Focus

Every founder understands that capital is finite. Attention deserves the same discipline.

For entrepreneurs and investors, focus means deciding what deserves our best resources, then protecting those resources long enough to achieve real progress.

AI raises the stakes. AI can give small teams more capacity to write software, develop ideas, and automate routine work. That creates extraordinary possibilities for entrepreneurs.

It also creates more opportunities to overextend. A new product concept can become a convincing prototype before anyone has established whether the customer needs it. Another promising experiment joins the roadmap. The team gets busier while the original commercial question remains unanswered.

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Until next week,

Steve Greenfield
General Partner
Automotive Ventures

🚗 Automotive

Nine years after it was first teased, Tesla revealed its ground-sucking EV Roadster supercar that hits 60 mph in less than 1 second. | Tesla

Elon Musk’s “flying” Tesla Roadster, which the tech titan unveiled on Thursday, is simultaneously an extraordinary engineering feat and a vanity project with little practical value. That is, no consumer will need a car equipped with rocket thrusters to drive up walls and perform acrobatics in the air. But here’s what’s fun about technological progress: The world would be far worse off if people invested only in research and development that could generate immediate market value. | The Washington Post ($)

Porsche revealed the new Mission S on Thursday, making it loud and clear that the production version of this car will sit above the 911. It looks wild, and you can bet it will drive that way too. That flattened front-end design is lifted loosely from the GT1 Le Mans racer, while the back half has tinges of the 959. | The Drive

Mexican drug cartels have found a remarkably simple way to build fleets of expensive SUVs and pickup trucks without paying for them, according to a new report: rather than stealing vehicles the old-fashioned way, they're renting them from American companies and driving them straight across the border. Some end up transporting cartel leaders in luxury, while others become heavily armored fighting machines—and thanks to a combination of legal restrictions and bureaucratic delays, stopping them is proving surprisingly difficult. A new investigation from The Los Angeles Times says that criminal organizations based south of the border are stealing what is believed to be thousands of rental vehicles annually. California is reportedly the biggest target, although thefts have occurred as far away as New York, Chicago, and Miami. The cartels aren't particularly picky, but they do supposedly have favorites. Cadillac Escalades and BMW SUVs are supposedly popular with cartel leaders, while Chevrolet Suburbans, Ford Raptors, Toyota pickups, and heavy-duty Rams are prized for their capabilities. Those last few often end up with modifications that would make most rock-crawling rigs look tame: according to the Times, cartels have been known to install thick steel armor, gun mounts, and firing ports, effectively turning stolen trucks into improvised armored vehicles. | Road&Track ($)

The automobile changed our world and symbolizes prosperity and personal freedom for billions of people. Making automobiles, meanwhile, is a miserable, grinding affair. The world’s automakers eked out an aggregate operating margin of just 3.6% last year; it was collectively less in dollar terms than that of just one large technology company, Apple. Understanding why helps to explain the current angst surrounding iconic car brands in the US and Europe and the threat from Chinese new entrants — and what might be done to address it. The big problem is that, as much as customers like buying cars, nations are more in love with just making them. The closure of a car plant is as much a societal bombshell as it is an economic decision, which means that decision often gets deferred. No politician wants to see thousands of jobs lost on their watch. Auto plants aren’t just factories for consumer products but also symbols of economic vitality and reserves of industrial capability underpinning national security. The result is chronic overcapacity. About 85 million new passenger vehicles will be sold around the world this year, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. Yet the global industry is capable of churning out 142 million vehicles. | Bloomberg ($)

The price of getting your car repaired has risen dramatically over the last seven years by 60 percent. The shocking statistic is partly due to the fact that we have more technology powering our cars. But the spike in prices is outpacing cost-of-living inflation by almost two to one. Federal data shows motor vehicle maintenance and repair costs rose 60 percent between January 2019 and August 2026. One of the main culprits behind the rising costs is that new cars which have proprietary electronics, software subscriptions and mandated driver-assist hardware built into the vehicles. | Yahoo!Autos

