The plan, presented at BMW’s two-day Capital Markets Day in Munich, sets a deliberately cautious medium-term financial target.

The automotive division is expected to achieve an operating margin of 3% to 5% by 2028, before BMW seeks to restore the 8% to 10% range in the early 2030s.

Automotive free cash flow is targeted to exceed five billion euros in 2028 and to surpass seven billion euros in the early 2030s.

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The investment, announced on Monday, covers major upgrades and new facilities in Derby, Bristol, Glasgow, Rotherham and Ansty in Warwickshire. Rolls-Royce said the programme would ensure its British infrastructure can meet manufacturing demand while supporting the development of future aerospace programmes.

The largest allocation exceeds 140 million pounds for the company’s Derby operations, which are the centre of its civil aerospace activities.

The investment will fund new engineering and manufacturing facilities, improve the working environment and increase capacity for aftermarket support. The Derby works are expected to be completed in 2028.

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The launch of the Torcal SUV comes just months after Ferrari’s Luce debut, an EV whose design invited criticism from the brand’s fans for deviating from the company’s traditional low-slung, petrol-powered cars.

Bentley has opted for a conservative approach by ensuring its debut EV retains styling cues from the luxury carmaker’s combustion-engine models, including diamond-shaped lights designed to evoke a traditional front grille, although EVs do not require a grille for engine cooling.

While the EV has replaced Bentley’s traditional V8 engine, the new powerplant has retained the engine’s traditional feeling by having a soundtrack based on orchestral timpani, or kettledrums, supported by smaller drums that quicken as the vehicle accelerates.

“Our intention was always to make a Bentley first,” Bentley CEO Frank‑Steffen Walliser told Reuters.

“We feel people are not asking for an entirely different car just because it’s electric,” he added further.

Beyond Ferrari, BMW-owned Rolls-Royce is the only other major ultra-luxury carmaker having an EV in its vehicle portfolio.

Lamborghini, which, like Bentley, is owned by the Volkswagen Group, has delayed its first EV until the end of the decade amid the parent group’s struggles against headwinds like low vehicle demand in Germany, increasing Chinese competition, and US tariffs.

Another British giant, McLaren, said last week it had no plans for an EV.

Both Lamborghini and McLaren have cited limited customer demand while justifying their decisions.

Bentley, too, delayed the launch of its first EV until 2026 and abandoned a target of becoming fully electric by 2030, saying customers were not ready to make the shift.

However, the Torcal SUV has arrived. Unlike the Luce EV, whose starting price stands at 550,000 euro (USD 628,000), the Torcal sits at the lower end of Bentley’s range, with a starting price of 173,000 pounds (USD 230,000).

As per Walliser, Bentley has tried to keep the model in a “more affordable” category, seeking a new market and customer base.

Bentley has been showcasing the vehicle to existing and prospective customers.

It has reportedly drawn strong interest from Europe, the Middle East, and American states where EV adoption is high.

A launch campaign in China, the world’s largest auto market, will begin in 2027.

“Half of the interest comes from ⁠existing customers, looking for a new EV or to replace a car in their fleets, while approximately 50% are new to the brand,” Walliser said.

The launch of the Torcal SUV should also be seen as the first act of a comeback from the struggling British automobile sector, especially in the EV domain.

To build Torcal, Bentley has invested 350 million pounds at its Crewe plant.

Taking together the announced commitments from McLaren and Nissan, total sector investment went past more than 1 billion pounds in seven days.

Bentley has given a British spin to its EV narrative, stating that the Torcal SUV has been designed, engineered, and built in the European country, and the project will support around 4,000 existing jobs in Crewe while reinforcing domestic automotive supply chains.

The investment also includes new manufacturing, design, and logistics capabilities at the site, alongside workforce training and skills development.

British business minister Jonathan Reynolds said Bentley’s investment was “proof once again that we’re creating the right conditions for good growth.”

Image Courtesy: Bentley

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Called Exobot, the futuristic premium electric sedan and SUV will start sales in the Kingdom in early 2027.

