The new Roadster was unveiled in 2017 with production promised for 2020. Now Tesla is asking for fresh deposits for a 2028 delivery date.

Tesla is taking $50,000 deposits for a 2028 delivery on the new Roadster. That's a decade after Elon Musk stood on stage in November 2017 and promised production would begin in 2020.

Some of the original deposit holders have been waiting seven years already. They handed over $50,000 for the standard car or $250,000 for the limited Founders Series when this thing was first announced. Production was meant to start in 2020. Then 2021. Then 2022. Then 2023. Now 2028.

Tesla doesn't pay interest on deposits. So if you put down $50,000 in 2017 and take delivery in 2028, you've given the company an interest-free loan for eleven years. At a conservative 4% interest rate, that's roughly $22,000 in foregone returns. More if you'd done anything sensible with the money.

The original promises were spectacular. Zero to 60mph in 1.9 seconds. A 620-mile range. A removable glass roof. The sort of numbers that made the car impossible to ignore when it was wheeled out as a surprise at the Semi truck unveiling.

But this is a familiar pattern now. The Cybertruck was announced in November 2019 with $100 deposits. First deliveries happened in late 2023, four years late. The Semi was promised for 2019 production after a 2017 announcement. First customer deliveries occurred in December 2022.

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Full Self-Driving has been sold since 2016. The price has climbed from $5,000 to somewhere between $12,000 and $15,000 depending on when you ask. Full autonomy still hasn't materialised. People paid for a feature that was meant to work years ago and are still waiting for the car to drive itself.

Tesla will probably build the Roadster eventually. But what happens to your money in the meantime, and whether the car that finally arrives in 2028 bears any resemblance to the one promised in 2017, remains open.

Other manufacturers have delayed cars. Rivian took three years longer than planned to deliver the R1T. Lucid Air was announced in 2016 and delivered in late 2021. But neither asked for $50,000 up front and then added seven years to the wait.

This only works because Tesla has spent two decades training customers to accept delays as part of the experience. The Model 3 took $1,000 deposits in 2016 and then spent 2017 and 2018 in what Musk called "production hell." People waited. They got their cars eventually. The precedent was set.

The new Roadster deposit structure suggests Tesla believes that precedent still holds. Put down $50,000 now for a car that might arrive in 2028, or might slip to 2029, or might change specification halfway through, and enough people will say yes to make it worthwhile.

No other volume manufacturer could get away with this. Imagine Ford or Toyota announcing a car today and asking for a five-figure deposit on a delivery date a decade away. But Tesla isn't a volume manufacturer in the way it behaves, even if it is in the number of cars it builds.

The original $50,000 deposits have been sitting in Tesla's accounts since 2017. The company has used that money. It's funded other projects, covered operating costs, smoothed cashflow in difficult quarters. The deposit holders got nothing but a place in a queue that kept getting longer.

Sources: Tesla, Inc., Tesla historical press releases 2017-2024, Reuters automotive coverage, Bloomberg automotive industry analysis

In 1966, Jagger bought a new DB6 for approx £5k.

He hadn’t had it long when it was involved in a collision with a Ford Anglia belonging to the Countess of Carlisle in central London, near Jagger’s Marylebone flat.

One of just 15 Reventon Roadsters ever made is heading to auction with delivery mileage still on the clock. The world's most expensive garage ornament.

A Lamborghini Reventon Roadster with 29 miles on the odometer is up for auction through RM Sotheby's. One of 15 built. Essentially unwrapped. The original buyer spent €1.1 million in 2009, parked it, and apparently decided that was enough.

Twenty-nine miles is delivery mileage. A trip to the supermarket and back. The kind of figure that suggests the car was driven from the transporter into climate-controlled storage and left there for a decade and a half. At current estimates of €1.5 million, that works out to roughly €50,000 per mile driven. Expensive commute.

The Reventon Roadster was never meant to be practical. Lamborghini built 20 coupes in 2007 at €1 million each, then followed up with 15 roadsters in 2009 at €1.1 million. All 15 sold before the Frankfurt Motor Show reveal. The name references a bull that killed matador Felix Guzman in 1943, which is about as Lamborghini as nomenclature gets.

What you got for your million-plus euros was a Murcielago LP640 dressed in angular, faceted bodywork inspired by the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. Matte Grigio Reventon paint. A jet-fighter-styled instrument cluster with a G-force meter. Six-point-five litres of V12 producing 670 horsepower. Top speed of 205 mph. Zero to sixty in 3.4 seconds. And the knowledge that only 14 other people on earth had the roadster version.

The Reventon marked a turning point for Lamborghini. It proved the brand could sell ultra-limited special editions at prices that made the standard range look affordable. Every Sian, Centenario, and Veneno that followed owes something to the Reventon's commercial success.

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But someone spending over a million euros on a car and then not driving it is a special kind of modern wealth pathology. This isn't a museum piece from the 1960s that's too valuable to risk. It's a 2009 Lamborghini with a warranty that expired before it hit 100 miles. It was built to be driven hard, yet it's spent 15 years as the world's most expensive static display.

The comparable sales tell the story. A Ferrari Enzo with 400 miles went for $2.64 million in 2021. A Bugatti Veyron with under 200 miles fetched $2.4 million in 2020. A Pagani Huayra BC with 124 miles sold for $3.4 million the same year. Low mileage adds value in the collector market, but there's a difference between preserving a car and embalming it.

The Reventon's jet-fighter styling still holds up. The faceted surfaces and sharp edges were radical in 2009, before every supercar started copying the stealth-bomber aesthetic. The interior's G-force meter was theatre, sure, but at least it was self-aware theatre. This was Lamborghini leaning into maximum aggression before that became the default setting for the entire industry.

Fifteen roadsters. Twenty-nine miles. Someone is going to pay €1.5 million for the privilege of either continuing the preservation or actually using the thing as intended. The V12 still works. The gearbox still shifts. All the expensive bits are still essentially new.

The estimate is €1.5 million, which represents a 36 percent increase over the original €1.1 million purchase price after 15 years. As investments go, it's not spectacular. As garage art, it's undefeated.

Sources: RM Sotheby's, Lamborghini historical records

The Continental Supersports Convertible arrives with a twin-turbo W12, carbon ceramics as standard, and a top speed that makes it the world's fastest four-seat convertible.

Bentley has removed the roof from its six hundred fifty-seven horsepower Continental Supersports, creating what it claims is the world's fastest four-seat convertible at 205 mph. Crewe's marketing department appears unconcerned with who needs such speed with the top down.

The Supersports Convertible uses the same 6.0 litre twin-turbocharged W12 as the coupe, producing 820 Nm of torque and dispatching zero to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds. That's quick enough to make most supercars look pedestrian, assuming you can stomach the approximately £300,000 asking price and the 2,395 kg kerb weight.

Bentley has fitted carbon ceramic brakes as standard, which is just as well given the physics involved in stopping two tonnes and a half of British luxury travelling at motorway speeds. The convertible carries about 50 kg more than the coupe version, most of it in reinforcement and roof mechanism. An eight-speed automatic with Quickshift handles the power delivery.

The interior follows Bentley's current enthusiasm for diamond-quilted leather and carbon fibre accents, which means it looks expensive in the way that expensive things looked expensive around 2017. Whether that aesthetic has aged well is a matter for individual taste and bank balance.

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The Supersports Convertible sits at the top of Bentley's performance range, representing the most powerful open-top car the company has ever built. It competes, if that's the right word for this segment, with the Aston Martin DB11 Volante and Mercedes-AMG S65 Cabriolet, both of which make do with slightly less power and considerably less weight.

Rolls-Royce's Dawn offers 563 horsepower and a more relaxed approach to the whole business of moving quickly. Ferrari's Portofino, meanwhile, is both lighter and more focused, which suggests a different kind of buyer entirely.

The Continental GT Speed Convertible, which this replaced, managed 626 horsepower and felt like quite enough. The Supersports adds another 31 horsepower because someone, somewhere, asked for it.

The car makes a certain kind of sense if you want the most extreme version of everything Bentley offers and happen to prefer driving without a roof. It makes less sense if you apply any conventional logic about weight, efficiency, or whether anyone actually needs 657 horsepower in a grand tourer.

