Day: October 13, 2025

• US EV sales hit a record in Q3 2025. Future growth is uncertain.
• Federal incentives are ending, challenging automakers to seek profitability through scale.
• Tesla dominates with profitability and scale, while others struggle with low volumes.

Electric vehicle sales in the US reached a new milestone in the third quarter of 2025. Beyond that, the future is uncertain for almost every player in this market, except one.

With federal incentives for EVs falling away, the US market must survive on its own merits. Who wins and who survives will depend largely on who has the scale and sales volume to make their businesses profitable.

Tesla has already reached scale and is comfortably profitable. Most other operators in the US EV market aren’t there yet.

“In the volume-driven business of automotive manufacturing, low volume is the enemy; EV profitability remains a distant dream for nearly every automaker,” Cox Automotive, an industry data provider, warned recently in its latest EV market report.

A record 437,487 EVs were sold in the US in the third quarter, according to estimates from Cox’s Kelley Blue Book. That marks a 30% year-over-year surge this quarter, underscoring the growing mainstream appeal of EVs.

Yet beneath the headline growth lies a harsh economic truth: without massive scale, most automakers are still losing money on their electric ambitions in the US.

Tesla remains the exception. Even as its market share slipped to 41% from 49% the previous year, it continues to dominate the US EV landscape. The Model Y and Model 3 alone accounted for more than 168,000 units sold in the third quarter, dwarfing competitors.

By contrast, only nine out of roughly 90 EV models sold more than 10,000 units in the US in the quarter. Most electric vehicles struggle to move more than 6,000 units a quarter, according to Cox data. That volume is probably too low to achieve economies of scale in manufacturing, supply chains, and software integration.

Major brands, including Mercedes, Toyota, and Nissan, saw flat or declining EV sales in the third quarter, despite consumers rushing to purchase ahead of incentives expiring on September 30.

Meanwhile, Volkswagen, General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai posted robust growth. While a promising sign, that may not be enough volume to turn their EV operations in the US into profitable businesses.

For instance, Ford’s EV division lost $2.2 billion in the first half of 2025, despite an increase in sales. Rivian lost about $1.7 billion in the same period. In contrast, Tesla reported a profit of more than $1.5 billion in the first half of this year.  

It’s no wonder that many legacy carmakers are backtracking on their EV plans. If they cannot reach a high-volume scale, they risk consistently losing money. At some point, they have to stop the bleeding.

In July, Mercedes stopped taking EV orders in the US. Stellantis has recently shelved some of its EV plans, along with Porsche and Honda. Even Ferrari, which has juicy profit margins, dialed down its EV plans.

With federal EV incentives now gone, analysts at Cox Automotive expect sales to decline in the fourth quarter and early 2026, testing whether the US market can sustain itself without government support.

This could reveal which carmakers have the stamina to suck up EV losses and try to reach scale in the US market. Tesla is already there. Very few other companies are even close.

“The training wheels are coming off,” said Cox Automotive’s director of industry insights Stephanie Valdez Streaty.

The next phase will reveal whether automakers can drive America’s EV market on fundamentals — cost efficiency, scale, and innovation — rather than incentives.

For now, Tesla stands alone as proof that, in this industry, volume equals survival.

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• Davidovs Venture Collective is launching a $75 million fund for Series A and B AI startups.
• DVC has amassed an AI talent network to source and oversee deals.
• In lieu of analysts, it’s arming investors with AI tools to help run deals.

As investors scramble to find the next big AI startup to fund, one VC firm got rid of its analysts and is instead using AI to help run deals.

Four-year-old Davidovs Venture Collective (DVC) — cofounded by married duo and general partners Marina Davidova and Nick Davidov — has launched a $75 million fund for Series A and B AI startups.

They say they fired their analysts, who typically help source and vet deals. Instead, DVC is tapping a network of 170 limited partners (LPs) — including founders and engineers from OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, SpaceX, and Perplexity — to source new deals, and it’s arming them with AI tools.

DVC initially employed five part-time and full-time analysts, Davidova said, and it eliminated those roles more than a year ago in lieu of AI.

DVC’s network of LPs now use AI agents to assist with deal memos, due diligence, and portfolio monitoring. The agents, which the LPs also helped build, can also identify founder needs and match them with relevant experts in the community.

The LPs will assist founders with hiring, sales, product development, and networking — in exchange for carried interest, a share of profits earned by investment managers. Davidov said that roughly 30% to 40% of the carried interest from each deal is shared with the community of investors, 30% to 40% goes to the partners, and the rest is divided between him and Davidova.

“We have really incredible talent that we would never be able to hire,” Davidov said. “They’re the kind of people that Zuckerberg offers a hundred million dollars to, and they work for us for free on their weekends.”

While AI has made the firm more productive, it can’t replace humans when it comes to assessing qualities like a founder’s mental state, Davidova said. Other VC firms are also using AI to replace associates, and Point72 Ventures managing partner Sri Chandrasekar predicted that AI can reduce head count by over 50%, Business Insider previously reported.

The couple launched San Francisco-based DVC in 2021 with a network of 50 LPs.

