Oil Is Moving Through The Strait Of Hormuz, But It's A Dangerous Trip

Happy Tuesday! It's October 6, 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 transit through the Strait of Hormuz, as well as ChargePoint's attempts to keep up with EV sales. We'll also look at Porsche's pursuit of profits, and Lucid's construction backlog.

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If you hadn't noticed already, either by reading this website or by existing in our shared reality, oil is getting a bit hard to come by these days. Gas prices are up, oil changes are getting more costly, and it's only a matter of time before plastics start being affected in the same way. So you might be surprised to see that the Strait of Hormuz is actually moving oil — in fact, more oil moved through the Strait last week than on some antebellum seven-day periods. From Reuters:

Ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz face a "heightened and increasingly unpredictable kinetic threat" given the recent sharp increase in traffic, Marisks, a shipping intelligence service, said on Saturday.

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The seven-day moving average for crude exports from the region was 18.3 million barrels per day on September 30, provisional data from Kpler showed, with volumes topping pre-war levels on 14 days in September.

That included Gulf oil ​sent Hormuz [sic], via the Red Sea, and from terminals and ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman.

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The recent export surge has ​been driven by Saudi Arabia loading from both the Red Sea and the Gulf, three weeks after a September 10 attack on its East-West pipeline, Kpler ​said.

The new factor here is, of course, Saudi Arabia's response to the attack on its East-West oil pipeline. With that pipeline now operational once again, we'll have to see whether oil transit through Hormuz drops off once again — or if, now that some mavericks have proved the strait can move oil, others follow in their footsteps. 

Electric vehicle adoption has long been beset by a chicken-and-egg problem: Buyers avoid EVs because there's little charging infrastructure, and no one builds charging infrastructure because there are no EV sales to justify the construction. Now, though, data from ChargePoint shows that the problem is beginning to tip towards one end of the scales. From Automotive News: 

Electric vehicle charging demand is outpacing infrastructure deployment at a rate that could become a major barrier to adoption, according to ChargePoint Holdings.

The U.S.-based EV charging solutions provider recorded 34 percent more charging sessions globally last year — more than twice the 16 percent growth in new ports—highlighting a gap that experts say requires urgent attention beyond simply adding more chargers.

"Charging infrastructure isn't keeping up with driving demand," ChargePoint CEO Rick Wilmer said in a report. "Our volume of charging sessions increased by more than one-third, despite a much smaller increase in the number of vehicles on the road."

The company provides hardware, software and cloud integrations to more than a dozen automakers including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai and Volvo.

I've long said that EV range isn't the problem, EV charging is — none of us much care how far we can go on a single tank of fuel, only that we can reach the next gas station. Maybe EV charging will become common enough that we can put range anxiety behind us. 

Yesterday, we talked about how GMC is using its Denali and AT4 trims to wring more profit out of fewer sales — trading volume for prestige. Now Porsche is looking to do the same, as investors express their distaste for a stock that keeps dropping. From Automotive News:

Porsche CEO Michael Leiters faces his biggest test yet this week as he unveils a strategy to revive the struggling sports-car maker and restore investor confidence nine months into the job.

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The stakes are high. Porsche shares have lost almost half their value since the company's initial public offering in September 2022, trading at about €43. The company has been hit by weaker demand in China, a thinner product lineup and costly delays to new models.

Leiters is betting that Porsche can become a smaller but more profitable automaker, combining higher-volume models such as the Macan and Cayenne SUVs with lower-volume, higher-margin vehicles built around the 911 sports car. The strategy will depend not only on cutting costs but on getting new products to market quickly and ensuring they match what customers want.

Ah yes, cost-cutting, that thing that people always want from their expensive sports cars. Hopefully, that's planned more for base-model Macans and Cayennes than for the 911 platform, but we'll see what Leiters ends up doing in his pursuit of profit. 

Lucid has been building some truly incredible EVs, but the company hasn't been moving them into buyer hands as quickly as it's been building them. That's a problem from an economics standpoint, so Lucid is throttling its own production in order to reduce the number of cars sitting on its lots. From Reuters:

Oct 5 (Reuters) – Lucid Group's third-quarter deliveries fell short of Wall Street estimates on Monday, with the ​luxury EV maker reducing production from ‌the prior quarter and selling vehicles from its existing inventory as part of a cost-cutting overhaul.

Here are some ​details:

* Lucid delivered 3,806 vehicles in the ​quarter ended September 30, below the average ⁠analyst estimate of 4,687, according to Visible ​Alpha data. It built 2,954 vehicles, compared with ​the 3,709 analysts had expected.

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* Deliveries exceeded production by 852 vehicles as ‌Lucid ⁠turned unsold cars into sales.

This isn't yet a problem for Lucid, but it could be if inventory continues to pile up. We all know what's happening with the Cybertruck. 

Twirling, twirling towards freedom!

A trend reversal — things had been looking better and better for so long, but today we see another jump.

I contain multitudes, and sometimes that means waking up with Black Sabbath inexplicably playing in my head.