Waymo’s vehicles have been involved in 94% fewer crashes that cause serious injury or worse than human drivers on the same roads. Pedestrian injuries are down 93%, cyclist crashes 84% and intersection crashes, among the deadliest we manage in the trauma bay, 96%. These are the company’s own figures, but analyses in peer-reviewed journals have reached similar conclusions. If the results hold as deployment scales (and, with each release, the data have grown more robust), the population-level health effect could rival those of seat belts or the decline in smoking. | Noema

Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries. The evidence is not fully independent, but it is unusually transparent, large‑scale evidence. So with thousands of lives annually in the balance who is against autonomous vehicles (AVs)? Trial lawyers. Remarkably the trial lawyers saw the writing on the wall very early and the have been lobbying against AVs for nearly a decade! The American Association for Justice, the trial lawyers’ lobby, has been a prominent opponent to AV legislation. (They have been joined by Democrats worried about labor and demanding that heavy trucks be excluded). The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents–Annual U.S. auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220B and trial lawyers are very eager to retain the right to sue car manufacturers for product liability. Waymo vehicles are already insured at $5 million liability coverage per vehicle, far higher levels than most human drivers are covered. | Marginal Revolution

How would for-hire Autonomous Vehicles impact New York City? As it stands, replacing a high-volume for-hire vehicle in New York City with a robotaxi would increase vehicle miles traveled and congestion. Waymo vehicles deadhead (drive empty, with no passenger in the car) more than New York City’s high-volume for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft). For every mile with a passenger, a Waymo vehicle in California logs 14.8% more empty driving miles than a New York City Uber or Lyft. New York City’s constrained parking supply would likely dramatically increase Waymo’s deadheading if deployed in the city, leading to more traffic and wear on the streets. Waymo vehicles spend over half their waiting time parked in California. Every 1% decrease in parked time would result in a 1.5% increase in deadheading; for example, if Waymo vehicles were only able to park 33% of the time while waiting for a ride in California, their deadheading would increase by 37%. | OpenPlans

There's an increasingly vocal group of Silicon Valley founders, investors and national security experts who see autonomous weapons not as the nightmarish killer robots of science fiction, but as a vital new frontier in military technology. Robots, in their view, could hone the military’s precision in combat, protecting civilians and friendly troops alike, and enable the United States to deter foreign adversaries. The rapidly improving capabilities of artificial intelligence — coupled with a push by the Trump administration to deploy new technology at the Pentagon — have made the once theoretical debate increasingly urgent. The military has boasted about how it has used AI tools to dramatically increase the pace of its strikes in Iran, and it already employs highly automated systems to defend against missile attacks. The next step would be drones and robots that are initially activated by a human but that would then be free to pick and attack individual targets. The United States Senate is considering a sweeping national security bill that would encourage the use of autonomous military systems, while trying to impose guardrails on the technology. The United States Department of War, under an order from President Donald Trump, is in the midst of updating its policies on how to deploy AI-powered weapons that can kill. | The Washington Post ($)

Elon Musk, in his telling, is a modern-day Cassandra—better than most at predicting the future, but doomed to be disbelieved. “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless. The main topic of conversation was AI. It is a technology, he says, that can move him from “exhilaration to terror” in a single day. For now, his “philosophical conclusion” is to “look on the bright side”. It is a choice that conveniently serves his own interests. Mr Musk believes that AI systems and robots will eventually handle most digital and physical jobs, rendering work by humans “optional”. To that end, xAI (now called SpaceXAI) is developing systems to perform cognitive tasks such as software programming while Tesla is manufacturing humanoids. Mr Musk plans to power the whole AI caboodle with data centres in space. Without jobs, he suggests there may need to be large-scale wealth redistribution to create “universal high income” for humans. But although the world’s richest man says he is fine to pay “trillions in tax”, he also argues that money will be irrelevant a decade from now. Thus he argues that governments should simply “issue people cheques”, because amid an infinite supply of goods and services produced by machines, deflation will be a bigger problem than inflation. Musk wonders if it all makes sense. At times, he says, he believes in a theory in which the universe is a computer simulation created by aliens. “The things I’m doing are so preposterous that it’s hard to believe they’re real.” | The Economist ($)

