Musk Goes Crawling Back

Happy Wednesday! It’s June 11, 2025, 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 Elon Musk’s almost piteous attempt to wriggle back to President Trump’s side, as well as his declaration that robotaxis are coming within two weeks — for real this time, you guys. We’ll also look at the dismal state of auto loans, and Polestar’s big bet on French car buyers. 

Elon Musk burned his bridge with President Donald Trump last week, claiming the sitting President was in Jeffery Epstein’s files who only got the job thanks to Musk’s graciousness and campaign spending. This would be a pretty wild thing for any other businessperson in history to say about any other President, but such is what passes for normal in 2025. Now, though, Musk is doing his best seventh grade science fair as he attempts to build a new bridge out of marshmallows and popsicle sticks. From Reuters:

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk said on Wednesday he regretted some of the posts he made last week about U.S. President Donald Trump as they had gone “too far”, the latest sign of a tentative reconciliation between the two men.

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Musk has since deleted some posts critical of Trump, including one signaling support for impeaching the president.

Sources close to the world’s richest man say his anger has started to subside and that he may want to repair the relationship. Company and market analysts suggested Musk’s tone could reflect a desire to protect his businesses.

“I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X on Wednesday, without saying which specific posts he was talking about.

I, for one, would probably not resume being friends with a guy I already didn’t like, who then took to his social media platform to imply I was a pedophile, but that’s just me. 

Tesla’s totally autonomous driverless taxis are just around the corner, according to Musk. They were also just around the corner last month, and last year, and last decade. This time, though, it’s for real. Definitely. For sure. From Automotive News:

Tesla tentatively plans to begin offering rides on its self-driving robotaxis to the public on June 22, CEO Elon Musk said on Tuesday, as investors and fans of the electric vehicle maker eagerly await rollout of the long-promised service.

Musk has staked Tesla’s future on self-driving vehicles, pivoting away from plans to build a cheaper EV platform, and much of the company’s valuation hangs on that vision.

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“We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift,” Musk said in a post on X in response to a question from a user about public robotaxi rides that the EV maker plans to first offer in Austin, Texas.

Musk also said starting June 28, Tesla vehicles will drive themselves to a customer’s house from the end of the factory line.

While a few Tesla models without drivers were spotted recently in Austin, none were the “Cybercab” pictured above, but rather a few Model Ys with their new Cybertruck-style faces. The Cybercab is just a year out, Musk super swears.

The economy is bad, this we all know, but how bad is it? Well, if you guessed “more car owners are over 60 days late on their payment than in 2009” levels of bad, you’re right! If you didn’t, bad news — everything is worse than you think it is, and will keep getting worse. From Automotive News:

The proportion of consumers at least 60 days late on their auto payments rose to 1.4 percent in the first quarter, a record for that time period that beat the 1.3 percent a year earlier and during the recession-era first quarter of 2009, according to TransUnion data.

TransUnion said 0.6 percent of new-vehicle borrowers were at least 60 days behind on their loans during the first quarter, the same rate as a year earlier. The average balance on the 80 million auto loans the credit bureau counted in the first quarter was $24,413, up 1.6 percent from a year earlier.

Vehicle prices keep climbing, wages keep staying flat, and everyone is getting fired and replaced with incompetent AI that does nothing well except sate bosses’ desires to cut salary spending. This is a good economic system and a sustainable way for a country to work. 

Polestar is in an unenviable spot. The company was spun out of Volvo to be an all-electric alternative, but now plenty of Volvo’s cars fill that own niche. Polestar is now not a performance marquee, not really the marquee to go to for stylish EVs, and neither fully Swedish nor fully Chinese — it’s a bit adrift. The company has a solution to that, though: Sell cars in France. From Reuters:

Swedish premium carmaker Polestar will start delivering its electric vehicles in France this year with the goal of making it one of its three main European markets, its top executive for the country told Reuters.

Confronted with a cash crunch, tariff pressures, and a broad slowdown in EV demand, the company, majority-owned by China’s Geely Holding, has decided to focus its efforts more on profitable Europe.

Polestar has European roots, so further European expansion makes sense — the name rings a bell. Unfortunately, so do the tariffs on Chinese vehicles. Best of luck to Polestar, because its vehicles truly are very good. They’re just not particularly differentiated from Volvo. 

New ITZY! We’re so back. No one has ever been more back. I need to get a butterfly knife to use for eye makeup, that’s the kind of energy I need to be giving in my life.