The line “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is widely attributed to Mark Twain, although he apparently never said it.

Either way, it feels appropriate today.

We’ve seen versions of this movie before: the railroad mania of the 19th century, the electrification boom of the early 20th century, the automobile, and, more recently, the dot-com bubble.

Each began with a genuinely transformative technology. Each attracted enormous amounts of capital. Each inspired predictions that the world was about to change forever.

And each produced a bubble.

It may be fashionable to compare today’s extraordinary investment in artificial intelligence with these earlier technological revolutions. There is good reason to do so. The amount of capital flowing into AI infrastructure is already enormous, measured in hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and it continues to grow. Data centers, GPUs, power generation, transmission capacity and networking infrastructure are being built at a pace that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

In that sense, AI looks remarkably familiar.

But it is also markedly different.

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Until next week,

Steve Greenfield
General Partner
Automotive Ventures

For 50 years, legacy automakers have survived every downturn the same way: cut costs, build better vehicles and fight for market share. That playbook just stopped working. The industry is trying to adapt to the fastest-changing consumer market it has ever faced. In the largest economies, car sales are flat, powertrains are shifting and affordability has become a serious problem. Costs are rising on every front, from labor and regulatory compliance to raw materials, just as a new wave of global competition arrives. Automakers have saturated markets with models and complexity, and incentive spending is climbing once again. Walls and trade protection may buy time, but they do not create value. The automakers that thrive will be the ones that reallocate capital toward what comes next and execute faster than their competitors. Legacy automakers are truly at a crossroads. The decisions, actions and execution of today will determine who thrives, who survives and who fails. | Automotive News ($)

Most automotive professionals expect software-defined vehicles to become a major cyberattack target within three years, as automakers consolidate functions onto central computers, according to a survey by software supplier QNX. In addition, 47 percent of respondents cited cybersecurity vulnerabilities as one of the biggest threats to SDV rollouts over the next five to 10 years, up from 44 percent in 2025. The global automotive cybersecurity market is projected to reach $8.8 billion in 2026 and between $17 billion and $24 billion by the early- to mid-2030s, according to Fortune Business Insights. Security concerns are growing because automakers are moving to centralized computing architectures, according to QNX, a BlackBerry division that supplies software for digital cockpits, advanced driver-assistance systems and body-control systems to automakers including Audi, GM, and Mercedes-Benz. | Automotive News ($)

Headlights have unquestionably gotten brighter in the past two decades, driven in part by the tiny but powerful LEDs that have mostly replaced halogen bulbs. The whiter and bluer light of LEDs feels harsher. And the soaring popularity of trucks and SUVs means headlights are more likely to be mounted higher off the ground, putting the offending light right at driver-eye level. It forces automakers to balance conflicting safety goals — giving drivers enough light to see without blinding others. Vehicles that get it wrong face potential consequences on two fronts: the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety / Highway Loss Data Institute can ding them in its safety ratings, while regulators can order them to dial it back. But pretty much everyone seems to think it’s a problem. When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NHTSA first solicited public input about headlamp glare back in 2001, it was flooded with more comments than it had ever received on any other safety concern to that point. Earlier this year, a AAA survey reported 6 in 10 drivers described glare after dark as a problem, with almost three-quarters of them saying it’d worsened over the past decade. | The Washington Post ($)

One of the most famous Porsches in the world is a race car painted in a psychedelic swirl of purples and greens. Known as the “Hippie Car,” the sleek, long-tailed Porsche 917LH stunned the racing world in 1970 by beating juggernaut Ferrari at the famed Le Mans race in France. It finished second behind another 917 on that torrentially rainy day, as captured in Steve McQueen’s iconic racing movie, Le Mans. Porsche says the Hippie Car raced again in 1971 in orange-and-blue colors, clocking 240 miles per hour, a record at the time. That makes the vehicle an ultra-rare artifact—with a market value potentially as high as the $25 million record currently held by another 917K. These days, masterpieces of motorsports history are selling for Pablo Picasso prices. Only now, two people own what appears to be the same Hippie Car.There’s a purple-and-green Porsche at the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum in Philadelphia. A second is owned by Frank Sytner, a former car dealer and race car driver who bought it in 2024 from another onetime race car driver in Brazil, who’d had it for decades. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

A few decades ago, a driver’s license was just about the most exciting thing you could offer a teenager. That little card offered a tantalizing taste of freedom. Passing the road test was a rite of passage for young adults eager to live life on their own terms; failing was a plot point in coming-of-age movies like “License to Drive” (1988, starring Coreys Haim and Feldman) and “Clueless” (1995). Just over a quarter of American 16-year-olds had their driver’s licenses in 2024, a 20-point drop from the early 1980s, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, more than 80 percent of teenagers reported having their licenses by the end of high school, according to data from Monitoring the Future, a national survey of young people conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan. Today, that figure has fallen to 57 percent. | The New York Times ($)

