Feb. 14, 2026 | Weekend Drive: Gordie Howe Bridge dispute; Larry flies a Joby air taxi

Welcome to this Weekend Drive edition of Daily Drive for the second week in February

2026.

I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas, we're breaking down some of the biggest stories in the auto

industry from the past week and looking forward to what's in store in the days ahead.

Joining me today are Michael Martinez, who covers Ford and the UAW for us at Automotive

News.

Money Mike, welcome back to Weekend Drive.

You got a new nickname this week, Mike, and Larry Veliquette, who covers Toyota Subaru

and Mazda.

Larry Legend, thanks as always for joining us.

Kellan, it is so wonderful to be here.

I'm very excited.

Well, I'm excited you're here, Larry.

All right, guys, let's start off with some, I guess, where you guys are at.

At local news, I guess, the Gordie Howe Bridge.

So we heard from Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkins, Mitch Otto's Glenn Stevens, and Greg Lason

from Automotive News Canada this week on Daily Drive, all talking about what President Trump's

threat means for cross-border trade.

But Larry, step back for us.

What does Trump's threat to block a bridge that's already built and paid for by Canada

tell us about how trade policy is being conducted right now?

Well, it tells us that it's being conducted in the most petulant, irrational manner that

one could come up with, right?

Anybody who knows Gordie Howe knows what kind of player he was, which you would think doesn't

have much to do with this bridge, but Canada's got its elbows up and with good reason.

This is a shakedown, pure and simple.

Canada built the bridge.

They paid for the bridge.

And why did Canada build a bridge and pay for it when it crosses the border?

Because the billionaire family that owns the bridge that's two miles up the river, the

Ambassador Bridge, is a privately owned bridge that carries most of the heavy traffic from

the United States into Canada, including all the auto parts and the cars that flow back

and forth, because the family of the owners of that bridge contacted the Commerce Department

and had a discussion the same day that President Trump decided to complain about how, quote,

unquote, unfair Canada was being for having the audacity to build a bridge, pay for it,

put it up, open it and not give anything to the United States.

How crazy is this?

Even the customs portions of this bridge for the US were built by Canada.

And why?

Because the United States couldn't muster the political will to do it in the face of the

Maroon family.

So yeah, this deserves some elbows.

This deserves a stick between the legs from Canada to the US.

Any kind of dirty shot that they want to take, we deserve it for this.

Now, Mike, what are you hearing from your sources about how serious this threat actually is?

You know, I'm not sure that folks are necessarily taking it that seriously at this point.

And it goes back to a comment I made, I think a few weeks ago on the podcast, just about

how things change in a matter of hours, if not days or weeks with President Trump.

And you don't know where he's going next or what he's thinking next.

And this could very well fizzle out, just like the Greenland takeover fizzled out into

some sort of deal that he was able to announce that was mostly a retread of things that had

already been agreed to.

So I could see something similar playing out here.

But folks are aware this was a question this past week during Ford's earnings call.

Somebody asked the CFO if this was an issue and something they're monitoring.

She said, yeah, they are.

But at the same time, they can't really say how this would affect them because it's not

open yet, right?

So they're using the Ambassador Bridge as a reference for everything right now.

It's not like the president is taking away something that they are currently using.

But I'll tell you, it could get dicey pretty quick if they're unable to use this bridge

for an extended period of time.

Jim Farley, Ford CEO about a year or so ago on a podcast referenced that if the Ambassador

Bridge shuts down or there's an issue, a backup, they'd run out of seats for the F-150

within an hour because that's with the just in time manufacturing.

That's how little time there is between a seat arriving from a supplier and getting put

into the truck in Dearborn.

So it has the potential to be an issue, but right now I'm not sure it really is that much

of one.

Now, Larry, nearly half of the freight crossing the Ambassador Bridge right now is automotive

vehicles and parts.

If this bridge opening gets delayed, what's the practical impact on the industry?

Well, right now, probably nothing, because as Mike referenced, those parts will continue

to flow over the Ambassador Bridge.

The problem is that the Ambassador Bridge is old.

It's a privately owned bridge, which seems crazy to 95% of the people in the United States.

This is a privately owned bridge between two nations.

And as such, it has to be cared for privately.

And I don't know how old is it, Mike?

It's almost 100 years old, right?

Wasn't it built in the 30s?

Right, I don't know.

It's old.

Right, it's older than anybody on this podcast, that's for sure.

And if, you know, if something happens to that bridge, we are, you know, this industry

is going to be in a jam.

Let's put it that way.

That's the kind way to say it.

So if for no other reason than having a secondary crossing in Detroit, that was a good idea to

have the Gordy Howe Bridge open, right, let alone the private ownership.

