Welcome in, today is Friday, August seventh, and we begin with Ford putting a price and a name on its affordable electric pickup, per WardsAuto. WardsAuto reports the truck will be called the Fathom, with a starting price of thirty thousand dollars. Pre-orders open in early twenty twenty-seven, according to that reporting, with deliveries slated for later in the same year. A named nameplate and a stated entry price give suppliers and dealers a dated window to plan the low-cost program against, rather than a range and an intention. Automotive News reports Ford settled on Fathom because the name has, in its words, a layered quality, and captures the mindset the company was looking for. Industry reaction leans skeptical that the sub-thirty-thousand headline reaches actual buyers. A recurring theme in the channel is expected dealer markups and thin availability of the base trim, which some frame as the real test of the affordability claim. A separate strand of doubt is financial rather than product-level: some observers question whether the new platform can be built profitably given prior EV losses, and read the truck as a bet on whether the reset works at all. Quality and recall history is the other most-repeated reservation. Also today, Uber and the UK startup Wayve have won licenses to run supervised robotaxis in London. Automotive News reports the two received permits to launch the service with a safety driver aboard, getting out ahead of Waymo's and Baidu's planned rollouts. Wayve will operate up to fifteen autonomous electric Ford Mustang Mach-E SUVs on a trial basis, per that reporting, with a supervisor in every ride, hands off the wheel unless they need to intervene. That takes autonomy in a major European market from testing into a permitted commercial pilot, which is the line operators have been working toward. Automotive World reports one hundred thousand sign-ups in eight weeks, and describes the rollout as phased, suggesting both firms remain cautious on scale. Industry reaction leans toward reading the license less as a single-company milestone than as a signal that London is becoming a multi-operator proving ground, with several observers arguing commercialization is arriving faster than earlier forecasts assumed. A separate thread questions the assumed cost advantage of shared fleets once servicing, commercial energy pricing and subscription lock-in are counted. Now, a development on the Japanese earthquake we have been tracking, where Honda's Civic and Prelude shutdowns were the latest marker. Toyota, Nissan and Mitsubishi restored production this week, Automotive News reports, leaving Honda the outlier. Its two Japanese assembly plants will stay shut through mid-August, per that reporting, as the automaker struggles to secure parts from a damaged supplier, with no concrete restart timeline. The same account puts the confirmed death toll from the July twenty-eighth magnitude seven point one quake in Kumamoto Prefecture at at least thirty-four. For anyone modeling Japanese output and parts flows, the disruption has narrowed to one automaker and one supply gap, which is easier to bound and harder to plan around. Commentary in the trade tends to downplay the near-term hit, noting the stoppages land alongside Japan's already-scheduled summer holiday shutdowns, which some argue absorbs part of the lost volume. Others reach for the twenty-eleven quake as precedent, suggesting prolonged Japanese outages historically shifted share toward rival automakers rather than shrinking overall demand. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Ford and Dacia have halted production at their Romanian plants through August nineteenth, Automotive News reports, as drought-driven electricity shortages force nuclear reactor shutdowns. Toyota is targeting ten and a half million vehicles in twenty twenty-seven, Just Auto reports, citing Nikkei Asia, with the plan already shared with major parts suppliers. BYD has launched its first Brazilian-made plug-in hybrid flex car, per Just Auto. The Song Pro Super Hybrid runs on electricity, gasoline or ethanol. And finally, following our earlier report on Mercedes-Benz's China-driven guidance cut, Automotive News reports the company will begin building its bestselling GLC crossover in Vance, Alabama, in the coming years, to blunt U.S. tariff exposure.