Elon Musk said Tuesday that he would like to see the consolidation of his business empire by formally merging his two largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla.
"Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said of a potential merger. He was speaking during a question-and-answer period as part of SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call. Musk said, ultimately, it not his decision. "But at the end of the day the shareholders have to be supportive of this."
Musk's talk of a merger comes after a busy year in which SpaceX already acquired Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, in February. In June, SpaceX went public with the largest initial public offering on record.
The human desire to go fast is old, dating back at least as far as the first time some adventurous Yamnaya saw a horse on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and thought, “I bet if I jumped on that thing’s back, it would be faster than walking.”
A thousand years later, someone else invented the wheel—and the chariot—and humanity was ready to roll. Now, about five millennia since that first horseback ride, equestrianism is mostly a leisure activity, and we drive cars, propelled by motors with more power than an entire herd of beasts could muster.
Acceleration, top speed, and lap times are the usual ways we quantify that performance, and performance electric vehicles are currently in an arms race to see which one can hit 60 mph in the least amount of time. But measuring a car’s performance is easy—all you need is a stopwatch and a track. How about measuring the effect of car performance on the driver? That’s a question Polestar is trying to answer with researchers at the University of Oxford.
As I sat in the cab of the pickup truck and manually rolled down the windows, I closed my eyes and, for the briefest moment, flashed back to opening the windows on a cold, winter day in my dad’s 1975 Ford Ranger to let more cigarette smoke escape. I opened my eyes and looked through the windshield at a wall in the Slate Customer Experience Center studded with bright color chips.
Last week, in a former Tesla store staffed by some former Tesla employees, Slate opened its first showroom. Located in the Fulton Market District just northwest of the Chicago Loop, the Slate Experience Center is a place for would-be buyers to poke around a prototype, check out customization options, buy some Slate merch, and even preorder a new Slate Truck with a $300 deposit.
Designed for the American obsession with pickup trucks, the Slate Truck is a bare-bones electric pickup truck retailing for $24,950. It sports plastic panels, a minimalist interior design sensibility, actual window winders, and a projected range of 205 miles. Ars went for a ride in a Slate Truck over the summer, but we haven't had a chance to shop for one. So I stopped by the Slate Experience Center so I could, er, experience the Slate.
The new Roadster, we’re told, will be unlike anything else, although the angular, wedge-shaped styling owes more than a little to Giorgetto Giugiaro’s original Lotus Esprit—Musk is known to own a James Bond prop car—as well as the more recent Lamborghini Gallardo. At the rear are four giant exhaust pipes; these do not signal Tesla’s sudden embrace of hydrocarbons beyond those emitted by private aviation.
Rather, it’s where 100,000 psi jets of compressed nitrogen shoot out. It’s early in the morning and the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Statutes are dense reading, so I am yet to find the section where it explains how and when it’s legal to use such a thing on the road.
Porsche showed us a preview of a new model this afternoon as it unveiled the Mission S concept in New York. It’s a mid-engined sports car that will slot into the Porsche range above the 911. But this won’t be a limited-run car like the Carrera GT or 918 Spyder—instead it will be a regular production model, part of Porsche’s plan to dig itself out of a financial hole by 2035.
Things have been tough for the German automaker of late. Just three years ago its profit margin was the envy of the industry at 18 percent; last year it collapsed to just 1 percent. It has recovered a little since then, and Porsche’s board has a plan to get back to double-digit margins by 2035, called “Sportwagenschmiede '35,” which involves prioritizing “value over volume,” with greater individualization for customers—and the associated higher selling prices that come with it.
Note the quad exhausts—will this be powered by a flat-8?
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Porsche
“We are pursuing a clear plan with our strategy Sportwagenschmiede '35. The ultimate goal is to further strengthen our unique sports car brand–across all model lines and with new, highly desirable models in particularly high-margin segments,” said Porsche Chairman Michael Leiters.