The next nearest crossing is in Sport Huron, which is about an hour north or so, hour and

a half north, which crosses into Sarnia in Ontario.

But that, you know, of course, if you do that, then it lengthens the trade route to get to

get your parts delivered.

Can I tell you a quick story?

Mike referenced the Jim Farley's quote about the seats back in the Cerberus era with Chrysler,

the new purchasing chief, a guy named John Campy, who came from Home Depot, thought it

would be a great idea to bid out the seats for the Jeep Wrangler, right, re-bid the seats.

This was in my former career at the local newspaper for the Wrangler plant.

So they decide, OK, they issue a warrant notice.

They're going to shut the plant down, which is only about 15 miles from the Jeep plant.

Campy's big idea was we're going to source these seats to India, right.

Now, the way that the seats were manufactured, because they could save money getting them

from India, the way the seats were manufactured, they came off the line in suburban Toledo

and within an hour, they were honest.

They were on a Wrangler, right?

He said, we're going to source these from India.

And then they realized they would not have any Wrangler production for six months while

they waited for the first ones to show up because of this.

And then they had to make sure that, you know, they had this, they had a constant

stream halfway around the world all to save a couple of bucks on their sourcing.

This is how closely just in time manufacturing works.

By the way, they abandoned that effort pretty quickly.

They decided not to close the plant miraculously.

All those folks kept their jobs.

This was a good learning experience for these folks from outside the industry

coming in of how just in time manufacturing works.

So Jim Farley is right, you know, it would cause some trouble.

Yikes.

Well, guys, let's pivot to Trump's EPA repealing the endangerment finding.

So this week, Trump repealed the endangerment finding this week, the scientific

determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health.

It's been the foundation for federal emission standards since 2009.

Mike, we've heard automakers say they need regulatory certainty to plan products,

but we've also heard them complain that regulations were too strict.

Now there might not be any federal standards at all.

Is this actually what the industry wanted?

Probably not.

And this is the same thing when you're talking about EVs or other emissions

standards that the automakers wanted some help.

And they felt that some of these rules or regulations were a little

unreasonable and probably not achievable.

But to go ahead and sort of swing the pendulum way in the opposite direction

and get rid of them completely, I think the industry generally agrees

that they should have a long term and even a near term goal of reducing

the amount of pollutants that are coming out of their products

because it's better for the planet, better for all of us.

So I can't believe they agree with this.

But the only thing I would say is, you know, if you play with fire,

you might get burned, right?

And this, if they were advocating for some help, well, they're getting a lot of it

and probably not exactly what they wanted.

So is it their own fault?

Partly, I don't know about that, but they're getting more than what they

bargained for. Larry, you've been covering Toyota for years.

They've been pretty quiet about this EPA move compared to other automakers.

Meanwhile, you wrote this week that they're expanding their EV lineup

with a familiar nameplate.

The Highlander will stick around as a fully electric vehicle.

What's the calculation there?

So they have been quieter about this.

And that's mostly because they're a global automaker, right?

They're the world's largest automaker.

They make 10 million vehicles a year.

They sell them all over the world.

The Trump administration's greenhouse gas emissions findings

not really going to affect their product plan

because they're still committed to their 2050 zero carbon promise.

So they take a wider view.

Let's put it that way.

In terms of the Highlander, this was a decision that they made a couple of years

ago back when regulations really promoted more EVs on the road.

The transition here is that they're making with the Highlander,

which used to be one of their top selling nameplates.

So certainly they're top selling three row nameplate.

But sales of the Highlander have fallen almost 80 percent since 2021.

A lot of that has come because they introduced the Grand Highlander,

which is a three row crossover for people with actual legs

who want to sit in the third row.

It has room.

You know, it it solved a big product

deficiency with that existed with the Highlander.

Moving into a bev platform may not even hurt its volume much.

I mean, they're down to about 50,000, a little over 50,000

Highlanders a year that they're selling now.

And it used to be 260,000.

It's kind of crazy how much it's fallen.

But I think their calculation here is they still want to have something

in every in every segment, including EVs.

They think this will help transition some folks over

and it'll pay off in the long term.

Larry, do we have a price of this EV Highlander yet?

We don't. We don't.

But we you can kind of kind of figure where it's going to be

based on their other crossovers.

It's probably going to start in the 50s.

OK, somewhere.

But it's going to be more than their other

EV crossovers, which they're introducing here shortly this year.

But this will be number four, the fourth EV in their lineup.

You know, guys, I'm really interested in the Highlander EV specifically

because this is one of those instances in the auto industry

where two different automakers are taking two very different paths.

Ford had been planning some three row EV crossovers for a while.

