Corvette ZR1 Could Smash AMG ONE Nürburgring Record, Claims Engineer
Speaking on the HorsePower Obsessed podcast, Mero suggested that, if the gaps between C8 Corvettes are roughly similar to the gaps between C7 Grand Sport, Z06, and ZR1 variants, which he helped develop, then that scale should mean that the C8 Z06's time of 7:10.52 (set by Auto Motor und Sport's Christian Gebhardt, it must be noted) would translate to a ZR1 lap time of 6:23. "If I put the C8 Z06 at seven minutes and use a scale factor, I get a 6:23," he said on the show. He added that he's probably going to "get into a lot of trouble for that, but it's speculation with some background."
Interestingly, he believes that the AWD, hybridized ZR1X might not set a faster time around the track, citing concerns over how long the electric motor's 186 horsepower would be available during the lap, as well as the question of how any extra weight may impact handling when the battery is depleted. Again, this is pure speculation from somebody who has no hands-on access to the car, and underestimating what the Corvette team has achieved there may be to one's chagrin.
According to CorvetteBlogger, the team behind the ZR1 is preparing to set a lap time very soon, but until it's close to achieving its goals, we doubt we'll hear anything about their own official estimates and expectations. The publication says that the Corvette team has booked a session at the track for some time this month, and if that's true, we can expect YouTubers and trackside photographers to have news for us before the official word is out, just as was the case with the Mustang GTD's sessions at the Nordschleife. Ford's 850-hp GTD set a time of 6:52.072, and you can be absolutely positive that the Corvette team will be aiming to smash that by a long distance with its 1,064 ponies and mid-engine layout, among other tricks. As Ford and Multimatic engineers can attest, the toughest foe to overcome at the Green Hell is typically the weather. Thus, any theoretical lap times may still be impossible to achieve without perfect timing, maximum commitment, and a dash of luck. Hopefully, we'll know the truth within a week, but if the ZR1 does beat (or even come close to) the time set by the $3 million AMG One, it won't matter when we find out - it'll still mean something epic for American performance.
Related: This $760,000 Mercedes 190E Restomod is Coming For Supercars at the Nurburgring
Copyright 2025 The Arena Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
27 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
A guide to all 16 teams in the Women's Rugby World Cup
Pool A LONDON (AP) — England World ranking: 1 Captain: Zoe Aldcroft Coach: John Mitchell Best finish: Champion 1994, 2014 Prospects: The team to beat. Won 57 of its last 58 tests, and the last 27, many of them blowouts. The one blip was the 2022 final in Auckland, where England overcame an 18th-minute red card to lead New Zealand until the 71st minute. England lost 34-31. The Red Roses have lost only seven times in RWC history, six of them to New Zealand, five of those in finals. Eight of the squad have never lost a test and don't have RWC baggage. Center Emily Scarratt will appear in a record-tying fifth RWC. World ranking: 6 Captain: Siokapesi Palu Coach: Jo Yapp Best finish: Semifinals 2010 Prospects: The game against the U.S. on Aug. 30 will likely decide the pool's second quarterfinalist. The Wallaroos beat the U.S. 27-19 in May in Canberra, one of only three wins in seven tests this year. Only Tia Hinds from the champion sevens side has reached the RWC. The squad also includes the youngest Wallaroos in tournament history, all backs: Waiaria Ellis (17), Caitlyn Halse (18) and Manu'a Moleka (18), who joins older sister Faitala. Ex-England captain Jo Yapp coached Australia to its first ever silverware, the WXV 2 in 2024, but is stepping down for family reasons after the RWC. United States World ranking: 10 Captain: Kate Zackary Coach: Sione Fukofuka Best finish: Champion 1991 Prospects: A 34-21 win over Fiji in Washington in front of a U.S.-record 15,000 fans last month ended a nearly year-long winless run. Back-rower Kate Zackary, captain since 2018, leads the Eagles at a second straight RWC. Loosehead prop Hope Rogers, the most capped Eagle, will appear at her fourth RWC. Center Ilona Maher, the most followed rugby player on social media with 8.7 million fans, returns to England where she made a big impact during a three-month stint with Bristol Bears this year. Samoa World ranking: 15 Captain: Sui Tauaua-Pauaraisa Coach: Ramsey Tomokino Best finish: 9th 2002 Prospects: For the Manusina's first RWC appearance in 11 years, preparation has been hampered by a lack of matches and players unavailable. Their worry is not having faced the intensity of tier one teams before playing three of them in 15 days. Captain and lock Sui Tauaua-Pauaraisa, who will be 38 in October, is one of their greats; she's represented Samoa in 15s, sevens and