The cars have arrived with the looks heavily inspired by the sci-fi thriller “Tron.”

Both the sedan and SUV versions of the Exobot possess “gullwing” doors that open upward.

“Ceer has also removed the pillars normally found between a car’s front and rear seats and relies instead on high-strength materials to provide structural support,” CEO Jim DeLuca said.

“We ⁠wanted to make sure the world could see what Saudi Arabia is capable of,” he added further.

Ceer’s arrival in the global automotive scene also coincides with the industry’s biggest course correction, in which Chinese automakers, armed with feature-laden yet cost-effective cars, are creating their positions around the world, challenging established ecosystems like the ones in Germany, Japan, and the rest.

Ceer is a joint venture between Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), and Taiwanese contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn.

While the Kingdom’s energy wealth is there to back up the company’s R&D efforts, the Saudi economy in 2026 has been facing logistics and inflationary problems due to the Iran war.

The sedan version of the vehicle has an estimated range of 670 km, while the charging time will take some 30 minutes to reach the 80% threshold. Acceleration speed (reaching 0-100 km/h) will take 2.6 seconds, with a maximum horsepower of 850 hp.

The SUV variant will have an estimated range of 560km, while the acceleration to 100km/h will take 2.9 seconds. Horsepower and charging time will remain like the sedan version.

Talking about Saudi Arabia’s efforts to become an automotive major, the Kingdom tried to host a Jaguar Land Rover factory on its soil in the last decade, which ultimately got ‌abandoned.

Toyota declined a similar deal in 2019, citing high labour costs and a lack of local suppliers.

Taking lessons from those failures, Ceer has taken a broader approach, leaning on global partners, apart from building up a local network to keep the supply of spare parts flowing.

Foxconn has provided the electrical architecture for the Exobots, while German premium automaker BMW acted as the engineering brain.

“Originally set up as a pure EV maker, Ceer’s full lineup will include plug-in hybrids and combustion-engine models to react to shifting market demand,” DeLuca said.

Following the Exobot’s launch, Ceer will launch five mainstream models between 2028 ⁠and 2030.

Ceer will also be customizing its vehicles to meet regulatory and customer requirements set at various automobile hubs.

As per DeLuca, the company aims to expand carefully through 2034. It will first target its neighbouring Gulf and North African markets, followed by global expansion.

“We want to make sure we move very methodically. It only takes one mistake and you can kill a startup,” DeLuca told Reuters.

Image Courtesy: Ceer

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The declaration from Thomas Schaefer, Volkswagen’s brand head, came amid German auto workers conducting nationwide protests after the automaker’s profit warning highlighted sectoral challenges from high costs and fierce Asian competition.

The protests at Volkswagen, BMW and parts supplier Bosch have emerged in response to painful job cuts, possible production relocations and even plant closures for Germany’s most important industry in a crisis that has also become a crucial election issue in the European country.

“I had hoped that the measures agreed in 2024 would ⁠already be sufficient. Unfortunately, that has not been the case,” Schaefer told a staff meeting at the company’s Wolfsburg headquarters.

“We have absolutely no time to lose and will therefore significantly step up our performance programme once again,” he said, adding that the company and employee representatives will discuss how to proceed.

Europe’s biggest carmaker has made up its mind to cut a further 50,000 jobs (on top of the previously agreed 50,000) as part of a massive restructuring agreed with stakeholders a couple of weeks back, averting a full-blown dispute with powerful unions that still repeated calls on management to fix the issues.

Volkswagen works council chief Daniela Cavallo and IG Metall union head Christiane Benner, however, have called for stronger protection against “unfair competition” from China, along with measures like effective European Union (EU) subsidy policy and ‌continuation of ⁠a phased vehicle retirement programme.

“We expect corporate leaders and management teams to take responsibility for Germany as an automotive nation, for employees and for jobs,” Benner told workers at Volkswagen’s headquarters.

Volkswagen has already cut its 2026 profit margin outlook ⁠to 1% at the most, blaming the sluggish Chinese market and higher provisions for retirements while also lowering expectations for its Porsche sports car brand.