ADAS on newer vehicles, along with sensors and other onboard electronics, require more parts, more highly trained technicians, and added scans and calibrations, raising ADAS repair costs, according to a white paper dated September 2026 from the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA). The paper is titled "A New Road Ahead for Auto Insurance: Safer Vehicles, Higher Claim Costs?" It found that the severity of paid vehicle damage claims, a category combining property damage liability and collision coverage, climbed 42.3% between 2020 and the four quarters ending in the third quarter of 2025. Claim frequency for the same coverages, measured per 100 vehicles insured for a full year, increased 1.4% over that period. APCIA drew those figures from the Fast Track Monitoring System through ISS Fast Track Plus. "As vehicles become more complex, access to repair tools, parts, and data becomes increasingly critical to controlling costs," the paper states. APCIA wrote that barriers to obtaining repair information, tools, and parts can reduce competition, slow repairs, and raise costs for consumers and insurers. | Autobody News

⚡️ EVs

Carbon dioxide emissions from plug-in hybrid (PHEV) cars are six times higher, on average, than official tests suggest, according to new 2024 data published by the European Union. The gap between PHEVs’ real-world CO₂ pollution and lab-based test results has actually widened every year since real-world emission measurements started in 2021. Earlier this year, General Motors CEO Mary Barra noted that the majority of PHEV owners don't plug them in. | Transport & Environment

The U.S. auto market will eventually embrace electrification despite a slow uptake of electric vehicles so far, Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa said on Tuesday, predicting the shift will happen more slowly than ‌in other regions. Speaking at an event on the sidelines of the Paris motor show, Filosa said EVs accounted for 7% of US auto sales this year, unchanged from five years ago. "It has been a bubble driven by regulation. But then, when the administration has decided to deregulate, the ⁠consumers have been preferring other powertrains," he said. | Reuters ($)

A fast-growing number of EVs will soon be scrapped and replaced. Shredding their batteries yields “black mass”, a powder from which valuable metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel can be recovered and reused. From next month, the EU will make it harder to export this waste. The aim is to encourage more processing of black mass close to home (at the moment most is shipped to Asia). In August, America, which has banned Chinese EVs but still imports lots of Chinese batteries, blocked all black-mass exports. China, however, is unlikely to suffer. Black mass might make up 20-30% of global demand for battery metals by 2050, says the International Energy Agency (IEA), a forecaster. So China is supercharging its recycling industries: not just to shore up supplies of battery metals, but also rare-earths and much else. The goal is to make its economy less “linear” (where raw materials are made into products which are then thrown away) and more “circular” (closing the loop so recycled waste replaces raw materials). Once recycling efforts were driven by concerns about pollution. Now, amid a global scramble for the materials needed to build a high-tech economy, security has become a primary motive. | The Economist ($)

🇨🇳 China

Chinese automakers can build an electric vehicle for $11,000 less per unit than their European rivals, a cost gap that tariffs alone cannot close, consultancy AlixPartners said as the Paris auto show opened on Oct. 12 with twice as many Chinese exhibitors as in 2024. European automakers face falling margins, costly platform investments and a narrowing window to restructure and close the gap with Chinese rivals, according to the consultancy. Speed is a key part of the gap. Europe’s established automakers take up to 60 months to launch new models and generate, on average, less than a third of sales from vehicles introduced in the past three years. Chinese rivals launch vehicles in 24 months, and new models account for 76 percent to 100 percent of their sales, AlixPartners said. European automakers need to aim for two-year development cycles, use artificial intelligence to reduce cost and accelerate time to market, and invest in the next generation of vehicles to compete against the faster product cycles of Chinese rivals, AlixPartners said. | Automotive News ($)

Legacy carmakers won’t likely be able to match Chinese rivals on price and may already have missed first-mover advantage on electric and software-developed vehicles, according to a report by Mobility Global’s automotive analysts. The paper, which the research firm released Tuesday, projects established automakers will retain the upper hand over newer, China-based peers in areas such as premium brands, safety-based engineering and fleet sales. But Chinese carmakers have an edge in mass-market vehicles from sheer scale, faster development and lower costs. The report, entitled New Order: China, the West and the Battle for Automotive Advantage, said that while China’s rise as a globally competitive auto power echoes that of Japan and South Korea, Chinese carmakers benefit from the widespread impact of software, which is reshaping business models, and easier access to capital as part of China’s effort to foster a home-grown auto industry. | Bloomberg ($)

