Starting in first gear
Good morning. Porsche built a 911 that tops out at 149 mph on purpose, and one of them closes on Bring a Trailer this afternoon.
Today's issue is mostly about volume. A Porsche built in a run of 2,500, a Chevy that won't reach a quarter of its planned run, and a used-car retailer that took less money on each car so it could sell a lot more of them.
In today's newsletter, we'll get into:
Auction Desk: An 8,000-mile 911 Dakar is bidding below every Dakar that has sold this year.
One Big Story: GM planned 150,000 of its cheapest EV. It's on pace for 35,000.
Engineer's Corner: The Dakar has two speed limits, and neither one is about horsepower.
Garage Economics: CarMax made $111 less on each car and grew earnings 81%.
Let’s roll.
THE AUCTION DESK
A $263,000 Porsche is at $301,000. The last four to sell went for $395,000 and up.
An 8,000-mile 2023 Porsche 911 Dakar closes on Bring a Trailer this afternoon at 1:10 PM ET, bid to $301,000 as of Tuesday with a reserve in place. The selling dealer in Boynton Beach, Florida acquired it this year. It is #2,124 of a planned 2,500 and stickered at $263,370 new, including roughly $28,000 for the Rallye Design Package: white and Gentian Blue Metallic paint with contrasting graphics, and a roof rack carrying Porsche-branded accessories.
Underneath, the Dakar is a Carrera 4 GTS with 50 mm more ride height and a hydraulic lift that adds up to 30 mm more. The twin-turbocharged 3.0L flat-six is rated at 473 horsepower and drives all four wheels through an eight-speed PDK. This car adds rear-axle steering, active anti-roll bars, Rallye Launch Control, carbon-fiber bucket seats, and a Burmester stereo, and it comes with a clean Carfax and a copy of the window sticker. The suspension gets its own section in Engineer's Corner.
The price history is the reason to watch this one. Bring a Trailer has logged 41 Dakar results since October 2023, and about a quarter of them ended without meeting reserve. From early 2024 through mid-2025, nearly every sale landed between roughly $290,000 and $365,000. Since late 2025, four have sold between about $395,000 and $460,000, and a fifth stalled around $386,000. This car's current bid sits below all of them.
My call: I think this one finishes between $350,000 and $375,000, and I'd call the reserve a coin flip. Eight thousand miles and the Rallye Design Package should keep it out of the old band, but a current bid of $301,000 is still off by 20%.
📈 Market signal: The sales history shows two price bands, and the higher one is the recent one. Sellers in 2026 have held out for about $385,000 or more, and buyers met that number three times out of four.
ONE BIG STORY
GM planned 150,000 of its cheapest EV. It's on pace to build 35,000.
GM brought the Chevrolet Bolt back this year as the affordable EV it had promised: a $27,600 starting price, 262 miles of range, lithium-iron-phosphate cells, and a Tesla-style NACS charging port. It won an EV of the Year award.
On Tuesday, the president of the UAW local at GM's Fairfax Assembly plant in Kansas said the plant is on pace to build about 35,000 Bolts before production ends in the first quarter of 2027. The earlier plan was about 150,000. His estimate is based on the plant's daily output, not a GM target, and GM hasn't confirmed a number. The company says it reviews market conditions and customer demand regularly.
Demand explains most of the gap. GM sold 4,224 Bolts in the first half of 2026. The $7,500 federal EV tax credit ended a year ago today, on September 30, 2025, and the fuel-economy rollback we covered Monday removes most of the regulatory reason to build EVs for compliance.
Why it matters to you:
Plant math. Most of a factory's cost is fixed: the building, the tooling, the salaried staff. At 35,000 units instead of 150,000, each Bolt carries more than four times its planned share of that cost. The plant's second shift is delayed, and nearly 1,000 Fairfax workers are on indefinite layoff.
The zip code thread. Fairfax gets the gas-powered Chevy Equinox in 2027, moved from Mexico, and the Buick Envision in 2028, moved from China. We flagged the Envision move in August.
The price floor. When the Bolt ends, the U.S. loses its only domestically built EV at or under $30,000. Ford's $28,350 Fathom pickup becomes the next test of whether that price point works here.
The other side: GM President Mark Reuss told an industry conference Tuesday that GM won't whipsaw its EV strategy as gas prices and policy move, and that it invests based on customer demand rather than policy. Cutting the Bolt run to match sales is consistent with that. GM has booked $10.9 billion in EV-related losses since the second quarter of 2025.
The takeaway: GM proved it can build a sub-$30,000 EV in Kansas. It hasn't found enough buyers for one at that price without the tax credit. Watch 35,000: if the line shuts down near that number in the first quarter, the affordable-EV question passes to Ford's Fathom.
ENGINEER’S CORNER
Why the 911 Dakar has two speed limits
The Dakar's 473-horsepower flat-six could push it well past 149 mph. Porsche stops it there anyway, and it lowers the raised ride height automatically at 106 mph. Both limits come from the parts that make it an off-road car.
