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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.

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.

Ford has started installing recall 25SC4 on the Kuga PHEV, the software fix for battery cells that can short-circuit and burn. It caps usable capacity instead of replacing the pack, and Ford's own letter puts the range loss at about 12 percent. Owners measuring their charging sessions report 20 to 30 percent. Around 167,000 cars built between August 2019 and November 2023 are affected.

A day after reports that the FIA might replace the ACO as WEC promoter and cost the 24 Hours of Le Mans its championship status, both organisations have pushed back, confirming their agreement runs through the end of 2027 and calling the reporting inaccurate. But the reassurance is narrower than it sounds: the deal is safe only to 2027, and the terms for what comes after are exactly what the two sides are still negotiating.