Mobility Global has published a whitepaper, "New order: China, the West, and the battle for automotive advantage," which illustrates that for legacy automotive manufacturers to compete with the Chinese, competitive advantage will increasingly depend not only on vehicle design, but on the ability to orchestrate cost, technology, supply chains and development speed across an ecosystem. | Mobility Global

The record 20 Chinese brands vying for attention at this week’s Paris auto show reflect a stark reality: as a slowdown at home pushes China’s overcrowded auto industry to consolidate, success in Europe could help determine which carmakers survive. With the U.S. market largely closed to Chinese automakers, Europe is by far the most profitable market still open to them, but also one of the toughest to crack. Chinese brands including BYD, Chery and SAIC’s MG have already established a foothold in Europe, while newer entrants are racing to build dealer networks, parts operations and brand recognition. For some, the stakes are existential. “If they drop exports in Europe, they die,” said Francois Roudier, secretary general of the International OICA - International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers. The pressure stems from China itself, where the world’s largest car market has become increasingly crowded. More than 100 automakers compete in China, where state support from national, provincial and city governments has helped sustain local champions and delayed long-expected consolidation that could entail significant job losses. | Automotive News ($)

Chinese carmakers can’t build or sell cars in the U.S., but they are building the kinds of cars Americans would love. Three-row luxury SUVs with built-in refrigerators and seats that conform to a passenger’s body. Pickup trucks that emphasize towing power and fuel economy. Fast-charging electric vehicles for speedy family road trips. Chinese automakers hope these offerings will help them aggressively expand overseas and offset slowing sales and hyper-competition at home. But while executives at the Paris Motor Show emphasized that global expansion is vital to becoming the world’s top car companies, many face the major hurdle of being shut out of the lucrative U.S. market—the world’s second-largest. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

By the standards of the EU’s policy towards China, trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič’s “understanding” with Beijing for an informal auto export quota for conventional hybrids and plug-ins was a victory. Announced last week, it in effect closed a loophole the EU left when it imposed anti-subsidy duties on electric vehicles in 2024. But those tariffs haven’t really worked, and not just because Chinese exports shifted to hybrids rather than battery vehicles. Unless European companies radically improve their functioning, neither the new import quotas nor the EU’s planned additions to its trade weaponry equip the bloc to meet Chinese competition. | Financial Times ($)

In many ways, whether the new Tesla Roadster flies or not is beside the point. Unveiling the Roadster with out-of-this-world technology reiterated that Musk has given up designing cars for regular people to drive. He says the Roadster is the last new vehicle Tesla will offer for humans to drive and is betting instead on remaking Tesla as a robotics company. In effect, Musk is leaving the mainstream car market to the Chinese—who, he has suggested, are so formidable that many Western automakers are unable to compete without government intervention. It’s a telling sign of where things are going for the Western automotive industry. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Volkswagen Group has spent decades trying to build a U.S. business that matches its stature as the world’s second-largest carmaker. Now the market it repeatedly struggled to crack is one it can no longer let languish. With its China business melting down and Volkswagen’s German plants shedding tens of thousands of jobs, Chief Executive Officer Oliver Blume has suddenly turned to the U.S. for growth. He’s lining up a new incursion that will take the company into the heart of the marketplace: The light trucks and off-road sport utility vehicles that have long captured American wallets. | Bloomberg ($)

Robotics is one of the strategic high-tech fields where China has seized an early lead over the U.S. While Silicon Valley still controls the most advanced AI models and an abundance of top-tier engineering talent, Chinese companies accounted for 97% of global humanoid shipments in the first half of this year. Thanks to robust government support, vast supply chains and ample mechanical engineers, China is staking its claim to an industry that may help dictate the path of modern economies. Morgan Stanley estimates the market for humanoids could top $5 trillion by 2050, as labor forces shrink and age, and AI adoption swells. What's unsettling Washington is not any single breakthrough, but the possibility that Beijing could end up writing the blueprint for how the machines enter daily life. | Bloomberg ($)

