Good morning. A 7.1-magnitude earthquake killed at least 13 people in Kumamoto on Tuesday and idled two automakers. That's the story everybody ran. The one nobody ran is that the same prefecture builds the chips inside your dashboard — and Toyota owns a piece of the fab.

It's a Japan-heavy issue: Honda emptied part of its own museum this week, and regulators finally noticed that a door should open when the electricity leaves.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into

The Auction Desk: Honda sold a portion of its own museum, and priced nothing

One Big Story: Kumamoto makes your Lexus and your Lexus's chips

Engineer’s Corner: Your door handle is a computer, and it needs 12 volts to let you out

Garage Economics: Detroit raised guidance. Germany raised severance.

Let’s roll.

Bidding closed Wednesday night on 16 cars from Honda New Zealand's Heritage Collection — the fleet the company has spent decades preserving as evidence of its own history. Nearly all of it went up without reserve, on Trade Me, with every dollar going to charities around Nelson.

The occasion is a funeral. Honda is closing the Nelson site after 46 years and moving distribution to Auckland. That building assembled Triumphs, Jaguars, Rovers and Austins before it was retooled for Civics in 1980, and stopped assembling anything in 1998 — the year after New Zealand scrapped import tariffs and made local production pointless. Distribution centre ever since. Now it's a listing.

The headline lot was the 2000 Civic Type R — an EK9 on 154,000 km, white over red-and-black Recaros, opening at NZ$30,000 with no floor under it. But the lot that says something is a 1992 Civic hatchback with 418,563 km on it. One owner, 1.3 litres, five speeds. Farther than the Earth is from the Moon — and Honda kept it on purpose, not because it was rare but because it was proof.

Tuesday's quake killed at least 13 people, buckled roads, derailed a train and cut power across the region.

The automotive damage report is simple. Toyota suspended Miyata — which builds the Lexus ES, UX, NX and RX, about 90% for export — plus its Kanda engine and Kokura hybrid powertrain plants, through today. Nissan halted two nearby factories. Honda's Kumamoto motorcycle plant stopped after the quake set off the sprinklers and flooded it.

Here's the part that got maybe two paragraphs anywhere: Kumamoto is also Japan's semiconductor cluster. JASM — the TSMC-led fab that counts Sony, Denso and Toyota among its minority shareholders — evacuated, confirmed its structures were sound, and is restarting in stages. Renesas suspended two plants after ceiling panels fell. Mitsubishi Electric stopped power-semiconductor lines, Sony paused image sensors, and Tokyo Electron idled the factories that build the equipment the other factories run on.

Why it matters to you:

The other side: AutoForecast Solutions' Sam Fiorani told CarBuzz that Japanese manufacturing is historically resilient — plants reopened inside a month after Fukushima in 2011 — and expects this volume to be made up without denting sales.

NHTSA has granted a petition to begin rule making on emergency door egress, after a run of crashes in which occupants or rescuers couldn't get electronic doors open — Bloomberg has documented at least 15 deaths across a dozen such incidents involving Teslas. Granting a petition isn't a rule; the Center for Auto Safety's Michael Brooks doesn't expect a compliance deadline before 2030. But it's worth knowing what regulators are actually pointing at, because it isn't the handle.

Why flush handles exist. The side of a car is where airflow is fastest and most attached; a protruding handle trips the boundary layer and drags a wake down the door. Tucking it flush is worth a mile or two of range on a 300-mile EV. Small — but aero engineers win by stacking twenty of these.

What replaced the linkage. Press a switch or a capacitive pad. The signal goes to a body control module, which fires a solenoid or small motor inside the latch that pulls the pawl off the striker. No rod, no cable, no mechanical path from your hand to the latch. The whole chain runs on 12 volts.

Where it breaks. That 12-volt system isn't the traction battery — it's a small separate battery topped up by a DC-DC converter off the pack. In a crash the high-voltage system deliberately isolates itself, which is a safety feature. Sever the 12V feed or let fire reach the harness and the latch has nothing to actuate with. The door isn't jammed. The door is fine. The door is electrically deaf.

The fix exists, and it's a rod. Current Lexus handles do both jobs with one part: push it and the latch releases electronically, pull it and the same handle pulls a cable and trips the latch mechanically. This was never a hard problem. It got designed out for a millimeter of drag and a cleaner render.

Ford posted a $1.3 billion net loss Tuesday and the stock went up almost 7%. Not a typo — a footnote. The loss came from $4.2 billion in special items, mostly a largely non-cash charge for unwinding the BlueOval SK battery venture. Underneath it, adjusted EBIT rose to $2.5 billion and Ford raised full-year guidance to $10–11 billion. GM ran the same play a week earlier: GAAP net income down 31% on EV charges, adjusted EBIT up 30%, guidance raised for the second time this year.

Both are writing off the 2021 EV plan in public and raising guidance anyway, because the truck business looks better once it stops subsidizing an electric one.

Now Germany. BMW agreed with its works council to cut roughly 8,000 jobs — about 5% of a 154,000-person workforce — via voluntary redundancy running from October through the end of 2027, aimed at administration and development, production untouched. CEO Milan Nedeljkovic told staff the rules of the industry had substantially changed. Porsche added 5,000 more cuts by 2035 on Monday.

For the ledger: truck and SUV pricing holds firm through year-end — it's funding everything else on the balance sheet. The discounts are on EVs the maker already wrote down. Nobody defends a car they've expensed.

Quick hits:

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