The global market for electric vehicles continues to grow, with a notable exception: the U.S. While vehicles with internal combustion engines remain a lucrative market, global trends suggest the U.S. and its manufacturers may be left behind. More than half of new vehicles sold in China last year were battery-electric or plug-in hybrids, compared with just 10 percent in the U.S., according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Around the world, governments are pursuing disparate regulatory and incentive strategies, and consumers want different types of vehicles. The strategies vary — China has built significant demand through industrial policy and subsidies, while Europe has relied on more measured regulatory boosts. Emerging markets are embracing EVs in part because of limited access to fossil fuels. But across the globe, the U.S. appears to be the odd one out. Is the U.S. “going to become a small, lucrative market with specialty vehicles, or are we going to be able to compete in the scale business of autos worldwide?” said Mike Murphy, the founder of EVs for All America, a group trying to eliminate the partisan divide over EVs. “That future is very uncertain.” | Automotive News ($)

A brutal season has arrived in China’s car market, among the most troubled in the world. Through September, Chinese consumers have bought about 22% fewer passenger vehicles this year than in the same period last year. This week, the head of a major Chinese car-industry group said sales for the full year would likely reach only 18.5 million vehicles, the worst performance since 2014. In China, “there’s so many competitors, there’s a lot of sorting that’s going to happen, needs to happen for long-term viability,” said Mary Barra, the chief executive of General Motors, in a call with Wall Street analysts in July. The needed shakeout, however, isn’t happening yet in a country known globally for its advances in EV technology. The growth model that powered the industry’s swift rise is making it hard to hit the brakes now that times have turned bad, leaving the industry filled with companies in various states of distress. For decades, local governments teamed up with the private sector to invest in the car industry. When EVs became a national priority in the last decade, Chinese cities—each hoping to become the Detroit of the EV era—poured billions of government dollars into local champions. The number of Chinese EV brands selling at least one product rose to a record 143 at the end of 2025, according to a tally by management consultant AlixPartners. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Passenger vehicle sales in China will drop 22 percent to 18.5 million in 2026, marking the steepest-ever downturn for the world’s biggest auto market and breaking its five-year growth streak, the China Passenger Car Association forecast on Oct. 26. The group expects only a modest 2 percent rebound in 2027. Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the trade group, attributed the plunge to multiple “short-term” factors, including tightened government subsidies, a new tax on electrified vehicles, higher oil prices and increased vehicle production costs. China’s new-car market has been shrinking at a double-digit pace since the beginning of this year, with January-September volume plunging 22 percent from a year earlier to around 13.3 million, according to the China Passenger Car Association. More stringent government subsidies have impacted demand. The government has maintained maximum subsidies at 2025 levels, but this year it tied the subsidies to vehicle prices. The pricier the replacement vehicle, the higher the subsidies. The price-tiered structure has hurt demand for affordable vehicles, Cui said. | Automotive News ($)

China’s car industry earned a profit margin of just 1.4% in September, the lowest in nearly four years, as a prolonged price war and rising material costs squeezed manufacturers, according to official data. Profit at auto manufacturers fell 22.8% from a year earlier in the first nine months of 2026, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday. It was among the weakest performances of any major industry, even as profit across all large industrial companies rose 15.5%. The sector’s margin fell to 3.3% for the period, according to an analysis of the NBS data by Cui Dongshu, Secretary General of the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). “Costs keep rising faster than revenue,” Cui wrote, describing a typical case of the industry growing sales without growing profit. | Electric Vehicles

About half of auto executives said in a recent survey that six of the top 10 automotive manufacturers will be headquartered in China in 2035, a forecast that would reshape the global auto industry. KPMG surveyed 775 senior automotive executives around the world, with 48 percent saying the majority of leading automakers would be based in China in less than 10 years. Twenty-four percent said that outcome was unlikely. The prediction relies on companies maintaining Chinese government support and supply chain control, even as China’s domestic auto market shrinks and it remains barred from the U.S. And it would require a reshuffling of the industry’s world order. Already, BYD and Geely ranked among the top 10 automakers by global sales in 2025, according to data from auto industry analyst Felipe Munoz. Four additional Chinese automakers will have to unseat Suzuki, Honda, Fordy, GM, Stellantis, Hyundai, Volkswagen or Toyota to make the top 10. | Automotive News ($)

