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By Joseph White, Global Automotive Correspondent

Greetings from the Motor City!

Welcome to the Silly Season! What a magical time of year. When else would hundreds of people churn the waters of Scotland’s Loch Ness looking for evidence of a plesiosaurus lurking in the depths?

Is that silly? I am not qualified to judge. I spent an hour last night (when I should have been asleep) hunting down video clips from a 40-year-old Talking Heads concert film. Stop making sense!

Is the World of Cars immune to the lure of the Silly Season? You tell me: As of this morning, the market cap of a company that has registered just 137 electric vehicles in the U.S. market since June is surging past $160 billion – headed for more than twice the combined market valuations of GM and Ford.

We do have serious business, and we’ll get to it all.

Today –

• • Tesla’s Autopilot faces two tough trials

  • Consolidation in China: Xpeng buys Didi’s EV business

  • BYD triples H1 profit and bulks up with a mobile tech deal

A Tesla crash.

Two lawsuits on track for trials this fall could reveal new information on how Elon Musk has dealt with safety concerns around Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance technology.

Both cases involve fatal crashes the plaintiffs argue were caused by Autopilot malfunctions. Tesla has denied liability and blamed driver error and inattention – a strategy that won for the company in a bellwether case earlier this year.

The cases could settle before trial. In the meantime, keep an eye on a case in Florida filed by the widow of Stephen Banner, killed when his Model 3 drove under a tractor-trailer. Lawyers for the Banner family want to make public the contents of depositions from Tesla employees and internal documents they said show Musk and other Tesla engineers knew about Autopilot’s safety problems and did not act.

Tesla is asking the court to keep the records under seal.

As noted last week, U.S. regulators are promising some action to resolve their two-year plus investigation of Autopilot.

Rival automakers put distance between the way they have designed and marketed driving assistance systems that compete with Autopilot in the expansive gray area between human-piloted and 100% robot-driven vehicles.

Automakers are counting on hands-free but not fully automated piloting systems to drive considerable revenue over the next decade. The outcomes of Tesla’s civil trials and the federal investigation could set new rules of the road.

Big and getting bigger.

Chinese EV maker BYD said first-half profits tripled on record deliveries to $1.5 billion.

The company also announced a $2.2 billion deal to buy Chinese—based mobile electronics manufacturing operations from Jabil, a U.S.- based semiconductor producer.

BYD’s latest financials showed a slowdown in the rate of profit growth during the April-June quarter as the price war launched by Tesla in the Chinese market escalated. Still, BYD’s second-quarter gross margin rose to 18.7% from 17.9% in the first three months of the year.

BYD’s unprofitable rivals have reason to BVA – Be Very Afraid.

Xpeng CEO He Xiaopeng

China’s ride-hailing market leader, Didi, said it will sell its EV development operations to Chinese EV startup Xpeng, in a $744 million deal that will result in Didi taking as much as a 5% stake in Xpeng.

On its face, this looks like one of those “win-win” deals everyone says they want. Didi once had ambitions of developing its own bespoke EVs for use on its ride platform. But as Elon Musk or Xpeng CEO He Xiaopeng could tell Didi management, manufacturing EVs is hard. China’s EV market is glutted with overcapacity, and relief is not in sight. Blocked from listing shares, Didi doesn’t have capital to incinerate in a redundant EV project.

For Xpeng, the new relationship with Didi provides a more realistic path to profitable scale – Didi has agreed to buy 100,000 of the vehicles Xpeng will build under a new brand, MONA.

Nevermind India’s lunar lander.

Vietnamese EV startup Vinfast’s market cap is what’s headed to the Moon at warp speed. As of Monday morning, Vinfast’s share price was up as much as 29% following a rally Friday that took its market cap to $160 billion.

Less than two years after building its first EV, Vinfast has become the world’s third most valuable automaker behind Tesla and Toyota, valued at more than the Detroit Three automakers combined. Stop making sense, indeed.

S&P Global is out this morning with a cautionary take on U.S. vehicle sales.

August sales will look good compared to a year ago, when supply chain snafus made it hard for consumers to find the vehicles they wanted. But compared to July, S&P said the daily selling rate is trending down.

Inventories of unsold vehicles advertised by dealers are up 57% from a year ago – and that does not count vehicles in transit, or vehicles dealers aren’t advertising for sale for whatever reason, S&P said.

How big a problem that will be depends on whether Detroit automakers lose production this fall to strikes by the United Auto Workers or Canada’s Unifor.

Could AI help your teen be a safer driver? Driver monitoring startup Nauto is working on technology to do just that, CEO Stefan Heck told the Auto File. Nauto is currently focused on deploying driver monitoring and coaching technology to commercial fleets. It has partnerships with General Motors’ BrightDrop and Stellantis’ commercial van business, among others, to integrate AI driver monitoring systems. Heavy truck fleets are another key market.

Heck said Nauto is working on consumer applications of its systems, which can warn drivers when they are taking safety risks such as fiddling with a smartphone on the road. The most promising use cases are at the ends of the age spectrum: Teens and elderly drivers, he said. “The teen part is the top request.”

India could make it easier to finance purchases of EVs by declaring battery-powered vehicles a “priority sector” for lending.

Renault’s Ampere EV unit could come to the market for an IPO by the spring of 2024.

Duke Energy is testing a flat-fee subscription model for home EV charging, in collaboration with BMW, GM and Ford. Customers in North Carolina will be able to sign up $24.99 a month charging plans that would launch Nov. 1, the utility said.

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