Its seed fund has invested $21 million to date in 120 companies, including Perplexity, Etched, Thinking Machines Lab, and Higgsfield.

LPs backing DVC’s new fund include TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Perplexity cofounder Denis Yarats, Zencoder founder Andrew Filev, and Semrush founder Oleg Shchegolev.

Along with launching the $75 million fund, DVC has onboarded two general partners — entrepreneurs Mel Guymon and Charles Ferguson — and named Meta AI product manager Alexey Rybak as a venture partner. Guymon will spearhead business sales support and governance, while Ferguson will focus on deal origination.

The new fund has secured $40 million and is finalizing the remaining amount with institutional investors, DVC said.

We, the daughters of the suffragist movement, write in our opposition to the SAVE Act (S. 128), which was passed by the House and is currently before the Senate. Karen shares ancestry with Susan B.…

In New York City’s volatile 2025 mayoral election, Columbus Day has become a visceral hot-button issue.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once known for being a MAGA diehard, has become a thorn in the GOP’s side.

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The Republican lawmaker representing Georgia’s northwest has, in recent days, doubled down on her criticism of her own party, this time hammering in on the continuing government shutdown. 

“I’m not putting the blame on the President,” Greene told CNN last week. “I’m actually putting the blame on the Speaker and Leader [John] Thune in the Senate. This should not be happening.” And she posted on X, explaining her party-bucking position on healthcare, which has become the primary sticking point between Democrats and Republicans in the shutdown fight, on Oct. 6: “I’m not towing [sic] the party line on this, or playing loyalty games. … I’m carving my own lane.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, La.) told Fox News Sunday that he had a “thoughtful conversation” with Greene to sort out issues, adding that he “offered to have her come in the room and be a part of that discussion if indeed she wants to do that.”

“There’s a lot that can be done,” Johnson added. “But you have to build consensus in a large, deliberative public body like this.”

Other Republicans have been less understanding of Greene’s defiance. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R, W. Va.) slammed Greene for breaking with party leadership in her criticism of the government shutdown. “I understand the frustrations, but I think it’s totally unfair to say that Republicans have not entered in negotiations and Republicans are not having conversations,” Capito said in a Thursday appearance on CNN’s Inside Politics.

But the shutdown fight isn’t the first time Greene has broken from her party this year. She criticized the Trump Administration’s military intervention in Iran, has referred to U.S. ally Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide,” and has called for transparency in the Epstein investigation that the Administration and Republican leaders in Congress have tried to bury—prompting President Donald Trump to reportedly ask multiple senior Republicans, “What’s going on with Marjorie?”

Meanwhile, Democrats have seized the opportunity to highlight their unlikely new ally. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said last Tuesday: “I think this is the first time I said this, but, on this issue, Representative Greene said it perfectly … Representative Greene is absolutely right.” And Sen. Raphael Warnock (D, Ga.) told the Independent: “You are going to hear me utter words I never thought I’d say: Marjorie Taylor Greene is right.”

Greene’s growing independence

In a Daily Mail interview published in August, Greene signaled that she’s not sure whether she wants to be part of the Republican Party anymore should its current trajectory continue.

But her apparent alignment with Democrats is also limited. In one of her recent X posts, Greene responded to a video on X by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that pinned the shutdown on Republicans: “DEMOCRATS created the healthcare crisis in America in 2010 by passing the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare,” she said.

The Georgia lawmaker, who was first elected in 2020, has repeatedly emphasized that she supports Trump, but she recently insisted that she is not a “blind slave” to him. 

“I’m not some sort of blind slave to the President, and I don’t think anyone should be,” Greene said in an NBC News interview. “I serve in Congress. We’re a separate branch of the government, and I’m not elected by the President. I’m not elected by anyone that works in the White House. I’m elected by my district. That’s who I work for, and I got elected without the President’s endorsement, and, you know, I think that has served me really well.”

NBC News reported, citing unnamed Republican sources, that Greene “felt especially burned after the White House talked her out of running for the Senate,” after already being disappointed she didn’t get an Administration job.

But Greene denied her ambitions for the upper chamber. “I don’t want to serve in that institution. Look at them. They’re literally the reason why the government is shut down right now,” she told NBC News. “I think those are just attacks to try to marginalize me or try to sweep me off, so to speak. And I really don’t care.”

Her string of defections from the party line as fellow Republican lawmakers have become increasingly deferential to the White House have led some in MAGA-world to call Greene a RINO—“Republican in Name Only.” 

“Don’t be surprised if she runs for president as a Democrat in 2028,” far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted on X on Sunday. “She’s trying to get the most anti-Trump, left leaning personalities to reshape her image and get the left to give her a chance. She wants revenge on President Trump because he didn’t endorse her Senate and Gubernatorial campaigns in Georgia. She wants to destroy MAGA because she isn’t the leader of MAGA.”

Others say she’s carving a lane out even further on the right. “What’s more MAGA than being true to your populist, anti-establishment and anti-elite roots?” Politico analyzed.

Either way, Greene’s growing independence poses a risk to Republican power: with a thin majority in the lower chamber, every non-party-line voter could upend Trump’s and the GOP’s agenda.