rugby league and New Zealand in rugby league. Pool B Canada World ranking: 2 Captain: Alexandra Tessier Coach: Kevin Rouet Best finish: Final 2014 Prospects: A second RWC final. Brimming with confidence. Unbeaten in seven tests this year, including a 27-27 draw in New Zealand. Has 21 players back from the 2022 RWC and includes six Paris Olympics sevens silver medalists. Midfielder Alexandra Tessier, a world player of 2024 nominee, took over the captaincy after goalkicking No. 8 Sophie de Goede, another former world player nominee, tore her ACL. De Goede returned in July after 13 months out. Canada has won 16 of its 22 matches since the last RWC, including wins over New Zealand and France. Says back-rower Fabiola Forteza of their RWC preparedness, 'We feel ready.' Scotland World ranking: 8 Captain: Rachel Malcolm Coach: Bryan Easson Best finish: Quarterfinals 1994, 1998 Prospects: The pool game with Wales on Saturday in Manchester looks set to decide whether Scotland reaches its first quarterfinals in 27 years. First-choice hookers Lana Skeldon and Elis Martin turned up at the squad announcement on crutches but are expected to be fit. Lock Emma Wassell made an inspiring comeback in July after two surgeries to remove a benign tumor in her chest. Captain Rachel Malcolm says they're motivated to do well for Bryan Easson, the coach since 2020 who is leaving after the RWC. Wales World ranking: 9 Co-captains: Alex Callender, Kate Williams Coach: Sean Lynn Best finish: Semifinals 1994 Prospects: The historic first test win in Australia on July 25 in Brisbane can't be understated. It followed Wales' first Six Nations whitewash and was the first win under coach Sean Lynn, who took over in January. Wales lost the second match in Sydney but it finally had signs of progress and encouragement after a tumultuous winter regarding contract negotiations that threatened Wales' withdrawal from the RWC. The squad has two pairs of sisters from the same club, including uncapped Wales Under-20 captain Branwen Metcalfe, and hooker Carys Phillips reaching her fourth RWC. Fiji World ranking: 14 Captain: Alfreda Fisher Coach: Ioan Cunningham Best finish: 9th 2022 Prospects: Fiji made its RWC debut in 2022, beat South Africa, and missed out on a quarterfinal spot on points difference. Ioan Cunningham was appointed the Fijiana coach in February, three months after resigning from leading Wales, which he improved. He's happy with the strides made by Fijiana in four matches since May, including a historic first visit by Australia and first test with the U.S. Flanker Alfreda Fisher became Fijiana's youngest captain at 20 and back Adi Salote Nailolo has come out of the new local Na Soko women's competition. Pool C New Zealand World ranking: 3 Co-captains: Ruahei Demant, Kennedy Tukuafu Coach: Allan Bunting Best finish: Champion 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2017, 2022 Prospects: Only the trophy marks a successful RWC for the perennial champion. The Black Ferns won't give it up easily. The great Portia Woodman-Wickliffe has come out of retirement, Kelly Brazier has come out of the cold for a fourth RWC, sevens stars Jorja Miller and Risi Pouri-Lane have been co-opted, and 18-year-old fullback Braxton Sorensen-McGee appears to be a star in the making. But following the 2022 RWC final victory against England, the Black Ferns have lost all three matches to the Red Roses by a combined score of 106-55. Ireland World ranking: 5 Co-Captains: Edel McMahon, Sam Monaghan Coach: Scott Bemand Best finish: Semifinals 2014 Prospects: Ireland admits missing out on 2022 lit a fire to get back. It qualified at the 2024 Six Nations. The Irish are led by No. 8 Aoife Wafer, voted the Six Nations' best player, and center Aoife Dalton, voted Ireland's best player. They include uncapped under-20s hooker Beth Buttimer and prop Ellena Perry, who played 11 times for England to 2020 and switched teams thanks to an Irish maternal grandfather. She debuted in their last warmup, a loss to Canada in Belfast. Japan World ranking: 11 Captain: Iroha Nagata Coach: Lesley McKenzie Best finish: Quarterfinals 1994 Prospects: Not good for New Zealand. Japan has never been drawn in a pool containing the eventual champion. The Sakura Fifteen followed their longest winless streak — seven tests — with a five-match winning run until this month when they lost to Italy in their last warmup in Calvisano. The wins included a first against the U.S. and two at home against Spain, also a pool opponent on Sept. 7. Japan is relatively experienced; only three players have less than 10 caps. Spain World ranking: 13 Captain: Laura Delgado Coach: Juan Gonzalez Marruecos Best finish: Quarterfinals 1998, 8th 2002 Prospects: Las Leonas won at least one match in their previous six RWC appearances, and their goal is one win in this RWC. They beat Fiji in the 2024 WXV 3 final to qualify. While they missed the 2022 RWC, they still have four players from the 2014 tournament, including prop and