Happy Wednesday! It’s November 4, 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 last night’s election and its fallout on the auto industry, as well as its effects on Elon Musk’s companies. We’ll also look at U.S. buyers dialing back their automotive luxury spending, and Honda looking at European production.
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1st Gear: Put the pronouns back in the email
Midterm elections were last night, and voters overwhelmingly went blue. Not just in battlegrounds like Ohio and Michigan, but in reach states like Texas. Votes are still being tallied, but Missouri and Alaska may well go blue too. Kansas has its first Democratic senator in nearly a century! Voters have soundly rejected Trump and the Republicans, which could spell some real complications for the party and the automakers that allied with it. From NBC:
President Donald Trump told voters to pretend he was on the ballot in this year’s midterm elections.
They did. And they resoundingly rejected both his policies and his Republican Party.
Democrats have captured full control of Congress, NBC News projects, with voters delivering a forceful repudiation of Trump’s agenda, coupled with a clear-cut message that Congress has not done enough to provide checks on his administration and needs to do more to address affordability and corruption.
The Trump administration of the last couple years has spent its time rolling back emissions regulations, destroying EV incentives, and generally cordoning off the U.S. automotive market as a little piece of history — somewhere automakers need not innovate to compete. With the legislative branch going blue, though, we may well see new environmental regulations. What will that mean for automakers that cozied up to the MAGA camp? Will we start to match European regulations and resume our EV push? Only time will tell, but all those automakers that returned to V8s may well regret their investments.
2nd Gear: Elon Musk, particularly, lost big last night
Elon Musk was the single largest donor in the 2026 election cycle, having spent nearly half a billion dollars backing Republican candidates across the country. Not only were his efforts for naught, but his adoptive home state of Texas has gone entirely blue — governor, senate, attorney general, even the railroad commissioner. He’s likely to see some complications in his business plans, and the markets are recognizing that. From the Wall Street Journal:
Shares in Elon Musk-led SpaceX and Tesla fell sharply premarket after Democratic candidates swept the midterm elections, handing a defeat to Republicans backed by Musk to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
…
Democratic control of Congress could derail a potential merger between SpaceX and Tesla, XTB’s Kathleen Brooks said.
“While Congress cannot stop a merger between SpaceX and Tesla, they could slow it down via extra scrutiny,” Brooks said. “There is now a political risk premium attached to both Tesla and SpaceX that could weigh on their share prices.”
Shares have trended upward since market open, but they’re still down from yesterday’s close. Nathan Johnson, former composer for “Dragon Ball Z” and incoming attorney general of the state of Texas, has already promised to investigate Musk and his companies for corruption. With pressure on both the federal and state levels, 2027 could be a rough year for the world’s richest man.
3rd Gear: Americans are dialing back automotive luxury spending, but Harley-Davidson is still going strong
U.S. consumers are getting ever broker, and when you’ve got less money to spend you’re unlikely to go RV or boat shopping. Yet, while automotive toy sales are down, Harley-Davidson is still up. In fact, the company is doing better than it has in years. From the Wall Street Journal:
His purchase helps explain why Harley is bucking a downturn in sales of leisure products: High interest rates, punishing gas prices and broad economic anxiety have dented sales of everything from RVs to boats.
But that downturn hasn’t come for Harley. In its primary market of North America, the bike maker has recorded year-over-year retail-sales growth in each of the last four quarters, and is on track for the first full-year increase since 2021. Globally, sales are up 4% so far this year.
The WSJ credits some of this increase to Harley revamping its Tri-Glide line, giving the trikes more power and comfort. Moving those trikes is good for Harley’s bottom line, but it’s not addressing the fundamental problem of the company: It carved out a market in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and has largely sold to those same people ever since — buyers too old to keep a million-pound Harley upright. If the company wants new buyers, bikes like its new Sprint are the way it’ll get them.
4th Gear: Honda could resume European production to dodge tariffs
Europe is looking to bring automotive production home to the continent, tariffing car imports to encourage automakers to build in local factories. Plenty of Chinese automakers have already bought in, but one company is still wary to dip its feet into EU production: Honda, which is still just thinking about what it’ll do. From Automotive News:
Honda’s European chief said the automaker may rebuild a manufacturing presence in the region, depending on the final outcome of new rules in the European Union that will favor locally made cars.
The company has “certainly no intention of leaving Europe,” Hans de Jaeger, president of Honda’s European unit, said Nov. 4 in an interview at the EICMA motorcycle show in Milan.
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Honda registrations across Europe were almost 59,000 in the first nine months of 2026. That’s too few to justify building a factory, De Jaeger said, though higher volumes could eventually change the calculation.
It’s an unenviable position: Honda doesn’t sell enough cars in Europe to justify building new factories there, but it sells enough that it likely doesn’t want to leave the bloc entirely. It could share space in a factory owned by another automaker, or eat the tariff costs, but none of those options are perfect. I’m certainly glad I’m not in charge of making that call.
Reverse: This was California, in 2008
The Fuel Up
Will we see prices crater after last night’s election? Rise based on deadlock within the government, with no veto-proof majorities in the House or Senate? Stay the same?
On The Radio: Rage Against the Machine – ‘Guerilla Radio’
Libbing out is permitted through today. After that, the work resumes.