The fastest track and field athlete is no longer the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt. In fact, it is not a person at all: it is the Chinese humanoid robot Tiangong Ultra, which in August ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds, nearly two-tenths of a second faster than Bolt’s world-record time and more than twice as fast as its own time a year ago. The race made global headlines and spread on social media in large part because of what it revealed robots still can’t do—in this case, slow down, as Tiangong Ultra ran right through the finish line and slammed into a safety wall. But it also showcased the incredible progress China’s robotics industry has made and the narrowing gap between human capabilities and new technology. China’s robotics achievements have become central to its evolving national AI strategy. Whereas Washington and Silicon Valley focus primarily on scaling large language models and digital AI applications, Beijing is concentrating on combining its strengths in software and hardware to develop robots that incorporate the advanced cognition of AI with autonomous physical movement. These robots, often described in China as “embodied AI,” could eventually operate factories, perform manual labor, and even replace human soldiers on the battlefield. If AI-powered robots develop enough autonomy to carry out sophisticated tasks in the real world, they could become a general-purpose technology, like electricity or the Internet, that is able to transform physical work across broad swaths of the economy. For Beijing, a powerful AI-driven robotics industry could serve several of its economic and strategic goals. It could ease demographic pressures from an aging population by reducing the need for workers and providing eldercare. It could also supercharge Beijing’s military capabilities by automating its reconnaissance, logistics, and combat operations. Most notably, some leading Chinese thinkers believe robotics could be the key to unlocking artificial general intelligence—systems capable of performing as well as or better than humans across most tasks. China’s investments in AI-powered robotics could be especially consequential if today’s leading AI companies in Silicon Valley, which are focused on scaling the data and computing power used to train large models, struggle to translate their digital gains into advancements in the physical world. | Foreign Affairs ($)

🤖 Autonomy

Self-driving cars are on the cusp of moving from novelty to commonplace. Waymo driverless taxis buzz around cities like San Francisco and Phoenix. Next up are the biggest, loudest, most-daunting-to-other-drivers vehicles on the highway: the trucks. As more goods are trucked across the U.S. every day, moving them is getting more expensive. Businesses complain of an acute driver shortage. Drivers need to stop after 11 hours to rest; driverless trucks don’t, saving both time and fuel. The cost of diesel has risen 62% since late February. The 240 miles of I-45 between Dallas and Houston is flat, straight and filled with trucks, and is the perfect testing spot for dozens of driverless big rigs, some without a human driver and others with one riding along just in case. About half a dozen companies, including Aurora, develop the technology for driverless trucks and team up with truck makers to produce them. Aurora, based in Pittsburgh, expects to have 200 autonomous trucks on highways in Texas and nearby states by year-end, up from around 30 big rigs today. Volvo Autonomous Solutions said it plans to roll out 300 autonomous trucks with Aurora and Waabi, another autonomous-trucking company, by the end of 2027 that would run in Texas and Oklahoma. Aurora estimates that by 2030, 30,000 autonomous trucks could be on the roads. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

🦾 Robotics

Drivers and warehouse-related jobs are most exposed to being taken over by robots, an analysis by AI company Anthropic finds. The technology for autonomous cars has advanced enough that it’s possible for robots to do about 97% of the work of taxi drivers, making this job the most exposed. But it’s not just technological capabilities that determine if and when robots take over a job; it’s also whether robots can do it at less cost, adjusting for factors like reliability, error rates and speed, and whether people are ready to accept having robots do the work and if there are regulatory restraints. On a technological basis, robots are capable of doing three-quarters of the physical work that’s done in the United States today, making up 34% of working hours, but the use of robots is cost-competitive in only 0.3% of cases, the equivalent of about 300,000 jobs, the analysis finds. As technologies improve and costs come down, robots could take over more work. “AI-powered robots could leapfrog our scale and do work they cannot today, for example by learning to climb ladders or use their arms and grippers more deftly,” the analysis says. | FacilitiesDive