Artificial intelligence poses a double challenge to the human mind. Not only will the most advanced models soon be able to think better than people, but AI has consequences for humanity which are so uncertain, so potentially vast and are approaching at such a rapid pace that even the best brains flinch. An example is Elon Musk. The engineer and entrepreneur sets out two paradoxes and one contradiction. The first paradox is that one of the world’s most power-hungry tycoons is enthusiastically helping create a technology that he says will render him—and all other human beings—powerless after as little as five years. The second is that the world’s richest man says he is preparing for a world of infinite abundance, where money, including his $750bn fortune, no longer matters. And the contradiction is that, despite these stated beliefs, Mr Musk continues to act as if they were not true. Mr Musk is divisive. His political views, disseminated to his 240m followers on X, strike many as plain-speaking and strike many more, including The Economist, as plainly bigoted. By his own admission, his attempt to use DOGE to scythe through the federal bureaucracy went wrong. But he is also one of a handful of men who are pioneering AI and who thereby have an outsize influence on its trajectory. When he speaks, he reflects the debates they are having. His data centres in space could power AI’s future. For all his political polemics, he has a record of being right about technology in fields such as electric cars, rockets and satellite communications that confounded other engineers and entrepreneurs. For those reasons, his claims about AI repay examination. Unfortunately, such an exercise only underlines how ill-prepared the world is for a technology that may soon throw everything up in the air. | The Economist ($)

People are spending more time with Google than ever. Users are writing queries three times as long as the keyword-heavy questions they asked of traditional searches. People are spending one to nine more minutes in AI Mode than on traditional Google searches. In about 75 percent of sessions, users never left AI Mode for the web. For publishers, businesses, banks and others that relied on Google to funnel its billions of users to their websites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company has increasingly incorporated A.I. into search. Google’s users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its A.I.-generated answers, which means fewer people are coming to their websites and search traffic has dropped. | The New York Times ($)

U.S. Department of Transportation is doubling down on its campaign against "DEI bike lanes," as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called them in a social media post earlier this month. The Federal Highway Administration has quietly stripped bike lanes, speed cameras and several other best practices from a list of "Proven Safety Countermeasures," as they're known, that have been shown to reduce crashes and save lives. The FHWA says the changes to its website, which have not been previously reported, are part of a broader review of safety countermeasures to ensure they align with current DOT policies and the administration's priorities. But critics say the Trump administration is undermining safety strategies that have already been proven to work. | NPR

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in January that he intends to make the military “an ‘A.I. first’ warfighting force across all domains.” Throughout the Pentagon, Uncle Sam-style recruitment posters with Mr. Hegseth’s likeness declaring “I want YOU to use A.I.” are plastered on the walls. His department has requested $54.6 billion in next year’s budget for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG, a body recently set up to coordinate all autonomous weapons programs across U.S. forces. The United States isn’t alone in this pursuit. Around the world, and particularly in China and Russia, an arms race is emerging to mass-produce autonomous, A.I.-operated war machines. President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared in 2017 that whoever leads in A.I. “will become the ruler of the world.” President Xi Jinping of China has poured billions of dollars into A.I. development for the country’s military. Prototypes of smaller, rudimentary A.I.-assisted weapons have already been reported in action in Ukraine, Libya, Azerbaijan and Gaza. In a few years, we could see swarms of self-guiding robots not only in the skies, but also at sea and on the ground. As the world’s militaries race to weaponize artificial intelligence, the international community has failed to establish limits on its use. The United Nations has spent a decade deliberating how to restrict autonomous weapons — a rare instance of anticipating a global threat before it arrives. Yet these efforts have yielded no binding rules or codes of conduct. Instead, global leaders are accelerating toward an era of automated warfare. The fear of body bags has been one of the greatest deterrents to conflict in history. Mass-produced, expendable robots do not carry the human or financial costs that have tempered the urge to go to war for centuries. | The New York Times ($)

Aviation accounts for around 2.5% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, although overall its contribution to climate change is reckoned to be greater, since high-flying jets produce other heat-trapping emissions, such as nitrogen oxides. These are proving particularly tough to clean up. As a consequence, the aviation industry’s pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 will probably be missed. Battery-powered aircraft will reduce emission levels only slightly, for they have limited range. Better batteries are also in the pipeline so the range of electric planes will increase over time. Yet it is unlikely batteries will ever be powerful enough, let alone light enough, to fly large numbers of passengers any great distance. Moreover, batteries are a deadweight, meaning that, unlike a combustion-engine aircraft, an electric plane does not benefit from getting lighter as fuel is burnt. And commercial aircraft are required to have enough fuel to circle if a runway is unavailable or to divert to another airport, which might be a long way off. Batteries powerful enough to run even a small airliner for several hours, with sufficient reserve for emergencies, would be so heavy that few, if any, passengers could be carried. Hence the industry is increasingly looking at hybrids, which combine an electric motor and a combustion engine. Most passenger planes are powered by gas turbines, working either as jets or as turboprops, in which the turbines turn propellers. The first such hybrids are likely to be turboprops operating regional routes. | The Economist ($)

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