And then they just completely scrapped them at great cost to themselves

because they fundamentally do not believe that customers want

a three row EV for whatever price point they would have to sell it at.

And they mentioned data that hardly anybody uses that third row anyway

when they buy a three row crossover gas or EV.

So it'll be interesting to see if Toyota has success with the Highlander EV

kind of prove Ford's thesis wrong.

Yeah. And if they and if they don't, I don't think Toyota cares.

Right. I mean, I hate to say that.

They're making their money on the ice side with the Grand Highlander,

which comes in at a higher price than what the Highlander did.

I think that they'll suffer through some

they're committed to just suffering through some low volumes on BEVs

because they think long term.

That's where their entire lineup needs to transition to some day.

When the public is ready, the infrastructure is ready, et cetera.

All right, guys, coming up.

Larry virtually piloted a Joby Air taxi recently.

We hear how that went next on Weekend Drive.

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Welcome back to Weekend Drive.

I'm Kellan Walker with Larry Velaquette and Michael Martinez.

Larry, you visited Joby Aviation in California this week,

the air taxi startup that got nearly nine hundred million from Toyota.

And you got to fly one of their air taxis in their flight simulator.

Please tell us about that experience.

Yeah, so whenever anybody in my family or somebody says, oh,

you really like your job, don't you?

These are the days that I point to, right?

I have wanted to learn to fly literally since I was in my teens,

which is as you guys keep reminding me was a long time ago.

Right. So it's always been a dream of mine.

I've done the discovery flights.

So I got an opportunity to climb into Joby Aviation's flight simulator.

Now, this is an electric air taxi, right?

It has six motors, six big rotors on it.

Instead of a quadcopter, though, you know, it has six,

but it also has a giant wing and these six motors,

they allow the vehicle to take off and land vertically.

But then they transition for forward flight with the wing.

It flies a lot like an airplane, like a small airplane.

It's it's five seat.

There's a pilot and then two rows for four passengers.

And the idea is this is an this is an air taxi, which would operate,

say, like the flight that I took between Kennedy Airport in New York

and the financial district.

So I got a chance to sit in this thing and fly it virtually.

And I got to tell you, it's it's one of the most intuitive things I've ever flown.

It was super easy.

Everything was kind of automated for you.

I kept it on on course, making little course corrections.

Most of my virtual trip as I flew over Brooklyn and then over the East River,

it was tremendously cool.

Now, what about Toyota's role here?

Why is the world's largest automaker putting nearly nine hundred

million dollars into air taxis?

What's in it for them beyond just an investment?

Well, it's certainly the investment is a key component, right?

This is a startup.

They have a stake.

They're also interestingly enough, though, what they're working on in addition

to the money they are on site, helping this startup company develop

its industrialization processes, right?

It's they're training them in the Toyota production system.

They have engineers on site.

They have folks back in Japan who are making actual supplies for this vehicle,

helping them with with some dedicated manufacturing prowess

for the assembly of these vehicles.

What's in it for them is their dream of shared mobility, what they say.

But automakers, people will always forget about the scale of this industry, right?

We earn a lot of stuff.

The auto industry is we get involved in a lot of stuff.

And some of it works out and some of it doesn't.

They're just hoping this works out.

And if it does, the founder of Joby Aviation,

he has a saying that his mission is to save a billion people an hour, an hour a day

with these things. Now, that's a that's a pipe dream.

It's a long way off.

They're not anywhere close to having the kind of volumes.

That's their but that's their mission down the road, right?

They want to be able to to get people, at least some people, save them,

get them off the road and get them through the air and get them to where they want to go faster.

Now, Mike, from your perspective, we've seen so many EV startups struggle

or fail over the last few years, Rivian, Lucid, Fisker.

They all discovered that building vehicles at scale is incredibly hard.

What are the parallels here with Joby?

Well, I'm sure building whatever it is they're building is incredibly hard.

But I'm just going to pour some cold water on this for a second.

I know I'm not as seasoned as my colleague here

with my time in the industry.

But I think I've been in it long enough to to learn

that whenever automakers are involved in things beyond automaking,

it really doesn't end well.

You go back to the early 2000s with Ford and think the think brand.

They had that golf cart right in that small electric city car.

They got into scooters.

They bought the spin electric scooter company GM, try to get into e-bikes.

They had a car share service called Maven.

All those pretty much failed or they sold them off.

Not to mention the autonomous vehicle

subsidiaries and tie ups that they invested in and ultimately didn't pan out.

So yeah, it's cool.

And I'm kind of jealous Larry got to do that simulator.

But I I don't know if Toyota's investment is going to pay off here.

I think we've found time and time again

that automakers pour money into non-core things like this.

And it doesn't really work out.

