Intel Report | Nov 4 | The Weekly Automotive & Mobility News That Matters

The one unifying metric for venture capital firms should be Alpha (a.k.a. achieving above-average returns for our investors). | LINK

??? Automotive

In the third quarter of this year, 24% of vehicles traded in had negative equity, an increase from about 15% in the third quarter of 2022, according to car marketplace Edmunds .?It is also taking longer for borrowers to catch up on underwater debt. Borrowers who have negative equity when they trade in owe an average of $6,458 more than what their car is worth, Edmunds said. About 22% owe $10,000 or more.?The share of drivers with negative equity is higher among those who financed their vehicles since 2022. Some 46% of drivers with electric vehicles are underwater, CarEdge found.?| The Wall Street Journal ?($)

Tactile controls are back in vogue. Apple added two new buttons to the?iPhone 16, home appliances like?stoves?and washing machines are returning to knobs, and several car manufacturers are?reintroducing?buttons?and dials to dashboards and?steering wheels.?The Wall Street Journal has described the trend as “re-buttonization." | IEEE Spectrum ?

The town of Swindon is home to a monster of an intersection named “The Magic Roundabout,” which consists of six individual roundabouts, five small ones swirling around a big central gyre.?| The Drive

Volkswagen’s new offshoot EV company Scout Motors Inc. , which revealed its first two vehicles last week, will use the software and zonal architecture being developed by the joint venture between Rivian and the 大众 . Scout will leverage the joint venture tech when its vehicles go into production in 2027. VW and Rivian are still working to close the $5 billion deal, which they expect to happen before the end of this year.?| TechCrunch

Watch the Xiaomi Technology SU7 Ultra lap the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 6:46.87 minutes, which would take the title as the fastest four-door car on the famous track. The production version of the SU7 Ultra will have a top speed of 217 mph and make 1527 horsepower. Its aero elements are claimed to provide up to 628 pounds of downforce. The vehicle can get from 0 to 100km/h (62 miles per hour) in 1.97 seconds and reach speeds of up to 350km/h, according to the company.?| Car and Driver

Toyota Motor Corporation said it will collaborate with a Japanese telecommunications company to develop an artificial intelligence-powered mobility platform with the aim of creating a “society with zero traffic accidents.” The automaker and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) announced the joint initiative to spend a combined 500 billion yen to create a "Mobility AI Platform" to “standardize the mobility field,” combining communications infrastructure with AI and computing platforms to “constantly connect people, mobility and infrastructure.” The companies said they plan to implement the platform by 2028, targeting “widespread adoption” starting in 2030.?| F&I and Showroom ?

???Electric Vehicles (EVs)

Most automakers other than Tesla are losing money on electric vehicles and struggling to find their footing. They include Volkswagen and Rivian . Ford’s challenges stand in stark contrast to the recent gains by 通用汽车 , its main U.S. competitor. GM executives say they are close to breaking even on its electric cars. | The New York Times ($)

Electric vehicles are becoming increasingly competitive in terms of cost, and experts believe the gap is expected to close further in the coming years as production costs fall.?Goldman Sachs Research expects battery prices to drop 40% by 2025 (compared to 2022 costs), while Gartner predicts the cost of producing EVs will fall below vehicles using internal combustion engines by 2027. | Euro News

After losing another $1.1 billion on its Model e business, Ford’s EV losses reached $2.5 billion through the first half of 2024. Ford expects EV losses to reach between $5 billion and $5.5 billion this year. Ford is losing $47k on average for every EV sold. | Electrek

福特 plans to stop building its F-150 Lightning from mid-November through the end of the year amid lower-than-expected demand for the electric pickup. U.S. sales of the Lightning are up 86% this year through September, to 22,807, although the truck lost its title as the nation’s bestselling electric pickup to the Tesla Cybertruck. | Automotive News ($)

California has reached a record of 22% market share for battery-electric vehicles (BEV) and over 40% if you include PHEVs and HEVs. Tesla has been responsible for much of California’s EV leadership, but the automaker is now down in the important EV market. According to the California New Car Dealers Association (CNCDA) data, Tesla’s sales are down 12.6% year-to-date. | Electrek

After decades of lithium-ion batteries dominating the market, a new option has emerged: batteries made with sodium ions. Scientists have been researching alternatives to lithium for years. Much of the world relies on this kind of battery, but the mining and processing of its materials can be harmful to workers, local communities and the environment. Sodium has recently emerged as one of the more promising options, and experts say the material could be a cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternative to lithium.?| The Washington Post ($) ?

????? China

比亚迪 notched up another win over Tesla , reporting quarterly revenue that beat Elon Musk’s carmaker for the first time since the pair have gone head-to-head in global electric vehicles sales. Revenue for China’s best-selling automaker soared 24% to 201.1 billion yuan ($28.2 billion) for the three months that ended in September, falling short of estimates but exceeding Tesla’s $25.2 billion in sales for the same period. | Bloomberg ($) ?

???Robotics & Autonomy

亚马逊 -owned Autonomous Vehicle (AV) company Zoox will start rolling out dozens of its purpose-built autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and in Las Vegas in the coming weeks. Zoox will start offering rides — starting with employees — in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, and on the Las Vegas Strip. | TechCrunch

ARK Investment Management LLC believes that Tesla should enjoy a price umbrella at its robotaxi launch, thanks to the high level of current ride-hail prices, while leveraging a lower cost per mile than the average vehicle on the road.?Why? The operating costs associated with electric vehicles are roughly one-third those of their gas-powered counterparts. Without safety drivers, Tesla has suggested that, at scale, its robotaxi rides will cost consumers only $0.30-0.40 cents per mile, slightly higher than ARK’s estimate of ~$0.25 per mile but well below current ride-hail costs of ~$2 per mile and personal car ownership costs of ~$0.70 per mile. Lower price points could unlock ~$11 trillion in revenue potential, ~80 times larger than the addressable market that Uber and Lyft target today.?| Ark Invest

After getting a hefty $5.6 billion in fresh capital last week, Alphabet Inc. ’s autonomous driving unit Waymo is now reported to be valued at more than $45 billion.?| Electrek ?

??? Aviation & Space

SpaceX catching its huge Starship booster shortly after liftoff was a major achievement. It was also a shot across the bow for competitors. Developing reusable boosters for its Falcon vehicles has been key to SpaceX’s efforts to cut the cost of space flight. Advancing the technology with Starship—the bigger and more powerful rocket it is developing—could extend the Elon Musk-led company’s cost advantage versus rivals, especially in launches to low-Earth orbit, where SpaceX and others operate satellites. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

The Chinese company Deep Blue Aerospace is getting into the space tourism business, planning to start launching paying customers into suborbital space in 2027. Tickets will cost 1.5 million RMB apiece — about $210,000 U.S. at current exchange rates. For that price, customers will get "much more than a brief weightlessness experience," Deep Blue wrote in a statement on Wednesday. (Translation to English by Google.) "They will experience the vastness and mystery of the universe and witness the magnificent landscape beyond the Earth. This will be an all-round, multi-sensory space journey that will be unforgettable for a lifetime." | Space

????Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Cars of the Week":?a?1963 Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Lusso.?| Broad Arrow

Have a great week,

Steve Greenfield