Texas Is America’s Big Car Market Now

Happy Monday! It’s June 29, 2026, and this is The Morning Shift — your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re looking at Texas’ growth as an auto market, and Jaguar Land Rover’s new U.S. focus. We’ll also look at Toyota’s sales woes, and Volkswagen’s future cuts. 

California has long reigned supreme as the United States’ biggest car market, but that could be about to change. Texas has already overtaken the Sunshine State in spending on vehicles, and now the former is poised to overtake the latter in overall sales too. From Automotive News: 

That Toyota, and later Tesla, chose Texas as their headquarters cemented the Lone Star State as a hub of U.S. automotive decision-making power. But Texas increasingly has become important to the industry for another reason — the second-most-populous state is close to overtaking California as the nation’s biggest new-vehicle retail market, according to a new report from JD Power.

Since 2019, California’s share of U.S. retail light-vehicle sales has been dwindling, to 11.4 percent this year from 12.5 percent, according to JD Power. Texas, meanwhile, has trended in the opposite direction, climbing to 10.8 percent today from 9.3 percent seven years ago. Less than 1 percentage point now separates the states. 

Texas already has become the nation’s leader in consumer spending on new vehicles, as Texans favor pricier pickups, JD Power found.

The second-best-selling state being all in on expensive pickup trucks really starts to put a lot of U.S. auto sales into perspective. We aren’t all spending tons of money on trucks, but a select few are very dedicated to doing so — and automakers are all too happy to play to that crowd. 

The United States is the biggest single market that Jaguar Land Rover serves, but the company wants to focus on us even more. Now, its CEO is saying that JLR wants to sell as many cars here as in the rest of the world combines. From Automotive News: 

Much of JLR and parent company Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles’ strategy to reach a targeted 10 percent long-term profit margin depends on JLR growing its business in the U.S. But how does it plan to do that?

JLR is “pivoting the entire organization towards the U.S,” CEO PB Balaji told investors on June 17.

North America is already the automaker’s largest market with just under 100,000 sales of Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar models in the financial year ending March 31, equating to 28 percent of the company’s total sales of 352,389, according to JLR figures.

However, the company’s goal is to grow its U.S. business to “the size of the entire JLR business today,” Balaji said, without giving a time frame or metrics.

Yeah, focus all your efforts on the nation with a mad king who loves to play trade war with cars. That’ll go well, for sure. Put all your energy into selling cars in a nation where fewer and fewer people can afford cars, and where the government wants to be completely out of touch with your home market. 

Toyota’s been, as the kids say, going through it this year. The company has had month after month of declining sales thanks to fuel prices and competition in China, and now its Middle East business is flagging too. From Bloomberg: 

Toyota Motor Corp.’s posted another drop in global sales, hit by Middle East disruptions and tough competition in China that pushed the world’s top-selling automaker into a fourth straight month of declines.

Global sales in May, including those of subsidiary Daihatsu Motor Co., fell 7.4% from a year earlier to 885,207 units, the Japanese auto manufacturer said Monday. Production declined 5.8% to 857,765 units.

Despite the US and Iran deal to end the conflict, the Strait of Hormuz is only gradually reopening with attacks on vessels still flaring, underscoring how Toyota and other global automakers remain dependent on the region’s logistics corridors and energy-dependent supply chains. For Toyota, which has dominated global volumes, the disruptions, along with aggressive local EV competition in China, threaten to erode the record profits it posted over the past fiscal year.

Is anyone doing better since the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began? If anyone, maybe just Iran. This was a good political move for sure. 

Volkswagen is the the second-largest automaker in the world, which of course means it needs to radically cut operations in order to keep up with new upstarts out of China. This is smart business, you see. When you’re good at something, you get rid of all the people who do that thing. It’s just good business sense. From Reuters: 

Volkswagen is considering shutting four German factories and ramping up job cuts to as many as 100,000, two people familiar with ‌the matter said on Friday, in what could be the biggest ever overhaul in the industry.

Members of VW’s supervisory board have been informed of the plans, which are due to be discussed at a July 9 meeting, the people said.

The move comes as the carmaker faces mounting pressure from Chinese rivals, stiff tariffs on car imports into the United States, as well as dwindling demand in Europe, which the company has said makes its business model unsustainable.

Closing the plants at Hanover, Zwickau, Emden and Audi’s ​Neckarsulm site would put more than 45,000 jobs at risk, according to the people. That would add to the 50,000 cuts that are currently planned.

In absolute terms, laying off 100,000 people and ​axing four assembly plants would be the largest restructuring in automotive industry history.

Cuts of this size would mean more than one in seven Volkswagen employees would be let go. That’s a staggering scale of layoffs, one that would certainly affect how VW does business — and likely not for the better, in the eyes of anyone but the executives. It’ll look great on the balance sheet for a quarter or two, but it’s an equally great way to kneecap your own company. 

So when the Supreme Court decides we can’t kill people, that decision is almost immediately ignored, but all the dumb decisions it’s made recently are enshrined in law forever. Just checking. 

Regular, mid-grade, and premium prices are still trending downwards as the Weekend War does its best to avoid market disruption. Ever notice how every week there’s a new Iran deal, and every Friday after market close the bombing starts again? The Weekend War. Anyway, the real issue here is diesel, which is still over a dollar higher than it was a year ago. Trending downward, but still elevated. 

I can’t stop listening to this track. It’s hard enough not to scream along, but I can hold myself back for the sake of my roommates.