captain Laura Delgado. Fullback Claudia Peña is considered the team's budding star at 20. The Spaniards were farewelled by original 1991 RWC players in a rousing sendoff. Pool D France World ranking: 4 Co-captains: Marine Ménager, Manaé Feleu Co-coaches: Gaëlle Mignot, David Ortiz Best finish: Semifinals 1991, 1994, 2002, 2006, 2014, 2017, 2022 Prospects: Les Bleues should ease through the tournament until the semifinals when they will likely run into England. Their last warmup was a 40-6 hiding from England in Mont-de-Marsan; a 16th straight loss to England and the biggest defeat in the contest since 2009. France's stars are backs, Pauline Bourdon Sansus and Gabrielle Vernier, and to boost a pack that was overwhelmed by England they have introduced prop Makarita Baleinadogo after Ambre Mwayembe broke her ankle, and back-rowers Marie Morland and Khoudedia Cissokho. Italy World ranking: 7 Captain: Elisa Giordano Coach: Fabio Roselli Best finish: Quarterfinals 2022 Prospects: A team that should stay poised under pressure. Eleven players have more than 50 caps, led by back Sofia Stefan's 98. Ten players are going to their third RWC. Keep an eye on center-wing Alyssa D'Inca, a threat since last year who scored four tries across the Azzurre's warmup wins over Scotland and Japan. South Africa World ranking: 12 Captain: Nolusindiso Booi Coach: Swys de Bruin Best finish: 10th 2010, 2014 Prospects: The most capped women's Springbok, lock Nolusindiso Booi, captains them at a second RWC and her fourth overall. South Africa prepared at home with two hidings from Canada and shared spoils with a Black Ferns XV. Winning the second match 41-24 in Cape Town this month heartened coach Swys de Bruin, who believed his Boks delivered what he hoped to see. Brazil World ranking: 25 Captain: Eshyllen Coimbra Coach: Emiliano Caffera Best finish: Debut Prospects: Brazil played its first test in 2008 then not another one for 11 years. As Yaras, named for a female warrior in myth, earned their first test win in 2023 and beat Colombia for the first time in 2024 to qualify for the RWC. They earned their fifth ever win in their 17th test and first over the Netherlands by 22-0 last month. It's no surprise that 11 of the squad are also sevens players. Brazilian rugby was accelerated by hosting the 2016 Olympics and the team has made every Games since. The 15s captain, Raquel Kochhann, recovered from breast cancer and was Brazil's flagbearer in the 2024 Paris Games. ___
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Daniel Jones named Colts' starting QB after training camp battle with Anthony Richardson
Daniel Jones is getting a second shot as a starter. The Colts named the ex-Giants quarterback as their Week 1 starter following an offseason battle against Anthony Richardson, the team's fourth overall pick in 2023, multiple reports said Tuesday. Daniel Jones will start for the Colts in Week 1 of the 2025 NFL season. AP Advertisement The ex-Giant beat out Anthony Richardson for the job. Getty Images Jones, a first-round pick in 2019, was released from the Giants last November after a rollercoaster five-and-a-half seasons. The breaking point came after a putrid 2-8 start to the franchise's celebratory 100th season. Advertisement He briefly linked up with the Vikings before signing a one-year, $14 million contract with the Colts in free agency. The Colts open the season on Sept. 7 against the Dolphins. This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
WIRED
an hour ago
- WIRED
The Global Car Reckoning Is Here. Far Too Many Auto Companies Don't Have a Plan
Aug 19, 2025 10:56 AM How are the CEOs of Ford, BYD, Lamborghini, Polestar, and more planning to survive the hellscape that is the current automotive world? We asked them. Photography: GETTY; WIRED Staff On a drab, overcast March day in Amsterdam in 2022, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares took off his face mask and strode onto a makeshift stage to confidently explain to a crowd of journalists and analysts how the company that had recently unified brands as diverse as Fiat, Peugeot, Maserati, Ram, and Opel was going rewrite the rules of the car industry. His tie sat slightly askew and his greying hair needed a trim, the picture of a man far too focused on applying dynamic capitalistic principles to an ossified, margin-destructive business to worry about his appearance. The Portuguese CEO had it all planned out until 2030. By that point Stellantis would generate software-based revenues of €20 billion from selling customers subscriptions. Distribution costs would be slashed by 40 percent as the traditional dealer model was rebuilt. Electric vehicles would account for 100 percent of Stellantis sales in Europe and 50 percent in the US. Revenue would grow two-fold and margins would stay in the magic double-digit space reserved for the best premium and luxury brands. 