Good morning. It's Monday, Monterey Car Week is off to a sweeping start, and the entire collector car world is currently arguing with an airline about whether a tweed driving cap counts as a personal item.

Before the peninsula swallows the news cycle whole, there's an auction closing this afternoon that asks one of the great questions of modern collecting: what does it actually cost to drive the car Porsche built specifically to be driven?

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Let’s roll.

Closing this afternoon on Cars & Bids: a 2024 Porsche 911 S/T — number 896 of exactly 1,963 built — showing 5,700 miles, which by this model's standards makes it a high-mileage barn find.

Context, because the S/T deserves it. For the 911's 60th birthday, Porsche built exactly 1,963 of them — a number chosen for the year it all started — and made it the purist's endgame: the GT3 RS's 518-horsepower, 9,000-rpm naturally aspirated flat-six, a six-speed manual with a lightened flywheel and clutch, magnesium wheels, no big wing, and less weight than any other 992 — about 3,050 pounds. No PDK option, no lap-time ambitions. Porsche pitched it explicitly as a car for the road, built for feel rather than numbers. Then it priced the thing at just over $290,000 and watched the market immediately price it like a Fabergé egg.

Porsche saw the flipping coming and tried something drastic: U.S. buyers had to sign a one-year lease before they could actually own their S/T. It didn't stop the speculation — it just scheduled it. Twelve months later the cars hit the open market at enormous premiums anyway, and the profit went to flippers instead of Zuffenhausen.

Two years on, the math has cooled into something more honest. Public auction results this year have clustered between roughly $625,000 and $665,000 — all for cars showing fewer than 1,200 miles — and a 1,000-mile example failed to sell in June with bidding stalled at $601,000. Dealer asks run from about $620,000 to $850,000, with one 18-mile car offered at $1.1 million, presumably to a buyer arriving by time machine. This car has its own paper trail: the same VIN wore a $622,992 dealer asking price in June before that listing quietly came down and the car headed to open auction instead.

So today's close is a genuinely useful experiment: one of the most-driven S/Ts yet to reach public auction, selling into a market that says it loves drivers' cars — and pays like it loves garage queens.

Tesla and SpaceX announced Thursday they'll invest $16.8 billion to start building "Terafab," a semiconductor plant in Grimes County, Texas that Elon Musk says will become "the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far."

The pitch: over 100 million square feet of manufacturing space on the site of a retired coal plant's cooling reservoir, producing chips for Optimus robots, Cybercabs, and SpaceX's planned orbital data centers — because Musk projects his companies will eventually need more compute than the entire global semiconductor industry currently produces. Intel says it will contribute to the project. At least 3,000 jobs are promised.

Now, your correspondent spent a few years in the semiconductor equipment world, so permit some translation. A fab is not measured in square feet. It's measured in wafer starts per month and in the tool list — and the tools are the expensive part. It measures technical capability. A single leading-edge lithography machine runs well north of $300 million, a competitive fab needs a fleet of them, and lead times are measured in years. For scale: 100 million square feet is more than ten times the floor area of TSMC's largest gigafab, promised by a company that has never shipped a production wafer.

The numbers around the announcement have also been doing quite a bit of shape-shifting. March's headline was $25 billion; Thursday's was a $16.8 billion "first phase." SpaceX filings have floated totals up to $119 billion — while SpaceX's own IPO paperwork in May described Terafab as a "general framework" with no binding commitments. Meanwhile, Tesla's actual near-term silicon is already spoken for: Samsung's Texas fab is producing the AI5 chip today, and a $16.5 billion deal covers the next-generation AI6.

And a callback to Friday's Cool-Down: the Cybercab — one of the two products this fab supposedly exists to serve — just had its Austin rollout delayed again.

Why it matters to you: Every modern car is a computer that happens to have wheels, and 2021 taught us what happens when the chips run out. Whether Terafab actually gets built decides real things downstream:

Dodge revived the Super Bee on Thursday — a 2027 Charger Launch Edition making an SAE-certified 600 horsepower, up 50 over the Scat Pack, from the same twin-turbo 3.0-liter straight six.

The headline change: larger 56-millimeter Garrett turbochargers. The interesting change: almost everything else Dodge touched was cooling.

That's not a coincidence. It's the whole story of turbocharging.

A turbocharger is an energy recycler. Exhaust gas that would otherwise carry heat and pressure out the tailpipe spins a turbine wheel; a shaft connects that turbine to a compressor wheel, which stuffs extra air into the engine. More air plus matched fuel equals more power. Simple — until you try to get greedy.

Problem one is inertia. A compressor wheel's resistance to spinning up grows dramatically faster than its diameter — heavier wheel, bigger radius, much more rotational inertia. That's turbo lag: the pause between your right foot's request and the boost's arrival. Go too big and the car drives like it's waiting for a permission slip. Modern fixes include twin-scroll housings that keep exhaust pulses organized, and, on diesels and the 911 Turbo, variable-geometry vanes that aim the exhaust like a thumb over a garden hose.

Problem two is the map. Every compressor has an operating envelope — surge on one side (air stalling and coughing back out at low flow), choke on the other (the wheel simply can't pass more air). A bigger compressor moves the whole envelope toward high flow, buying top-end power by taxing low-rpm response. Sizing a turbo is choosing which insult to your driving experience you can live with.

Problem three is the one Dodge actually spent its money on: heat. Squeeze air and it gets hot — that's physics, not a defect — and hot air is both less dense (less power per gulp) and more likely to detonate before the spark plug asks it to. Knock is how 600-horsepower engines become 600 pieces. So the Super Bee's new front fascia flows 30 percent more air, hides auxiliary radiators in its corners, and reroutes ducting to feed them. The turbos make the boost; the cooling makes it survivable. Porsche solved the same equation on its 700-horsepower GT2 RS by spraying water onto the intercoolers — a factory-fitted squirt gun.

Porsche SE — the Porsche-Piëch family holding company that controls Volkswagen — posted a first-half net loss of €2.21 billion (about $2.6 billion) last week.

In the same six months, Volkswagen Group, the company it holds, earned an operating profit of €5.93 billion.

Losing billions on a profitable company sounds like a magic trick. It's actually accounting — and it's worth three minutes of your Monday.

Porsche SE owns 31.9 percent of VW's shares but 53.3 percent of its voting rights (dual-class shares: the family keeps control while owning less than a third of the economics). Because of that control, it books its VW stake under the equity method: each quarter it records its slice of VW's earnings and carries the stake on its books at a calculated "value in use" — essentially a discounted bet on VW's future cash flows. When that projected future shrinks, the holding must write the stake down, and the writedown lands on the income statement as a loss even though no cash left the building. That's what happened: €3 billion impaired on the VW stake, another €200 million on its 12.5 percent of Porsche AG. Strip the writedowns out and Porsche SE actually earned €949 million.

So why does a paper loss matter? Because of who's holding the pen. A writedown is the controlling family formally lowering its own estimate of what the empire's future is worth — and this one arrived with a message. Chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch declared VW at "a historic crossroads" and demanded management move faster on restructuring: up to 100,000 jobs on the table and four German plants facing possible closure, with cheap, fast Chinese competition — the same wave Jim Farley spent Issue #7 warning about — as the pressure behind all of it.

Quick hits to start your week:

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