The parts bin is the news

Good morning. The Friday before Labor Day is when the industry files its paperwork and goes quiet, which is why the loudest thing in the news this week is a tariff on parts nobody had bothered to tax before. Meanwhile the Emira closed Wednesday afternoon, and this section has a new tenant.

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

Let’s roll.

First, the Emira. The 2024 Lotus Emira V6 First Edition from Wednesday's issue sold at $88,000. Solid price relative to it’s MSRP.

Today's car is a different kind of test. This is a 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser First Edition in Sand with a Light Gray roof over black, one owner in New Mexico since new, 27,700 miles, closing today at 3:48 PM EDT on Cars & Bids. It was bought new in September 2024 for $77,564 according to the window sticker, and it has since been fitted with a Rough Country 5.5-inch lift and 37-inch Nitto Ridge Grappler tires. Everything else is stock First Edition: locking center and rear diffs, the heritage grille and round LED lamps, ventilated seats, the 14-speaker JBL system. Carfax shows four service visits in two years, all routine.

Two facts anchor the price. Toyota built 5,000 First Editions, and when the first one hit auction in May 2024 it was at $60,000 with six days still to run, before deliveries had even fully started. That was the flipper window, selling for $81,100. Two years on, a stock First Edition retails around $65,000 and private-party guides sit in the mid-$50Ks to low $60Ks, roughly a 24 percent haircut from sticker.

Then there's the hardware. A 5.5-inch lift on an independent-front-suspension truck is a lot of lift. It changes the CV angles, the geometry the electronically disconnecting front sway bar was designed around, and the bump-steer curve, and the kit is the budget option in its category. The tires are the more interesting engineering problem. Going from the stock 265/70R18 to a 37 raises the rolling diameter by roughly 13 percent. The listing reports no re-gear, so the truck is running factory axle ratios with an effectively taller final drive. The 2.4-liter turbo hybrid makes 465 lb-ft, and the electric motor's low-speed torque will hide a good deal of that on the trail. On the highway, the eight-speed will hunt more, the speedometer will read low, and the 1.87 kWh nickel-metal hydride buffer does nothing about tire mass.

The U.S.-Canada trade talks collapsed the night of Friday, August 21. Fifty percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods took effect the next morning, and Prime Minister Mark Carney answered with retaliatory tariffs starting September 8, the Tuesday after Labor Day. Then on Monday, August 24, the President announced that tariffs on Canadian cars and trucks would double to 50 percent on January 1, and added a 50 percent tariff on Canadian auto parts.

The parts line is the new piece, and for this readership it's the one that matters. Finished vehicles are a small share of what crosses the Ambassador Bridge each day. Engines, transmissions, stampings, wiring harnesses, and seats are the bulk of it, and USMCA-compliant parts had been crossing duty-free. A Windsor-built transmission bound for a Michigan assembly plant is a parts shipment, not a car. Under the January rule it gets taxed as one. For the record, I'm a Windsor-built component myself, exported across that same bridge ten years ago with a fresh engineering degree, and nobody has yet asked me for a certificate of origin.

Canada's list, notably, does not target autos. It covers U.S. steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. Carney has since said Canada may shift from matching dollar-for-dollar to more targeted measures, and polling by Angus Reid found about three in four Canadians approve of walking away from the table. Auto stocks priced the escalation the day it was announced: Ford down 3.2 percent, Stellantis down 4.7 percent, GM down 1.1 percent.

There's a labor layer too. Unifor's GM Canada ratification meetings were scheduled for August 29 and 30, TK result, and the Brampton Assembly deadline with Stellantis is still September 20. None of those dates moved because Washington did.

Why it matters to you:

Sodium-ion batteries have been the "next year" chemistry for a decade. In 2026 they're shipping. CATL expects its sodium cells in 10,000 to 20,000 Changan EVs this year, with a range around 250 miles, and a Chinese supplier called Xupai is now delivering sodium-ion 12-volt batteries to BAIC's Arcfox brand. That second one is the story. The lead-acid battery has been the starting battery in every car for more than a century, and it's the same component that took the blame in #6 when the door handles on a dead EV stopped working.

The chemistry is a close cousin of lithium-ion. Same intercalation principle: ions shuttle between a layered cathode and a carbon anode. The differences all come from the ion itself. A sodium ion is about a third larger than a lithium ion, and sodium sits at a lower voltage, roughly 3.0 to 3.1 volts nominal per cell against 3.6 to 3.7 for a lithium NMC cell. Bigger ion plus lower voltage means less energy per kilogram, which is why sodium lost the EV race for so long.

But three things fall out of that same chemistry, and they're exactly what a 12-volt battery wants.

First, sodium doesn't alloy with aluminum the way lithium does, so the anode current collector can be aluminum instead of copper. Cheaper, lighter, and it means the cell can be fully discharged to zero volts and shipped that way without damage. Second, sodium cells hold up in cold that turns a lead-acid battery into a brick, with usable output well below minus 20 Celsius, which is the exact condition a starting battery is judged on. Third, cycle life: a lead-acid battery gives you a few hundred deep cycles, a sodium cell gives you thousands.

And the voltage that hurt sodium in the EV pack helps it here. Four sodium cells in series land around 12.4 volts nominal, which is close enough to lead-acid's 12.6 that the rest of the car's electrical architecture barely has to know. Four lithium iron phosphate cells sit higher, and that's part of why LFP 12-volts have needed dedicated management to play nicely with alternators and charging logic.

The catch is weight and cost at scale. Lead-acid is heavy, but it's astonishingly cheap and recyclable at a rate no other chemistry matches. Sodium's raw materials are abundant, but the production base is young and the factories are all in one country. That's a supply-chain sentence I've written before, in a different context.

The debut car is a 2016 BMW Alpina B6 Gran Coupe, Alpina Green Metallic over Amaro Brown, bought on Cars & Bids at no reserve in June 2024 with 53,300 miles showing. The owner is an automotive engineer in Detroit and a reader of this newsletter, which is the whole point of this section.

Quick refresher on what he bought. Alpina took the F06 6 Series Gran Coupe, kept the 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8, and tuned it to 600 hp and 590 lb-ft through an 8-speed automatic and xDrive. It cost meaningfully more than a 650i Gran Coupe, sold in tiny numbers here, and this one came with the Executive and Driver Assistance Plus packages, Adaptive Drive, the 20-inch Alpina Classic wheels, and a Bang & Olufsen system. Warm-climate registration since new.

Then he did the thing most winning bidders only think about. He flew to San Jose and drove it home. San Francisco to Los Angeles, up to Sedona and the Grand Canyon, across to Albuquerque, down to Dallas, over to Nashville, and north to Detroit. Call it 3,000 miles of shakedown before the car ever saw his own driveway.

Two years on, it's his daily driver, Michigan winters included, and he has added roughly 25,000 miles. The maintenance ledger: oil changes on a short interval, well inside BMW's schedule, because a twin-turbo V8 that lives with hot oil deserves fresh oil. Control arms, because the bushings were worn, done in his own garage. Tires. An alignment. That's the list.

For the F-series faithful, the bushings are the expected entry. BMW filled the front tension-strut bushings with hydraulic fluid to isolate road noise, and once they weep, the tell is a steering shimmy under braking. Replacing the arms outright is the sensible fix, and a 600-hp car that commutes through salt season and asks for nothing else in 25,000 miles is a better ownership story than most forum threads would predict.

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That's a wrap. Enjoy the long weekend. Canada takes Monday off too, which as of this week is the only thing the two countries still agree on. See you Monday, same inbox, lower gear.

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