From Tesla to Porsche, New EVs Revealed at Germany’s International Motor Show

Roped off on the Volkswagen Group stand at the IAA Mobility auto show in Germany was perhaps the sexiest car present, the Porsche Mission X concept. The supercar is aimed at being the fastest road-legal vehicle at the Nürburgring race track’s Nordschleife loop. The inspiration, on Porsche’s 75th anniversary, was the legendary 1985 959, the fastest series-production car of its time, capable of traveling 196 miles per hour. A more modern ancestor was the 918 Spyder of 2013.

Of late, Porsche, Rimac, and Tesla have been battling back and forth over the electric record at the German track. Rimac took the title Aug. 18 via its Nevera, but the Tesla Model S Plaid Edition with Track Pack has also been a contender, beating Porsche’s Taycan Turbo S.

Despite its racing mission, the Mission X will be a production car and appears totally ready for road work, with a luxurious leather-clad interior. The steering wheel looks like a video game controller, though, and the passenger-side stopwatch is for timing events—with both an analog and digital display. The road version seems likely to become a limited-edition special edition, and if so it should sell out quickly—even at what is likely to be a pretty high price.

The Tesla Model 3 gets a new nose, among several other refinements.
Jim Motavalli

Over at the Tesla booth was the revamped Model 3, which now has a much kinder and more aerodynamic built-to-be-electric nose. It no longer appears to be missing its grille.

Other Model 3 improvements in 2023 include new head and tail lamps, new wheels, fresh aluminium, and textile trim on the interior, customisable ambient lighting and ventilated seats, a quieter cabin thanks to sound-deadening materials and acoustic glass, dual wireless phone charging, available 17-speaker audio and, a somewhat dubious achievement, delete of the turn-signal stalk. Instead, in the name of decluttering the interior, there are a pair of touch-sensitive buttons on the steering wheel. Unfortunately, the wheel turns around so the buttons are not always in the same place. It seems confusing and unnecessary.

Audi’s Q6 e-tron had “Prototype” written all over it.
Jim Motavalli

BMW’s most striking exhibit was the Vision Neue Klasse sedan, reviving a name the company used to introduce its winning line of cars in the 1960s. The car sits on a new EV platform that will support six or seven Neue Klasse models between 2025 and 2027. Combining that platform with the sixth-generation BMW eDrive powertrain and more efficient batteries is said to yield a 30% range and 25% efficiency gain over previous models. The concept shown is striking and uncluttered, managing to be futuristic and slightly retro at the same time. The cabin on view was very airy, with large windows and a panoramic sunroof, an interior-dominating central screen, and seats with avocado inserts.

From Audi came the 2025 Q6 e-tron, which is slotted between the Q4 and Q8, and has been tested in 373 and 479 horsepower variants.

Volkswagen itself showcased another electric, the ID. GTI “hot hatch” concept based on the ID.2 (an entry-level EV we didn’t get in the U.S.) The GTI model has always been welcomed by American buyers, so this one could be too. The European price when it goes on sale in 2026 will be approximately US$32,000. VW also displayed the ID.7, a larger EV sedan aimed at executives with a 77-kilowatt-hour battery and a US$67,000 price as shown.

VW displayed the larger “executive” ID.7 electric.

Chinese brands haven’t penetrated the American market yet, but they were out in force in Munich. BYD, the best0selling brand in China, has a large dealer network in Germany already, and showed off its marine mammal-themed Dolphin and Seal models. The Seal is an electric sedan, and its new Seal U variant is a small SUV that uses its technology. The Seal U will have both 71- and 87-kilowatt-hour battery options, and 218 horsepower. That’s not hugely impressive, but the affordable price ($48,000 in Europe) will be a convincer for many buyers. Both Seals had impressive fit and finish, auguring that—if the road performance matches the appearance—BYD is probably ready for U.S. competition.

BMW’s Vision Neue Klasse introduces styling that will be seen on many production models
Jim Motavalli

The venerable British sports car brand MG (an abbreviation of “Morris Garages”) is now Chinese-owned, like Volvo and Polestar. MG has been selling gas, hybrid, and electric SUVs in Europe (16 countries), but at Munich it showed the new Cyberster, a pretty two-seat roadster concept with an electric powertrain. It resembles a beefier Miata more than it does a classic MGB, but it’s definitely attractive. U.S. sales of what was once a popular brand could happen in five to eight years.

Many suppliers were at the show hoping to catch the attention of major automakers. Rimac, which makes its Nevera supercar in tiny numbers, had a stand offering its cutting-edge electric components to other manufacturers. Michigan-based Gentech, a leading maker of the world’s rear-view mirrors, was there showing how technology—from cameras to driver monitoring systems and back-seat kid detection—can be embedded in what was once a simple device. Gentech announced a stake in Israel’s Adasky, which makes tiny thermal cameras that fit just about anywhere.

The MG Cyberster is the first sports car from the reborn brand, now China-owned.
MG

Israel-based Mobileye and Canadian parts supplier Magna International demonstrated their technology for automated driving. Massachusetts-based Nodar revealed its stereo cameras’ ability to see objects in the road at great distances. New York-based J.P. Morgan Chase’s offering was an all-in-one plan for mobility payments—loans, car subscriptions, parking, tolling, and electric vehicle charging. It debuts later this year. And SAE, the standards agency, announced a move into Europe and work on a Battery Passport that will trace the origins of minerals used in their production. “Just as we don’t want blood diamonds, we don’t want blood batteries,” said Fabian Koark, chief operating officer of SAE Europe.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

From Tesla to Porsche, New EVs Revealed at Germany’s International Motor Show

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.