The first limit is the tire. Pirelli developed the Scorpion All Terrain Plus for the Dakar, the first all-terrain tire made for a Porsche production car, in 245/45 R19 front and 295/40 R20 rear. Tread depth is over 9 mm, and two carcass plies raise sidewall stiffness by about 40% and help the tire resist cuts. The taller sidewall also supplies 10 mm of the extra ground clearance, which is why the Dakar's wheels are an inch smaller than a GTS's.
A tire's top speed is a heat limit. Every time a section of tread rolls through the contact patch, it flattens and springs back, and the rubber turns part of that work into heat. The faster the tire turns, the more heat it makes each second. Deep tread blocks mean more rubber flexing on every revolution and more mass the tire has to hold together against centrifugal load. Porsche capped the car at 240 km/h instead of giving up the tread.
The second limit is the lift. Hydraulic actuators in the spring struts raise the car, using the same principle as Porsche's front-axle lift, the system owners use to clear driveway aprons. On the Dakar it works on both axles and has to hold at speed, so Porsche added a pressure accumulator, enlarged the expansion tank, and raised system pressure from about 110 bar to 135 bar, roughly 1,600 to 1,960 psi. The high setting works up to 170 km/h. Above that, the car lowers itself.
Porsche doesn't publish the reason for the 170 km/h cutoff. The likely factors are aerodynamic and dynamic: more air flowing under a raised car adds lift and drag, and a higher center of gravity loads the outside tires harder in a fast lane change. The struts are also longer than a Carrera's, with more travel in both directions and considerably softer springs, and Porsche retuned the adaptive dampers, active anti-roll bars, and rear-axle steering to match.
From an engineering standpoint, the tire decision is the one I'd point to. Porsche offers P Zero summer tires as an option, so a road tire was always available. For the standard fitment, it kept the tread depth and cut resistance the car's purpose calls for, and put the speed limit in software.
The takeaway: Neither Dakar speed limit comes from the engine. The tire construction sets 149 mph, and the lift system's operating range sets 106 mph. Porsche wrote both into software instead of weakening the parts that let the car work off-road.
GARAGE ECONOMICS
CarMax made less on every car and earned 81% more
The Bolt story is about fixed costs spread over fewer cars. CarMax's quarter shows the same math working in the other direction.
The largest used-car retailer in the U.S. reported results Tuesday morning for its fiscal second quarter, the three months ending August 31. It was the second quarter under CEO Keith Barr, the former hotel executive CarMax hired after its previous CEO stepped down in December. Revenue rose 19.5% to $7.9 billion. Retail used-car sales rose 13.8% to 227,391 units, and earnings per share rose from $0.64 to $1.16.
Here is how the numbers fit together:
Less margin per car. Gross profit per retail used car fell $111 to $2,105, the result of deliberate price cuts. Higher volume still pushed used-car gross profit up 8.1%.
Cheaper overhead per car. Selling, general, and administrative costs rose 4.6% to $628.6 million, but spread over 14.7% more units, they fell $157 per car to $1,621. That $157 more than covers the $111 given up on price. CarMax has cut 725 jobs this year and targets $200 million in annual overhead savings by the end of February 2027.
More from the add-ons. Extended protection plans earned $623 per car, up $46. Income from CarMax's lending arm rose 32.1% to $135.6 million.
Two caveats. First, the year-ago quarter was weak, with retail units down 5.4%, so this one had an easy comparison. Second, the lending growth is coming partly from riskier borrowers. CarMax financed 22% of its Tier 2 (below-prime) volume, up from 10% a year ago, and its allowance for loan losses rose to 3.07% of the portfolio from 2.95% in May. The stock is up roughly 48% this year, buybacks resume this quarter, and management is holding a strategy update on November 3.
The takeaway: CarMax's turnaround so far is a volume strategy: lower prices, lower overhead per car, and more lending to shakier credit. The first two are showing up in the results. Watch 3.07%. If the loan-loss allowance keeps climbing when CarMax reports on December 17, the lending growth is costing more than it earns.
🏁 THE COOL-DOWN LAP
The SL65 didn't sell. Monday's 2006 SL65 AMG from Collectible Classics was bid to $28,750 and did not meet reserve.
The Roadster date moved. Tesla pushed its Roadster reveal from tomorrow to Thursday, October 15, citing a severe weather forecast for an event it says can only be held outdoors.
Two-tone is back at Ford. The 2027 F-150 in XLT and Lariat SuperCrew trims gets an optional two-tone finish through Ford Custom Garage, with Oxford White, Carbonized Gray, and Agate Black accents. Somewhere, a paint shop masking schedule just got longer.
Nissan's chairman puts a date on Mexico. Christian Meunier said Chinese automakers will be building vehicles in Mexico within three years, with aggressive pricing to follow. Jim Farley gave the U.S. a five-to-ten-year window back in July.
Jaguar Type 01 is next Tuesday. The October 6 New York reveal still stands. We'll have it in the October 7 issue. Sneak peek here.
That's a wrap. See you Friday — same inbox, lower gear.
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