Throttle Weekly Issue 47: The Roadster Flies, GM's Record Quarter, and a Playoff Lead Halved
A flying Tesla Roadster, GM's biggest quarter alongside a battery plant closing, a NASCAR points lead halved at Phoenix and Toyota's fifth Hypercar title lead this week's sourced car digest, with an explanation of the fan that holds a car to the road at zero mph.
The week in one pass
Coverage: October 14 – October 21, 2026.
Tesla spent nine years promising a second Roadster, then drove it up a ramp upside down and flew it off the end. GM booked the largest quarter in its history in the same week it confirmed the closure of the plant that builds batteries for its flagship electric Cadillac. Subaru showed an electric platform of its own design. At Phoenix, NASCAR's points leader left with nothing and half his lead.
- Industry: Tesla revealed the new Roadster at SpaceX's Texas test site, where a prototype drove upside down on a fan and flew on SpaceX thrusters. 12 GM posted $50 billion in quarterly revenue and said it is closing Brownstown Battery Assembly. 34 Subaru showed an in-house electric platform with 510 horsepower. 5 Volkswagen will cap charging at 80 percent on 22,524 ID.4s through an over-the-air update. 6
- Trackside and community: Tyler Reddick won at Phoenix while points leader Kyle Larson failed to finish, halving his deficit. 7 Toyota finished 1-2 at Barcelona to take its 13th world championship. 8 Max Verstappen used his first GT World Challenge Europe weekend to defend a teammate from online abuse. 9
- Explainer: how a fan underneath a car holds it to the road when the car is standing still, and why a Formula 1 team tried the same thing in 1978. 10
- Car culture: the US Marshals are selling a convicted fraudster's 90-car collection. 11 Bugatti restored the one-off mirror-finish Veyron. 12 A 1976 Chevrolet pickup with one owner and 37,000 miles ends its auction today. 13
Industry news
The Roadster drives upside down and flies
Tesla revealed the second-generation Roadster on the night of October 15 at SpaceX's test facility in McGregor, Texas. The reveal came nine years after the concept. A prototype drove up an arching structure and across it upside down, held to the surface by a fan system underneath. 1
At the end of the structure the car flew. Four rear-mounted thrusters fed by SpaceX-supplied hardware, said to produce more than 80 kilonewtons of force, pushed the prototype forward through a barrel roll and a landing in a cloud of smoke. 1 Another car then jumped over a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Semi, a Model S and a Model 3 while rolling. 2
Elon Musk set the tone. "I should say that this is not necessarily a safety optimized car," he told the crowd. "But it takes the fun-meter to 11 out of 10." He also said the car would be a real, ownable product, with production starting in 2028. 2
The acceleration runs were the part with numbers attached. Tesla claimed one second to 60 mph on the first run and 0.81 seconds on the second. Musk said he expects the production car to improve on that. 12
Top speed is claimed at over 230 mph, with Musk aiming at half the speed of sound, or about 383 mph. The thrusters run on compressed air, and Tesla says the car can refill its own tanks. 1
Three versions are planned. Performance has the active rear wing and the fan. Thrust adds the rear cold-gas thrusters. Rocket adds thrusters around the body that let the car move up and sideways in the air, and comes with a driver's seat only, by invitation. 1
Anyone can join the queue at tesla.com/roadster with a $50,000 deposit. Tesla has published no price for the car, and no independent test of that claim. 2
GM posts its biggest quarter and closes a battery plant
GM reported $50 billion in revenue for the three months to September 30, its highest quarter ever, and $4.1 billion in earnings before interest and taxes against $3.4 billion a year earlier. Silverado and Sierra sales carried the quarter, with Super Cruise revenue up 60 percent and OnStar up 40 percent. 3
The company has paid $1.8 billion in tariffs so far this year and expects the low end of its earlier $2.5–3.5 billion full-year estimate, chief financial officer Paul Jacobson said. GM is on course to cut its electric-vehicle program losses by $1 billion to $1.5 billion this year. 3
President Mark Reuss told the Automotive News Congress that GM has absorbed more than $11 billion in EV-related charges over the past year. "We're in it for the long haul," he said. "Work may be a little slower on EVs, for instance, but that's OK." 3