The revamp, in all probability, also eyes the end of Volkswagen’s struggling Spanish marque Seat, potentially making it the first major auto-brand casualty of the rise of Chinese carmakers as experts predict sweeping industry consolidation.

Seat would be the first longstanding auto brand to disappear since the early 2010s, when Ford axed Mercury, ‌General Motors dropped Saturn and Pontiac, and Saab went bankrupt.

Volkswagen said Seat’s future “beyond the current product cycle is still being evaluated”, adding that “various scenarios remain possible beyond 2030”.

As per Reuters’ report, Seat’s fast-growing sister brand Cupra, which is going electric, will get all future products as Seat’s combustion-engine ⁠models are phased out.

We would prefer to maintain one brand name, said the unnamed source who spoke with the outlet.

Established in 1950 as a state company, Seat was bought by Volkswagen in 1986 as a low-cost brand for its growing automotive empire.

However, the subsidiary didn’t launch a new model since 2020. In 2025, the Barcelona-based brand accounted for less than 3% of Volkswagen’s global deliveries in 2025.

Sister sports brand Cupra, launched in 2018, overtook Seat in annual sales for the first time in 2025.

Cupra offers three fully electric models, including the new Raval, which Seat-Cupra CEO Markus Haupt described in May as a “game changer.”

Seat, by contrast, has no fully electric models.

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The figure became the second largest fine ever issued under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, behind only the 1.2 billion euro that Ireland imposed on Meta in 2023, and it overtook the 746 million euro Luxembourg levied on Amazon in 2021, a penalty a Luxembourg court set aside on procedural grounds in March this year.

The number drew the headlines. The reasoning is what should worry boardrooms. The regulator found that between 2018 and 2022 Uber let software decide, on its own, when a driver stopped earning.

Where the company’s systems suspected fraud, an account was switched off automatically for a period.

Where a driver’s customer ratings stayed low for long enough, the regulator says the account was switched off for good, again by machine.

In neither case, the watchdog found, was there a human being who looked at the file before the driver lost access to the platform, and drivers were not told enough about how the decision had been reached to have any realistic chance of challenging it.

Monique Verdier, the authority’s deputy chair, put it plainly. Drivers, she said, went from earning to not earning in an instant, with no warning and no person involved.

“A computer should not make decisions on its own that have such major consequences,” she said.

A human should have reviewed the case first.

Uber does not accept the finding.

“We strongly disagree with this decision and disproportionate fine,” a company spokesperson said, adding that Uber takes drivers’ rights seriously and that its policies include both human review and a route for drivers to dispute a suspension.

The company says it will appeal, which moves the case into the Dutch courts, where the penalty can be upheld, reduced or thrown out.

Uber has already contested the regulator’s two previous large fines against it, and neither of those disputes has concluded.

What Uber is accused of doing
The GDPR has been in force since May 2018. Article 22 of the regulation gives every person in the EU the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing where that decision has legal effects or otherwise significantly affects them.

There are exceptions, but even where an exception applies the person is entitled to safeguards, including the right to obtain human intervention, to express their point of view and to contest the decision.

A second set of provisions requires organisations to tell people when automated decision-making of this kind is taking place and to explain the logic behind it.

The Dutch authority found Uber in breach on both counts. On the first, the regulator’s view is that switching off a driver’s account is about as significant an effect as a decision can have, because it removes the driver’s livelihood on the platform for as long as the block lasts.

The French data protection authority, the CNIL, which worked on the case with its Dutch counterpart, described the practical effect in the same terms. Once an account was blocked, the driver could accept no rides and earn no money through Uber, and there was no human involvement in reaching that outcome.

The examples the regulators give are ordinary features of ride-hailing. Uber’s systems flagged drivers who appeared to have taken unnecessary detours to inflate a fare, or who accepted a trip with no intention of completing it. Those flags led to automatic suspensions.

ALSO READ | Uber makes big-ticket investment commitment in self-driving startup Nuro

Separately, drivers whose ratings from passengers fell below the threshold Uber set were suspended and, the regulator says, in persistent cases removed permanently.

