Automakers Want To Charge You More With AI

Happy Thursday! It's August 21, 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 automakers trying to profit off AI, and Geely offering a vehicle-building engineering kit to other automakers. We'll also look at LG making fewer EV batteries, and a Chinese automaker hoping to sell police robots to the Middle East. 

If you'd like a recap of the latest auto news sent to your inbox each weekday, you can sign up for Jalopnik's free Morning Shift newsletter here.

Is your car just too dang reliable and trustworthy? Automakers sure seem to think so, because they're interested in putting AI everywhere in hopes that they can use it as an excuse to charge you more. From Automotive News: 

General Motors, Ford Motor Co. and other automakers are deploying artificial intelligence assistants to make their vehicles more personalized — and ultimately more profitable.

GM this year began rolling out the Google Gemini AI assistant on about 4 million vehicles in the U.S. from the 2022 model year and newer, with plans to integrate an assistant created in-house in the future. Ford, meanwhile, is offering an AI assistant through its smartphone app, with plans to launch an in-vehicle version starting in 2027 on the Expedition and Lincoln Navigator SUVs.

At the same time, BMW is integrating Amazon's AI technology into its vehicles, Volkswagen has brought ChatGPT into its voice assistant, and Mercedes-Benz and Google have partnered on an AI-based system.

...

GM's proprietary AI system "potentially makes that ecosystem much easier for consumers to access," said Paul Waatti, director of industry analysis at AutoPacific.

"A generic chatbot knows information," Waatti said. "A properly integrated automotive assistant can know the state of the vehicle, its state of charge, tire pressure, route, HVAC settings, maintenance status, Super Cruise availability and eventually a much deeper set of vehicle functions."

Yeah, looking at my climate controls is too hard. I need the environment-destroying hallucination robot to tell me what the air temperature in my car is. That's way better. 

Time was, you'd only get your automaker into China if you partnered with an automaker from the nation — and, inevitably, taught it all you knew about carmaking. Now things have flipped, with more advanced Chinese automakers offering Western manufacturers their engineering know-how. From Automotive News:

NINGBO, China — For decades, global automakers brought platforms and technology to China through joint ventures. Now Geely Automotive Holdings is flipping that model, offering legacy brands from Detroit to Europe starter kits for making cars at China Speed.

The offer comes with 800 engineers, modular platforms, artificial intelligence-powered electrical architectures, and hyper-efficient manufacturing systems that can slash development cycles and cost.

A recently established division at Geely is dedicated to collaborating with partners on tailor-made, end-to-end services that leverage its China-based engineering and production capabilities. The company says this is a way to show others how to make cars the Chinese Way.

Geely established its External Collaboration Research Institute in 2021. Now, it has more than 100 projects underway with a dozen clients, including Renault and Waymo. Its work expanded in July when Ford Motor Co. and Geely agreed to establish a joint venture at Ford's manufacturing hub in Spain to develop new models for Europe.

Industry watchers liken the new approach to a "reverse joint venture." Stellantis leverages its partnership with China's Leapmotor in similar fashion, as does Volkswagen with its Xpeng tie-up.

"In the past, it was always the foreign partner that offered the product, platform and technology, while the Chinese partner paid the licensing fee," said Zhang Yu, managing director of Automotive Foresight Co. in Shanghai. "Now, it's reversed. They borrow from the Chinese side."

Can Geely teach any of these automakers how to make cars cheap and small again?

Electric cars were supposed to be the future, the thing that saved us all from acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, and all those other ills that Captain Planet told you about as a kid. Now, even the companies making EV parts are giving up, and throwing their lot in with AI datacenters. From Reuters:

A few years ago, battery manufacturer LG Energy Solution (373220.KS), opens new tab was racing to make cells for electric ‌vehicles. Today, its focus has mostly flipped to a new product: energy storage batteries.

Most of LG Energy's North American factories are making energy-storage batteries, or gearing up to, said Robert Lee, the company's president for the region. Demand for large battery cells to store power is booming ​from the buildout of AI data centers.

It has been a frenetic pivot for battery companies and automakers, which ​poured tens of billions into U.S. battery factories early this decade in anticipation of an ⁠EV boom that has not materialized.

South Korea's LG Energy, which says it is North America's largest battery maker by number ​of cells produced, said five of its eight factories in the region will be making batteries for energy storage systems, or ​ESS, by the end of this year.

"We're highlighting ESS right now because that was the growth that we didn't expect," Lee told Reuters during an opening event on Tuesday at LG Energy's factory in Lansing, Michigan.

Sure, we may live in a world of ever-worsening natural disasters and increasingly deadly heatwaves and freak storms, but at least now we have a chatbot that lies to us! Surely that's worth it, right?

Chery, an automaker out of China, also makes robots. It's the style of the time. Where Chery differs, though, is that it builds cop robots — and it's now taking its robotics arm public, hoping to sell more of them to the Middle East and Southeast Asia. From Reuters:

BEIJING, Aug 19 (Reuters) – The robotics division of China's largest auto exporter Chery Automobile is gearing up ​for an IPO to fund future growth and investments, its chief said on Wednesday, as competition intensifies in the country's fast-growing humanoid robot ‌sector.

AiMOGA Robotics is in talks over potential listing venues and expects to sharply increase humanoid robot deliveries next year as it seeks to join the ranks of global robotics heavyweights, Zhang Guibing, head of the business and president of Chery International, told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Robot Conference in Beijing.

...

Earlier this year, AiMOGA unveiled humanoid police robots, with 110 units already deployed across multiple Chinese cities to assist with traffic management, crowd guidance and public-safety awareness campaigns.

Paul Verhoeven told us that robot cops are a good idea. A flawless one, really. 

Did the October Revolution have anyone who wasn't a communist thought leader?

It had seemed like things had stabilized earlier in the week, but now prices are heading up again. 

You drive better this way, 'cause you're more careful!