The rising tide that has been the Drive to Survive effect has lifted more boats in motorsport than simply Formula 1’s. Sportscar racing is enjoying its own surge in popularity internationally at races like Le Mans in France, but also in North America in IMSA’s WeatherTech Sportscar Championship. For one thing, multi-hour, multi-class racing lends itself better to the age of streaming and second screens than it did linear broadcast TV, and fans are taking advantage of that: IMSA’s audience grew by more than a third domestically and almost a quarter internationally last year.
Having some of the coolest-looking cars racing today certainly helps, whether that’s the (mostly) hybrid prototypes or the GTs, racing versions of road-going cars from Porsche, Ferrari, and others. And it definitely helps that fan access at the races is virtually unmatched, with open paddocks and grid walks that now see huge crowds get up close to the cars just before the start of each race.
“I think we're just scratching the surface,” said IMSA President John Doonan. “I think besides the people that are here on the ground, the people watching, people engaging with us on social media, I'm seeing the passion come out more. Just on the grid walk, these fans coming up and being so excited to be here.” The series has certainly been making an effort, among other things getting local high school students exposed to the industry and starting a partnership to train more mechanics with ASE.
Perhaps the days when auto shows debuted new models aren’t entirely over. The big trade shows for cars were a gateway drug for many, expos where you could see the newest models of today and the concepts of tomorrow. But automakers increasingly got tired of sharing the spotlight with each other. New reveals moved offsite to events the night or even the week before the show itself. One by one, brands pulled out of auto show after auto show until there was little left to see. And then the pandemic hit.
But the news out of Paris, where its auto show held media day yesterday, seems like we stepped back into a time when automakers would debut new cars aplenty. That retro vibe extends to the cars themselves, with plenty of familiar nameplates reimagined.
France’s Renault has a long and glorious history of delightful concept cars, and more on what it brought to Paris later. But the star of the show was arguably Stellantis, with strong work from Citroen, Peugeot, and Fiat, to name but three. But this article is meant to irritate you, because I’m pretty sure none of the stuff you’re seeing here will come to the United States. And it’s doubly irritating considering what Stellantis’ brands do offer us over here, doubling down on the same malign trends I saw back in 2020: did you know they’re about to relaunch a V8 Hellcat-powered Charger?
Formula 1’s lengthy 2026 season is entering its final stretch. The sport took to the floodlit streets of Singapore on Sunday night, but Saturday saw action, too; this Grand Prix weekend was also the final of six sprints this year. The night race might be one of modern F1’s greatest spectacles. From overhead shots, the track becomes a bright, illuminated ribbon among the looming darkness of the city-state’s overpasses and skyscrapers. At ground level, the cars shower glittering sparks from their titanium skid blocks as the drivers flirt with how close they can get to the walls. As tracks go, the 90-degree turns and concrete barrier-lined streets were a world away from the abrasive tarmac and ample runoff of Malaysia last time out. But the tropical heat and humidity were a constant given both locations’ proximity to the equator.
Showers for the sprint
In Malaysia (which was still technically the Bahrain GP), a pre-race downpour disrupted things mightily. On Saturday morning in Singapore, shortly before the start of the sprint, it seemed history was about to rhyme when the skies opened. With standing water in places on the track, the sprint was delayed by 30 minutes. The sprint format, where a short extra race replaces a practice session a day before the main event, is unloved by the drivers and teams. For one thing, there’s little prestige in winning Saturday’s sprint. And with qualifying just a few hours later, risk-taking is discouraged lest one wreck the car and ruin Sunday’s race a day early.
Oh no, not again!
Credit:
Mark Thompson/Getty Images
And in Singapore, like most street circuits, the proximity of the unyielding barriers that line the track means there are real, punishing consequences for getting it even a little wrong.
