This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Before DOGE, there was Twitter. In 2023, Elon Musk seemed too distracted by his latest venture to run the world's most valuable car company. Tesla was faltering as he focused on remaking (and renaming) the social-media network. So at Tesla's investor-day event in Austin that March, Musk responded with a rare show of force.

The car industry ignored warnings more than a decade ago that keyless technology on modern vehicles risked a surge in vehicle thefts, an investigation by the Observer can reveal. Legal and computer researchers claimed keyless entry and vehicle software would be "subverted" because of inadequate security. The industry was warned of research that car owners could "expect to find their cars stolen in the future without any sign of entry." An increase in vehicle crime with keyless entry has contributed to record prices for car insurance, with some drivers now facing quotes of more than 2,000 a year or more to insure their car. Car theft in England and Wales in the year to March 2023 was at its highest level for more than a decade.

It has been called the new gold rush – a rush to catch up with China in producing and refining the materials needed in everything from computers to cars: but has it come too late to save Europe's car industry? Deep inside a former East German town lies the first fruits of the EU's grand plan to "de-risk" and wean itself off dependency on imports for the green revolution. In Bitterfeld-Wolfen, 140km south-west of Berlin, an Amsterdam-listed company is scrambling to complete construction of a vast factory that will be the first in Europe to deliver battery-grade lithium. There is now a race across Europe to both mine the silver-white soft metal and manufacture its refined form, lithium hydroxide – the key ingredient in the batteries that power electric cars, robot vacuum cleaners and mobile phones. "Everybody wants to get access to lithium. This is maybe why they call it the white gold, because it is like a gold rush," says Stefan Scherer, chief executive of AMG Lithium.

Baidu has a Google-like grip on China's internet industry, bringing in billions each year through search advertising, cloud computing, and other online services. But its ambitions extend even further than Alphabet's--and include shaking up the car industry. Today in Beijing, Jidu, an automotive company recently created by Baidu and the Chinese automaker Geely, unveiled a prototype of its first vehicle, a futuristic-looking, largely autonomous hatchback called Robo-1. The company says it will cost at least the equivalent of $30,000, and is expected to go on sale next year. The Robo-1 is sleek and angular, with doors that swing upwards at the front and open backwards at the rear.

Clement Delangue, the co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, has said huge ML models are to machine learning what formula 1 is to the car industry. He laid out his case in a series of tweets: First, like formula 1, it's obviously good PR and branding and very much driven by ego; Second, the resulting models are too costly, unusable and dangerous to use in real life just like you wouldn't drive a Formula 1 car to go to work; however, it's useful in the sense that by pushing everything to the extreme, you learn a ton! To me, huge ML models are to machine learning what formula 1 is to the car industry! Ironically, Delangue's bold statement was another PR stunt. He plugged the BigScience Research Workshop (a gathering of 1,000 researchers around the world.

According to the Automotive Council UK (ACUK) "… in the East Midlands and Yorkshire… Over a third of automotive manufacturers produce components. Read more: Mark Casci: Can cannabis save the high street? A quarter produce commercial vehicles, one fifth are aftermarket suppliers." In June 2017, the ACUK's report "Growing the Automotive Supply Chain: Local Vehicle Content Analysis" found "…cars manufactured in Britain are becoming more British…" A main reason quoted in the report was "the parts sourced by UK car manufacturers from UK first-tier suppliers has increased from 36 per cent in 2011, to 44 per cent in 2017." This is of course great news for the UK – but we would be foolish to ignore the advancements in technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) and how it has infiltrated a large part of our lives, domestically, commercially and politically.

The first idea that likely springs to mind when you think about artificial intelligence and cars is autonomous driving. But the auto industry has many other uses for AI: Collecting and parsing safety data, and design, to name just two. Given the hype around the opportunities presented by intelligent machines, we might expect that segment of the industry to be booming. Like a host of other industries where leaders want to explore and employ AI but can't, there just aren't enough people to hire. Car companies globally aren't progressing AI projects nearly as fast as trends suggested they would two years ago, according to a report released last month by the Research Institute of Capgemini, a global consultancy firm.

Stuttgart-based Bosch, the world's largest car-component maker, is putting the pedal to the metal, announcing a five-year investment program worth €4 billion ($4.6 billion) to boost the development of self-driving cars and quadruple the number of artificial intelligence experts to 4,000 by 2021. "Driverless driving will be a game changer for individual mobility. It will open the door to disruptive business models such as robotaxis and shuttle-based mobility," Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner said in a statement. "We want to belong to, and can be, among the top," he said, hinting at US and Chinese rivals. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google owner Alphabet, is considered a leader in self-driving car technology and has already tested driverless vehicles on hundreds of thousands of miles. Tesla, with its Autopilot feature, taxi service Uber and the Chinese rival Didi are also far advanced in testing autonomous vehicles.

Testing and trial runs of autonomous cars are going on briskly so that they can hit the roads soon, commute from one place to another and ridesharing companies can use them to ferry passengers to their destination. Autonomous cars would alter the long-established relationship between the driver and the car, as the vehicle steers, stops, accelerates, turns, identifies hurdles on its own and avoids collisions. This would be reinventing the car industry and its implications for the future would be colossal. But would autonomous cars make all forms of human intervention a thing of the past completely and at any stage there would be no need of human direction? What would happen in rarer scenarios where the car may need an external control for better navigation?

The race to transform the global auto industry has reached full throttle. Facing what has been touted as a once-in-a-century transformation, domestic carmakers are rushing to transition from conventional manufacturers into tech-driven "mobility companies" focused on CASE (connected, autonomous, shared and electric) technologies. Toyota Motor Corp. on Tuesday unveiled two revamped models -- the Crown and the Corolla Sport -- the first offerings in its lineup of so-called "connected cars" that will be able to utilize online services offered through a special communications network. The networked models, for example, allow their owners to become "friends" with them on Line. The owner can then use the messaging app to set a destination on the car's navigation system, while the car can use it to remind the driver to start on time and make sure there is enough fuel for the trip. Toyota hopes its so-called mobility service platform will allow other companies, including insurers and car-sharing services, to make use of big data to offer other services to drivers of connected cars.