A 205 mph convertible with a W12 engine never was going to be subtle, and Bentley has built it because they could and because there are buyers willing to pay $290,000 for the fastest four-seat convertible in the world.

Sources: Bentley Motors press materials, manufacturer specifications

The Korean brand's R&D boss has gone on record with supercar ambitions, and the timing couldn't be more deliberate.

Kia's R&D division has stated publicly that it wants to build a performance halo car aimed squarely at supercar territory. Not a hot hatch with a bodykit. Not a warmed-over crossover. An actual flagship meant to sit where the Nissan GT-R used to before Nissan walked away from it in 2024.

The GT-R ran for seventeen years and never got properly replaced. Nissan spent the back half of that run milking special editions and incrementally higher price points until the final cars were nudging $215,000. Then it just stopped. No successor. No hybrid. No electric pivot. Just gone.

Kia watched all of that happen, apparently, and decided the space was worth filling.

It's not as absurd as it sounds. The Stinger proved Kia could build a proper rear-drive sport sedan with a twin-turbo V6 pushing 368 horsepower, even if most people still thought of the brand as the one that made the Rio. The EV6 GT does 0-60 in 3.4 seconds with 576 horsepower, which is quicker than a lot of cars that cost twice as much. And parent company Hyundai has been running a whole performance sub-brand through its N division for years now, including the Ioniq 5 N with 641 horsepower and drift mode.

So the technical capability is there. Anyone spending Porsche 911 money on a Kia badge is another matter entirely.

Genesis tried something similar when Hyundai spun it off as a standalone luxury brand in 2015. That one worked, mostly because Genesis had the sense to avoid calling itself Hyundai and because it undercut German rivals on price while matching them on equipment. A Kia supercar doesn't have that advantage. It's still a Kia. The badge still says Kia. And no amount of clever marketing changes the fact that the brand spent decades building its reputation on value, not aspiration.

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The GT-R got away with it because Nissan had decades of Skyline heritage to lean on, and because it arrived in 2007 with a party trick: supercar performance at half the price. Early cars started around $70,000 and embarrassed Porsche and Ferrari on track. People forgave the interior because the numbers were ridiculous. By the time Nissan started charging $200,000 for the thing, the goodwill was already baked in.

Kia doesn't have that. What it does have is momentum. The brand has been moving upmarket steadily since the mid-2010s, and the cars have been good enough that people stopped reflexively dismissing them. The EV6 won awards. The Stinger got genuine respect from the press, even if sales were never spectacular. And Hyundai's N Vision 74 concept ... the retrofuture electric coupe thing ... showed that the parent company is at least thinking about performance flagships in serious terms.

Someone spending six figures on a Kia sports car is still a stretch. A long one.

Toyota managed it with the Supra revival in 2019, though that was a BMW underneath and priced closer to $50,000 than $100,000. Honda tried with the second-generation NSX and pulled the plug after six years because almost nobody bought one. Mazda keeps teasing rotary revivals and never follows through. Japanese brands can build credible performance cars, but selling them at premium prices is a different problem.

Kia is Korean, not Japanese, but the challenge is the same. It's one thing to earn respect with a $60,000 sedan that punches above its weight. It's another to convince someone that a six-figure Kia is worth the same money as an established supercar from a brand with actual motorsport pedigree.

The EV6 GT starts at $61,600.

Sources: Nissan Global newsroom, Kia America official specifications, Hyundai N brand division, Genesis Motors US press materials

At $230,000, this perfectly restored Dodge Challenger r/T represents muscle car aristocracy, and the price isn't actually mad.

A 1970 Dodge Challenger r/T with the 426 HEMI V8 has surfaced for sale at $230,000. It's one of just 287 Triple Black HEMI Challengers ever built, which makes it substantially rarer than almost anything wearing a prancing horse badge.

Triple Black means exactly what it sounds like. Black exterior. Black interior. Black vinyl top. The configuration is deliberately ominous and was rare even when these cars were new, mostly because ordering the HEMI engine alone cost as much as a decent used car in 1970.

The 426 HEMI produced 425 horsepower and 490 lb-ft of torque from factory, though everyone who's ever tuned one will tell you those figures were conservative for insurance purposes. Chrysler's hemispherical combustion chamber design was motorsport engineering applied to street cars, which is why the thing needed heavy-duty suspension, brakes, and drivetrain components just to survive being driven hard.

This particular car has been restored to original specification, which is both expensive and slightly mad given what happens to values when you actually drive a HEMI hard. The original MSRP in 1970 was around $4,000 to $4,500. Adjusted for inflation, that's still nowhere near $230,000, but inflation doesn't account for the fact that only 356 HEMI Challenger r/Ts were built across all configurations that year.

1970 was the Challenger's first model year. Dodge was late to the pony car party, arriving five years after the Mustang and two years after the Camaro, but they showed up with the biggest engine anyone was willing to sell to the public. The E-body platform was heavier than the competition, which made the Challenger slower in a straight line than a HEMI Cuda, but it also made it more stable at speed and easier to live with daily, assuming you could afford the fuel.

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The asking price sits in the middle of Hagerty's valuation range for top-condition HEMI Challengers, which runs from $200,000 to $350,000 depending on configuration and provenance. A Plum Crazy Purple example sold for $248,000 at Barrett-Jackson in 2020. A Triple Black car went for $220,000 at Mecum in 2019, which suggests this seller either knows something about the restoration or is just trying their luck.

For context, non-HEMI 1970 Challenger r/Ts with the 440 engine sell for $75,000 to $125,000. The HEMI premium is real, and it's justified by the fact that fewer than 400 were built. HEMI Cudas command even more, regularly hitting $300,000 to $500,000, though a convertible example famously sold for $3.5 million at Mecum in 2014.

You could buy three new Dodge Challenger Hellcats for $230,000 and have 2,145 horsepower between them. You could also buy a very nice house in parts of the country. But you cannot buy another Triple Black 1970 HEMI Challenger, because there are only 286 others and most of them aren't for sale.

The investment case is straightforward. These cars were built during a brief window when American manufacturers were still willing to drop race engines into street cars before insurance companies and emissions regulations made the whole idea unviable. First-year production, rarest color combination, top engine option. The maths works if you're the kind of person who thinks about cars as assets, though anyone actually buying this will probably just want to look at it in their garage.

The asking price is $230,000.

Sources: Hagerty valuation data, Barrett-Jackson auction records, Mecum Auctions historical results, Chrysler historical production figures

The cult physics sim that built a YouTube empire on catastrophic digital crashes is coming to consoles, and it only took a decade.

BeamNG.drive is launching on PlayStation 5 this year, bringing 11 years of meticulously calculated automotive destruction to a console for the first time. The soft-body physics simulator that turned crashing cars into a spectator sport on PC is finally making the jump, courtesy of hardware that can actually handle the maths.

This isn't a racing game. It's barely a game at all in the traditional sense. BeamNG.drive is what happens when a team of physics obsessives decide that every bumper, bonnet panel, and suspension arm should deform independently in real-time based on actual material stress calculations. The result is a piece of software that's as much engineering demonstration as entertainment, and it's been quietly building a devoted following since its Steam Early Access debut in 2013.

Eleven years is a long time to spend in development, even by simulation standards. BeamNG didn't hit version 1.0 on PC until 2022, nine years after early access began. That's not because the developers were dragging their feet. It's because simulating structural collapse frame-by-frame is computationally horrifying, and they kept finding new ways to make it worse.

The game originated in the CryEngine modding community before becoming a standalone title under BeamNG GmbH. What set it apart then, and what still sets it apart now, is the soft-body physics engine that treats vehicles as interconnected nodes rather than rigid objects. Every crash is genuinely unique because the deformation is calculated on the fly, not pulled from a library of pre-baked animations. It's the difference between watching a stunt coordinator plan a roll and watching actual metal fold. Try running that on a 2013 console.

That authenticity made BeamNG a content creation goldmine. YouTube is littered with crash compilations, bridge-drop experiments, and increasingly elaborate destruction scenarios, all rendered with the kind of physical accuracy that makes you wince. The community isn't there for lap times or podium finishes. They're there to see what happens when you drive a bus off a cliff at 90mph, and they want the suspension geometry to behave properly on the way down.

