Welcome back, today is Friday, October second, and we begin with Transport Topics on Toyota and Hyundai closing the gap on Detroit. Transport Topics reports Toyota sold more than six hundred thirty-three thousand vehicles in the United States in the third quarter, including Lexus, edging closer to General Motors, where deliveries fell five and a half percent to just under six hundred seventy-one thousand. The same reporting has Hyundai at a record quarter, hybrid volume up thirty-five percent and now close to a third of brand sales. Reuters adds that Cox Automotive expects the Hyundai group to pass Ford in quarterly sales for the first time, about five hundred eleven thousand vehicles against roughly five hundred four thousand. Ford reports today. Price is the pressure behind it. Average transaction prices topped fifty thousand dollars in August and average monthly payments likely rose to eight hundred twenty-one dollars last month, a record for September, according to J.D. Power, while incentives have risen to nearly three thousand six hundred dollars a vehicle, up seven point three percent. With full-year sales seen near sixteen million, every automaker faces the same call: hold price to protect margin, or spend to hold volume. Industry reaction reads the move mainly as a powertrain-mix story, with a recurring view that hybrids, not electric vehicles, are doing the work. Also today, Washington. Following our earlier report on the delayed vote on a permanent ban on Chinese vehicles, that bill has slipped to November, and the push for approval now runs past the midterms. Automotive News, carrying Reuters, says supporters could not resolve the concerns of Senator Rand Paul, described as the lone Republican holdout. Per that account, sponsor Bernie Moreno says the final version would ensure Mercedes-Benz is not barred from selling vehicles in the United States. For importers and sourcing teams, the connected-vehicle restrictions still have no binding date, now for at least another election cycle. Some in the trade flag a scoping problem beneath the delay: the bill's threshold for Chinese ownership could reportedly sweep in established non-Chinese automakers carrying Chinese minority shareholders, which is said to be driving lobbying to loosen the definition. Staying in Europe. Volkswagen has terminated several of its wage agreements with IG Metall, effective December first, raising the prospect of strikes early next year. Automotive News, citing Reuters, reports Germany's largest industrial union has vowed to escalate once its truce expires on January first. The same reporting notes the group last cancelled parts of that collective bargaining framework in twenty twenty-four, and strikes followed. This follows our earlier coverage of Oliver Blume's restructuring mandate, and it puts a dated window on German output that supplier and logistics planners have to cover from the new year. Industry reaction leans toward reading the terminations as a symptom of a structural cost and speed gap rather than a wage dispute, with some treating the simultaneous retrenchment across German carmakers and their suppliers as the early signal rather than Volkswagen alone. Now to Ford. Following our earlier report on the week-long F-150 stoppage at Dearborn, Chief Executive Jim Farley says the company has fully recovered from the fires at aluminum supplier Novelis that cut F-150 output by tens of thousands of trucks over the past year. Automotive News reports Ford resumed taking supply from the Novelis plant in New York about four weeks ago, after paying more to source aluminum overseas during the disruption. On that account, the higher-cost overseas sourcing that carried the per-truck premium has stopped. Some in the trade treat the all-clear as premature, pointing to that late-September halt and a recurring concern that backup aluminum suppliers often sit behind the same upstream chokepoint. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. At the Automotive News Congress, executives from Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai warned that Chinese-brand access to the United States market would bring cutthroat pricing, thinner dealer profits, layoffs and security risk, Automotive News reports. Stellantis held flat in the third quarter, ending its streak of gains at four, and Ram outsold Jeep for the first time, with Ram fifteen hundred up seventy-three percent, per Automotive News. CATL has restarted Europe's largest battery plant, in Debrecen, Hungary, with trial production resuming September twenty-second after an August halt over worker exposure to high nickel levels, the same outlet reports. And finally, BMW will favor generic, industry-standard parts over bespoke components to lift profitability, a shift Automotive News frames as mirroring Chinese cost strategies.