Your friendly neighborhood BMW just wrapped itself in Spider-Man

Porsche has patented a dual-clutch gearbox that switches between full automatic, paddle-shift sequential and a real H-pattern with a working clutch pedal, none of it mechanically connected. Published at the European Patent Office on 20 September, the filing covers combustion and hybrid cars, which is the 911 architecture Porsche said in August could not take a manual.

EU fuel set a record in the week of 14 September: €2.063 a litre for petrol and €2.159 for diesel, the highest in a European Commission series that begins in 2005. ECB experts expect diesel refining margins to peak in October. France's 16 percent of stations short of a fuel is 91 percent one company's price cap, not a supply failure.

Renault has built a 1,500-unit limited edition of the Rafale called hypnotic, priced at €63,550 in France against €60,250 for the Atelier Alpine it is based on. The four options it makes standard cost €3,600 on that car, so the exclusive paint, wheels and numbered plate effectively cost nothing. Orders open on 1 October in 14 countries.

Mercedes will close one German assembly plant and one German powertrain plant if it cannot agree cost cuts with its workforce, production board member Michael Schiebe told staff in Sindelfingen. The demand is a 40-hour week at 35 hours' pay. Kecskemét in Hungary has just doubled to 400,000 cars, where an hour of labour costs €15.60 against €49.50 in Germany.

The 2026 Azerbaijan Grand Prix will be run on Saturday 26 September rather than the usual Sunday. Formula 1 agreed to move the Baku weekend forward 24 hours at the request of local organisers, so the race does not clash with Azerbaijan's Remembrance Day on 27 September, which honours the roughly 2,900 soldiers killed in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.

Nissan brings its e-Power series hybrid to the United States in the 2027 Rogue Hybrid: two motors, 225 hp, all-wheel drive, from $35,490 plus delivery. Nissan quotes 40/36/38 mpg, yet the petrol Rogue already returns 36 mpg on the highway, and a RAV4 Hybrid does 42 for $2,315 less. Europe's next X-Trail gets the same system in 2027.

McLaren has replaced its wordmark with lettering adapted from the sign above Les and Ruth McLaren's Remuera service station, where their son Bruce restored his first Austin 7. The McL 6GT is the first car to wear it. The Speedmark is separated and demoted, Papaya moves towards the racing team, and McLaren Automotive adopts a dark Midnight palette, days after L'IMAD's £500 million plan.

Fernando Alonso is reportedly weighing retirement from Formula 1 at the end of 2026 to join the World Endurance Championship in 2027, where he would race Aston Martin's Valkyrie hypercar. It would return the 45-year-old to a series he already conquered with Toyota, winning the title and the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice, and reunite him with a manufacturer whose F1 team is fighting near the bottom of the grid.

Rolls-Royce has started the global test programme for Project Nightingale, the 100-car electric roadster it revealed in April. Prototypes will cover 350 collective weeks from southern France to the Arctic Circle and the Arabian Peninsula, run to 250 km/h and open the sideways Piano Boot 15,000 times. Deliveries start in 2028, the year the Spectre was once meant to be 70 percent of the brand's sales.

Ceer has revealed the Exobot sedan and SUV, the first cars from Saudi Arabia's PIF and Foxconn joint venture. Top versions claim more than 1,100 hp and 0-100 km/h in 2.1 seconds, with a Rimac rear drive, Hyundai Transys front motors and a BMW technology licence. Production starts in January 2027 and deliveries in March, two years after the date set at the brand's launch.

Delage Automobiles has a new shareholder in Antoine Arnault, who invests through Marbeuf Capital alongside the Pinault family and Xavier Niel. The €2 million D12 hypercar has reached three customers since December 2025, with about six firm orders against a run of 30. The Nürburgring record attempt planned for 2020, then 2023, then spring 2025, still has no date.

Hyundai has shown the finished fifth-generation Tucson in Korea: 4,700 mm long on a 2,785 mm wheelbase, a 245 hp 1.6 turbo hybrid, a 193 hp petrol with an eight-speed automatic, and Pleos Connect with the Gleo AI assistant. Korean sales start in October, global markets follow in the fourth quarter. Hyundai's home sales are down 15% this year, and the Tucson is the car meant to fix that.

Tesla is recalling the Model 3 Premium across the EU and the Gulf because its far-side airbag logic can push a front occupant's shoulder past the 3.0 kN limit of the UN R135 pole test. The Netherlands alone counts 10,787 cars, Saudi Arabia 182, and the fix is a software update that needs no workshop.