BYD now has more than 1.02 million employees, according to chairman Wang Chuanfu. That’s more people than Toyota, GM, Ford, and Tesla employ combined. And it’s a big jump from the start of the year. BYD reported about 869,600 employees at the end of 2025, which means the Chinese automaker has added roughly 150,000 people in 10 months while its vehicle sales are down. Roughly 960,000 of BYD’s people work in China and about 60,000 work abroad. Up to 120,000 of them are R&D engineers, according to Wang, who shared the figures on stage Wednesday at the China Society of Automotive Engineers’ (CSAE) 33rd annual conference. Their work covers battery cells, motors, electronic controls, and semiconductors. Wang credits vertical integration for that scale. In his telling, keeping batteries, chips, and motors in-house is what took BYD from a battery maker founded in 1994 to the world’s top-selling new energy vehicle brand several years running. He called the company’s rise a microcosm of China’s auto industry going from follower to leader. | Electrek

Mexico has become a showroom for the electric cars you can’t buy in the United States. Amid aging fleets of American Chevys and Fords is a growing stream of sleek new vehicles from Chinese EV brands you’ve never heard of, such as Zeekr, JAC and BYD. A wall of tariffs, trade barriers and software restrictions effectively bans Chinese EVs from entering the U.S. Chinese branded vehicles have gone from less than 1 percent to 15 percent market share in five years, as well as about 90 percent of all EVs. That’s fast eroding America’s market in its backyard, as well as abroad, where the U.S. has seen its share fall or stagnate in Asia, Europe and Latin America. Even at home, the Big Three now command less than 40 percent of the auto market, down from 92 percent in 1965. Chinese cars can’t be kept outside the U.S. forever, argues Clifford Winston, an economist and fellow at The Brookings Institution who specializes in transportation. He predicts Chinese vehicles — or the technology inside them — will find their way into the American market within years, because the center of innovation of the global auto market has moved to China. | The Washington Post ($)

Volkswagen Group could turn to software developed in China for many of its future European cars, potentially saving billions of euros in development costs. According to a report from Manager Magazin, Thomas Schäfer, head of the core brand, wants to expand the use of the group's China-developed electrical and electronic architecture across much of its European lineup, potentially replacing technology planned with American partner Rivian. The proposal would mark a major shift in the company’s software strategy. Until now, the group has largely planned to use different architectures by market, with technology developed in China intended primarily for local vehicles and software from its global R&D centers earmarked for other regions. | Motor1

Recently, there has been increased discussion of the risks of automation complacency for increasingly capable Level 2++ automated driving features. A significant difficulty in reasoning about the effect of autonomy failure on safety is that people have trouble paying attention to generally capable automation. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the probability of a supervisor failure is likely to increase as the autonomy failure rate decreases from left to right along the horizontal axis of Figure 1. In other words, the less often autonomy fails, the less reliable supervisor intervention becomes due to automation complacency. The most dangerous operational region will be in the middle, where the autonomy is failing often enough to present a significantly elevated risk, but not often enough to keep the supervisor alert and engaged. | Phil Koopman

General Motors Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson, who ran Tesla’s Autopilot program in 2015 and 2016, says dropping radar for a camera-only self-driving system is “a weird religious stance that ignores physics.” It’s the bluntest rebuke of Tesla’s vision-only bet yet from someone who helped build the original Autopilot. And it lands while Tesla is pushing camera-only Cybercabs into driverless service in Austin. Asked whether GM could eventually move to a vision-only approach like Tesla’s, he didn’t leave much room for interpretation. “If you scale back to vision-only, physics suggests you’ll be in trouble in certain situations,” Anderson said. He added that radar is so cheap that removing it makes no sense, and that “cameras can’t see through dense fog or measure instantaneous velocity like radar can.” | Electrek

Toyota is setting its sights on becoming a global robotics powerhouse, as the world’s largest car manufacturer modernises production lines to compete with China and diversify beyond the auto industry. Its top executives have been drumming up global investor interest for its robotics strategy, including plans to deploy 400,000 robots as part of a $6.4bn annual investment plan to automate factories and establish a dedicated robotics team under the leadership of its chief production officer. Investor buzz is growing at the mounting evidence that Toyota is using two decades of robotics research and development to commercialise intelligent robots and compete with Tesla, Xpeng and Hyundai. | Financial Times ($)