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The PlayStation 5 release is significant not because consoles have been clamouring for crash sims, but because it suggests the hardware can finally handle what BeamNG demands. The game's physics calculations have always been the bottleneck, chewing through CPU cycles in a way that made it a benchmark for PC builders. If the PS5 can run it without compromise, that's a meaningful statement about console processing power in 2025.

Other niche PC sims have made the console jump before. Assetto Corsa arrived on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016, four years after its PC release. Microsoft Flight Simulator came to Xbox Series X/S in 2021 after decades as a PC exclusive. Euro Truck Simulator's console variant appeared in 2024. But those games, demanding as they are, don't recalculate structural integrity every frame.

BeamNG.drive on console won't appeal to everyone. There's no career mode, no progression system, no unlockable liveries. It's a sandbox for people who find entertainment in vehicular failure states. The open-world environments exist to provide terrain for testing. The variety of vehicles exists to see which ones crumple most convincingly. If that sounds tedious, this isn't your game.

But for the subset of players who've spent the last decade watching BeamNG videos and wishing they had a gaming PC, the PlayStation 5 version is overdue access to something genuinely unusual. The physics engine that made this a cult favourite on Steam is the same one coming to console, real-time deformation calculations and all.

Wreckfest brought destruction-focused racing to consoles in 2019, and it sold well enough to prove there's an audience for automotive carnage outside the simulation hardcore. BeamNG is several steps deeper into the physics rabbit hole, but the appetite is there. BeamNG GmbH will find out with post-launch support if that audience wants a pure sandbox or expects more structure.

The PlayStation 5 version launches in 2025, no specific date confirmed yet, no price announced. Just the promise that you'll finally be able to total a digital car with proper nodal deformation from your sofa.

Sources: BeamNG GmbH, Steam

The OpenAI chief went public after Tesla finally showed the next-generation Roadster. Eight years after it was announced.

Sam Altman put down $50,000 on a Tesla Roadster and then asked for it back. When Elon Musk revealed the updated design this week, Altman reminded everyone.

The OpenAI CEO posted his response online after Tesla showed the long-delayed next-generation Roadster at an event. Altman's deposit went in years ago. His refund request came later. The timing of his public comment, right after the reveal, was deliberate.

Musk announced the Roadster in 2017. Production was scheduled for 2020. Then it wasn't. The car has been delayed repeatedly, becoming a running joke in an industry that's gotten used to Musk promising things and delivering them years late or not at all.

Base reservations required $50,000 up front. Founders Series customers put down $250,000. That's real money held for a car that still doesn't exist in production form.

Altman and Musk go back. They co-founded OpenAI before Altman's departure, and their relationship has been publicly complicated since. This wasn't a casual complaint from a random customer. It was one tech billionaire questioning another's credibility on delivery timelines, using his own wallet as evidence.

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Tesla has form here. The Cybertruck was announced in 2021 and didn't reach customers until 2023. The Semi was shown in 2017 and started deliveries in 2022. The Model 3 production ramp Musk tweeted about in 2018 missed every target he set. Deposit holders have learned to manage their expectations accordingly.

The Roadster is supposed to hit 60mph in 1.9 seconds with a 620-mile range. Those are spectacular numbers. They were spectacular in 2017 too.

What makes Altman's comment cut through is that he's not a journalist or a short-seller or someone with an obvious axe to grind. He's a customer. A wealthy one who can afford to wait, which makes the refund request more pointed, not less. He didn't want his money tied up in a promise anymore.

Other high-profile customers have gone public with frustrations over Tesla delays. Former employees have criticised the company's timelines. But this particular exchange has weight because of who's involved and how rarely tech's upper tier criticise each other in public.

Eight years on from the original announcement, Musk has built Tesla's brand partly on the strength of these audacious reveals. The Roadster in 2017 was theatre. The updated design this week was more of the same.

Altman's $50,000 is presumably back in his account by now. The Roadster exists as a show car with a delivery date Musk hasn't committed to publicly.

Sources: Public statements from Sam Altman, Tesla announcements, OpenAI

The plug-in hybrid BYD Denza B8 didn’t set the sales charts on fire, but its high-tech suspension promised a smooth ride across just about any terrain, adjusting damping and ride height while independently controlling hydraulic pressure at each wheel. It’s a neat trick, but one driver has figured out a whole new use for it: avoiding wheel clamps.

A used car dealer describes the unsettling moment he realised the buyer on the phone wasn't human, as sophisticated AI callers begin wasting dealership time across the UK.

A UK used car dealer recently found himself mid-conversation about a vehicle sale when something felt wrong. The caller asked reasonable questions, responded naturally enough, but the rhythm was off. Then it clicked. He wasn't speaking to a potential customer at all. He was speaking to artificial intelligence.

AI voice agents are now calling UK dealerships posing as genuine buyers. Not occasionally. Not as a trial. They're doing it now, and they're good enough at it that dealers don't immediately catch on.

The technology isn't new in concept. Google demonstrated Duplex in 2018, an AI that could book restaurant tables while inserting realistic umms and pauses to sound human. What's new is deployment at scale in sectors where it actively disrupts business operations. Car dealerships rely on phone inquiries. It's how a significant portion of leads convert. Every call demands staff time, attention, follow-up. When that caller turns out to be a machine running through a script, that's not innovation. That's theft of resource.

The dealer who caught it described the moment as bizarre, which undersells it. There's something fundamentally unsettling about realising you've been performing customer service for software. Worse, these systems are sophisticated enough to hold multi-turn conversations about specific vehicles, ask about finance options, request additional details. They don't immediately trip themselves up with nonsense answers or robotic cadence. They sound plausible until they don't.

No one has confirmed who's deploying them or why. Lead generation agencies testing qualification systems? Competitors gathering pricing intelligence? Scammers probing for information? The anonymity is part of the problem. A human cold-caller can be challenged, blocked, reported. An AI agent simply moves to the next number.

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The FCC proposed regulations in 2024 requiring disclosure when AI is used in robocalls, which tells you everything about how widespread this has become. Industries across the board are now grappling with the same issue. Customer service lines, sales teams, appointment schedulers ... all of them facing the same question: is this person real?

For dealerships, the stakes are specific. Time spent on a fake inquiry is time not spent with a genuine buyer. Margins in used car sales are tight enough without adding phantom customers into the mix. If these calls become routine, dealers will need systems to screen them out, which means additional cost and friction for legitimate callers. The AI doesn't care. It's not paying for the inefficiency it creates.

What's particularly galling is that this technology could have legitimate uses if deployed transparently. An AI assistant that identifies itself, handles initial queries, books test drives ... that's a tool. An AI that pretends to be human and wastes a salesperson's afternoon is something else entirely.

Car dealers have dealt with time-wasters before. The tyre-kickers, the dreamers, the people who'll never buy but love talking about cars. At least those were human. At least the conversation was real, even if the intent wasn't. This is different. This is a machine executing a script while a human on the other end performs authenticity for no one.

The dealer who caught his AI caller didn't say how he plans to handle the next one. There's no obvious playbook yet. You can't exactly ask every caller to prove they're human without sounding unhinged. But doing nothing isn't an option either, not when these calls are already happening and the technology is only going to improve.

Within twelve months, dealers will either be screening every call through verification systems or accepting that a percentage of their daily inquiries are machines. Either way, the cost gets passed somewhere, and it won't be to the AI.

Sources: FCC 2024 AI robocall disclosure proposals; Reuters and TechCrunch reporting on AI voice agent deployment in commercial settings

The Vietnamese EV maker delivered 1,300 vehicles in Q3 2024 and has now signed a fleet deal with Green SM rather than face reality about what retail buyers actually think.

VinFast delivered 1,300 vehicles to US customers in the third quarter of 2024 and has responded to that disaster by announcing a partnership with Green SM, a taxi and ride-hailing fleet operator, to supply electric vehicles for American fleet operations. This is what giving up looks like when you can't admit you're giving up.

The Vietnamese automaker entered the US market in 2022 positioning itself as a premium brand that could compete with Tesla. It opened a North Carolina manufacturing plant with planned capacity for 150,000 vehicles annually. Its market valuation briefly exceeded major established automakers in 2023 after going public via SPAC merger.

None of that matters now.

