Another week, another stack of automotive news worth knowing about. Here’s what flew under the radar.
Porsche has announced a new 911 variant that the enthusiast community has been requesting for a while — a GT3 Touring-style model with more practical daily-driver capability while preserving the core performance credentials of the GT platform. Porsche has a long history of threading this needle with great success, and the appetite for a naturally aspirated, high-revving 911 that you can actually use as a primary vehicle without destroying your spine on a commute is real. The details on availability and pricing will determine how attainable this actually is for the buyers who want it most.
The midterm election results are still filtering through, but the automotive policy implications are becoming clearer. The IRA’s EV provisions are unlikely to be significantly altered in the near term, but the appetite for new aggressive mandates and funding programs appears diminished. For the auto industry, the message from the results is probably ‘more of the same’ rather than acceleration or reversal — which gives manufacturers a somewhat more stable planning environment.
FTX’s collapse is generating automotive-adjacent coverage because of Sam Bankman-Fried’s well-documented support for climate-focused investments, including some EV-related ventures. The broader cautionary tale for speculative capital flowing into early-stage EV and mobility startups is relevant: the same easy money that inflated crypto valuations also inflated projections for EV companies that may never reach the production volumes their fundraising implied. As capital gets more selective, companies without a clear path to profitability are going to face harder questions.
On the vehicle theft front, Milwaukee continues to rank near the top of national per-capita theft statistics, driven largely by the Kia/Hyundai vulnerability that has been spreading through social media. The manufacturer fix — a software update that changes the behavior of the immobilizer system — is being distributed, but the pace relative to the scale of the problem remains a source of frustration for owners and law enforcement alike.