Robotics labs are spending billions of dollars to generate the real-world data needed to train their machines, in a bid to overcome a deficit that is holding back “physical AI” start-ups’ development. Unlike AI model makers, who scraped large parts of the web to develop their systems, a lack of training material has emerged as a serious bottleneck for robotics companies, which require a more diverse and complex dataset than text-based models. Companies such as Generalist, Physical Intelligence, NEURA Robotics and Skild AI are tapping external data providers and building out their own so-called robot gyms kitted out with bimanual manipulators, a set of robotic arms that workers operate and use to complete physical tasks that can later be emulated by robots. Some start-ups are also shipping recording equipment to thousands of factories, homes, offices and holiday rentals all over the world to capture first-person video footage of people completing tasks, collecting millions of hours of this “egocentric” data. “There is no internet for us to download from. There is no large corpus for model developers to work with,” said Joe Fox Jr., director of robotics operations at Scale AI, a data provider. “It is an arms race to get the best data.” Robotics companies and physical AI labs are stepping up these costly projects after raising nearly $48bn in the year-to-date, according to PitchBook data, making it one of the hottest new corners of the AI boom for venture capital investors. A large portion of this figure will be spent on the equipment and tools used to generate data. | Financial Times ($)

No organization in the world operates more robots than Amazon. The company already has more than 1 million robots working in warehouses around the clock to make tens of millions of same-day and one-day package deliveries happen on a daily basis—and Amazon is poised to significantly grow that robotic fleet in the coming years as it establishes new factories to churn out increasingly more capable robot workers. Despite deploying so many robots, Amazon is also the second-largest corporate employer in the world, with more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time human workers, according to its 2025 annual report. Amazon executives say that the growing robot fleet has eased the burden on its human workforce by taking on the toughest fulfillment center tasks that carry the greatest risks of physical fatigue and injury. But labor advocacy groups and independent researchers point to evidence suggesting that warehouse automation driven by AI is not all upside for the humans who work alongside robots. “For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we’ve seen usually happens away from workers—you’re taking that high-risk task away from the worker, and you’re doing so in a way that is not physically proximate,” Brad Greenwood, professor of business at George Mason University, told Ars Technica. “The rise of collaborative robots really changes that dynamic for two reasons: one is that it is physically proximate, and two, the robot has the ability to dictate the pace of work.” In many ways, robotics and AI are well suited to the relentless pace of work that is already happening inside e-commerce fulfillment centers. Amazon’s promise of speedy deliveries for its 200 million Prime subscribers in particular requires hundreds of thousands of human employees to speedily assemble and ship out customer orders that often combine a dizzying array of products. | ARS Technica

🤖 Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The cost of new technology tends to fall over time as companies become more expert at making it and improving it. But the cost of AI is falling so fast it’s almost charting a vertical drop, per this chart from Deutsche Bank comparing new tech pricing over time. “The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has tumbled about 47 percent a quarter, or 13 times a year, since 2023. That is four times faster than DNA sequencing, six times faster than compute, and 18 times faster than lithium batteries,” Deutsche’s Adrian Cox said in a recent note. | Fortune ($)

Few people doubt that AI is among the most transformative technologies to emerge in the past century. By many measures, it is spreading faster and more widely than any innovation since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines came into common use in the nineteenth century and electricity in the early twentieth, but their full potential was not realized before the completion of railways, highways, and power grids decades later. Computers for business use emerged in the 1950s, but they gave no visible lift to the economy before the Internet connected them in the 1990s. Commercial artificial intelligence, by contrast, appeared almost overnight on screens worldwide, at a moment when the overwhelming majority of humans already had access to a computer or smartphone. Less than four years after the release of ChatGPT, roughly 30 percent of Americans are now using AI, five times the share of Americans who were using smartphones, the Internet, or electricity at comparable stages of development. Revenue for AI companies is three times what previous digital technologies, including the Internet, cloud computing, and early mobile apps, generated in their early years. Policymakers, investors, and business leaders are counting on AI to be a miracle cure for everything from runaway public debt to the costs associated with aging populations. Among investors, even some of the world’s most successful contrarians—who make their fortunes betting against conventional wisdom—are embracing the idea that AI could yield bigger benefits more rapidly than any past technological advance. The euphoria is not universal, however. An ever-lonelier minority of skeptics argue that AI’s rise may seem unusually fast but is in fact following a centuries-old script. Major technology revolutions have always triggered dramatic boom-bust cycles. People get overexcited about the latest breakthrough and begin investing indiscriminately in the companies driving the innovation. As a team of researchers from Texas Tech University, Texas A&M University, and the Vlerick Business School in Belgium found in 2018, all of the most revolutionary technological innovations of the last two centuries inflated a major market bubble—a rapid increase in stock prices, followed by a precipitous decline. | Foreign Affairs ($)