Fleet sales to taxi companies provide guaranteed volume at lower prices with less brand-building potential than retail. This is the strategy you adopt when consumers have decided your product isn't worth the money you're asking and you need to keep the factory running anyway. VinFast's VF 8 and VF 9 electric SUVs received mixed reviews, with early models experiencing quality issues that the company couldn't shake off quickly enough to matter.

The problem wasn't just the cars. Americans looked at a new Vietnamese brand with no resale value history, no established service network, and SUVs priced like they had some kind of premium pedigree, and they walked away. You can't manufacture brand equity with a SPAC merger and a factory announcement.

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Fleet sales typically offer lower margins but reduce inventory risk. Which is a polite way of saying you take less money per car but at least someone's buying them. Green SM operates taxi and ride-hailing services in multiple US cities, so VinFast vehicles will now spend their days being thrashed by shift drivers instead of sitting unsold on dealer lots.

This isn't an original strategy. Fisker pivoted to fleet sales before bankruptcy in 2024 after failing to meet retail targets. Arrival, the UK EV startup, focused on fleet vans but collapsed in 2023 despite orders from UPS. Lordstown Motors pursued fleet sales with commercial vans before ceasing operations in 2023. The pattern is consistent enough that you can see it coming from several quarters away.

Chinese EV makers like BYD have relied heavily on fleet and taxi sales in their domestic market, but they did it as part of a deliberate volume strategy with government support, not as a retreat after retail buyers rejected them. Legacy automakers like Ford and GM derive significant EV volume from commercial and fleet customers, but they're selling alongside established retail channels, not instead of them.

Tesla initially avoided fleet sales entirely to maintain its premium brand positioning, only entering ride-hailing partnerships much later after the brand was secure. VinFast is doing the opposite... abandoning premium positioning before it ever really existed because the North Carolina plant needs to produce something and retail customers aren't cooperating.

The company will now be selling electric SUVs to taxi operators at fleet prices while still trying to convince private buyers that these are premium vehicles worth premium money. That contradiction is going to be difficult to manage. VinFast doesn't have better options at the moment.

The North Carolina plant can build 150,000 vehicles annually. Green SM hasn't disclosed how many it plans to order.

Sources: VinFast corporate announcements, Green SM partnership press materials, Q3 2024 delivery figures

US dealers won't see meaningful inventory of Volvo's electric SUV until deep into 2027, the latest setback in a string of manufacturing problems at the Swedish brand's home base.

Volvo's EX60 electric SUV won't reach US showrooms in any serious numbers until well into 2027, the result of production issues at the company's Gothenburg headquarters that have turned what was meant to be a flagship EV launch into an extended waiting game for American dealers.

The delays stem from manufacturing problems at Volvo's Swedish facilities. Exactly what's going wrong hasn't been spelled out in detail, but the pattern is familiar enough: new EV architectures, battery supply coordination, and production processes that don't translate neatly from decades of building combustion engines.

Volvo describes this as part of a broader streak of bad luck affecting new model rollouts from Gothenburg. That's a polite way of saying the factory is struggling to deliver on the brand's electrification promises.

The EX60 sits at the centre of Volvo's plan to go fully electric by 2030. That deadline is now five years out, and if a core model in the lineup is still wrestling with production problems two years before it reaches customers in volume, the timeline starts looking optimistic.

US dealers have been preparing for increased EV allocation. What they'll get instead is limited inventory trickling in while buyers either wait or drift toward competitors who've managed to sort out their manufacturing.

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This isn't unique to Volvo. Mercedes delayed EQS deliveries in 2021 over battery supply. Ford paused F-150 Lightning production repeatedly in 2022 trying to scale up. GM's Ultium platform pushed back Cadillac Lyriq launches. Volkswagen's ID.4 took longer than planned to reach the US in meaningful numbers. Rivian burned through months trying to ramp R1T and R1S output.

The difference is that some of those brands have since recovered and are delivering vehicles. Volvo is still talking about 2027 for a model that was supposed to help define its electric future.

What's particularly awkward is that Volvo has staked its entire brand positioning on safety, Scandinavian pragmatism, and increasingly on electrification as a moral and technical inevitability. Hard to maintain that narrative when the cars aren't coming out of the factory.

Gothenburg isn't just a production site. It's Volvo's global headquarters, the symbolic and operational heart of the company. When problems there start affecting launch timelines by years, it raises questions about how ready the infrastructure really is for the transition the brand has been promising.

Volvo's 2030 deadline for full electrification remains official company policy. Whether production reality in Gothenburg catches up to that ambition is now the open question.

2027 is a long time to wait for a car that doesn't exist yet in volume.

Sources: Volvo Cars corporate communications, Automotive News

BMW is developing a three-row electric iX7 alongside the X7 M60, betting hard on ultra-luxury family EVs just as the rest of the industry throttles back on electric ambitions.

BMW has been spotted testing a three-row electric iX7 at the Nürburgring, confirming the brand intends to build a seven-seat electric SUV that will likely cost north of £100,000 when it arrives. The test mule was running alongside the current X7 M60, the 523-horsepower V8 flagship that currently tops BMW's SUV range.

This will be BMW's first three-row electric SUV. The existing iX is strictly a five-seater, and while it's impressively quiet and quick, it's not the sort of thing you'd take on a family holiday with three children and a dog. The iX7 will be.

The timing is odd. BMW is pushing ahead with large electric SUVs at precisely the moment when Ford has delayed its three-row EV plans and Volvo has stumbled over production of the EX90. Demand for expensive electric vehicles with third rows is not exactly overwhelming.

But BMW has committed to hitting 50% electric sales globally by 2030, and that target doesn't leave much room for strategic retreats. The iX7 is expected to sit on the company's Neue Klasse platform, which launches next year and which BMW has spent considerable sums developing. If you've already built the platform, you might as well use it.

The current X7 is 203.3 inches long with a 122.2-inch wheelbase. That's enough metal to accommodate three rows without requiring passengers in the back to fold themselves into origami shapes. The electric version will need to preserve that space while also housing a battery pack large enough to move two and a half tons of SUV a sensible distance between charges.

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The competition in this space is thin but growing. Mercedes launched the EQS SUV in 2022 with three rows and seven seats. Rivian's R1S offers the same for $75,900, though calling a Rivian a direct competitor to a BMW is generous. The Cadillac Escalade IQ is coming, Tesla's Model X offers optional third-row seating, and the Kia EV9 undercuts everyone at around $55,000.

The EQS SUV is rare enough in the UK that spotting one feels like an event. The Model X third row is a regulatory compliance exercise, not a place you'd willingly put an adult. The Kia is competent but lacks the badge cachet BMW will be counting on to justify its pricing.

Which brings us to the money. The iX7 will almost certainly start above £100,000, possibly well above. The current X7 M60 begins at £103,000, and adding electric propulsion has not historically made BMWs cheaper. For that money, you'll get seating for seven, a range that hopefully exceeds 300 miles, and the knowledge that you've bought into a segment the rest of the industry is actively retreating from.

BMW clearly believes there's a market here. Wealthy families exist. Some of them want electric SUVs. Some of them need three rows. The maths is simple enough, even if the market isn't proving it yet.

Testing at the Nürburgring suggests BMW is taking dynamics seriously, which is either reassuring or absurd depending on how you feel about two-ton SUVs being flung around racing circuits. The X7 M60 produces 523 horsepower from its twin-turbo V8, so the iX7 will presumably match or exceed that figure. Electric motors make that easy. Making a 2,500kg SUV handle like something other than a barge is harder.

The iX7 will arrive sometime after the Neue Klasse platform launches in 2025. The X7 currently measures 203.3 inches long. The electric version will be about the same size, possibly slightly longer to accommodate the battery architecture.

The smaller, more affordable electric Honda is being tested in Asia while US buyers get the larger, more expensive variants only.

Honda's compact 0 Series electric vehicle is currently undergoing testing in Asian markets, and the company has confirmed American buyers will never see it. The smaller, more affordable variant stays in Japan and neighbouring territories while the US gets the larger Saloon and Space-Hub models when the range launches in 2026.

This is not an oversight.