Porsche has delivered its one millionth new car in mainland China, a 911 GT3 Touring handed over in Shanghai on 13 September, 25 years after the brand's first Beijing dealership. The milestone comes as China deliveries fall for a fifth year: 41,938 in 2025 and 14,501 in the first half of 2026, fewer than Germany, while the dealer network shrinks to about 80 outlets.

Toyota Gazoo Racing has revealed that its GR GT3 customer racer, built for IMSA competition, shares more than 80 percent of its components with the road-going GR GT supercar. The figure dwarfs the roughly 25 percent the outgoing Lexus RC F GT3 shared with its own road car. Toyota says the race car's needs shaped the road car's design, and testing continues at the Nürburgring ahead of a 2027 arrival.

McLaren will retire the GTS, Artura and 750S by the end of 2028, according to Autocar. The GTS goes first in 2027 and the Artura follows in 2028, while the 750S is in its final stages behind the 200-car 788HS. McLaren has confirmed a front-engined SUV and two in-house hybrid engines, but has not announced a single replacement for the three cars it sells today.

Volvo Cars has appointed Škoda CEO Klaus Zellmer as its next president and chief executive, to start no later than 1 October 2027. He succeeds Håkan Samuelsson, whose two-year contract runs out in April 2027. Zellmer, 59, spent two decades at Porsche and has run Škoda since July 2022, where 2025 brought 1,043,900 deliveries and an 8.3 percent operating margin.

BMW has put its Debrecen plant on three shifts to build the iX3 around the clock, after 100,000 European orders in under a year and more than 50,000 cars built. A second Neue Klasse model starts there this autumn. The plant assembles its own battery packs, but the cells still arrive from Asia while CATL's Debrecen cell lines stay halted.

TechArt has revealed the GTclassic, a Porsche 964 reworked into a pre-1974-style backdated 911 with a 380 hp, 3.8-litre air-cooled flat six and 18-inch forged wheels hiding Turbo brakes. It is TechArt's first classic restomod after 39 years spent tuning only modern Porsches. Singer opened this segment in 2009, and TechArt has not announced a price.

Xpeng takes the G9L global at the Paris Motor Show on 12 October, with European cars assembled at Magna Steyr in Graz, its fourth model there. The 5,120 mm five-seater comes as an 800-volt EV with up to 755 km CLTC or as a 1,602 km range-extender. Chinese prices start at 231,800 yuan, 10.8% below the August pre-sale price.

Volkswagen's ID. Buzz holds a Guinness World Record for the most countries visited on one continuous electric journey: 92, across 99,767 km and 445 days, with Rainer Zietlow driving. TÜV Nord certified the 86 kWh battery at 95.75 percent state of health on its return to Hanover, after more than 300 charging stops. The same MEB platform had 94,031 cars recalled over battery modules in March.

Volkswagen now expects an operating margin of at most 1 percent for 2026 after a €6 billion goodwill impairment on Porsche. The group had already earned €5.93 billion in the first half, so the new ceiling implies an operating loss of at least €2.8 billion between July and December. It is the third guidance cut in the last fortnight of September in a row.

Jeremy Clarkson is selling the three cars he kept from The Grand Tour: the Lancia Montecarlo Spider from the final special, the Alfa Romeo GTV6 from the 2019 Scotland trip and the Lincoln Continental Mark V from Lochdown. Iconic Auctioneers offers them without reserve in Birmingham on 14 November. Clarkson says he rarely drives them; the auction house says the reason will be told in the next Clarkson's Farm.

Audi's electric A4 e-tron will not enter production before March 2029, nine months later than planned, because Volkswagen's SSP platform is running three years behind its 2026 promise. A late switch to a 48-volt electrical system is the technical cause. The electric Golf and T-Roc slip with it, and Audi sits out the electric mid-size segment while Mercedes and BMW sell into it.

Leapmotor used its Tech Day in Huzhou to unveil the CTC 3.0 High-Low Fusion battery, which supplies the 12-volt network from the traction cells and removes the lead-acid battery, the cause of nearly half of ADAC's 3.7 million callouts last year. It sits inside the new LEAP 5.0 architecture with 48-volt distribution. First cars arrive in 2027, in China. Europe's current Leapmotors keep their lead battery.