On the second count, the regulator found that drivers were not properly informed. They were not told that a machine was making the call, and they were not given enough information about why, which left them unable to argue their case.

Uber’s defence rests on two points. The first is factual. It says it has never used automation to make a permanent deactivation decision, that most suspensions are short, and that a human reviews any permanent removal. The second is proportionality.

Uber says relatively few drivers were affected, and points out that 126 drivers across Europe were deactivated for low ratings in 2021. It also says the policies under examination were discontinued years ago and that its current process includes human evaluation and a clear appeal channel. The Dutch authority itself confirms that Uber has stopped the practices it objected to.

Why the bill is so large
The regulator did not arrive at 825 million euro by counting affected drivers and multiplying. GDPR fines are set by reference to the seriousness of the breach and then capped at a share of the offender’s worldwide turnover.

For the most serious categories of breach, which include violating Article 22, that cap is 4%. All European privacy regulators use the same method, and the Dutch authority aligned its decision with other supervisors across the bloc before issuing it.

Uber’s global revenue in 2025 was about 44.5 billion euro. Four per cent of that would have been roughly 1.78 billion euro.

The penalty imposed works out at about 1.85% of turnover, less than half the maximum, but the base figure is Uber’s entire worldwide business, not its European ride-hailing arm and certainly not the fraction of European drivers who were deactivated.

That is the design of the law. It was written so that a global company could not treat a European fine as a rounding error, and it explains why a dispute that Uber frames as involving a small number of drivers has produced one of the largest privacy penalties in history.

The Netherlands got the case because Uber’s European headquarters is in Amsterdam. Under the GDPR’s one-stop-shop rule, the regulator in the country where a company has its main European establishment leads cross-border investigations.

The complaint began in France, with the human rights group Ligue des droits de l’Homme, and reached the Dutch authority via the CNIL.

This is the fourth Dutch fine on Uber. The regulator imposed 600,000 euro in 2018, 10 million euro in 2023 and 290 million euro in 2024, the last of those for transferring drivers’ personal data to the United States without adequate safeguards.

Paul-Olivier Dehaye, founder of the Swiss digital rights group PersonalData.io, which helped drivers obtain their data, has said the fines all trace back to complaints from the same group of drivers.

The man who started it
That group formed around Brahim Ben Ali, a former Uber driver in France whose account was deactivated in 2019.

According to the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, Ben Ali gathered testimonies from about 170 other drivers before taking his complaint to the Netherlands, with PersonalData.io helping the drivers use their data access rights to find out how decisions about their accounts had been made.

Dehaye’s description of the problem is the one that resonates with drivers.

A driver can complete a thousand journeys with satisfied passengers, he has said, but “if just one person reports a very serious problem, the consequences can be enormous.”

Dehaye is now setting up a company called StartClaims to support litigation and further regulatory action, starting with Uber and later extending to other gig economy platforms and to advertising technology.

PersonalData.io has said it is preparing a class action seeking compensation for drivers.

That matters for the arithmetic. A regulatory fine goes to the state. Compensation claims go to the people who lost income, and under the GDPR individuals can seek damages for harm caused by a breach.

If the Dutch decision survives appeal, it becomes a ready-made finding of fact on which such claims can be built. The 825 million euro may be the first bill rather than the last.

The timing is the story
What lifts this case above a large number and a corporate appeal is the calendar. On July 27, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, known as the “Digital Omnibus on AI,” entered into force. Its centrepiece was a delay.

The EU AI Act’s rules for high-risk systems listed in its Annex III, a list that expressly covers software used in recruitment, task allocation, monitoring and the termination of work relationships, had been due to apply from August 2 2026.

The omnibus pushed that date to December 2 2027. Systems embedded in products already regulated under EU safety law got until August 2 2028.

Businesses read the delay as breathing space, and law firms across Europe wrote client notes telling them that the heaviest compliance regime had moved out by sixteen months. Three weeks later the Dutch regulator signed a decision that made the point the other way.