The same week brought the plant news. GM will close Brownstown Battery Assembly, a leased 480,000-square-foot site, when the lease ends next summer. Brownstown builds batteries for the Cadillac Celestiq and built batteries and drive units for the Corvette E-Ray. 4
About 80,000 square feet of Brownstown was used for hydrogen work, most recently for the GM-Honda fuel cell joint venture that was dissolved last year. GM says it has stopped work on fuel cells, citing cost, infrastructure and demand. A second, smaller Detroit plant tied to a dissolved project with Piston Automotive also needs a new use. 4
Electric vehicles were 5.8 percent of the US market in the third quarter, down from 7.4 percent a year earlier. GM's total sales are down 11 percent through nine months. Chief executive Mary Barra told analysts the company has begun investing in hybrids, though she said demand is strongest in compact and mid-size cars and minivans, segments GM has left. 3
Subaru builds its own electric platform
Subaru showed a prototype of its next electric car in Japan, built on a dedicated platform the company developed itself. The test mule wears an Outback body on a longer wheelbase. 5
Two motors drive all four wheels for about 510 horsepower, which Subaru says is enough for 0-62 mph in under four seconds. The front motor makes 201 horsepower and the rear 308, with the motors developed alongside Aisin. 5
The battery comes from a joint development with Panasonic Energy that began in September 2024. It uses 4,000 cylindrical cells and is claimed to be 25 percent lighter than Subaru's current pack, with a target energy density 20 percent above the industry average. Engineers told Automotive News the new motors are 30 percent more efficient than the industry average. 5
Subaru says the whole platform is about 220 pounds lighter than its current ones. The front structure is reworked to absorb a crash around the battery, and the front motor is designed to rotate on impact. 5
Some of the technology reaches customers from 2029, which is as specific as Subaru has been. Its current electric lineup — the Uncharted, Solterra and Trailseeker, plus the three-row Getaway due early next year — all came out of Toyota collaboration. 5
The company also says it is working on more efficient combustion engines for future gas and hybrid models, and on a next-generation Eyesight driver-assistance system built around AI. 5
Volkswagen caps ID.4 charging at 80 percent, remotely
Volkswagen will send an over-the-air update to 22,524 ID.4s that limits charging to 80 percent, according to recall documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The documents say the affected batteries can catch fire under certain charging conditions when the car is above 80 percent charge. 6
The limit is temporary. Volkswagen has not established why the batteries catch fire, and the recall documents describe the 80 percent cap as a fix until it does. Owners will also receive warning stickers for the car. 6
Dealers have been notified. Owner letters go out in late November, by which point the software change will have been in place for close to a month, according to InsideEVs. 6
This is the second battery-fire recall for the ID.4 this year. The January action covered nearly 44,000 cars from the 2023 to 2025 model years. Volkswagen has not said whether the two recalls are related. 6
For owners, the practical effect is range. A cap at 80 percent removes about a fifth of the usable pack, and the documents say a car showing the recall conditions may also lose range or performance. 6
Trackside and community
Reddick wins at Phoenix and Larson's lead halves
Tyler Reddick won the Freeway Insurance 500 at Phoenix Raceway on October 18, his sixth win of the season and his first since Kansas on April 19. 7
The standings moved more than the result suggests. Reddick arrived 114 points behind Kyle Larson and left 56 behind, because Larson had a tire failure and did not finish. A 61-point day for Reddick cut the lead roughly in half. 7
Reddick restarted fourth with 23 laps left, the first driver to pit for right-side scuffs. He went four wide on the restart with Gibbs, Chase Elliott and Ryan Blaney, took the outside lane, and passed Chase Briscoe for the lead. 7
Blaney finished second and Elliott third, his best finish of the playoff. Christopher Bell led the most laps, scored the most stage points and moved to second in the standings, five points behind Larson. 7
Briscoe ended up third in the standings, 24 points back after passing Denny Hamlin, who finished 28th. Joey Logano sits sixth, 44 points behind Larson. 7
Toyota takes a fifth Hypercar title at Barcelona
