Good morning. This week the federal government approved a car with no steering wheel, opened an investigation into 1.2 million cars whose steering may stop responding, and watched Romania's navy dynamite a riverbed so two car factories could turn the lights back on. Somewhere in all of that, a Ford GT with 8 miles on the odometer — total, since 2006 — crossed the block on Bring a Trailer. The industry can't decide whether humans should drive.

We'll take the humans-optional future, the humans-mandatory past, and the demoted engine, in that order.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into

Let’s roll.

A 2006 Ford GT Heritage Edition closed on Bring a Trailer yesterday showing 8 miles. Not 8,000. Eight — a number your last test drive beat. One owner since new, offered through a Missouri dealer on a clean Ohio title, and finished in the Gulf-tribute Heritage Blue over Epic Orange that Ford reserved for a sliver of 2006 production: one of just 343 Heritage Editions built.

Under the livery: the supercharged 5.4-liter V8, six-speed manual, and hydroformed aluminum chassis good for over 200 mph. This one adds forged BBS wheels, a McIntosh stereo the owner has statistically never heard, and — the most honest accessory in auction history — a wall display, included in the sale.

The hammer: $2.101M. Context: Hagerty pegs a #3-condition ("Good") Heritage at roughly $704,000, up more than 54% in a single year. Recent comps back the climb — a 4,900-mile Heritage brought $801,000 in June, and a standard-livery '06 GT did $742,500 in July, both on BaT. Nearly 450 first-gen GTs have traded publicly in three years — a deep market bidding one up, not a thin one

On July 30, NHTSA granted Amazon-owned Zoox the first-ever approval to charge passengers for rides in a vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no human controls of any kind. Paid service starts in Las Vegas, with more cities to follow.

Why that's bigger than another robotaxi press release: every Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard assumes a human at the controls. Waymo runs half a million paid rides a week, but in retrofitted Jaguars with steering wheels — legally, just cars. Zoox's pod has no front, no back, and bench seats facing each other, so it needed exemptions from portions of eight federal standards, windshields to rear visibility, capped at 2,500 vehicles a year for two years.

The approval comes with homework: extra crash reporting, U.S.-based remote operators, and published maps of where the pods operate. NHTSA says the system meets or exceeds a conventional vehicle's safety — weeks after telling the whole AV industry to stop interfering with police and firefighters. Zoox itself recalled 105 vehicles last month over smoke detection. Nobody's spiking the football.

The competitive picture just inverted, too. Tesla is building the Cybercab — also no controls — with no outlined approval path. Zoox chose the slower, duller strategy: build the weird vehicle, then get it formally excused from the rules.

Nissan's Rogue e-Power hits U.S. dealers this fall carrying, per Automotive News, most of the company's American hopes. It's a hybrid, but not the kind you know — and the difference is the most interesting powertrain architecture decision on sale this year.

There are three ways to build a hybrid. In a parallel hybrid, the engine is geared to the wheels and a motor assists — the engine is the athlete, the motor is the trainer. In a power-split hybrid, Toyota's planetary gearset blends engine and motor torque continuously — the trick that's powered every Prius. In a series hybrid, the engine never touches the wheels. Ever. It spins a generator, the generator feeds a small battery and two electric motors, and the motors do all the driving. The engine has been demoted from athlete to power plant.

That's e-Power: a 1.5-liter turbocharged three-cylinder acting purely as a generator, a 2.1-kWh buffer battery, dual motors driving all four wheels, one-pedal driving, and — read this part twice — no transmission at all. There is physically nothing to shift.

Why demote a perfectly good engine? Because combustion engines are only efficient on a small island of their operating map — one narrow combination of rpm and load where the thermodynamics all cooperate. A conventional engine spends its life swimming around that island: idling at stoplights, lugging at part throttle, screaming through onramps. Chain the engine to a generator instead of the wheels, and it can sit on the island all day, running its ideal speed and load regardless of what your right foot is doing. That's how Nissan quotes 42% thermal efficiency — territory the very best conventional car engines only visit on their happiest day.

The catch, because there's always a catch: converting mechanical energy to electricity and back costs a cut both ways. Stop-and-go, the island effect wins easily. At a steady 75 mph, a plain gear is hard to beat — which is why Toyota keeps a mechanical path, and why series drive has always ruled the one vehicle that never meets a stoplight: the diesel-electric locomotive, the oldest series hybrid there is.

One distinction before someone emails us: series hybrid plus big battery plus charge port equals an EREV — the old Chevy Volt, the coming Ram Ramcharger. Nissan went the other way: a battery so small it hides under a seat, no plug, no charging homework. Fill it with gas. Drive it like an EV.

AutoNation's second quarter is the whole modern dealership business in one earnings release. Revenue: $6.93 billion, down about 1% and short of Wall Street's $7 billion. New vehicles retailed: down 4%. Used: down 7.5%. EVs: down more than 30%, per CEO Mike Manley. Gross profit on each new car sold: $2,381, down from $2,785 a year ago — a 14% haircut on the thing dealerships theoretically exist to do.

And yet: adjusted EPS of $5.56, up year over year — a sixth straight quarter of growth. How? Everything that isn't the showroom: record after-sales (parts and service) gross, a captive finance arm whose portfolio hit $2.7 billion and whose income quintupled to $10.7 million, and $600 million of revenue acquired in June, mostly luxury stores — because the customers still paying sticker are the ones buying Porsches.

For the ledger: this isn't an AutoNation quirk. Group 1's revenue fell 5.6% the same quarter, and forecasters see dealer profits down roughly 12% across 2026. The new-car showroom is quietly becoming the customer-acquisition department for a service-and-lending company. You don't sell a car to make money on the car. You sell a car to book the oil changes and write the loan.

Quick hits:

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