It did not cite the AI Act. It did not need to. It reached for a provision that has been in force since 2018 and that most companies had filed under privacy rather than employment, and it used that provision to penalise precisely the kind of automated dismissal decision the AI Act’s high-risk rules were meant to govern.

The lesson is uncomfortable. The AI Act delay changed when companies must document, test and register their high-risk systems.

It changed nothing about whether they may let those systems make consequential decisions about people without a human in the loop. That question was settled eight years ago, and the answer was no.

Nor is the GDPR the only older instrument in play. The EU’s Platform Work Directive, adopted in 2024, requires member states to write human oversight of algorithmic management into national law by December 2 2026, a year ahead of the AI Act deadline.

Dutch courts have also already ordered Uber and its rival Ola to explain automated decisions to drivers in cases brought by driver groups.

The regulatory floor under algorithmic management was built well before the AI Act, and it is the floor, not the ceiling, that companies are now tripping over.

Why this reaches far beyond ride-hailing
Uber is the defendant, but the practice it is accused of is widespread. Over the past decade thousands of companies have moved recruitment screening, performance scoring, productivity monitoring and in some cases dismissal recommendations onto software.

The stated reasons are consistency and speed. The unstated reason is cost. A human reviewer is expensive, and the whole economic logic of automating a decision is that no human needs to look at most cases.

The Dutch decision attacks that logic directly. If a decision significantly affects a person, the GDPR says a human must be able to intervene, and regulators have been clear for years that the intervention must be meaningful.

A person who glances at a screen and clicks approve on whatever the model recommends is not a safeguard. That means the cost saving from automation shrinks the moment the decision becomes consequential, and it means that a company which cut its review staff on the assumption that the software could be trusted now carries a liability it did not book.

Not everyone agrees with the regulator’s framing.

The technology commentator John Gruber argued that the decision risks making it unlawful for Uber to police drivers who scam passengers or leave them stranded, and that describing a computer as the decision-maker is like blaming the time clock when a habitually late employee is dismissed.

The rules, in his view, were set by managers and the software merely tracked whether they were followed.

Dehaye’s response was that Uber remains free to discipline drivers who cheat, provided a person makes the decision and the company takes responsibility for it. That is, in substance, what the regulator is asking for.

The GDPR does not ban fraud detection or rating systems. It bans handing the final, livelihood-ending decision to the machine and walking away.

What happens next
Uber’s appeal will take years. Its earlier disputes with the Dutch regulator over the 2023 and 2024 fines are still unresolved, and Meta’s challenge to the 1.2 billion euro Irish fine, now more than three years old, is a reminder of how slowly these cases move.

The Amazon precedent cuts both ways. A court did annul that fine in March, but on the grounds that the regulator had not properly assessed fault and proportionality, while endorsing the finding that Amazon had broken the law.

Uber’s best argument on appeal is the same one, that the sum is out of proportion to the harm.

The political backdrop will not help. Washington has repeatedly threatened retaliation against European penalties on American technology companies, and a fine approaching a billion dollars on a US ride-hailing group adds to that pile.

For everyone else, the practical questions are simpler. Which decisions about staff, contractors and customers does the company currently allow software to make alone? Which of those would a regulator regard as significant?

And where a human is nominally in the loop, would that person’s review survive scrutiny as a real check rather than a formality?

Companies that were planning to answer those questions in late 2027 have just been told the deadline passed in 2018.

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“If China wanted to come in and open a plant to build their cars here, I’d be okay with that,” Trump said in an interview on the Fox News program “The Ingraham Angle.”

However, he put one condition: Chinese automakers should not build cars in Mexico and ship them to the United States.

“I’m not knocking Chinese cars,” Trump said further.

The US President’s statement arrived immediately after American Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, said there were “rumors that Trump is planning to allow Chinese cars to be sold in the US as part of a larger deal ‌he’s ⁠putting together. ” That would be a strategic mistake.”

Trump, however, called Slotkin’s statement a “total phony rumor” and said he had kept Chinese vehicles out of the United States.

