1. Australia is now the i30 N hatch's last stand
Australia is the last place in the world where you can still buy a brand-new Hyundai i30 N hatch. Tighter emissions rules have pushed the original N car out of other markets — most notably Europe, where it was largely engineered. It's now the only i30 hatchback still sold here, after the regular version was dropped at the end of 2025. The Czech factory is now the only plant still building the i30 hatch range. It turned out 1,598 i30 N hatchbacks in the first nine months of 2026, with 826 sold in Australia over the same period. More than 58,000 have been built since production began in 2018, and one in five of them — 11,452 cars — has come here. If a successor ever appears, Hyundai Europe's product boss says it would need to be hybrid or electric.
Source: Drive
2. Luxeed will ditch Huawei tech for its export cars
Chery's luxury brand Luxeed will strip all Huawei hardware and software from the cars it sells outside China — including the ones headed here. Luxeed is a joint venture between Chery and Huawei. But CEO Shawn Xu told Drive: "We're not related to Huawei, for international markets." Its two current models are being renamed for export: the RX becomes the Stormax performance SUV and the V9 becomes the LLounge luxury people mover, with a redesigned exterior. Luxeed plans to arrive in Australia in mid-2027, leading with the LLounge and its 1.5-litre turbocharged petrol range-extender powertrain, followed by the fully electric Stormax. Huawei was blocked from Australia's 5G network in 2018, though there are no specific bans on Huawei-equipped vehicles here.
Source: Drive
3. Baidu's new simulator trains robotaxis without the road
Baidu has launched Apollo World, an AI system that simulates real-world road environments to train robotaxis and predict how situations evolve. It can generate up to 100,000 km of simulated driving a day — roughly three years of real-world testing by a safety-driver-equipped autonomous vehicle, according to Baidu. The system is already being used to train the fleet of Apollo Go, China's largest robotaxi operator. Morgan Stanley has estimated China's robotaxi fleet could grow to one million vehicles by 2035, and Volkswagen's Chinese partner XPeng plans to launch robotaxi operations in 2027.
Source: 93-5 The Lloyd (Reuters)
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