Trade News

In this week's pages, we explore America's charging challenge.

Constructing public charging infrastructure for what will be hundreds of millions of electric vehicles is a time-consuming, complicated process that requires coordination and investment across sectors.

Many players, including automakers, charging companies, retailers, utility companies and other stakeholders, are coming together to develop a convenient, reliable charging map for EV drivers.

Automotive News spoke with dozens of industry participants and observers during the past two months to identify the hurdles and solutions to deploying charging infrastructure.

My articles highlight the challenge and urgency of charger deployment with buy-in across sectors, the process for choosing charger locations, collaboration between automakers and charging companies and alternatives to standard public charging. Laurence Iliff explains how Tesla secured EV dominance and built its global Supercharge…

The head of North America at ev.energy explains how smart charging can help reduce strain on the electrical grid. He says different regional utilities face different challenges, including weather and grid capabilities.

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Electric vehicles are complex pieces of machinery made up of roughly 30,000 parts. As both the public and private sectors look to accelerate the adoption of EVs, one part, the battery, has taken center stage. With much of the conversation rightfully focused on how to properly recycle batteries, the reality is that the component makes up only around 40 percent of an EV by value, leaving 60 percent — and thousands of other parts — unexamined.

Ecological concerns play a major role in consumers' desire to purchase EVs, so understanding their vehicle's impact on the environment has become important. As automakers and stakeholders seek to capture value and drive growth in a world increasingly focused on carbon, there is growing opportunity to incorporate circularity into automotive design and end-of-life disposition.

A framework grounded in reduced waste production and multiple life cycles of raw materials, circularity offers automakers a chance to …

2022 rank Dealership group Total usedretail units 54 McGovern Automotive Group 14,357 79 Envision Motors 10,429 90 Bomnin Automotive Group 8,620 94 Empire Automotive 8,332 95 Young Automotive Group 8,191 97 Gilchrist Automotive 8,020 98 Bob Loquercio Auto Group 7,995 99 Murgado Automotive Group 7,989 Source: Automotive News Research & Data Center

Eight dealership groups are new to this year's top 100 used list. Three — McGovern, Envision and Young — are new to both this used ranking and the recently published list of the top 150 dealership groups based in the U.S. and ranked by 2022 new-vehicle sales. The other five groups — Bomnin, Empire, Gilchrist, Bob Loquercio and Murgado — have appeared in earlier top 150 lists but had never made the used ranking until now.

Dealership groups 2022 used-retail vehicles 2021 used-retail vehicles % change 1: Asbury Automotive Group † 151,464 105,206 44.0% 2: Cavender Auto Family 19,611 14,538 34.9% 3: Keating Auto Group 22,846 17,115 33.5% 4: Envision Motors 10,429 7,903 32.0% 5: Empire Automotive Group 8,332 6,476 28.7% 6: Shottenkirk Automotive Group 26,107 20,325 28.4% 7: Morgan Auto Group 77,610 62,808 23.6% 8: Fletcher Jones Automotive Group 19,278 15,785 22.1% 9: Car Pros Automotive Group 8,713 7,228 20.5% 10: Del Grande Dealer Group 12,801 10,767 18.9% † Publicly held Source: Automotive News Research & Data Center

Twenty-three dealership groups on the list recorded double-digit percentage gains in used-vehicle retail units sold. Those with the highest increases largely achieved the gains as a result of dealership acquisitions made in 2021 and 2022, as the addition of more stores boosted overall sales volumes. The chart above shows the groups with the 10 highest percentage improveme…

Last week, one of the most important organizations in this industry, SAE International — formerly known as the Society of Automotive Engineers — was in downtown Detroit for the WCX Leadership Summit.

I only wish I could have given those thousands of engineers a homework assignment before they left the Motor City. That's because automakers, dealers and consumers need a uniform, objective standard with which to measure — and more importantly communicate — an estimate of the remaining battery health of electric vehicles.

