In today's issue:

The buyer does not get it yet. The car goes back to Maranello for final assembly, with delivery scheduled for Q1 2027. Public comments trashed this car. Bidders did not. Forty million dollars buys a lot of silence.

GM cuts 350 jobs to retool a plant it promised to EVs: GM will lay off 350 workers at Lansing Grand River Assembly and Lansing Regional Stamping effective January 14, ahead of a $1.25 billion retooling, per Automotive News. The money is not new: GM committed that same $1.25 billion to Lansing in 2023 for future EV production under its UAW contract, and took a $500 million Energy Department grant a year later to electrify the plant. What it is now retooling for is the next-generation, gas-powered Cadillac CT5, per Autoblog. Affected workers are expected back as retooling finishes, some by late 2027. It is the plant-level version of the reversal we covered when GM brought gas Cadillacs back after a $10.9 billion EV reality check. #analyst

Porsche is leaving VW's emissions pool to buy compliance from a Chinese rival: Porsche's fleet averaged 130.2 grams of CO2 per kilometer last year against an EU limit of 93.6, dragging up a group average that already sat at 100. So Porsche is exiting Volkswagen Group's own emissions pool and pooling with Chinese EV maker Xpeng instead, per Autoblog. VW CFO Arno Antlitz has guided to 400 to 500 million euros in annual CO2 penalties from 2025 through 2027, as much as 1.5 billion euros (about $1.7 billion) in the worst case, at 95 euros per gram over the limit per vehicle. The compliance trade is the story here rather than the fine: a VW brand is now paying a Chinese competitor, one that sold roughly 19,000 cars in Europe last year, to carry its emissions math. #analyst

Volvo will pay you to drive like your insurer is watching: Volvo's new Safety Coach app scores driving behavior for potential insurance discounts, per Autoblog. It lands as the average new car price cleared $50,000 last year, a factor squeezing premiums across the board, per Autoblog. #market

A 1964 Shelby Cobra is the most expensive American car ever sold at auction: Chassis CSX2300, one of six Cobra Daytona Coupes built and a car campaigned in Shelby American's 1965 FIA World GT Championship season, sold for $42,905,000 at the Gooding Christie's Pebble Beach sale, per The Supercar Blog. Hammer was $39 million before fees. The previous American record was the $22 million paid for a 1935 Duesenberg SSJ in 2018. The same weekend produced an $18.7 million sale for a 1963 Corvette Grand Sport, nearly five times the previous Corvette record, per americancarsandracing.com. We previewed the Monterey Car Week auction slate as the covers came off; this is what it sold for. #culture

Rebuilding a McLaren P1 battery now costs more than the factory charged: The P1 was built from 2013 to 2015 on cells dating to as early as 2010, so the oldest packs are around 16 years old, and McLaren sold owners a replacement for about $160,000 back in 2022, per Autoblog. Aftermarket specialist V Engineering has now announced Project Continuum, quoting £160,000, roughly $216,400, for a pack it says stores more energy and weighs less than the original, with long-term technical support attached. That is more than $50,000 above McLaren's 2022 price, and it is the bill that arrives when an electrified hypercar becomes a modern classic. #culture

21 million cars have bad backup cameras, and it's rarely the camera: Carscoops tallies 21 million US vehicles pulled into backup-camera recalls, with most failures traced to software and wiring faults rather than dead hardware. Drivers report blank screens, frozen feeds and misleading images, per Carscoops. → If you own one: Check NHTSA.gov by VIN before assuming a blank reverse camera means a trip to the dealer for a paid repair.

Chery recalls 1,852 EVs over a pedestrian-warning glitch: A software fault can silence the E5's low-speed warning sound, per Drive.com.au.

"Don't get it right, just get it running": Our sister car-podcast platform Car Curious listened to 252 episodes across 167 podcasts this week and found three shows circling the same question, which is what it costs to keep a car usable at all. Roadkill co-host David Freiburger, talking to Very Vehicular, has a name for the car that gets restored and then never driven again: "Yeah, it goes to paint jail. It comes back." The same roundup follows the salvage yards that supply the parts, and finds them now worth more as dirt than as yards, per Car Curious.

Yesterday's picks

Washington Keeps Chinese EVs Out. Waymo Imported 2,600 of Them.: More than 2,600 Zeekr Ojai robotaxi vans reached the US this year, out of more than 3,200 imported since 2024, per Carscoops, citing Forbes.

Tesla is winning a market that is shrinking under it: Tesla took 61.5% of US EV registrations in June, up from 50.4% a year earlier, while total EV registrations fell 11%, the ninth straight monthly decline since the $7,500 federal credit expired, per Automotive News, citing Mobility Global. Tesla's own registrations rose 8% to 61,813. Every other brand combined fell 31%, to 38,702. EV share of the total US light-vehicle market dropped to 6.9% from 8.6%.

NHTSA widens its probe into Ford timing belts that shred at 70,000 miles: Regulators upgraded an investigation opened in December 2025 into 1.0-liter Ford engines. The upgraded probe covers 2014-2017 Fiestas and 2015-2018 Focuses with manual transmissions, plus 2018-2021 EcoSports and 2016-2018 Focuses with automatics, per CarComplaints. NHTSA found the wet timing belt can disintegrate and clog the oil pump pickup screen, starving the engine, with failures around 70,000 miles against a 150,000-mile replacement interval, and it happened to owners who followed the oil maintenance schedule. → If you own one: The pickup screen cannot be inspected or cleaned without pulling the engine, so treat a low oil pressure warning as a stop-driving event rather than a scheduling prompt.

The week in attention

How many separate outlets ran a headline naming each company over the last 7 days, across the 560+ sources we monitor. Press releases and Reddit are excluded, so this counts what got written about, not what got announced. A few brands whose names double as ordinary English words are not counted yet.

Czinger: 22 outlets this week, about 1 in a median week.

Samsung SDI: 17 outlets this week, against none in a median week over the previous 9.

Rezvani: 13 outlets this week, against none in a median week over the previous 9.

Quieter than usual: Renault Group (14 outlets against about 36), BYD (20 outlets against about 33).

Most covered overall: Volkswagen Group, General Motors, Ford Motor.

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