| Thanks for reading Hyperdrive, Bloomberg’s newsletter on the future of the auto world. When Bloomberg Television asked Oliver Zipse about the toll that trade wars will take on BMW this year, the CEO offered up an axiom that executives have stated with increasing regularity of late. There are “no winners in that game,” he said Friday. Zipse’s electric car-making competitor Tesla proves the BMW CEO’s point. Elon Musk has long taken pride in his company’s red, white and blue bona fides, trumpeting Tesla’s position in a ranking that Cars.com releases annually. The Model Y is the “most American-made car in America,” the CEO boasted in August. He and Tesla touted the automaker’s position atop the standings in prior years. But even Musk, a leading adherent of vertical integration, is reliant on external suppliers for the thousands of parts that go into each of his company’s cars. Many of those parts happen to come from outside the US. So when Tesla was granted the opportunity to comment on the Trump administration’s trade practices, the company admitted that it has only been able to go so far in procuring its parts from within the US. “Even with aggressive localization of the supply chain, certain parts and components are difficult or impossible to source within the United States,” unidentified Tesla representatives wrote in a letter dated March 11.  Elon Musk at a town hall event hosted by his America PAC in October Photographer: Ryan Collerd/AFP via Getty Images The content of this letter should come as no surprise. CFO Vaibhav Taneja did, after all, just caution during Tesla’s latest earnings call that the company is “still very reliant on parts from across the world for all our businesses.” Taneja followed up this prepared remark with an extremely vague one. “Therefore,” the CFO said, “the imposition of tariffs, which is very likely, and any reciprocity will have an impact on our business and profitability.” How much of an impact? Taneja didn’t say, and analysts didn’t follow up on the topic. In fairness to Taneja, it was pretty unclear as of Jan. 29 — when Tesla was hosting its earnings call — what Donald Trump’s trade policies were going to be, precisely. The trouble is, the picture hasn’t gotten all that much clearer. The president’s on-again, off-again approach to tariffs makes it awfully challenging for Tesla, BMW and others to quantify just how impactful higher US levies will be to their businesses. “We don’t think that all these tariffs will last for very long,” Zipse told Bloomberg TV Friday. “Some of them might last a little bit longer, but we accounted for that with €1 billion in our guidance.” Those comments are similarly vague and betray a troubling lack of clarity as to which of Trump’s tariffs are going to stick, and which will fade. It also can’t be encouraging for BMW investors that the company is bracing for a seven-figure bill that it doesn’t see any way around. It remains to be seen whether Tesla will be quite as forthcoming about the extent of the damage being done by an administration its own CEO is advising. An anonymous source the Financial Times quoted in its story about Tesla’s comments to the USTR don’t inspire a ton of confidence that transparency is nigh. Tesla’s letter was unsigned, this person told the FT, “because nobody at the company wants to be fired for sending it.”  A bike bridge in Waterbeach is part of the town’s extensive network of cycling infrastructure. Credit: Urban&Civic You could be forgiven for thinking you’re in the Netherlands when you enter Waterbeach. The 716-acre lakeside development outside the UK city of Cambridge is rising on wetlands that were reclaimed by Dutch engineers in the 1600s. And like many places in Holland, Waterbeach’s design and planning puts people before cars. New residential developments that deprioritize auto ownership are spreading in the US, as well, in a trend that aligns with global efforts to reduce transportation-related carbon emissions. But building a car-light town from scratch isn’t easy. Waterbeach’s bike-friendly character came about thanks to a series of specifically local conditions: a location next to a city with a strong cycling culture, a road system that was already full to capacity, an unusually bike-positive local council and a public property owner prepared to partner with a more sustainable developer. | 