'It is our blueprint. It is about how Stellantis will engineer the future of mobility,' Tavares said. If anyone could shake up automotive, it would be Tavares. He'd already spectacularly proven his abilities by returning the perennially loss-making Vauxhall-Opel brand to profitability after leading PSA Peugeot-Citroen's buyout from General Motors. Now he was ready to apply his private-equity style of management to the newly created behemoth blending PSA Group with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Here was a global company with all the fresh energy and scale benefits ready to face the new era. A little more than three years later however, Tavares is gone and the company posted a €2.3 billion net loss for the first half of 2025 after the new boss Antonio Filosa wrote off €3.3 billion, much of it related to those 2022 plans. A rather forlorn note now sits below the 2022 statement on Stellantis' website: 'Many of our Dare Forward 2030 targets have become increasingly challenging in view of the current trends in market dynamics, government policy and regulation that have emerged since the Plan's introduction.' Stellantis is not alone. Other results posted at time of writing included a €837 million half-year loss from Volvo, a second-quarter loss for Ford and a supposed return to the red for Tesla's automotive business once emissions credits had been stripped out, according to Philippe Houchois, managing director of autos research at investment bank Jefferies. Right now the auto business is very publicly grappling with an existential quandary. Many of the traditional big hitters are trying to navigate the seismic shifts taking place in the car business globally, led by, but not restricted to, the sunsetting of internal combustion and the arrival of cheaper and better EVs from China. But the real concern is that, facing such an onslaught of unfamiliar pressures, automakers—with very few exceptions—don't have a strategy to get them out of hot water. Moving Fast Breaks Things Car companies need long-term plans because it generally takes around four to five years to develop a new model. But the world is currently moving too fast for the industry to accurately predict what customers will want in four years, what new governments will demand, and what cost targets to hit to be competitive. 'In the good old days, you looked at the market, you looked at the competitors, you looked at the economy, you wrote the plan and it kind of happened,' Adrian Hallmark, CEO of Aston Martin and formerly Bentley, told a London conference hosted by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders in June. 'Now, you write it, throw it away, and just wait.' His views were echoed by Jaguar Land Rover's chief financial officer, Richard Molyneux. 'It's not just the quantity and scale of some of these risks that's important. It's the speed,' he told analysts on the company's investor day in June. 'We saw a 1,000 percent increase in our tariff costs into the US with eight days' notice. [Our] industry simply cannot respond that quickly.' Porsche CEO Oliver Blume was blunt in a July memo to employees seen by Bloomberg as he laid out the threat from US tariffs as well as a slump in China sales and slow luxury EV sales. 'Our business model, which has served us well for many decades, no longer works in its current form,' he said. Amid the post-Covid, Tesla-inspired optimism that motivated Stellantis' Dare Forward plan, the smooth electric transition would be paid for by new forms of revenue generation such as software subscriptions and online sales. That turned out to be a mirage. For a while between 2021 and 2023, everything seemed to be going as planned as carmakers made profits close to record levels. Software engineers were hired in their thousands, plans emerged to replace the combustion engine, and dealers had their contracts ripped up as carmakers planned to sell directly to the public. However, much of the profit hike turned out to be a direct result of the chip shortage that slowed vehicle production and provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to increase prices. Meanwhile, EV sales grew lumpily rather than soared universally; reengineering automotive software proved bloody hard; and car companies turned out to be much worse at selling cars than properly incentivized dealers. Formidable New Threat Suddenly carmakers were back to where they were five years earlier, discounting heavily to encourage sales and posting low single-digit profit margins. However this time they were facing a formidable new threat, especially to volume players such as Stellantis, Renault, and Hyundai. 'One of the challenges is clearly the rise of China as a global leader in car manufacturing,' José Asumendi, head of global autos at the bank JP Morgan, tells WIRED. 'They're taking market share globally.' Boosted by lower costs—achieved by a combination of subsidies and sheer hard work—China now exports around 20 percent of its production to claim around 5 percent of the European market and 10 percent in Latin America, according to JP Morgan's figures. In China, the share of sales taken by local automakers has risen to 65 percent up from 41 percent in 2021, the bank said. 