One owner, 38 years, 51,000 miles. This E30 M3 is at $70,000.

Good morning. The man who bought a BMW M3 new in 1988 is selling it this week, 51,000 miles later. Buried in the seller's notes is a detail that a Florida address and a Florida title can't hide: this car spent years subject to emissions standards in Connecticut. At some point, the one-owner M3 and I could have been neighbors in southwestern CT.

Jaguar is two weeks from showing the first car it has built in nine months. Saudi Arabia showed its first car ever on Monday. And a Formula 1 car, it turns out, is mostly a data acquisition system with tires.

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

Let’s roll.

A 1988 BMW M3 in Salmon Silver Metallic over black is live on Cars & Bids out of Lake City, Florida. The seller bought it new in 1988 and has held the title ever since. The odometer shows about 51,100 miles. Bidding sat at $70,000 as of Tuesday, and the auction closes this afternoon at 1:30 PM EDT.

It's a U.S.-spec first-year E30 M3: the 2.3-liter S14 rated at 192 hp and 170 lb-ft, a five-speed manual, and the flared homologation body that shares little more than its hood and roof with a regular E30. BMW built roughly 5,300 for North America from 1988 through 1991. The factory build sheet in the gallery shows 15-inch Style 5 basketweaves, a power sunroof, leather, air conditioning, cruise control and the on-board computer.

Two items in the listing are engineering decisions rather than cosmetics:

The rest of the recent service list covers rotors, brake lines, rebuilt rear calipers, differential seals, the cluster circuit board and a battery. The engine runs a Dinan chip, with the factory chip included, and this is where my state shows up. The seller notes the car consistently passed emissions testing in Connecticut with the Dinan chip installed. Connecticut stopped testing anything 25 model years or older, so a 1988 aged out in 2013, which means those passes came back when a sniffer test still counted. Somewhere between then and now, car and owner moved south.

Known flaws are small: chips, a quarter-panel ding, bumper scratches, worn touch points. The one with a dollar figure is the tires, which carry 2008 date codes. Eighteen-year-old rubber is a tow-truck item, not a driving item. Budget a set before the first drive home.

On October 6 in New York, Jaguar reveals the Type 01, a four-door electric grand tourer and the first new Jaguar since the company shut down its entire lineup. The last F-Pace was built in December 2025. Since then Jaguar has been a brand with dealers, a logo and nothing to put on the lot.

The internet remembers only the pink car. The path:

What we know about the car: a bespoke Jaguar Electric Architecture built in the UK, three motors, more than 1,000 PS, a targeted 430 miles of EPA range, and 200 miles of charge in 15 minutes. It's about 5.2 meters long and 1.4 meters tall, and is expected to ride on 23-inch wheels. Pricing is expected to start around £120,000 (roughly $160,000) and pass £150,000 (about $200,000) for personalized cars, above a Porsche Taycan and below a Rolls-Royce Spectre. Deliveries are targeted for the first half of 2027.

Why JLR would do this at all: Jaguar sold 180,833 cars in 2018. In the fiscal year ending March 2025 it sold 26,862. The brand was already small before the hiatus, and JLR's money comes from elsewhere: Range Rover, Range Rover Sport and Defender were 80.8% of the company's wholesale volume last quarter. JLR's fiscal 2026 revenue was £22.9 billion (about $30 billion), down 21%, with pre-tax profit before exceptional items of £14 million (about $19 million) after U.S. tariffs and a cyberattack shutdown. Against that, a Jaguar that sells 20,000 cars a year at a real margin is worth more to the parent than one that sold 100,000 at a loss.

The people who placed the bet are mostly gone. CEO Adrian Mardell retired at the end of 2025, and design chief Gerry McGovern, who signed the Type 00, left at the same time. PB Balaji, previously Tata Motors' CFO, runs JLR now and has kept the plan, and kept the New York venue, which says the U.S. is still the intended market even with federal EV incentives gone.

Strip the bodywork off a modern Formula 1 car and what's left is a data acquisition system that happens to go 200 mph. Mercedes' trackside electronics group has described the plumbing, and the numbers are worth keeping.

Start at the sensors. A car carries more than 250 on a race weekend, in three groups: control (what the car needs to run), instrumentation (what engineers want to see) and monitoring (health). They read temperatures, pressures, torques, speeds, inertial loads and displacements. Some are mandated, like the tire-pressure monitors inside each wheel. Some are built in-house, like the small thermal imaging cameras on the wings and floor that watch tire surface temperature in real time, because nothing off the shelf did the job.

