On France’s “free flow” stretches of motorway, the barriers are gone, replaced by a seventy-two-hour countdown nobody told you about. Miss it and the bill climbs to 10 euros, then 90, then 375, for a toll that was worth six. Motorway companies can obtain your mailing address, but they only write once the penalty has accrued. Article 529-6 of the Code of Criminal Procedure lets them record the offense themselves and keep the proceeds. A business model that thrives only on the user’s ignorance isn’t progress, it’s a trap.
On July 9, 2026, Volkswagen announced the unthinkable: its lineup cut in half, options slashed by 75 percent, four German plants under threat, and up to 100,000 jobs on the line. Days earlier, news broke that BYD had twice tried to take control of Renault, rebuffed by a French state playing the hero while Geely was already inside the house. The prevailing narrative blames China; it has the wrong culprit. Entrenched codetermination, an EV calendar set by decree, capital locked up by the Florange law: Europe’s auto industry isn’t dying of competition, it’s dying of fifty years of protection that excused it from adapting. Creative destruction deferred doesn’t disappear, it accumulates until the break, and the wolf never had to force the door: we sold it the keys.
A phone maker just beat Audi and Porsche at the Nürburgring with the YU7 GT, and its electric motor already speaks our language: torque, efficiency, rpm, internal components. Mechanical fascination isn’t dying, it’s just changing addresses, and the very name of the unit, “V8S EVO,” gives away that the mystique of the combustion engine is still the most powerful selling point of all. But let’s distrust formulas that are too neat: this is neither an eternal recurrence nor a clean substitution. It’s a molt. The machinery persists and even hardens, the geek joins the mechanic rather than replacing him, and the sensual side reinvents itself in the whine of a rotor at 28,000 rpm. One question remains: will we know how to pass the old thrill on to those who will only ever have known the new?
There are passions that don’t merely occupy the mind: they colonize it. Mine has a name (the automobile) and a scent: burned fuel mingled with hot rubber. I wanted to capture what really happens when a man, a machine, and a road cease to be three separate things. A tribute to the internal combustion engine, to the precise gesture, and to the brief communion that no algorithm will ever be able to delegate. And, in the final line, a confession I couldn’t keep to myself.