Yeah, he's right. You you forgot Chrysler's intervention with Jim, right?

That was a that was a golf cart.

And you know, an expanded golf cart operation

back in the early teens. Oh, there there are mikes.

Right. There are a bunch of because this sounds like a whole bunch

of really bad ideas that I've never heard of before that I feel like got

swept under the rug very fast.

Yeah, but I will say Toyota is not the only automaker in this space right now.

True. Solantis, Hyundai, Mercedes Benz.

They're all they're all experimenting with, quote unquote, air mobility

and somebody I'm still waiting for somebody to give me a good

solid business explanation for what mobility is, right?

That we that we have to chase it with billions of dollars.

But that's a that's a topic for another day.

I think this is this is probably a

you know, I don't I don't know that this will work out.

I don't know that the economics of it will work out.

It's still an air taxi and it's still going to be very expensive

because it's going to be, you know, these are limited numbers.

It's a heavily, heavily regulated industry.

I mean, auto is regulated.

Aviation is next level, right?

Next level regulations.

Larry, how long would it take to for an air taxi to get from Detroit to Toledo?

Probably 120 knots, probably 15 minutes.

There you go.

Yeah, you can come into the office more often.

It'd be nice to see you.

See, that's that's why the economics don't work out.

My my my thing is I don't know if one of you should do this

or we should just bring them on the show, but we need to bring someone

from the FAA into automotive news and interview them

about this aviation mobility thing of how realistic it is.

Because I remember CES last year where they had all the flying planes and stuff.

And that was like the the thing last year and the year before.

That was like the big thing.

And I'm like, how like, like, no, like, there's no way

that they're going to just let people just maybe at a certain altitude.

But like when you start getting 20, 25,000 feet,

now you're getting in passenger jet territory, right?

So I'm like, how do you even think that you would allow something like this?

Do people have to fly, you know, under 15,000 feet?

I just have so many questions.

And I feel like we should bring someone from the FAA on

because you see these companies with all these investments

that want to get into this space.

But like you guys said, how realistic is it?

Yeah, well, I should I should point out here that the that the Joby vehicle

is non-pressurized.

It would probably fly lower than most general aviation aircraft, right?

So you're probably talking Max 5000.

Got you. Max.

Because these are going to be short run.

So we got to it's got a range of 100 miles.

And it's got a top speed of 200 miles an hour, right?

So that means you could the max you're going to do is a 50 mile trip.

You know, at top speed and and those two things

you can't in other words, you're not going to run 200 miles an hour for 100 miles

because that's that's not the actual range.

And you can go 200 miles or you can go or you can go 100 miles

or you can go 200 miles an hour, just like an electric car, right?

If you put a tow hitch on the back of your Tesla, what happens to your battery?

Kel drains very fast.

That's why there's no hitch on the back of my Tesla.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, you know, I just I keep reminding myself, though,

to add a little perspective.

This is especially true with electric cars.

We are still in the in probably the bag phone era.

We're maybe at the end of the bag phone era, maybe to the flip phone.

I'll just say we're flip phone era.

I think we're past the bag.

Yeah, I think we're flip phone.

We in the we in the motor road, a motor or the car phone

with the with the long, you remember how the old BMWs had the car?

My uncle had one, the car phone with the with the long cord.

We might be there or the brick phone.

Yeah, well, those those predated the StarTech by by several years.

This is true. So yeah, maybe we are StarTech then.

I like Jim Farley's metaphor better.

We're in the second or third inning of a nine inning game.

All right, man, he's got a baseball head.

I will let him we'll let him live.

Mike, Larry, always a pleasure, guys.

Thank you so much for joining me, Cal.

You have a good weekend, bud.

Let's go. You too, Mike.

That's all for this weekend drive edition of Daily Drive.

I'm Kellen Walker.

Thanks to Automotive News executive producer, Jake Neer,

for his help on today's podcast.

You can get the latest news on the Gordy Howe bridge dispute,

the EPA's endangerment finding repeal and everything happening

in the auto industry at auto news dot com.

Come back on Monday for a conversation with Maria Anhalt,

CEO of Electrobit about how the auto industry faces economic

and technological pressure to deliver products and features faster.

We are so squeezed between economical, technological,

organizational pressure for getting everything much quicker

at a better cost.

So everything that we can do to speed up the development

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It's a good thing for the customers.

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Feb. 14, 2026 | Weekend Drive: Gordie Howe Bridge dispute; Larry flies a Joby air taxi

About this episode

Ambassador Bridge

Ford F150

just in time manufacturing

Jeep Wrangler

Toyota Highlander

Toyota Grand Highlander

BEV platform

EVs

EV

EV crossovers

three-row crossover

Lucid Air

electric city car

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