EVs will continue to increase their share of new-vehicle sales, which means that in just a few years, they will do the same in the secondary market. But accurately assessing the value of a used EV for a trade-in or consumer purchase requires at least some advanced information about the battery pack, the EV's most important system and the one whose future service life will depend not only on how far it has been driven but how and …

Automakers can read the writing on the wall: Americans now enjoy shopping for new cars on their cellphones or laptops at home in front of the TV. The industry's question is not how to stop all that — it's how to embrace it.

Mercedes Benz and its retailers are launching a two-pronged strategy. First, design new-generation showrooms that focus less on pushing inventory and more on assisting shoppers who are already engaged in the digital process. Second, create boutiques where a customer might learn about a model, explore the brand and discover the retailer. Both formats offer a peek into the future, where Mercedes showrooms and dealership lots get smaller and staff members have a new digital-first outlook on retailing autos.

Mercedes has two new retail looks coming into the market. One is the brand's first store redesign in a decade, called MB EVolution, left. The other is a concept for dealers to display vehicles and explain the brand in off-…

LOS ANGELES — A California state court jury on Friday handed Tesla Inc. a sweeping win, finding the electric vehicle maker's Autopilot feature did not fail in what appeared to be the first trial related to a crash involving the partially automated driving software.

Tesla has been testing and rolling out an Autopilot and more advanced "Full Self-Driving" system, which CEO Elon Musk has touted as crucial to the company's future but which has drawn regulatory and legal scrutiny.

Los Angeles resident Justine Hsu sued in 2020, saying her Tesla Model S swerved into a curb while on Autopilot, and an airbag was deployed "so violently it fractured Plaintiff's jaw, knocked out teeth, and caused nerve damage to her face.”

She alleged defects in the design of Autopilot and the airbag, and sought more than $3 million in damages.

Tesla denied liability for the accident and said in a court filing that Hsu used Autopilot on city streets, despite a user manual wa…

Private equity and other investors funneled $394 million into U.S. transportation technology startups in March, about a 43 percent decline from the previous month, according to data compiled by Automotive News.

Investment by venture capitalists, companies and others into burgeoning advanced transportation technology companies has cooled sequentially from $1.16 billion in January to $690.5 million in February and then again to the March figure.

All told, startups in the sector have raised nearly $2.8 billion this year. Automotive News started compiling the figures for 2023 and does not have comparable data for the prior year.

Investment in mobility technology companies is slowing because of high-interest rates and the fallout from the Silicon Valley Bank run and failure. If there is an investment bright spot, it's in battery technology companies. That sector's investment activity is driven in large part by tax provisions in the federal government's Infla…

The industry disruption that followed the COVID-19 pandemic, which left dealership lots bare and shoppers struggling to find cars, has turned the buying process on its head.

"Customer service everywhere has gotten significantly worse since the pandemic," said Matthew Phillips, CEO of Car Pros, a dealership group operating seven stores in California and Washington.

"Organizations that can get customer service right have a unique opportunity to especially 'wow' customers, because people in general and in the dealerships — their expectations have been lowered," he said.

That's why Phillips — a second-generation car dealer who spent the bulk of his career on the operations side as CFO and in human resources, IT and risk management — is now focused on elevating customer service across the retail group. And he's doing it by training staff to simply listen with empathy to understand what each customer's needs and wants are.

Phillips graduate…

Automotive News on May 22 is introducing a new list of large used-only vehicle retailers. This list will include major players such as CarMax Inc. and Carvana Co. If you operate a large used-only vehicle retailer, please submit your contact information to receive a survey collecting your information.

Trash can-size metal boxes popping up in dealerships filled with old cellphones and laptop computers won't solve automakers' overwhelming mineral requirements to convert their production to battery-electric propulsion — but they could certainly help.

This month Volkswagen became the second brand, following sibling Audi, to ask its dealers to install metal collection boxes for old consumer electronics — such as laptops, cellphones, electric toothbrushes — from Redwood Materials in their stores.

The reason is simple: While there is likely some gold in all of those old devices taking up space in America's junk drawers, there are also a lot of other extremely valuable minerals lurking in those devices that can be recycled and remanufactured into battery packs for electric cars.

Nickel, copper, lithium, cobalt and other precious minerals all were common in the batteries powering yesterday's electronics and can be extremely useful in b…