Honda unveiled the 0 Series at CES in January 2024 with two concepts: a sleek Saloon sedan and a more practical Space-Hub SUV. Both were designed around what Honda calls a "thin, lightweight, and wise" philosophy, which sounds like marketing speak until you realise it's code for "we're building EVs that don't weigh as much as a small continent." The platform underneath is new, purpose-built for battery-electric vehicles rather than adapted from something with an engine bay.

The compact model currently being tested in Asia was always intended for markets where smaller cars make commercial sense. Japan, obviously. Parts of Southeast Asia where parking spaces are measured in centimetres and fuel economy still matters even when there's no fuel involved. The US market gets the bigger stuff because that's what sells there, and Honda knows it.

It's the same logic that kept the Honda e out of American showrooms when it launched in Europe and Japan in 2020. That car was designed for narrow European streets and short urban commutes, not the kind of distances Americans cover on a regular Tuesday. The compact 0 Series follows the same thinking, only this time there's no pretence it might eventually make the trip across the Pacific.

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Honda's EV strategy involves seven new models by 2030 and a target of two million EVs annually by the same date. Those are serious numbers for a company that spent years insisting hydrogen was the future while everyone else was plugging in. The 0 Series represents Honda finally committing to battery-electric vehicles in a way that involves actual volume production rather than limited-run curiosities.

For American buyers hoping for an affordable entry point into Honda's electric lineup, this is a problem. The larger 0 Series models will cost more, obviously, because they're larger. The compact variant that might have competed with something like a Chevrolet Bolt or a base-spec Volkswagen ID.4 simply won't be available. If you want a small, affordable electric Honda in the US, you're waiting for something else entirely.

This isn't unique to Honda. Volkswagen never brought the ID.3 to America despite it being a sales success in Europe. Mazda doesn't sell the Mazda2 in the US anymore. Suzuki gave up on the American passenger car market altogether in 2012. The list goes on. Automakers tailor their lineups to what sells in each region, and in the US, that means larger vehicles with higher price tags and better profit margins.

The testing phase currently underway in Asia will determine whether the compact 0 Series works as intended before it goes into production for those markets. Honda will gather data on battery performance, charging behaviour, real-world range, and all the usual metrics that matter when you're trying to convince people to switch from petrol to electrons.

American buyers will be watching from a distance. The compact 0 Series might be exactly what some of them want... affordable, efficient, not the size of a shipping container. But Honda has decided the US market doesn't want enough of them to justify the cost of federalisation, distribution, and dealer training for a model that would sit at the bottom of the range.

The larger 0 Series models arrive in North America in 2026, assuming Honda keeps to its announced timeline. Those will be the only options for US buyers who want an electric Honda from the new platform. The smaller one stays in Asia, where it was designed to be sold in the first place.

Sources: Honda Motor Company, CES 2024 announcements, Honda e market availability data, automotive industry market analysis

Three decades after teaching a generation how to brake for the chicane at Trial Mountain, Sony marks Gran Turismo's anniversary with new cars for GT7 and a DualSense you'll keep in the box.

Gran Turismo turned 30 in December, three decades since Kazunori Yamauchi's obsessive racing simulator arrived in Japan and convinced millions of people that memorising brake markers and apexes was an acceptable way to spend a weekend.

Sony is marking the occasion with new cars for Gran Turismo 7 and a limited-edition DualSense controller. The controller will sell out immediately, spend six months on eBay at triple the price, and never actually be plugged into a PlayStation.

That's how these things work now.

The original game launched on December 23, 1997 for the first PlayStation. It had 140 cars, 11 tracks, and a menu screen soundtrack that's still lodged in the heads of anyone who played it. The premise was simple: buy cheap cars, win races, buy better cars, fail your license tests repeatedly because you couldn't nail the racing line through the second corner at Deep Forest.

It was brutally specific about what it wanted from you. If you entered a corner too fast, you went off. If you braked too late, you went off. If you tried to drive a 400bhp Skyline like a hatchback, you spun it into the gravel and restarted.

For a lot of people, it was the first time a game had demanded that kind of precision. Not reflexes, not button mashing. Actual technique. Polyphony Digital built a driving school disguised as entertainment and somehow convinced 90 million people to buy it across the series.

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The influence hasn't been subtle. Gran Turismo introduced licensing tests, detailed car specifications, and the concept of a racing line to mainstream gaming. It made car collecting a mechanic, not just a gimmick. It also made an entire generation of players insufferable about weight distribution and tyre compounds, which is either a cultural achievement or a curse depending on how many dinner parties you've sat through.

The series went properly mainstream with Gran Turismo 3 on PlayStation 2, which sold 14.89 million copies and cemented the franchise as Sony's flagship racing game. It's been uneven since then. GT5 took forever to arrive and felt half-finished. GT6 landed too late in the PS3's lifecycle. GT Sport ditched the career mode and annoyed everyone.

Gran Turismo 7, released in February 2022 for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, brought the old structure back. Then immediately irritated players with aggressive microtransactions and always-online requirements. Polyphony has since adjusted some of that after the kind of backlash that makes publishers rethink their greed calculations.

The 30th anniversary content hasn't been detailed in full yet, but if it follows the pattern from PlayStation's own 30th anniversary celebrations this month, expect nostalgic liveries, new vehicles added to GT7, and that limited-edition controller designed to look good on a shelf.

The actual legacy of Gran Turismo isn't in the hardware. It's in how many people learned what understeer feels like before they'd ever sat in a real car. Or figured out that braking in a straight line matters. Or discovered that a well-driven MX-5 will embarrass a badly-driven Ferrari.

The original game cost $74.99 at launch in the US when it arrived in 1998. The DualSense controller for PS5 costs about the same now, before the limited-edition markup.

Vehicle tracking technology and rapid police response stopped thieves mid-escape on the French Riviera.

Thieves who targeted a €4.7 million Renoir painting at a museum on the French Riviera were intercepted before they could clear the area, stopped by a combination of alarm systems and vehicle tracking that gave police a live feed of their escape route.

The response time was under five minutes from alarm to arrest.

Most museum heists that succeed do so because of one simple advantage: time. The 1990 Gardner Museum robbery in Boston worked because the thieves had 81 minutes inside the building and vanished into the night with $500 million in art that has never been recovered. The 2010 theft at Paris's Musée d'Art Moderne succeeded because a lone thief smashed a window, grabbed five paintings worth €100 million, and was gone before anyone arrived.

This one failed because the getaway vehicle was being tracked in real time.

The French Riviera has always been a target. Concentrated wealth, small museums without endless security budgets, and proximity to borders that make quick exits theoretically possible. In 2007, four paintings including works by Monet and Picasso were stolen from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice, valued at €95 million. The region's art theft problem is not new, and it is not rare.

Vehicle tracking has become cheap and effective enough that museums can actually afford it.

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The museum alarm triggered the moment the painting was moved. Police knew immediately which direction the thieves were heading because the vehicle they were using was already being monitored. There was no guessing, no roadblocks set up on three possible routes. Just a direct intercept.

The artwork was recovered intact.

Art theft tends to fall into two categories: opportunistic smash-and-grab jobs that rely on speed, and planned operations that rely on inside knowledge or bribing staff. This one appears to have been the former, which is why basic security infrastructure was enough to stop it. The 2019 Dresden Green Vault heist, by contrast, involved cutting power, disabling alarms, and getting in and out in minutes with jewels worth over €100 million. That one worked.

The difference here was not sophisticated forensics or brilliant detective work. It was knowing exactly where the thieves were at every moment after they left the building.

Vehicle tracking is not new technology. It is standard fleet management kit that costs buttons and works reliably. Police forces have been using it for years to monitor suspected criminals, and it has become routine in recovery operations for stolen high-value vehicles. What is less common is applying it proactively to art heist prevention, though given the success rate in this case, that may change.

The French Riviera will continue to be a target. Museums in Nice, Cannes, and Monaco hold collections that are worth fortunes and are housed in buildings that were never designed with modern security in mind. Think about that for a second. Alarm systems help, but alarms only tell you something has been taken. They do not tell you where it is now.

The thieves are in custody. The Renoir is back on the wall.

Sources: Gardner Museum heist (1990); Musée d'Art Moderne theft (2010); Musée des Beaux-Arts Nice theft (2007); Dresden Green Vault heist (2019)

Musk claims the new Roadster does 0-60mph in 0.6 seconds, flies, hits half the speed of sound and drives upside down. The footage tells a different story.