Meta Platforms has built a prototype humanoid with Chinese robotics company Fourier and is already working on a second version, as the social media giant steps up efforts to develop robots for people’s homes, according to people familiar with the initiative. Meta and Fourier built the roughly 106-pound humanoid, known internally as Max, in just three months. The goal was to help Meta develop a more polished future product at its robotics arm that it could eventually release as a product, one of the people said, adding that no launch target had been set. While it’s still a relatively early step, the prototype represents the most concrete progress in Meta’s robotics aspirations since it launched Meta Robotics Studio early last year and tapped the former chief executive of General Motors' autonomous vehicle unit, Cruise, to run it. Meta has also focused on the software side of robotics, in May acquiring Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a startup that developed AI models for training robots to understand and adapt to human behavior in different environments. Meta’s ambition to develop consumer robots that can help with housework and everyday tasks has taken on new urgency with the launch of the company’s consumer-focused AI agent, Muse. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth has described humanoid robots internally as a physical embodiment of Muse, the knowledgeable people said. | The Information ($)

Whether A.I.-powered robots can live up to their promise remains unclear. Companies need to teach them to perform complex tasks, a challenge that requires the collection of vast amounts of data. After rolling out 2.3 million industrial robots, almost half the global fleet, China is moving into the next frontier. Unlike the mostly one-armed machines that have been used for decades to perform repetitive tasks, the next generation of robots is expected to see, hear, feel and — most important — learn. | The New York Times ($)

A wave of AI-enabled hacking is advancing across the world, triggering alarm inside national governments as well as multinational companies. The technology can also help fix software bugs and enable defenders to move more quickly, but executives at AI and cybersecurity companies warn that they expect it to help malicious hackers more in the short term. Last month, the U.S. National Security Agency advised websites to shut down if they could not immediately patch a major security hole in PHP, a programming language used by an estimated 70 percent of websites, discovered by a research firm using AI tools. “Basically any pedestrian, non-hacker can take these frameworks and start leveraging them to go after different targets,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. The company has tracked an increase in the speed with which cyberattacks can move once inside a target’s networks, as seasoned hackers and rank amateurs alike get a boost from AI tools. “Anyone can be a super-hacker now,” Meyers said. Concern began to spread earlier this year among cybersecurity experts and U.S. national security officials that the technology could trigger a chaotic era of widespread computer security breaches.| The Washington Post ($)

The digital publishing industry has relied on Google for a very long time. Many outlets spent time and money optimizing their webpages to show up at the top of the search engine, with the goal of getting readers to click on their articles or discover their websites for the first time. For years, the relationship between Google and publishers was largely reciprocal; online publishers filled out Google’s search index with content, while Google supplied publications with exposure and traffic. But that relationship has changed. The launch of Google’s AI search features — coupled with changes to the way it ranks search results — has made it harder for publishers to survive on traffic from Google alone. In 2024, Google rolled out AI Overviews, a feature that slots an AI-generated search result summarizing pages from across the web at the very top of Google Search, with links to sources its AI system determines to be the most useful placed below the summary. Instead of vying for clicks on the first page of Search, publishers became beholden to an AI system that regurgitates results, with no guarantee that users will actually click on the source of that information. | The Verge ($)

Reddit has long attracted millions of users to its site through Google, with many even appending the word “Reddit” to their search queries for better answers. But as search traffic dries up amid the shift to AI-powered search, Reddit is rethinking its relationship with the open internet. In its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the company announced it’s transitioning to a primarily “logged-in experience.” The move is designed to protect its data from AI scraping, allowing the company to instead forge lucrative licensing deals with model providers. But just as important, such a shift could help Reddit to increase its revenue even as it faces daily active user declines in its largest market, the U.S. The company is not alone in seeing such declines; the shift to an AI-centered web has impacted most websites and publishers by now, leading to fewer click-throughs, as AI summaries provide answers that don’t require website visits and Google’s traditional “ten blue links” have reduced relevance. (The change is now even impacting Google’s bottom line, its earnings revealed.) | TechCrunch ($)

For as long as there have been ads on the internet, marketing has targeted human eyeballs. But as AI agents crowd onto the web, advertisers and publishers are beginning to deliver ads only AI can see, sparking consternation among some of the agents’ developers, who fear marketers could try to sway agents to take actions without their users’ knowledge. The first publisher to experiment with these types of invisible ads was venerable TIME magazine, which continues to generate a significant portion of its revenue from ads on Time.com. Those ads—for Ally Bank and Project Management Institute, a trade group for project managers—first showed up online in August and were developed in a partnership with Mobian, a New York–based ad tech startup. The ads were designed to give agents information about the institute’s expertise in project management and Ally Bank’s online banking services and ATM network. | The Information ($)