'Those figures are obviously going to move higher in the next three years,' Asumendi says. The loss of China sales share is a blow to those including General Motors, Volkswagen Group, Ford, and others who benefited hugely from the emergence of China as the undisputed global number one marketplace for auto sales. China is still the biggest market for German brands including BMW and Mercedes. 'If you go back and look at the amount of capital that the Western OEMs have taken out of China over the last 10 to 12 years, its $80-plus billion,' Ford vice-chair John Lawler told a conference held by the Bernstein bank in May. 'That capital funded a lot of the investment that's happened in the industry. With that gone, everybody is not going to be able to do this on their own.' International carmakers have watched with a mix of fear and fascination as their local manufacturing partners in China have evolved their home-grown efforts from one of clumsy pastiche to a global force. 'It's the most humbling thing I've ever seen,' Ford CEO Jim Farley told the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival in June. 'The cost and the quality of their [electric] vehicles is far superior to what I see in the west.' EVs now account for 30 percent of China's market, while the country's battery makers dominate the global supply chain. 'People don't realize that China has the IP that America needs,' Farley said. 'We need to learn, and how we learn is through joint ventures and cooperations and partnerships, but we can't be so obsessed with China as an enemy that we aren't humble enough to set up those business structures.' Farley regularly takes executives over to China to test the latest EVs, bringing back to Detroit the ones they really want to 'drive the crap out of,' and then strip down. The Porsche-like Xiaomi SU7 was a particular recent favorite. The Broken Subscription Model China is also threatening to rip up the software subscription revenue model, which was fueled by carmakers' hope that customers will pay for downloads like better map integration, superior entertainment packages, or to unlock vehicle features such as automated driving, potentially generating profit margins closer to Apple levels. 'For decades, the industry dreamed of moving away from a transactional-based business to a life-cycle revenue generator,' Philippe Houchois at Jefferies tells WIRED. Rather than waving goodbye to the customer at the dealership, the carmaker maintains a relationship digitally via the dashboard screen and phone app where it can offer 'new services' (even if the sophistication of these new services right now rarely extends beyond custom wallpapers on the cabin screens.) The urgency to generate this new revenue has ramped up as car sales have stalled globally. 'It wasn't existential [when it was first proposed] because the industry was still growing. If all of a sudden there is no growth, then it's not a nice-to-have, it's a must-have,' says Houchois. Charging for features as a mass-market brand requires everyone to go along with it, or customers just switch to the brand that offers it for free. So the news that BYD, China's largest carmaker and along with Chery, the country's largest car exporter, isn't at all keen on this business model is a blow to western automakers. 'This is not our motto,' executive vice president of BYD and president of BYD North America Stella Li tells WIRED. 'If customers need more technology, our platform can support them, but it's not what we pursue to make additional revenue.' Indeed, BYD has said it will package its upcoming 'God's Eye' assisted driving technology for free. Tesla is often compared with BYD in the global battle for EVs, but really is very different. Whereas BYD operates as a car company along mostly traditional lines, Tesla sees charging customers to access its automated driving as becoming one of its primary revenue sources. The problem is, CEO Elon Musk's long-promised software download to turn your Model 3 or Model Y into a robotaxi has yet to materialize. Houchois describes Tesla as a reluctant carmaker, forced to spend industrial levels of capital updating a physical product from which software levels of margin are always tantalizingly out of reach. 'Musk doesn't want to play the BYD game,' Houchois says. 'He thinks the BYD game is last year's game. Except until you have tomorrow's business generating cash, you need to play in last year's game.' Data Driven Shift All carmakers are still working very hard on creating the fully upgradeable vehicle. 'For me the software-defined car is really the game changer,' Xavier Martinet, head of Hyundai in Europe, tells WIRED. 