EDITORIAL: It's war o'clock again

This year will mark my 20th year trying to understand the automotive industry as a journalist. A full understanding is, of course, an impossible task. The global scale, the endless levels of complexity, the billions of consumers and dollars and components. But it's been an enjoyable mission, one that has a 0% chance of becoming boring any time soon, even if I might want the ups and downs to stop being quite so dramatically high and low.

As I write this in mid-March, the U.S. is still launching attacks at Iran with nothing but ever-changing threads of reasoning attached. The resulting chaos has shot gas prices in the U.S. back to what they were at this time of year in 2024, according to AAA, and governments from Japan to the UK are searching for ways to intervene and keep gas prices under some semblance of control. The Danish energy minister suggested people there avoid driving their cars unless it is “strictly necessary.” And yet, a fair number of analysts now find more things to worry about in the Middle East than they can point to areas of security. Without a doubt, the war's tendrils have already begun reaching into food production (apparently around fertilizer sourcing), health care (at least one apparent Iran-connected hack), and the auto industry, with initial supply chain questions revolving around aluminum and plastics, is the sense I'm getting. In the U.S., spot shipping rates have jumped almost 30% in recent weeks, which will only worsen the financial troubles OEMs and suppliers are facing in getting vehicles to customers.