Sample rates run from 1 Hz to 1 kHz depending on the channel, and vibration sensors can be sampled at 200,000 samples per second before signal processing filters them to something worth logging. Every sensor is wired either as an analog input to the standard ECU or over one of several CAN buses around the chassis to that same box. Everything is time-synchronized, so a torque spike, a brake pressure and a steering angle line up to the millisecond.

Then it leaves the car. Live telemetry runs about 30 MB per lap, encrypted and sent over a trackside radio network that, unusually for F1, every team shares. The teams used to build their own masts and radios and decided that wasn't the race they were in. Back in the garage, two to three times more data is offloaded than was streamed live. Across a weekend, including video, it comes to about a terabyte per car. At the 2024 Mexican Grand Prix, Mercedes moved roughly 11 terabytes between the circuit and its two factories.

Latency is the constraint nobody outside the sport thinks about. At a European race, telemetry, voice and video reach the factory in 10 to 15 milliseconds. From Australia or Japan it's 300 to 400 milliseconds, which is why the time-critical calls happen at the track and the analysis happens in Brackley.

Mercedes' own comparison is the right one: the raw bandwidth is about what two or three people streaming HD video from their phones would use. The difference is that every bit in the F1 stream is a physical quantity someone in the factory is responsible for.

What drivers do with it is less mystical than the broadcast suggests. Between qualifying runs they overlay their lap against their teammate's to find where the time went; Friday nights they check how the tires degraded against the model. Any change to the steering wheel display gets tested against recorded data before it goes near the car. Track time is the one resource you can't buy more of, so the data has to be right the first time.

On Monday, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pulled the cover off the Ceer Exobot, a sedan and an SUV that are the first production cars from Saudi Arabia's first car company. Two weeks ago we ran the numbers on a billionaire starting a car company. Ceer is the other model: a state doing it, with a sovereign wealth fund as shareholder, customer and, to a degree, market.

The history is short because the company is. Ceer was launched on November 3, 2022, as a joint venture between the Public Investment Fund and Foxconn, with BMW licensing component technology. The announcement said cars would be on sale in 2025. Foxconn supplies the platform and electrical architecture, the same bones under its own Foxtron EVs. Hyundai Transys has a contract worth about $2.2 billion for the front drive units; Rimac builds the rear drive; Dürr, Schuler and Siemens built the paint shop, press line and automation. The design chief, Rob Melville, spent 13 years at McLaren. The CEO, James DeLuca, spent 47 years at GM and then ran VinFast. Ceer calls the cars designed and engineered in Saudi Arabia, and that is true in the sense that the checks were.

The cars: a 112 kWh battery on an 800-volt architecture (10 to 80% in 30 minutes), steer-by-wire with a yoke, no B-pillar, gullwing doors, and 5.26 meters of sedan or 5.02 of SUV. Ceer hasn't published a spec sheet, so the power figures come from the CEO: around 850 hp on the launch cars, more than 1,100 on top versions, 0 to 100 km/h in the low twos. Range claims are 560 km for the SUV and 670 km for the sedan, on the generous NEDC cycle. No prices.

The plant at King Abdullah Economic City is the real product. Construction drew a contract worth about $1.3 billion, capacity at full build is quoted at 240,000 vehicles a year, and localization deals have stacked up: about $1.7 billion with 250 local companies before 2025, another $1.5 billion in February 2025, and $987 million this February. The targets are 45% local content by 2034, 30,000 direct and indirect jobs, and $8 billion of GDP. Headcount today is 2,300, 46% of them Saudi.

Now the demand side, where sovereign car companies usually go quiet. Saudi Arabia bought about 800,000 cars last year, and roughly 3% were electric. That's 24,000 EVs, in a country that already has a PIF-owned EV factory next door: Lucid's plant in the same economic city opened in 2023 with a government order for up to 100,000 cars over ten years and a planned 155,000-unit capacity. Lucid built 18,378 cars worldwide in 2025. The two Exobots are homologated for the Gulf only. DeLuca says the platform takes plug-in hybrid and range-extender powertrains with minimal changes, and five more models follow through 2028, some of them hybrids. That is the realistic reading.

Production is now scheduled for January 2027 with first deliveries in March, against a founding promise of 2025 and a January promise of this year's fourth quarter. DeLuca says the plan is fully funded through 2040. The fund making that promise spent the last two years trimming Neom and pulling out of LIV Golf.

That's a wrap. See you Friday — same inbox, lower gear.

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