Volkswagen’s ID.4 is no more. The midsize crossover debuted in 2021, one of VW's first new electric vehicles designed in the wake of dieselgate. A year later, the company began local production in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a couple of years ago facelifted the model, adding a much-improved rear drive unit in the process. But Chattanooga turned its attention away from the ID.4 earlier this year. And, having sold almost a million ID.4s (and near-identical ID.5s) globally, the German automaker has decided it’s time for its replacement. Meet the ID. Tiguan.
Dropping the numerical and adopting the moniker of VW’s big seller is a statement. “The Tiguan is our best-selling model worldwide, and the ID.4 and ID.5 are among our most successful electric cars. The ID. Tiguan brings these two success stories together,” said Thomas Schäfer, CEO of the VW brand.
VW was an early pioneer of using flexible vehicle architectures to create a multitude of bodystyles and sizes with common parts, and its transition into building EVs hasn’t changed that. The ID. Tiguan uses an updated version of the company’s mass-market EV platform, now called MEB+, with either 58 kWh or 77 kWh battery packs. The smaller pack is only available with a 187 hp (140 kW) rear electric motor, but the 77 kWh battery can be had with either a 281 hp (210 kW) rear-wheel drive powertrain or as a 295 hp (220 kW) all-wheel drive version. Range is up to 373 miles (600 km), at least according to the European WLTP test.
One of the regulations that make vehicles in the US different from those in Europe or Japan is our headlight rules. They’re laid out in the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), and changing them is—or used to be—a lengthy, laborious process, which is a major reason automotive lighting technology has lagged in the US. But the current administration says it’s time for “bolstering driver safety, slashing red tape, and embracing new technologies,” so it’s going to start a negotiated rulemaking process to rewrite the regulations to suit 2026.
“Today’s standards do not allow automakers to deploy the latest safety-improving lighting technologies, so we are bringing key experts and stakeholders together to modernize our standards and address potential causes of glare,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Jonathan Morrison said. “This collaborative approach will allow us to update outdated regulations, foster innovation, and keep everyone on our roads safer.”
While it is fair to be skeptical of the government's efforts to streamline bureaucracy, it is also fair to say US headlight regulations really could use an update.
Does it feel like people are perhaps a little grumpier or more on edge these days? It’s not like it’s without reason. There are wars. The climate is going haywire. Someone just died of plague. Scientific research is under attack. Machines keep stealing humans’ work. The media is a mess. And just when it all starts to feel a little overwhelming, Jaguar goes and unveils a new car.
The Type 01 is the first model to arrive from Jaguar’s rebirth. The British carmaker was an early entrant to the modern EV market with the 2017 I-Pace, which was fun to drive even if it was too small inside and perhaps completely unreliable. An all-electric sedan was supposed to be next, but a year from the showroom, it was abruptly canceled, leaving the automaker with nothing to sell as old models like the F-Pace ceased production.
Instead, Jaguar got to work on an all-new electric vehicle platform called JEA, which will underpin an all-electric product line. An elevated ownership experience and a starting price of about double the brand’s previous $60,000 entry point was the idea, Jaguar boss Rawdon Glover told me in 2024. Then last year the brand started teasing its relaunch, and everyone got upset. Things got even worse when the first images of the slab-sided and pastel-shaded Type 00 coupe concept leaked.
There’s been something of a change in the world of motorsport over the past few years. It has to do with where the money comes from. In the old days, it was tobacco and, to a lesser extent, booze. Today such things are mostly banned, and when you look at a racecar covered in sponsor logos, you’re likely to see something crypto-, cyber-, or AI-related.
This makes sense—an ever-larger share of our GDP is wrapped up in those segments. They’re the ones with all the money, and it takes money to go racing. So at the amateur level, we’ve seen tech CEOs replace dentists as the privateer of choice: This past weekend’s Petit Le Mans included co-founders of GitHub, CrowdStrike, Shopify, and the creator of Ruby on Rails, to name a few.
But this is an instance where a sponsor can provide tangible benefits to their motorsports partner beyond a bank transfer, as Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR) and OpenAI have been showing in IndyCar this year.
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