'If everything is mechanical, if you want to go from manual air conditioning to automatic air conditioning, you cannot. If it becomes a software issue, you can actually sell it.' Carmakers however, while well-versed in selling physical options like leather seats or sunroofs, have yet to prove they can do the same with digital upgrades. Most now understand from early experiments in selling subscription access to preinstalled technology such as heated seats, or accepted freebies such as Apple CarPlay, appear greedy and can alienate customers. According to a survey from S&P Global customers increasingly don't like such subscriptions, with proportions of those saying they would pay for connected services dropping from 86 percent in 2024 to 68 percent in 2025. Undeterred, VW has just introduced a monthly subscription to increase the power of some of its electric cars, a move that mirrors Mercedes' Acceleration Increase for its EQ models, which initially cost $1,200 a year. Perhaps more crucially, automakers have been so entranced by the mere possibility of selling software in cars, few have been able to nail down precisely what in the future they'll sell that consumers will deem genuinely worth buying. Yet despite setback after setback, car companies are clinging to the dream that when this as yet largely unidentified genuinely useful new technology arrives, they can be the ones to monetize it, rather than losing out to more nimble tech companies or other suppliers. Forced to raise their game, carmakers are only now realizing they cannot repeat past mistakes such as letting others build up parts and services businesses off the back of their core product. 'They stole the business from us,' Martinet says, referencing as an example windscreen replacement companies. 'So I don't want them to steal the next one.' Hyundai is staying in the subscription sales business—a more flexible form of leasing. 'Sometimes you're losing money as a whole, but you're recovering a business that has been lost to leasing companies, to banks, to insurers,' he says. One car company that refreshingly seems to have more than just a rough outline of a plan for the next decade is Ford. Farley believes business customers are an excellent source of income for subscription revenue. 'The customer who uses their vehicle for business looks at their vehicle completely differently than a retail customer,' Farley told WIRED. 'When it's not working they lose revenue, unlike retail customers, who are just annoyed. So they pay for productivity software.' Ford claims it now has almost one million subscriptions for its 'Pro' software. What's more, Farley feels this success will translate to consumer sales. 'What we are learning in Pro is going to be the general model for our business model at Ford—not because it's a business, because the relationship with the customers changed. We're telling the customer how to use their asset,' says Farley. 'The data will be used for different things on retail, but I don't think it's going to be this land rush of autonomy that's going to make us all the money and add value to the customer. Certainly that will be the case for eyes-off-the-road highway driving. But the data… we can't even imagine what the data off the vehicle is going to be used for the customer yet.' 'And so the dealer in that model is a consulting role. It is not a selling role. 'We're noticing you're not using your vehicle the right way; we're noticing you're not paying attention on predictive failure of your components.' It's the same for retail. I don't think it's going to be different,' says Farley. Service Economy Car companies worry a great deal about how to keep their dealers happy. Having bought the car from the manufacturers below the retail price, dealers are fine with giving away some or all of their profit margin because the bulk of their profit comes from servicing and parts sales. But that delicate balance changes with electric cars, which don't need high-margin servicing. According to Li, BYD estimates that dealer income from servicing will fall from 50 to 30 percent. The company plans to overcome this by having dealers selling more new and used cars apiece to cover any shortfall. 'We are paying a lot of attention to make sure [our] per-store sales number is the highest in the industry,' Li says. Importantly, BYD already has the spare manufacturing capacity to massively ramp up car production. No new plants will be needed. Hyundai is also behind the idea of the superdealer. 'We have the FBB plan—fewer, bigger, better—because there are some dealers that will never be able to accompany us,' Martinet says, adding that the plan right now is to overcome a "short-term emergency" while a more solid but as-yet-unbuilt plan is cooked up. "We're just trying to outrun the [competition] and then find another way to defeat them," Martinet says. Plug-in hybrids as an interim technology is making carmakers, suppliers, dealers happy because they're higher priced, with more content per vehicle and more servicing opportunities. But they are not long-term. Lamborghini is making the move to Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles with cars like the Urus SE and new Temerario, but CEO Stephan Winkelmann understands that in a future EV era a completely new business plan is needed. 