Amazon has long been the first stop for many online shoppers, but Meta Platforms just built a new one. In September, the social-media company behind Instagram rolled out its personal AI agent, dubbed Muse. The animated personal shopper that can also complete tasks like booking travel and making budgets has exploded in popularity. More than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada set up Muse agents in its first month and a half, the company said. Muse is also a growing nuisance for Amazon, the largest company in the U.S. by annual revenue and its second-largest retailer. The threat lies in Muse’s potential to undermine one of Amazon’s most lucrative businesses: advertising. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

There are a handful of truly monumental collective achievements in our history: Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza, and perhaps, if we’re being generous, the Roman aqueducts. Modern global civilization has made one contribution to this eternal pantheon. It is not the moon landing. It is the semiconductor supply chain. This strikes almost all of us as ridiculous. A microchip is a bauble of metal and refined sand. It doesn’t appear to have epic proportions. Upon close examination, however, the epic proportions are there in miniature. Imagine a perfect replica of a sprawling metropolis, a Tokyo or a São Paulo, engraved at atomic dimensions on a tile the size of a fingernail. The urban details would be faithfully rendered to the last golf ball or egg—each reduced to approximately the bulk of a hemoglobin molecule, or the distance grown by a human fingernail every five seconds. If a chip were merely a sculpture, this chiselling would represent a considerable achievement. But a chip is, in fact, a functional city for a population of busy electrons. They buzz about, flying our airplanes, powering the stock market, and, increasingly, thinking on our behalf. Unlike rockets, which are produced in relatively meagre quantities, microchips are stamped out by the billion. This is the most impressive thing about them. Or, maybe, about us. Microchips are mass-produced, like any tchotchke, at factories. Most of these factories, and the best of them, were once situated in the United States. By the nineteen-eighties, that began to change. American semiconductor firms were threatened by the emergence of Japanese rivals. Our domestic industry petitioned the government to intervene. Economists shrugged. The consensus at the time was in favor of free trade. If a good could be inexpensively produced elsewhere, everyone benefitted. American consumers deserved bargains on digital watches, pocket calculators, and primitive computers. The most legendary, if apocryphal, expression of this attitude was credited to a George H. W. Bush Administration factotum: “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference? They’re all chips.” | The New Yorker ($)

Wall Street placed a multitrillion-dollar bet on artificial intelligence. Some investors are desperate to take the other side. The trade has proved a lasting winner up to now. Excitement about AI’s potential to transform the economy has lifted stocks from tech heavyweights to utilities and chip makers, while driving a speculative frenzy in other corners of the market. Some of these optimistic forecasts got a recent reality check, with big and small players alike failing to meet the market’s expectations. Now, investors are sizing up how to protect themselves against the risk of a larger unraveling. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

SpaceX and Tesla are at two very different stages of the corporate life cycle. Though they were both founded in the early aughts (SpaceX in 2002, Tesla in 2003), SpaceX is growing at the pace of a startup, while Tesla has stagnated, dramatically underperforming the S&P 500 over the past five years. The challenge of this mismatch is that SpaceX, being the larger company, would have to issue new shares equal to 92% of its current shares outstanding, thus diluting existing shareholders. Tesla shareholders would end up owning nearly half of the combined company, and with it nearly half of SpaceX’s future earnings. | Prof G Media

Reports of speed restrictions on Ukraine's military use of Elon Musk's satellite network Starlink have reminded America's allies that they rely too much on access to critical tech that they don't control. The European Union has the means and motive to support alternative satellite networks such as Eutelsat Communications and SES Satellites, and is also backing a new €15.6 billion satellite network called Iris2. Europe should accelerate initiatives to get its space efforts closer to lift-off, including exploiting Eutelsat's existing Eutelsat OneWeb low-orbit satellite constellation and remaining open to global partnerships to pursue autonomy. | Bloomberg ($)

China is aiming to surpass the U.S. in space exploration, with plans to send a crewed mission to Mars and establish a permanent base on the moon by the 2030s. China's goal is to become a "space hegemon" by the 2040s, setting the agenda and rules for activity in cislunar space, and its engineers have made significant strides in recent years. The U.S. is warning about the threats of China in orbit, with officials saying the PLA is pursuing strategies to transform outer space into a contested battlespace and potentially deny the U.S. access to valuable resources on the moon. | Bloomberg ($)

📢 Our Automotive Ventures “Car of the Week”: a 1998 RUF Project Dragon. | Gooding Christie’s

📢 A new program launched by Intrepid Direct Insurance and Kinetic ID could reduce business insurance costs for collision repair shops that recognize and complete ADAS procedures. | Repairer Driven News

RockED is the mobile platform 80,000 dealership employees open every day. Two-minute Guides in the flow of work, virtual coaching before speaking to real customers, and service performance data that shows what it earned. | RockED

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