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The European giant, while embarking ⁠on its biggest ever restructuring, citing stiff Chinese competition, US tariffs, and overcapacity, is also exploring alternatives for four German plants that will eventually run out of models during the next decade, along with a reduction of around 50,000 more positions than previously planned.

As per reports from the German magazine Der Spiegel and Reuters, phasing out production in ⁠Emden and Zwickau would cost about 1 billion euros each, while 2 billion euros each would be incurred at the Neckarsulm and ⁠Hanover plants.

About 10 billion euro would be set aside for costs related to cutting up to ⁠60,000 jobs worldwide.

However, on September 7, the automobile giant found a ray of hope, as it signed a preliminary deal with Israel’s Aurelius Capital and Volkswagen’s ⁠home state of Lower Saxony, in which the carmaker would sell its factory in Osnabrueck that will then be repurposed for defence production under the new ownership.

According to the state’s labour officials, the move could preserve about 1,400 of the Osnabrueck site’s 1,800 jobs. The vehicle production there is due to end in 2027.

According to Volkswagen, an initial “anchor project” for Osnabrueck would be a cooperation with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, one of the key partners behind Israel’s Iron Dome, Arrow, ‌and David’s ⁠Sling air and missile defence systems.

“These plans involve the potential manufacture of systems and components for air defence systems for Germany and Europe,” Volkswagen said, adding that the newfound cooperation could pave the way for further such deals.

According to reports, Volkswagen is also considering converting its Amarok pickup trucks into military vehicles in response to the increasing pace of defence spending in Europe.

When it comes to repurposing underused automotive plants for defence production, Volkswagen is not alone, as Rheinmetall and Continental are also pursuing similar initiatives.

Under the new arrangement, Aurelius would take a majority stake ⁠in the Osnabrueck site alongside Lower Saxony, whose premier Olaf Lies said the state’s engagement would be similar to its stake purchase in the Meyer Werft shipyard in 2024.

At the time, Lower Saxony spent 200 million euros (USD 232 million) for a 40% stake in the shipyard.

In its pursuits of becoming leaner, Volkswagen is also considering the ‌sale of Ducati, the motorcycle maker owned by the Audi division.

Giving further hints about the news, Audi CEO Gernot Dollner told Bloomberg, “Within the Volkswagen Group, we are committed to disciplined, ⁠responsible portfolio management.”

“It’s part of the evaluation ⁠process that we’ll also talk about Ducati, but ⁠nothing has been decided,” he ⁠added further.

While Volkswagen is facing intense competition in China and looking to desparately scale up its 3% market share in the United States, it is also exploring a strategic partnership with Indian conglomerate JSW Group to improve competitiveness and profitability in the world’s third-largest ‌car market.

“The partnership is aimed at expanding Volkswagen’s portfolio in India, deepening local sourcing and strengthening manufacturing,” the German giant said.

JSW Group, a steel-to-energy Indian conglomerate, entered the South Asian giant’s passenger vehicle market in 2023 through JSW MG Motor India, a joint venture with China’s SAIC Motor that sells MG-branded cars.

“The proposed collaboration will likely be structured as a two-party partnership with joint control, defined operational roles, and governance mechanisms designed to enable quicker decision-making,” Volkswagen stated further.

The duo will also explore ‌ways ⁠to increase local sourcing, share vehicle platforms, and expand production capacity.

Volkswagen, whose market share in India stands around 2%, mainly sells vehicles through Skoda Auto in the South Asian nation.

Image Credit: Volkswagen Group

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The Tata Motors-owned luxury carmaker said on Monday (August 7) that the workforce reduction was part of a broader plan to strengthen its competitiveness in a rapidly changing global automotive market.

The company plans to implement a voluntary redundancy programme, primarily targeting non-production and salaried roles. The company plans to implement a voluntary redundancy programme that will primarily focus on non-production and salaried roles.

JLR employs about 40,000 people globally, including roughly 30,000 in the United Kingdom. The scale of the reduction therefore represents a significant restructuring of one of Britain’s most important industrial employers.

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