'This is all undergoing a deep analysis, and nobody has a clear response,' he tells WIRED. 'It's clear that the complexity of a car is much higher than a cell phone or a computer,' Winkelmann says. One opportunity he mentions might involve tempting customers to spend more at service time by offering to upgrade the battery with a newer chemistry giving a longer range. Who makes that battery is another contentious issue. Parts suppliers are responsible for about 85 percent of the value of a new car, Stellantis' former CEO Tavares pointed out last year. Reducing that number should be an easy way to claw back revenue lost to the Chinese, to the global tech giants or to stagnant car sales. But in an electric world the battery supplier now has outsized importance, eclipsing the work carmakers have done to lower manufacturing costs. Assembling the car more quickly with fewer parts doesn't move the needle much when the battery costs as much as the rest of the car, Thierry Charvet, Renault's head of industry and quality, pointed out to journalists in June at event held at the company's manufacturing plant in Palenica, Spain. Then you have a dilemma: Do you take battery production in-house, as VW is doing? Or let suppliers—mainly from China—take the risk and grab the reward? As with GM and Korea's LG Chem, and as Ford plans with China's CATL, Renault favors a loose partnership. 'The chemistry is going very fast and battery plants are very, very capitalistic,' Charvet said, while acknowledging the dangers. 'The cell makers are very sensible. Their job is to sell chemistry which is available, not the chemistry they are working on for the future. We need to be able to challenge them.' Ford has just announced it is spending billions on a radical reinvention of auto manufacturing, making EVs in a completely new way, with battery production brought in-house. It's all aimed squarely at taking on Chinese competition—but if it works this truly bold move won't come to fruition until 2027 when the first vehicle from Ford's Universal EV Platform arrives, a midsize four-door electric pickup with an aimed starting price of $30,000. European Makers Want to Hit the Brakes With fewer and fewer international players able to compete in China, the pivot to electric is mainly a European challenge. Here tailpipe CO2 reduction is mandated up until 2035, when the sale of new combustion engine cars will be banned. Faced with heightened competition at home and the loss of their high-margin combustion-engine SUVs, European carmakers are lobbying hard to push back the ban. 'We need a reality check. Otherwise we are heading at full speed against a wall,' Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius, also president of the European auto lobby ACEA, told the German publication Handelsblatt. The US was going the same way on EVs, albeit at a slower pace, until EV-sceptic President Donald Trump rammed the direction of travel into hard reverse by removing EV sales credits and reducing manufacturer penalties for not meeting fuel efficiency targets to zero. That forces global carmakers to develop combustion engines and electric cars simultaneously, stretching budgets. With China racing to electric far faster than either of the other two big global regions, as well as requiring specific software unique to the country, carmakers are having to silo development for each region, if they can afford to. 'What's happening is a rapid fragmentation of markets in a way that I and our business has never seen before,' Aston Martin's Hallmark said. 'As a small player, we can't imagine having electric vehicles and combustion-engine vehicles in parallel, and coping with three radically different regimes around the world.' Just like BYD, Michael Lohscheller, CEO of EV brand Polestar, thinks that while ancillary revenues will be important for the car industry of the future, there's no getting over the basic tenet of the auto business. 'Cars are the biggest profit contribution [to any auto business], and it will stay like this,' he says. 'You have to make sure that you can make money [selling] electric cars—and it can be done. I'm not saying digital services will contribute more than the sale of the car. That won't happen. We are not dreaming. You have to make money with cars, and if you just hope that everything else will come from other areas, you have a big problem.' Bold words from the CEO of an EV company that lost $1.8 billion in 2024. In contrast, BYD made a record $5.6 billion last year. With an industry-wide accepted winning gameplan still not obvious, it seems the best that old-guard international carmakers can do right now to ensure survival is outrun their rivals. 'You cannot be average,' Hyundai's Martinet says. 'When you have newcomers as strong as [China's] are, you cannot be a B or B minus. You have to be an A at least.'
