Welcome in, today is Wednesday, August twenty-sixth, and we begin with a tentative wage deal at Hyundai, per Automotive News. Following our reports on the Hyundai strike, the walkout is over. Automotive News reports Hyundai Motor's South Korean union has reached a tentative agreement with management, averting further production losses after its longest stoppage in a decade. Just Auto carries the terms: monthly base pay rises by one hundred thousand won, about seventy-two dollars, alongside a performance bonus worth more than four hundred percent of monthly salary and a lump sum of twelve and a half million won. The two sides also agreed to discuss artificial intelligence and robotics job security, the demand that pushed this dispute past pay and onto ground other unionized automakers will read closely. In a commentary, Automotive World argues a commitment to discuss Hyundai's automation plans is not the same as a meaningful say in whether, or how fast, it automates. Industry reaction leans toward reading automation pace as set by labor relations as much as engineering readiness. Also today, a development on the Canada tariff fight we have been covering. Automotive News reports Prime Minister Mark Carney has doubled Canadian countertariffs on United States steel and aluminum to fifty percent, matching the new American duties dollar for dollar. That retaliation covers roughly twenty billion dollars of United States imports, per the same reporting, paired with billions in support for Canadian businesses hit by the trade war. Anyone running steel or aluminum heavy North American supply chains now prices a second leg of input cost. Analyst commentary leans toward calling the response politically symmetrical but economically outmatched, with a recurring concern that the real exposure sits in the integrated auto supply chain rather than the metals themselves. A competing account circulating publicly ties the collapse of talks to alleged transshipment of third-country metal through Canada. It is contested and unverified. Separately, Honda has tied its next North American plant to trade policy. Automotive News reports a senior executive said the automaker might not build an eighth North American assembly plant unless the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is extended. Executive Vice President Noriya Kaihara told reporters at a roundtable in Washington that Honda is close to full production capacity in North America, per that account. We reported earlier that the Japanese build-out was driven by capacity limits and share ambition rather than tariffs. The condition now attached puts the trade framework itself inside the investment case, which suppliers planning footprint decisions will have to weigh. Industry reaction leans toward treating it as a policy bet rather than a demand signal, a recurring concern being that a one to two year decision window is tight for capacity meant to run for decades. Now to China, where passenger vehicle retail sales fell twenty percent in July. Just Auto reports domestic sales continued to decline sharply last month while exports surged. That is the split that matters outside China: volume the home market did not absorb is being redirected outward, and pricing pressure tends to travel with it into other markets. In a commentary, Automotive World argues the Chinese car market may stay weak for some time while battery-electric models remain fairly well insulated from the pain, with combustion sales continuing to fall. Reaction engaging the substance is sparse, though a recurring thread frames the contraction as a mix story rather than a uniform slump, concentrated in combustion lines and among specific automakers. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Automotive News reports the autonomy race is pivoting to AI-powered Level Two systems over eyes-off Level Three, that argument citing testing, validation and cost. Volkswagen Group chief executive Oliver Blume was booed by workers at Wolfsburg while pitching sweeping job cuts and possible plant closures, Automotive News reports, following our report on his call for deeper cuts. Uber has launched Baidu's fully driverless Apollo Go in Dubai, which Uber calls the launchpad for scaling thousands of the vehicles across its network, per Just Auto. And finally, Porsche is selling IT consultancy MHP to a Tata Consultancy Services subsidiary under its Sportwagenschmiede thirty-five plan, Just Auto reports.