Good morning and welcome to The Down Shift, or TDS for short.
The Down Shift is The Drive‘s new weekday early morning quick-hit rundown of the latest bubbling news. Pair it with coffee and a Pop-Tart.
Today is the third installment of TDS and the feedback regarding both format and content from the comments section and email (tips@thedrive.com) has been appreciated.
Light. Short. Quick. TDS is not a manifesto or full-featured story, rather it’s a quick heads up for that early morning shuffle. Headlines are summarized into a single sentence with a link providing the option to go deeper for those seeking more information.
Pinky swear not every TDS will headline with Tesla or even contain Tesla news, but seems the EV darling can’t stay out of the news this week.
The first cup of coffee’s gone here, so let’s get into it.
🚘 What I’m driving: The refreshed 2025.5 Volvo XC90 T8 plug-in hybrid luxury SUV is in my garage for the week and it’s been refined even further with the latest updates. More on that as the week develops.
🛻 Tesla engineering boss Lars Moravy revealed at X Takeover 2025 that talk internally about a smaller truck slotting below the Cybertruck is real, and the design studio has been churning as to what it might look like.
⚡️ Chevrolet teased the return of the Bolt EV on Instagram and it looks like almost the same car with revised lighting and a Tesla NACS charge port.
🏎️ Bentley’s new CEO Frank-Steffen Walliser said the automaker has room to explore and go further towards the extreme edges both in terms of luxury and performance.
🔋 Audi CEO Gernot Döllner said an electric sports car concept will debut in early September, and it won’t be a TT or an R8, rather something in-between.
🏭 Nissan said it will close its Ciudad Industrial del Valle de Cuernavaca industrial park (CIVAC) in 2026, and it was the first factory the automaker built outside Japan.
💶 The list of automakers screaming to prepare investors and the world for doom and gloom is getting long with Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Aston Martin, Porsche, and Lamborghini all cutting projections on profits citing U.S tariff impact as the culprit.
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