The geography of AI innovation is still a landscape of American advantage. But the threats to that advantage are mounting, and the global terrain becomes more challenging, as AI redraws the strategic map. Since ancient times, technological change has made and broken empires. It has reworked patterns of influence and advantage. The most recent great-power contest was decided, in part, by the move from one technological era to another. The Soviet Union was a superpower when strength resided in heavy industry and mass manufacturing. It was an also-ran amid the digital revolution that helped Washington and friends win the Cold War. We don’t yet know whether AI will cause similar geopolitical earthquakes. Key components of that technology emerge from a geopolitical ecosystem that America has long cultivated. Success, from Washington’s perspective, involves using this advantage to lock in an extended period of U.S. and democratic supremacy. Mastering a technological revolution is essential to preventing autocratic enemies from carrying out a geopolitical revolution of their own. But AI will change the global landscape. It is revealing new relationships of power and dependence; it is remaking relations between non-state actors and states. It is highlighting the intersection of military danger and tech development in places from the Persian Gulf to the Taiwan Strait; it is challenging old views of which countries and regions matter most. The AI revolution is just beginning. But it will, undoubtedly, force us to revise our strategic maps in the years ahead. | Bloomberg ($)

Autonomous agents are the hottest thing in AI. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won’t play nice? In recent weeks, users of services like Meta’s Muse, XAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorganChase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they’re blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them. Amazon was already fighting off AI agents last year when it banned Perplexity’s agentic shopping feature and sued the AI startup, raising legal and practical questions about the future of agents on the web. At the time, Amazon claimed it “repeatedly requested” that Perplexity stop allowing its AI agents to shop on its website, adding that third-party companies that purchase items on behalf of customers “should operate openly and respect service provider decisions whether or not to participate.” | The Verge ($)

✈️ Aviation & Space

Ukraine said Elon Musk’s SpaceX has imposed new limits on military-grade Starlink terminals without warning, hobbling Kyiv’s ability to conduct midrange drone attacks and intercept Russia’s new-generation jet-powered drones. The limits on Starlink, which restrict the speed at which some of Ukraine’s weapons can travel and still connect to the internet, come as President Trump piles pressure on Ukraine, demanding that it stop hitting Russian oil refineries, blaming President Volodymyr Zelensky for continuing the war and calling for his removal. "I confirm that SpaceX implemented a speed limit for Starlink terminals operating in motion last night,” Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Zelensky, wrote on the Telegram messaging platform. “Our defense forces received no warning about this restriction, and it has led to the disruption of a number of missions.” It wasn’t immediately clear what had caused the disruption. SpaceX, which produces Starlink, didn’t respond to a request for comment. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Since it opened for business in 2021, Starlink has grown like Topsy. The satellite-internet service offered by Elon Musk’s SpaceX has signed up more than 12m individual subscribers, as well as a clutch of airlines and shipping firms. It also plays a crucial—and changing—role in the Ukraine war. More recently it has signed deals with big network operators such as T-Mobile in America to enable Starlink’s satellites to connect directly to their customers’ mobile phones, providing service in places outside the reach of land-based phone masts. Mr Musk has yet bigger ambitions for the service. On October 8th, SpaceX confirmed what many observers had long suspected: it will build a fully fledged mobile-phone network that will compete directly with those run by big incumbents. Markets seemed to take the idea seriously. The share prices of the three biggest American mobile operators—T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon—fell sharply after the announcement. For now, the threat to their business is modest. But Mr Musk is betting that, in the roboticised future he envisions, Starlink will play a vital role. Although precise details are scant, SpaceX’s plan seems to have three components. The first is to launch even more satellites. In its announcement, SpaceX said it had received approval from the Federal Communications Commission, an American regulator, to fly up to 15,000 satellites specifically designed to beam voice calls and data to smartphones on the ground. | The Economist ($)

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures “Car of the Week”: a 1980 Ferrari 512 BBi. | Broad Arrow

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👀 Automotive Ventures Company to Watch

AutoTrainer is purpose-built to bring live role-play into every deal, while coaching, monitoring, and optimizing F&I performance at scale. | AutoTrainer