Thursday newspaper round-up: UK car manufacturing, River Island, Tesla

(Sharecast News) - British car and van manufacturing slumped in the first half of the year to its lowest since 1953 outside the Covid pandemic, as Donald Trump's US tariffs caused global industry chaos. UK vehicle manufacturing declined by 12% to 417,200 units in the first six months of the year, figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), a lobby group, show. - Guardian Google exceeded Wall Street expectations for the quarter ending in June after closing out a few months of AI-related momentum. On Wednesday, the company reported $2.31 in earnings per share (EPS) on $96.4bn in revenue, surpassing analysts' projections of $2.18 EPS on $94bn in sales. Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, pointed to "robust growth" in key spaces across the company including AI, search, YouTube and Google Cloud. - Guardian

The British Army has been trialling German-made kamikaze drones designed to detect and knock out Russian crafts before they can target troops. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been working with Alpine Eagle, a German start-up founded in 2023 that has developed an airborne sentry drone capable of intercepting hostile unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). - Telegraph

River Island faces collapse within weeks unless landlords and creditors approve a radical rescue plan, The Telegraph can reveal. The retailer has put forward a proposal to hand the keys back on 33 stores, slash the rents on a further 71 shops and write off a series of debts to stave off a severe liquidity crisis. The plan will be put before the High Court next week. - Telegraph

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk warned of "rough quarters" ahead as the electric carmaker reported the steepest fall in quarterly revenue in more than a decade and missed Wall Street's ­expectations amid faltering demand. Shares in the company dropped 4 per cent in after-hours trading after he said the company was in a "weird transition period" as it coped with the end of US tax incentives on electric cars, shifting tariffs, and regulatory uncertainty around self-driving cars. - The Times

There is a growing consensus that house prices will barely rise this year, with the public increasingly wary of the uncertainty brought on by President Trump's tariff war and the possibility of looming tax rises. Savills, the estate agent, had expected UK house prices to go up by 4 per cent on average in 2025. However, owing to a "weaker first half" than it anticipated, it has cut its growth forecast to just 1 per cent. - The Times