The Drive

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is the premier automotive gathering in the world, showcasing some of the rarest, oldest, wildest, and also loudest cars and motorcycles. But every now and then, something truly special graces the 13th Duke of Richmond’s driveway. This year, that’s freaking Lightning McQueen. Unfortunately, Mr. Ka-Chow isn’t actually competing for a time up the hill, meaning his presence is purely for entertainment.

It has been a wild couple of weeks for the Big Brother news beat—wild enough that a particularly alarming item managed to slip beneath just about everybody‘s radar. According to the Daily Mail, the European Commission wants the power to force cars to obey speed limits with help from GPS. European cars already leave the factory with speed monitoring systems installed, and no, I don’t just mean speedometers.

It was only last December that Ram CEO Tim Kuniskis was called out of retirement to right Mopar’s sinking pickup brand. The “Father of Hemis” came back with a pretty simple simple mission: Give the customers what they want. And Ram customers? They want V8s—even if they don’t actually end up buying them. Don’t try to parse it, but if you somehow still needed evidence that cars are highly emotional purchases, look no further.

A slate of laws impacting new cars has just gone into effect in the European Union as of Wednesday, and it’s likely to have some opponents. The bloc is now mandating that every vehicle come equipped with an interior-facing camera as part of an “advanced driver distraction warning (ADDW) system” that can monitor when drivers are distracted, drowsy, or otherwise inattentive, and alert them to stay focused.

F1 Academy’s mission is to give 20 young women a global platform to prove their driving skills in top-tier motorsport, but most importantly, to provide them with a path to follow as they develop what is hopefully a successful racing career. Series sophomore Emma Felbermayr is well on her way to doing just that, and with the support of the Audi Formula 1 Team, she’s the only driver to have scored points in every race so far this year.

Ruf is one of those performance car companies that does very little wrong, if anything. Most folks know the brand for its Yellowbird: a Porsche 911-based, twin-turbo sliding machine that hit 211 miles per hour in 1987. It certainly didn’t stop there, though, as Ruf is still building wickedly powerful machines with P-Car influence.

Taking a pulse of the auto industry a few years ago would have resulted in most people thinking, at least for a hot minute, that the immediate future was going to be electric with a quick and hard shift away from fossil fuels. Automakers started swapping gears and gas for batteries and inverters. Then it all fell apart despite everyone taking different strategies. Ford made a normal-looking F-150 that just happened to be electric and resurrected the Lightning nameplate, then killed it.

The biggest car news and reviews, no BS Our free daily newsletter sends the stories that really matter directly to you, every weekday. Welcome to The Downshift, or TDS for short, The Drive’s morning news roundup serving the biggest automotive headlines from around the world. The Downshift summarizes news items in a few sentences, with links to other sites to get the deeper story. Here’s your bulletin for Thursday, July 9, 2026.

With all the attention around gas prices these days and their connection to an ongoing war with Iran that shows no signs of abating—not to mention midterm elections in the fall—it’s not terribly surprising that the federal government might want to ease public concerns about affordability.

Just in case you held out any hope that EA was cooking up a new entry in the Need for Speed franchise, the boss in charge of Criterion Games, the team responsible for NFS Unbound, among other installments, has squashed that dream. A look into Criterion upon the U.K. studio’s 30th anniversary, published by IGN, makes it abundantly clear that the team is all about Battlefield now. The story wrestles with how to recognize flashes of Criterion’s former self in what its become.