The No. 8 Toyota TR010 of Sébastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa won the 6 Hours of Barcelona on October 18 after taking the lead on the opening lap. Hirakawa crossed the line 0.583 seconds ahead of Mike Conway in the No. 7 car. 8
The pair swapped the lead in the second hour, when Buemi took a drive-through penalty. The No. 7 pulled out more than 14 seconds before the No. 8 came back. Both Toyotas made the call to switch off wet Michelin tires at the right moment. 8
The 1-2 finish gave Toyota its 13th world championship and its fifth since the Hypercar class began. The No. 50 Ferrari 499P completed the podium, 39.148 seconds behind. Its sister car stopped nine times and finished three laps down in 15th. 8
"I'm trying not to think about the driver's championship right now," Hartley said. "Today's about the team. We clinched the manufacturer's title." The No. 8 leads the No. 7 by 17 points going into the finale at Monza. 8
In the World Endurance Championship's LMGT3 class for production-based GT cars, the No. 92 Manthey Porsche won, the seventh different winner in seven rounds of the class this season. 8
Verstappen's GT3 weekend ends with a post about his teammate
Max Verstappen raced in GT World Challenge Europe for the first time at Portimão on October 17, sharing his Team Verstappen No. 3 Mercedes-AMG GT3 and taking the closing 45-minute stint. 9
His teammate Chris Lulham picked up a drive-through penalty for spinning the No. 48 Mercedes driven by Stolz while going for fifth. Lulham served it around the handover, which put Verstappen 24th. He drove to ninth overall and fifth in class. 9
On Sunday morning Verstappen posted about the reaction Lulham had received. "Everyone can have their opinions about what happened on track, but these personal attacks are not okay," he wrote. "Chris had a really strong stint, and mistakes can happen." 9
Maro Engel, a co-driver in the No. 48 that Lulham hit, agreed. "It's sport. Not more, not less. Mistakes happen, but there is no room for personal attacks," Engel wrote. Lulham had co-driven with Verstappen to Verstappen's first GT3 win at the Nürburgring last September. 9
Explainer: how a fan pins a car to the road
A Tesla Roadster drove upside down on a fan. Two separate systems made the stunt possible, and both are older than the car that used them.
Downforce normally comes from speed. A wing or a diffuser turns the car's motion into a pressure difference, pushing the body down harder the faster it goes. At zero speed, a wing generates no downforce.
A fan works the other way around. Mount it so that it pulls air out from under the floor, and the floor stops pushing up as hard as the roof pushes down. The car is pressed onto the road by the weight of the atmosphere. The fan's speed sets the downforce, whatever the car is doing.
The floor has to be closed for this to work. Air leaking in at the edges of the car bleeds the pressure difference away, so the effective area has to be sealed off from the outside. That is the whole design problem: the lower and better sealed the floor, the more the fan has to work with.
Reporting on the Roadster, Autoweek's Mark Vaughn wrote that it sounded like the McMurtry Spéirling and the 1970 Chaparral 2J. 2
Formula 1 had a go in 1978. Brabham's BT46B carried a large engine-driven fan at the rear that sucked air from under the chassis, and the team claimed the fan's primary job was cooling the engine. 10
Mate Rimac has been circling the idea for years. In 2019 he emailed himself a plan he called "static downforce," a fan system modelled on that Brabham. In 2020 his team ran a project to add cold-gas thrusters to the Nevera, with the idea of putting them in its successor and going below one second to 60 mph. 10
Both projects went quiet while Rimac worked on the Bugatti Tourbillon's V-16 engine. "I'm happy that Elon did it, that Tesla did it, that McMurtry did it," he said. "It's more exciting; it makes the future even more exciting." 10
McMurtry's Spéirling shows what the system is worth in numbers. The company claims up to 4,400 pounds of downforce at zero mph, enough for about 3 g under braking and in corners. The production Spéirling Pure weighs just under 3,000 pounds before options. 14
Tesla's version runs the fan in two modes. At low speed it suctions the car down for traction. At high speed it opens the front and rear of the suction system to move more air under the floor. 1
The thrusters are a separate mechanism with a separate job. They run on cold compressed air held in two carbon-overlay pressure vessels of more than 200 litres, about 250 kilograms of air, released through 10 nozzles. 2 The fan presses the car down; the thrusters push it somewhere else.