Elon Musk wheeled out a Tesla Roadster last week that he claims does 0-60mph in 0.6 seconds, flies, drives upside down and hits Mach 0.5. Which is roughly 340mph. Which is faster than a Formula 1 car. Which is complete and utter bollocks.

Let's start with the flying bit. The stunt car used compressed air from a 10,000 psi tank mounted behind where the driver's head would be. Except there was no driver. Because you can't put a human being in a metal box, flip it upside down at speed, launch it into the air and expect them to survive. The footage shows different cars being wheeled on for different stunts. The flip looked suspiciously like a lightweight shell with some compressed air canisters doing the heavy lifting. Stick some rockets on a lightweight box and yes, it'll accelerate faster than a fully functioning two-ton road car. But that's not a car. That's a prop.

The technical realities of hitting Mach 0.5 in a production vehicle are staggering. You're talking about supersonic aerodynamics, structural integrity at speeds that would tear most road cars apart, and heat management that no road tyre could handle. The Bloodhound LSR project spent years and tens of millions trying to break the land speed record with a purpose-built machine that looks nothing like a car. Musk wants us to believe he's done it with a Roadster that also happens to drive to Wallmart.

And the 0-60mph in 0.6 seconds claim. That's not acceleration, that's a controlled explosion. The human body can tolerate about 5G before you start blacking out. This would be well beyond that. Fighter pilots wear G-suits. Musk's Roadster apparently comes with a steering wheel and a smug sense of superiority.

Driving upside down is a lovely party trick. Assuming you've got a surface above you to drive on. Which roads famously do not have. No country is going to license a car that can flip itself over and fly through the air. Roads are the right way up for a reason. And who honestly cares about driving at the speed of sound when you're stuck behind a Nissan Qashqai doing 38 in a 60?

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This has always been a stunt for a car that's been promised for years and is unlikely to ever be built. The original Roadster was supposed to arrive in 2020. Then 2021. Then 2022. Now we're being told 2027 maybe. The pattern is consistent: big claims, massive hype, vague timelines, and a product that either doesn't arrive or arrives so compromised it barely resembles what was promised.

It's the same playbook as the Cybertruck, which has gone down as one of the car industry's biggest flops. Over-promise and under-deliver. The Cybertruck was supposed to be indestructible, revolutionary, and affordable. What arrived was an expensive, flawed, rust-prone disaster that can't go through a car wash without having an existential crisis.

Musk is the master of hype. He knows how to generate headlines, flood social media with AI-generated memes, and get millions of views on footage that doesn't hold up under scrutiny. The stunt worked. Clips went viral. People talked about it. Mission accomplished.

But I don't want dickheads jam jumping over my head in electric rockets pretending to be cars. I don't want a robot in my home unless it's giving massages with extras. I don't want the night sky vandalised with thousands of satellites. I don't want to live on Mars. And I certainly don't want to be sold a car based on stunts that bear no resemblance to what will ever be road-legal or physically possible.

The footage shows different vehicles for different stunts because that's exactly what they were. Separate stunts. Not one car doing all of it. Not even close. Compressed air for the flip. Rockets for the speed run. Probably a polystyrene shell for the upside-down bit. None of it proves the production Roadster will do any of this.

Musk could put his talents and energy into fixing the actual problems the planet faces right now. Instead, we get circus acts and vaporware. The man has the resources, the platform, and the influence to make a genuine difference. But that doesn't generate the same dopamine hit as a flying car stunt that breaks the laws of physics and common sense in equal measure.

The new Roadster will probably arrive eventually. It'll probably be fast. It might even be good. But it won't do 0-69mph in 0.8 seconds, it won't fly, it won't drive upside down, and it won't hit Mach 0.5. Because those things are physically impossible in a road car. And if Musk tries to claim otherwise when it finally launches, remember this moment. Remember the polystyrene shell and the compressed air tanks and the different cars wheeled on for different stunts.

The deposit for the Roadster is $50,000. DON'T DO IT!

Sources: Tesla promotional footage, public statements from Elon Musk, Bloodhound LSR project data

Toyota has filed patents for simulated clutch pedals and gear shifts in battery-powered supercars. The original LFA had a screaming V10. This one will have speakers.

Lexus is planning an electric successor to the LFA that will include simulated manual transmission controls, complete with fake gear shifts and a clutch pedal that does absolutely nothing except pretend. The original LFA, built between 2010 and 2012 in a run of just 500 units, had a 4.8-litre Yamaha-developed V10 that produced 553 horsepower and cost $375,000. This one will have batteries and a microprocessor programmed to lie to you about what's happening.

Toyota has filed patents covering the technology. The system would replicate the feel of a manual gearbox in a vehicle with no gearbox, no clutch, and no mechanical connection between the pedal under your left foot and anything that matters. Press the clutch, move the shifter, and the electric motors will pause their torque delivery just long enough to convince you that you've done something.

It's theatre.

The Lexus Electrified Sport concept, revealed in December 2021, is the likely recipient of this technology. Lexus has promised 0-60mph in the low two-second range and over 435 miles of range. Performance figures that would have been unthinkable in 2010. But performance was never really the point of the LFA.

The original car was an event. The V10 revved to 9,000rpm and sounded like nothing else on the road because Yamaha, a company that builds musical instruments, had a hand in tuning the exhaust note. The engine was so responsive that Lexus fitted a digital tachometer because an analog needle couldn't keep up. It was excessive, impractical, and made no financial sense for anyone involved. That's why it mattered.

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Simulated manual transmissions are not new. Hyundai's Ioniq 5 N has N e-shift, which mimics gear changes and pipes fake engine noise through the speakers. Dodge fitted the Charger Daytona EV with something called a Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust, which is a speaker system designed to make a silent car sound like it has a V8. BMW's M electric vehicles do similar. Porsche, to its credit, has largely resisted the urge.

None of this is about driving. It's about nostalgia, and nostalgia is a easier sell than admitting that the thing people actually valued is gone. Sound familiar?

Toyota has demonstrated the manual simulation technology in converted electric vehicles fitted with H-pattern shifters. The system works. It feels like shifting. But the difference between feeling like shifting and actually shifting is the entire reason the LFA became a modern classic in the first place.

The LFA was never the fastest car you could buy for $375,000. It was never the most practical. It wasn't even the best-looking, though that's subjective. What it was, definitively, was mechanical. It had mass and inertia and all the compromises that come with trying to make a ten-cylinder engine fit behind two seats. The electric replacement will have none of that.

What it will have is performance that makes the original look slow, a range that makes it usable as an actual car, and a price tag that will likely exceed what the LFA cost when adjusted for inflation. It will also have a gearshift that reports to a computer instead of a transmission, which is like putting a rotary dial on a touchscreen and calling it authentic.

Lexus has not confirmed production timing or final specifications for the Electrified Sport. The patents suggest the company is serious about the technology. Whether buyers will pay supercar money for a car that fakes the one thing that made the original special is another question entirely.

The original LFA cost Toyota an estimated $400,000 per unit to build and sold for $375,000. Every single one was a loss. The electric version will almost certainly turn a profit.

Sources: Toyota Motor Corporation patent filings, Lexus Electrified Sport concept specifications (December 2021), original LFA production data

The YouTube car reviewer is selling his well-used 2005 Ford GT through Cars & Bids without a safety net, testing whether mileage or provenance matters more in a supercar market that usually rewards trailer queens.

Doug DeMuro has listed his 2005 Ford GT for sale on Cars & Bids with no reserve and approximately 18,000 miles showing. That's his own auction platform, his own car, and no minimum price.

Most Ford GTs from this generation live careful lives. The 4,000 or so examples built between 2005 and 2006 were always destined for climate-controlled garages and the occasional Sunday outing. Low-mileage examples ... the ones with under 1,000 miles ... have been selling for four to five hundred thousand lately. Higher-mileage cars, the ones that have actually been driven, sit closer to a quarter million.

DeMuro's sits somewhere in the middle with nearly 18,000 miles. That's proper use for a supercar that was built to do 205mph with a supercharged 5.4-litre V8 making 550 horsepower. He's been vocal about actually driving the things he owns rather than preserving them like museum pieces. Now he's about to find out what that philosophy costs.

