Here is everything The Auto Wire published on Sunday, September 13, 2026 — a £450 million expansion McLaren won’t confirm but is already hiring for, Volkswagen conceding it built three million vehicles’ worth of factory it cannot fill, and Stellantis’ North American business going from the company’s biggest liability to the only thing holding its global numbers up. 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 not confirmed the widely reported £450 million commitment tied to its Woking campus. There is no release on the company’s own newsroom, no statement from the UK’s Department for Business and Trade, and no filing that puts the number on paper. Its careers site is far less coy: more than 120 open UK positions, 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 says more about McLaren’s volume plans than the headline figure does.
Volkswagen Didn’t Build Too Few EVs. It Built Too Many Factories.
Volkswagen’s Supervisory Board didn’t just approve a restructuring plan on September 3. It signed off on an admission the company spent years avoiding: it built assembly capacity for roughly 12 million vehicles a year and can currently sell about 9 million. Everything attached to Future Plan 2030, including the roughly 50,000 positions being eliminated, follows from that three-million-vehicle gap rather than from the EV transition alone. Volkswagen has already trimmed 2 million units of capacity over two years, plans another 500,000 each in China and Europe, and is targeting about €1.5 billion a year in efficiency gains from its European plants.
Stellantis’s $13 Billion Bet: America Isn’t Like Everywhere Else Anymore
A year ago Stellantis’ North American segment lost €440 million. In the second quarter of 2026 it posted €284 million in adjusted operating income on net revenue up 32% to €18.2 billion, and it is now the only reason the global numbers look healthy. Every region turned a profit except Enlarged Europe, which finished at a negative 0.6% margin even as shipments rose 5%. The footnotes carry part of the swing: a €317 million gain from renegotiating emissions-credit contracts left worthless when fuel-economy penalties were repealed, against a first-half tariff hit of roughly €0.3 billion. That is the backdrop for the $13 billion U.S. investment announced last October.
That is every news and feature story The Auto Wire published on September 13, 2026. Garage Deals roundups were left out of this recap.