What a fan costs is power and packaging. It has to be driven, it takes up floor area, and its benefit disappears if the seal under the car is broken. A wing, by contrast, costs drag only when the car is moving fast enough for it to matter. That trade is why fans have stayed rare, and why almost every fast car on sale uses wings instead.
The human-interest coda
The Marshals sell a fraudster's 90 cars
Clayton Lloyd Iley, a North Texas businessman, was sentenced to 160 months in federal prison for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. As part of his plea agreement he gave up more than 90 collector vehicles. 11
The inventory mixes supercars with military trucks. There are two Lamborghini Aventadors, two Huracáns, two Ferrari 488s and three Maserati MC20s, alongside a 2021 Porsche Taycan, a 2014 SRT Viper and a 1968 Pontiac Firebird. 11
Then there are the military vehicles: a 1989 AM General Humvee, a 1993 Humvee and a 1990 BMY M923A five-ton truck. A 2013 Toyota Tundra sits on the same list. 11
Other cars in the collection went back to banks rather than to auction. The rest go under the hammer through Apple Auctioneering, whose calendar lists a US Marshals sale running October 27 to November 3, though the inventory for that sale is not yet posted. 11
"Clayton Iley's conduct caused real financial and emotional harm to the victims he targeted," US Attorney Ryan Raybould said. "Those who steal from members of our community, manipulate them with fabricated schemes, and misuse their identities will face significant federal consequences." 11
Bugatti restores the mirror Veyron
Chassis 8.100 is a Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse with a body of polished aluminium, finished like a mirror. Building it in 2014 took aluminium blocks weighing up to 20 tons, shipped to Bugatti's works in Molsheim. It was reported at the time as the most expensive Veyron ever built. 12
Twelve years later the car went home. Bugatti's La Maison Pur Sang program stripped the aftermarket personalisation the car had acquired and returned it to its original specification, including the mirror finish. 12
Under the aluminium sits the standard Vitesse drivetrain: an 8.0-litre quad-turbocharged W16 making 1,183 horsepower, with a claimed 254 mph top speed. The cabin is Carmine Red leather with exposed carbon fibre and more polished aluminium. 12
Bugatti has not named the owner, and says the car now lives on the French Riviera. Videos circulating on social media show Fernando Alonso driving it through Monaco. 12
A 1976 K10 with one owner and 37,000 miles
A man walked into a Chevrolet dealership in Colorado in 1976, bought a K10 pickup and kept it. Fifty years later the truck has 37,000 miles on it and the same owner on the title. 13
The spec is a 350-cubic-inch small-block V-8 making around 150 horsepower, a four-speed manual, a dual-range transfer case and manual locking front hubs. The paint is Hawaiian Blue over beige, and the interior is blue cloth with woodgrain trim and an AM radio. 13
Trucks of this generation were usually worked hard, which makes a 37,000-mile survivor unusual. The listing sits on Bring a Trailer, and bidding closes today. 13
References
- 1Revealed! New Tesla Roadster Takes Flight with SpaceX Thrusters
caranddriver.com
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- 5Subaru Reveals First Details of New EV Platform Coming in 2029
caranddriver.com
- 6Volkswagen Will Remotely Limit Some ID.4s to 80 Percent Charge
caranddriver.com
- 7
- 8Toyota Secures Team Championship with 1-2 Finish at Barcelona
roadandtrack.com
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12This Refurbished One-Off Bugatti Veyron Is a Mirror on Wheels
caranddriver.com
- 13
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