Here is everything The Auto Wire published on Sunday, September 13, 2026 — McLaren’s careers page giving away a £450 million plan the company still won’t confirm, Volkswagen admitting it built three million vehicles’ worth of factories it cannot fill, and Stellantis leaning on one-time regulatory gains to make North America look like a turnaround. All of it in one place, with links back to the full stories.
McLaren Won’t Confirm Its £450 Million Plan. Its Careers Page Already Has.
McLaren has said nothing on the record about the reported £450 million Woking commitment or the roughly 1,000 jobs attached to it — no newsroom release, no statement from the Department for Business and Trade, no filing. Its own careers site is far less coy: more than 120 UK openings, including a Head of General Assembly and End of Line Manufacturing Engineering and a Head of Body Assembly Manufacturing Engineering, both posted within the past two days. Assembly-line leadership gets hired twelve to eighteen months before a line actually runs, which makes the job board a firmer signal than the number everyone is quoting. It also runs directly against a UK industry where car production fell 10.6% year-on-year in July.
Volkswagen Didn’t Build Too Few EVs. It Built Too Many Factories.
Future Plan 2030, approved unanimously by Volkswagen’s Supervisory Board on September 3, is built around one number the company spent years avoiding: assembly capacity for roughly 12 million vehicles a year against sales of about 9 million. The 50,000 positions being eliminated, the cut of about a quarter of management roles worldwide, and another 500,000 units of annual capacity coming out of China and Europe all follow from that three-million-vehicle gap. The most telling detail is the smallest one — seat variations drop from more than 2,300 to roughly 100, equipment-option complexity falls about 75%, and the model portfolio halves by 2035. This is also Volkswagen’s second restructuring attempt in two years, and the deeper one.
Stellantis’s $13 Billion Bet: America Isn’t Like Everywhere Else Anymore
Stellantis’ North American segment posted €284 million in adjusted operating income in the second quarter of 2026 on revenue up 32% to €18.2 billion, a year after the same region lost €440 million. The footnotes complicate the comeback: a €317 million gain from renegotiating emissions-credit contracts that deregulation had already made worthless, and shipments up 38% against just 6% growth in actual regional sales, partly inventory build ahead of a summer plant shutdown. Tariffs cut the other direction, with a net cost of €1.0 billion to €1.2 billion expected for all of 2026. The $13 billion U.S. investment is the hedge; the next few quarters, once the one-time regulatory gains roll off, are the real test.
That is every news and feature story The Auto Wire published on September 13, 2026. Garage Deals roundups were left out of this recap.