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The Daily Brief wraps up the biggest stories and our exclusive reporting on the auto industry and car culture.
Good morning and welcome to The Downshift, a daily sweep of today’s top headlines from the auto industry and car culture, curated by The Drive’s editorial team. Each story gets a short summary and a link to the original source if you want to dive deeper.
Here’s what’s cooking on Tuesday, September 15, 2026:
🍎 General Motors is revamping its infotainment interface, and this big update is due to hit the company’s trucks first “before expanding across the broader portfolio.” The new UI sports a simpler aesthetic with higher contrast—plain white text on a stark black background. A new menu of quick-access toggles puts frequently adjusted features more readily at your fingertips. However, the big news is the return of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, after the company floated omitting them from all cars, not just EVs. GM says that these phone projection platforms are integrated “with our native system, giving customers the best of both worlds. Content appears in a large card window alongside native apps like trailering and vehicle status.” That makes it sound like users won’t be able to expand them to take up the whole display like in vehicles from other automakers, but this is still a big change, and one that should be welcomed by many. [General Motors]
🛻 A new report courtesy of the U.K.’s The Times claims that Land Rover will entrust Stellantis to build a pickup version of the Defender at one of its plants in the U.S. This plan would not only add a truck to the luxury brand’s lineup, but, by using Stellantis’ plant capacity to manufacture in the States, the company could circumvent the 25% Chicken Tax that it’d have to pay if the pickup was imported from elsewhere. In May, Jaguar Land Rover and Stellantis announced a memorandum of understanding regarding product development collaboration in the U.S. [Automotive News]
🏭 It appears there will be a gap where the Toyota Highlander nameplate will temporarily fade from the market, since the all-electric next-gen version has been delayed until a first-quarter 2027 production start, and the current gas model is expected to be phased out by December. It’s a phenomenon that’s impacted a few different models across multiple brands in recent years, like the Acura RDX (whose replacement isn’t expected to land until 2028) and the Jeep Cherokee (which took more than two years off between its previous generation and revival). [Automotive News]
🗺️ BMW is beefing up the navigation system on its latest vehicles, like the iX3, with new 3D visualizations that project active ADAS features onto the map itself. [BMW]
🚕 Waymo intends to expand into Tokyo by 2027. If it manages to do that, it’ll become Japan’s first autonomous taxi service. The initiative will be a partnership with taxi app Go and operator Nihon Kotsu. [Reuters]
🤌 A boutique shop in the U.K. is offering a Fiat 500 restomod featuring an 800-cc twin-spark engine and manual transmission, in addition to chassis improvements. The cost? Somehow about $200,000, reminding us that the restomod craze can drive up the price of any vehicle to absurd heights, even city cars that originally cost the equivalent of $9,500 70 years ago. [Motor1]
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