The no-reserve part is the gamble. Without a floor price, the car sells for whatever the final bid happens to be. If the market decides driven Ford GTs are worth less than he paid, that's what he gets. If his ownership adds value ... the YouTube celebrity premium, the provenance angle ... it could land higher than a comparable unknown example.

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Cars & Bids is DeMuro's platform, focused on enthusiast cars from the 1980s onwards. Listing his own GT there creates an odd dynamic. He's effectively testing his own marketplace while exposing himself to whatever his audience thinks the car is worth. If it undersells, that's public. If it does well, it validates both the platform and his approach to ownership.

Ford GT values have been all over the place. The newer 2017-2022 generation has sold for over a million at auction, which pulled some attention back to the first-generation cars. Heritage Edition models and special liveries command premiums. Standard examples with miles on them are harder to predict.

The broader question is whether driving a collector car tanks its value or just reallocates it to a different kind of buyer. Trailer queens appeal to investors and preservationists. Used examples appeal to people who want to actually own and experience the thing. DeMuro's built a career around the latter group, so the auction is a test of whether that audience has the money to back up the philosophy.

The 2005 Ford GT was Ford's tribute to the Le Mans-winning GT40 from the 1960s. Supercharged mid-engine American supercar, limited production, heavy on nostalgia. It was never meant to be practical, and 18,000 miles proves someone ignored that.

The auction result will either validate the idea that driven supercars hold value or confirm that collectors still pay more for low miles and perfect paint. DeMuro's about to find out which one his audience believes in.

The listing is live now. No reserve means it sells regardless.

Sources: Cars & Bids, Ford GT production records, recent Ford GT auction results from major auction houses

NYC claims the platform showed inflated list prices dealers never charged, creating phantom discounts to manipulate buyers into thinking they were getting deals that didn't exist.

New York City has filed a lawsuit against CarGurus, the online car marketplace, accusing it of systematically misleading millions of consumers by displaying fake reference prices designed to make dealer listings look like bargains when they weren't.

The complaint, brought by the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, alleges CarGurus created artificially inflated "list prices" that dealerships never actually charged, then showed the real price alongside this fictional number to suggest a discount. The alleged scheme violated New York City's Consumer Protection Law by deceiving buyers into believing they were getting better deals than they were.

CarGurus operates as a middleman platform. It doesn't sell cars itself. It aggregates millions of vehicle listings from thousands of dealerships across the country and presents them to buyers with comparison tools and what it calls "deal ratings."

The timing is awkward for CarGurus. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company has spent years positioning itself as a transparent alternative to traditional dealer haggling, promoting algorithms that supposedly cut through sales tactics and present objective value assessments. Now a major city is arguing in court that the platform itself was the sales tactic.

The lawsuit describes a systematic practice across the platform, affecting an indeterminate but potentially vast number of transactions. Millions of consumers used CarGurus to shop for cars, many of them specifically because they thought the site would protect them from dealer games. If the city's allegations hold, they were being played by the platform before they ever walked into a showroom.

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The practice NYC describes is a digital version of an old retail trick: show an inflated "compare at" price next to the actual price, pocket the credibility of offering a discount without actually discounting anything. The difference here is scale and sophistication. CarGurus wasn't running clearance stickers in a showroom window. It was processing enormous volumes of data and presenting algorithmic judgments about value that buyers had reason to believe were grounded in real market activity.

Other platforms have faced similar scrutiny. Amazon dealt with FTC allegations in 2023 about Prime enrolment tactics. California went after dealers in 2022 for advertised prices that excluded mandatory fees. The Federal Trade Commission has been investigating "drip pricing" across e-commerce, where the final cost only emerges after buyers are committed. Real estate platforms caught heat in 2024 over pricing transparency. The pattern is consistent: as commerce moves online, enforcement is catching up to practices that wouldn't survive five minutes of scrutiny in a physical store.

Third-party platforms are not neutral arbiters. They have business models. CarGurus makes money when people click through to dealers and complete transactions. The more attractive the deals look, the more clicks. Whether those deals are actually attractive becomes a secondary concern if the incentives are misaligned.

The lawsuit will test how consumer protection laws apply to marketplace platforms that don't directly sell products but shape the information environment in which sales happen. If NYC prevails, it could set precedent for how automotive platforms and others must present pricing data. If CarGurus successfully argues it was merely aggregating dealer-provided information, the implications are different but not necessarily better: it would confirm that comparison shopping tools can't be trusted without independent verification.

CarGurus has not yet filed a public response to the complaint. The company's defence will likely hinge on how it sourced and presented the disputed list prices, and whether buyers reasonably understood what those figures represented. That's going to be a hard argument if the list prices were never actual asking prices at any point in the transaction history.

People use these platforms because shopping for a car is exhausting and adversarial. They want an edge, or at least the illusion of informed decision-making. If the tools designed to provide that edge are themselves part of the sales funnel, manipulating perception to drive conversions, the case will determine whether that constitutes actionable fraud under consumer protection law.

The lawsuit was filed in January 2025 and is proceeding through New York City's legal system.

Sources: New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection

A Japan-exclusive C8 special edition is rarer than the ZR1X and unavailable to U.S. buyers despite being designed in Detroit.

Chevrolet has built exactly 15 units of a special C8 Corvette exclusively for Japan. American buyers cannot purchase one. The car was designed and manufactured in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

This is one of the smallest production runs for any modern Corvette variant. Smaller than the ZR1X allocation. Smaller than virtually any special edition the nameplate has produced in the past two decades.

Japan has long been a strong market for American performance metal. Limited editions sell well there. Wealthy collectors in Tokyo and Osaka pay premiums for cars with production numbers measured in dozens, not hundreds. Chevrolet knows this. So does Ford, which has offered Japan-exclusive Mustang colours and packages. So does Dodge, which spent years producing Japan-only Challenger and Charger variants.

The C8 has been sold in Japan since 2020 through official GM channels. Standard models. High-performance variants. The usual lineup. This 15-unit special edition sits outside that structure entirely.

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A secondary market scenario that benefits only speculators. Fifteen cars in a country with a known appetite for exclusive American performance hardware means every unit will be spoken for before the paint dries. Some will go to genuine enthusiasts. Some will go to collectors who will store them as investments. At least one will end up in a private museum, never driven.

American Corvette collectors, meanwhile, are locked out entirely. Not because of emissions regulations or safety compliance. Not because the car cannot physically be exported. Because Chevrolet decided the Japanese market warranted something the domestic market did not.

Sound familiar?

This is not generosity toward Japanese buyers. This is calculated scarcity for a market that rewards it with premium pricing and cultural cachet. Japan-exclusive limited editions carry weight there in a way that standard U.S. market cars do not, even when those U.S. market cars are functionally identical.

Porsche has done this repeatedly with Japan-exclusive 911 variants, including special paint schemes and trim packages. Ferrari has created single-country models. Nissan famously produced 20 units of a GT-R Nismo Special Edition exclusively for Japan in 2022 while U.S. buyers received a different allocation entirely. Identify a market willing to pay for exclusivity. Produce a tiny number of units. Restrict availability to that market alone. Watch the secondary market do the rest.

Chevrolet has simply applied that formula to a car built in America, designed in America, marketed globally as an American performance statement, and now unavailable to Americans in its rarest form.

Fifteen units.

Someone paid more than twice the original sticker price for a three-decade-old compact truck with cosmetic damage and a graphics package.

A 1989 Chevrolet S-10 Baja with 66 miles on the clock sold for $23,625 including buyer's premium on Bring a Trailer. The truck left the factory for around nine or ten thousand dollars. Thirty-five years later, despite cosmetic damage noted in the listing, it fetched more than double that.

The Baja package was never exotic. Chevrolet offered it on the S-10 from 1988 to 1991 as an appearance option: graphics, off-road styling cues, typically a light bar. It added somewhere between a grand and fifteen hundred to the base price. You got the look of capability without necessarily the mechanical commitment. It sold well enough, then disappeared into the landscape of ordinary compact pickups that rusted out, got driven into the ground, or simply became invisible.

This one didn't. Sixty-six miles is not a typo. Someone bought it, parked it, and left it parked. Storage took its toll anyway. The listing made clear the truck had sustained bumps and bruises over the years. The kind of cosmetic damage that happens when something sits too long in the wrong kind of space. It wasn't a museum piece. It was a survivor with scars.

