The union voted for the layoffs. Happy Labor Day.

Good morning. It's Labor Day, so we'll keep the irony short: the biggest labor story of the year was approved on Thursday by a board that is half labor. Volkswagen's supervisory board, ten of whose twenty seats belong to the workforce, voted unanimously for a plan that cuts 100,000 jobs by 2030 and leaves four German plants with nothing to build after 2031. Nobody abstained.

Before Wolfsburg, two auctions. Friday's lifted 2024 Land Cruiser topped out at $56,100 and did not meet reserve, which says something about our $60,000 watch-number. And a 1974 Aston Martin V8 in New York closes this afternoon at $210,000 and counting, with a factory certificate describing a car it no longer is.

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

Let’s roll.

Start with the paperwork. The Heritage Trust certificate says this car was built on July 19, 1974, and dispatched five days later to a dealer in Canada: left-hand drive, Canadian spec, Cambridge Blue over Natural leather, manual, Webers.

The car on the block today is Cambridge Blue over black. The factory 5.3-liter V8 was bored to 5.7 last year by Autosport Designs on Long Island, with 540 Vantage-spec cams, oversized valve seats, and fresh timing chains. The original manual is gone, replaced with a Richmond six-speed. A Harvey Bailey handling package sits underneath. The body wears a Vantage air dam, a blanking plate where the mesh grille was, Perspex headlamp covers, and the three-piece bolted flip-tail spoiler that marks the early real Vantages. Then there's the Rockford Fosgate stereo, which Newport Pagnell definitely did not fit.

The engine number matches the certificate. Almost nothing else does. The certificate even carries a printed warning that the factory sometimes modified cars after production and before shipment, Aston's polite way of saying the 1974 books and the 1974 cars did not always agree. Invoices from the refurbishment total more than $144,000. The odometer shows roughly 5,000 kilometers, marked true mileage unknown.

It's a dealer car in New York with a Montana title, a sentence that needs no further comment.

Volkswagen's supervisory board approved Future Plan 2030 on Thursday, a day earlier than expected. The headline is 50,000 more job cuts on top of 50,000 already agreed in late 2024, 100,000 by the end of the decade. The plan halves the model portfolio by 2035, cuts variant complexity by three quarters, and targets a 9% operating margin on nine million annual sales. Four German plants, Emden, Zwickau, Hanover, and Neckarsulm, have no secured production from 2031 to 2034 and are being studied for "alternative uses."

That's the plan. Here's why the vote matters more than the plan.

Volkswagen is governed under a 1960 law written to keep the company from being taken over. Lower Saxony holds 11.8% of the equity but 20% of the votes, and resolutions that need 75% anywhere else need more than 80% at Volkswagen, so the state can block anything. Half of the twenty-seat board belongs to labor. Together, labor and the state blocked an earlier version of this plan in July, and as late as Thursday morning both had signaled opposition. Management had reportedly prepared to call an extraordinary shareholders' meeting to go around the board if it lost.

Then the board voted 20 to 0.

A unanimous vote from that board means the works council and the state read the numbers and concluded there was no version of Volkswagen with 100,000 more people in it. European capacity exceeds demand by more than 500,000 units. The company has acknowledged a roughly 20% cost disadvantage against global competitors, which in a business with mid-single-digit margins is not a gap, it's the whole margin twice over.

What labor got for its vote is the shape of the cuts. Employment protection at most German sites holds until 2030, so reductions come through departure agreements and attrition; more than 28,000 employees across VW, Audi, Porsche, and the software unit had signed by June. Roughly half the new cuts are expected in Germany, near 25,000. The four plants are not closed. They are unallocated, which in this industry is the same word said slowly.

Shares rose 8% on the day. They are still down a fifth on the year.

Every wing on every car shares one defect: it does nothing at a standstill. Wing downforce scales with the square of speed, so a car that makes a tonne at 150 mph makes a quarter of that at 75 and nothing at the lights. Two cars in history refused to accept this, the Chaparral 2J and the Brabham BT46B, and both were banned.

The third one is now in production. McMurtry's Spéirling PURE, revealed in final form in July and shown publicly at The Quail last month, seals its underbody with skirts and pulls the air out with two fans at 23,000 rpm. The result is up to 2,000 kg of downforce at zero mph on a car that weighs about 1,350 kg. That's the number behind last year's upside-down run, and it isn't a stunt, it's arithmetic: if the car is pushed down harder than gravity pulls, the ceiling is a road.

The physics is gentler than it sounds. Two thousand kilograms is about 19.6 kN. Spread across an underbody of four to five square meters, that's roughly 4 to 5 kPa, or 4 to 5% below atmospheric. The car isn't held down by a vacuum. It's held down by a mild pressure difference acting on a large area, which is why the skirt seal matters more than the fan. Lose the seal and you lose the area.

The consequences cascade. Launch becomes a tire problem rather than a motor problem: with 2,000 kg pressing on 1,350 kg of car, the contact patches see roughly two and a half times normal load before the car has moved, which is how a rear-drive car runs 0 to 60 in 1.4 seconds. Braking works the same way in reverse. And the fans draw from the same 100 kWh pack as the twin motors, which is why run time is quoted in kilometers at LMP2 pace rather than in laps.

Then the part your inner engineer will respect. The prototype that set the Goodwood hillclimb record in 2022 weighed under 1,000 kg. The production car gained close to 450 kg, grew almost eight inches in wheelbase, and swapped 95% of its parts. A 100 kWh battery, a driver envelope up to 6'7", cooling that survives a stint, and a crash structure that satisfies someone's lawyers all cost mass. Records are set by prototypes. Products are built by accountants.

The last hypercar program SCG worked on with Podium Technologies was packaged around a fuel tank and a V8, both of which sit higher and want to be near the middle. This one is packaged around a battery and two fans, which want to be flat and low. That changes where the driver sits, where the mass sits, and what the car does the moment you turn the wheel. Nothing in the layout is a compromise inherited from a combustion car, which is rarer than it should be.

A hundred will be built at two a month, £995,000 before tax, deliveries later this year. Most of the records on the company's ledger were set at 50 to 80% of available power and downforce, which is either a boast or a warning.

Volkswagen's board said European capacity exceeds demand by more than 500,000 units. In a plant, that number looks like this.

A modern European assembly plant is built for roughly 200,000 to 300,000 units a year on full shifts. Half a million surplus units is two whole plants' worth of output, or, more realistically, six or eight plants each running below the line where they pay for themselves. That line is the problem. Fixed cost in a car plant is brutal: the building, the body shop, the paint shop, the robots, the tooling for every variant, and the salaried headcount cost the same whether the line runs one shift or three. The rule of thumb is that a plant needs about 80% utilization to earn its keep. Below that, every car carries a bigger slice of the fixed cost, and the plant slides from profit center to subsidy.

That's why the plan attacks three things at once, and why they're the same thing. Fewer models means fewer tooling sets, fewer homologations, and fewer part numbers in inventory. Fewer variants does the same work inside each model. And fewer plants pulls the fixed cost out entirely instead of spreading it thinner. The company's own targets tell the story: €37 billion of overhead against €31 billion of operating result at a 9% margin, from a margin in the mid single digits today. You don't close that gap with a hiring freeze.

The SEAT report that surfaced this week is the same logic applied to a badge. A leaked planning document reportedly winds the Spanish brand down by the end of 2029 in favor of Cupra, which now outsells it. The company says no decision has been made, and notably, nobody has suggested closing the Martorell plant. That's the tell. A brand is cheap to retire: signage, marketing, dealer agreements. A plant is not. So you kill badges to concentrate volume into fewer, fuller factories.

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