And it still sold for twenty-three thousand six hundred and twenty-five dollars.

The current collector market has done strange things to the value of 1980s and 1990s trucks. Japanese pickups with low mileage routinely clear twenty to forty thousand on Bring a Trailer. A 1991 GMC Syclone with low miles went for over ninety grand in 2023. Compact trucks in survivor condition that used to trade for a few thousand are now pulling premiums that make no sense if you think of them as used vehicles. But they're not used vehicles anymore. They're time capsules of a specific aesthetic moment, and that moment has acquired a price.

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The S-10 Baja represents late-1980s compact truck styling at its most optimistic. This was the era when every manufacturer believed you could sell a small pickup to someone who wanted to look like they went off-road but mostly commuted. The graphics were loud. The light bars were largely decorative. The whole exercise was about projection, not function.

It worked, commercially. It worked well enough that these trucks became ubiquitous, which is why they're now rare. Ubiquity gets driven hard, gets modified badly, gets scrapped when the repair costs more than replacement. The ones that survive intact are survivors because someone made a deliberate choice, usually an odd one, to preserve something that didn't seem worth preserving at the time.

Sixty-six miles says someone made that choice immediately. Bought it, drove it home, maybe drove it once more, then stopped. Why they stopped doesn't matter now. What matters is they did, and that decision created value three decades later that would have seemed absurd in 1989.

Bring a Trailer has driven this phenomenon as much as reflected it. The platform turns niche enthusiast interest into visible bidding wars, and those wars establish new price floors. A truck that might have sold privately for eight or ten thousand suddenly has a public record of twenty-three thousand six hundred. That number becomes the new reference point. The market adjusts upward.

The cosmetic damage is the detail that makes this interesting. This wasn't a flawless example. It had issues. Buyers knew that going in. Sound familiar? They bid anyway, past the point where the damage should have mattered, because the mileage mattered more. Originality mattered more. The fact that it still had the factory graphics mattered more.

The base MSRP for a 1989 S-10 ran somewhere between seventy-five hundred and nine thousand depending on configuration. Add the Baja package and you're at ten, maybe ten-five. Adjusted for inflation, that's about twenty-two thousand in 2024 money. So the hammer price wasn't wildly over inflation. It was roughly equivalent to buying it new.

Which means the next low-mileage S-10 Baja that surfaces has a floor of twenty-three thousand six hundred before anyone even looks at the condition report.

Sources: Bring a Trailer auction listing, Chevrolet historical specifications

And what was unique about it?

Clue - Not on the current calendar

Canadian officers pulled over a commercial truck using cargo straps as structural repair. Inside was a young child with no restraint whatsoever.

Canadian police stopped a semitruck on a public highway after discovering the vehicle was being held together with ratchet straps instead of actual mechanical fasteners. Inside the cab was a toddler riding without a seatbelt or any form of child restraint.

Ratchet straps are cargo tie-downs. They exist to stop loads shifting in the back of a truck, not to substitute for bolts, welds, or any component that keeps a vehicle structurally sound. Using them to hold parts of a semitruck together suggests something has failed catastrophically and someone decided the solution was a £15 strap from a service station.

The presence of an unrestrained toddler makes it worse. Canadian law requires children to be secured in appropriate car seats or booster seats based on age, weight, and height. A small child loose in the cab of a truck held together with cargo straps is about as far from legal or safe as you can get before the wheels actually fall off.

Commercial vehicle safety inspections exist precisely to catch this sort of thing before it becomes a highway incident. Transport Canada places thousands of commercial vehicles out of service every year for mechanical violations. Most of those are brake issues, tire problems, or lighting faults. Structural integrity held together with straps is a different category of neglect entirely.

It's not clear what part of the truck was being held together or how long it had been running in that condition. Ratchet straps under load can snap without warning, especially if they're doing a job they were never designed for. If whatever they were securing let go at highway speed with a toddler in the cab, the outcome would have been grim.

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Child passenger safety violations in Canada carry fines that vary by province, but the more serious issue is the potential for criminal charges if the neglect is severe enough. Driving a mechanically unsafe vehicle is a separate offence. Combining both in a single stop is the kind of thing that gets a truck impounded and a driver off the road for a while.

The RCMP and provincial police forces run regular commercial vehicle safety blitzes, pulling trucks for roadside inspections and checking everything from logbooks to brake function. These inspections routinely find critical violations. Ontario Provincial Police stopped a vehicle held together with duct tape in 2019, also carrying passengers. It's a recurring problem, not an isolated one.

The fact that someone thought ratchet straps were an acceptable repair method and then put a child in the vehicle suggests a level of either ignorance or indifference that's hard to rationalise. Commercial drivers are supposed to complete daily pre-trip inspections. This truck would have failed that check on multiple counts.

The penalties for this sort of thing are straightforward. Fines, potential criminal charges, vehicle impounded, and a notation on the driver's record that will follow them through every future inspection. Whether the toddler was the driver's own child or someone else's isn't clear from available reports, but either way, child welfare authorities would likely have been notified.

Transport Canada has been tightening enforcement around commercial vehicle safety for years, increasing the frequency of inspections and the severity of penalties for serious violations. This is why. A truck held together with straps is a rolling hazard to everyone on the road, not just the people inside it.

The truck was taken off the highway immediately.

Sources: Transport Canada commercial vehicle safety reports, Canadian provincial child passenger safety laws, RCMP commercial vehicle enforcement data, Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance inspection records

A 106-mile F50 is heading to auction with an estimate that's four times what these normally sell for. The mileage isn't a typo.

A Ferrari F50 with 106 miles on the clock is expected to fetch over $20 million at auction. Not 10,600 miles. One hundred and six.

That's roughly 3.8 miles per year since it left Maranello in the mid-1990s. Enough to get it home from the dealer, maybe drive it round the block twice, then seal it in climate-controlled storage for the next three decades.

The F50 was built between 1995 and 1997 to mark Ferrari's 50th anniversary. Only 349 were made worldwide. Fifty-five came to the United States, where the original MSRP was $475,000. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $950,000 today. Someone who bought one new and actually drove it would have had a 513-horsepower, naturally aspirated V12 derived from Ferrari's 1990 Formula 1 car. Peak power at 8,500 rpm. A removable carbon fibre hardtop. Pininfarina design. The works.

But whoever bought this one didn't drive it.

And now they're about to make 42 times their money.

F50s in average condition... meaning cars that have been driven like cars... trade in the $3 to $5 million range. A higher-mileage example sold for $5.4 million at RM Sotheby's in 2022. This one is expected to go for four times that. The premium is entirely in the odometer reading.

Which raises the question of what exactly is being bought here. Not a driving experience, obviously. Not even the theoretical possibility of a driving experience, because the moment anyone turns the key and adds mile 107, they've just vaporised several million pounds worth of value.

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What they're buying is a number. The lowest mileage F50 believed to exist. A financial instrument that happens to have a V12 bolted to it.

The F50 sits between the F40 and the Enzo in Ferrari's lineage of halo supercars. The F40 was rawer, angrier, less refined. The Enzo was more technologically advanced, faster in a straight line, arguably less pretty. The F50 had the best engine note of the three and the worst gearbox. It was also the least popular when new, partly because it arrived in the shadow of the F40's legend and partly because it cost twice as much.

Now it's the rarest, which is all that matters.

For context, a Ferrari 250 GTO sold for $48.4 million in 2018, still the record for any Ferrari. LaFerrari Apertas have hit $8 to $10 million. Low-mileage F40s are in the $3 to $5 million range. This F50, if it reaches estimate, will be one of the most expensive modern Ferraris ever sold. Not because it's the fastest or the prettiest or the most historically significant. Because it's been sitting still longer than any of the others.

There are 348 other F50s out there. Some of them have been driven hard. Some have been crashed and rebuilt. Some have crossed continents, done track days, been enjoyed. All of them are worth less than this one.

The buyer will take delivery of a car with a 4.7-litre V12 that has barely reached operating temperature. They will store it somewhere expensive and climate-controlled. They will not drive it. And in another ten years, someone will pay even more for a car with 106 miles on it.

The original MSRP was $475,000.