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Ellie Harris, senior director of sales at Ally Financial, shares tips that can help dealerships evolve their F&I practices and exceed changing customer expectations.

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Emma Hancock, Automotive News: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the All Ears podcast. I'm Emma Hancock, host and strategist at Automotive News. This podcast is sponsored by Ally Financial and produced by the Automotive News Content Studio. In each episode, we explore topics that are important to leaders in automotive retailing. Our guests include experts in their field from Ally, plus dealers from around the country, and we cover tips and explore insights that can help dealerships successfully navigate the transformational ch…

WASHINGTON — The nation's top auto safety regulator opened an investigation this month into more than 120,000 Tesla Model Y crossovers from the 2023 model year after reports of steering wheels detaching while driving.

In a document made public Wednesday, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation said it was aware of two reports of "complete detachment of the steering wheel from the steering column while driving."

Both vehicles were delivered to the owners with a missing retaining bolt that attaches the steering wheel to the steering column, the agency said in the document.

The steering wheels on both vehicles were removed and reinstalled.

"A friction fit maintained the connection between the steering wheel and the column splines during operation until separation," NHTSA said. "Sudden separation occurred when the force exerted on the steering wheel overcame the resistance of the friction fit while the vehicles were in motion. Both known incidents oc…

SHANGHAI - Chinese President Xi Jinping told CATL on Monday he had mixed feelings about its status as the world's largest battery maker - remarks that come at a time when the company is rapidly expanding abroad and moving to undercut domestic rivals.

After a presentation by CATL Chairman Zeng Yuqun, who described how the company commands 37 percent of the global battery market, Xi was quoted as saying that he was "both happy and worried," glad about its leading position but concerned about the risks.

Xi was speaking in a closed-door meeting with industry and commerce representatives on the sidelines of the annual session of parliament, according to a statement published by the official Xinhua news agency on Tuesday.

CATL has been building factories overseas and last month agreed to license its technology to a new plant that Ford Motor Co. is building in Michigan.

It has also offered to cut costs for Chinese automakers, sources have said, seeking …

China’s week-long annual legislative conference kicked off on Sunday. As the cavernous Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square packs full of the country’s political elite, auto industry executives are watching closely for what, if any, new state support for the electric vehicle sector may emerge.

National subsidies that at one point handed as much as 60,000 yuan ($8,700) back to electric-car buyers were key to spurring uptake of EVs in China. For the most part, they’ve been a runaway success: China is the world’s biggest market for electric cars, with shipments of new-energy passenger vehicles almost doubling last year to 6.5 million.

But national subsidies fell away at the end of the year, and while EVs are still selling at a pace that puts other countries to shame, growth has slowed. Auto executives have started to call for bringing subsidies back at the national level.

Feng Xingya, president of state-backed Guangzhou Automobile Group Co., is a de…

DETROIT — Traditionally, automakers didn't install anything on a vehicle that they couldn't charge for. While it might simplify manufacturing somewhat to build each vehicle with the same set of parts, it costs money to install buttons, switches, knobs, sensors, computers and wiring for optional or nonfunctioning equipment.

When you build hundreds of thousands of vehicles each year, every extra nickel or dime in parts matters. But in the electric vehicle/infotainment/subscription era, that strategy is changing. With the average age of vehicles at a record high (12-plus years), average transaction prices increasing and loans stretching to eight years and longer, automakers are thinking about how vehicles can generate revenue long after they leave a showroom.

Volvo's EX90 is a good example of how automakers are building capability into vehicles that they might someday be able to monetize.

Every EX90 built will come standard with lidar, even though the sof…

Honda has built and sold millions of midsize cars in the U.S. for decades and has perfected the family sedan recipe with the Accord: comfortable interior, respectable fuel economy, affordable pricing and a full suite of safety gear.

Accord design has evolved with the times, notably to stand out in an expanding sea of crossovers and SUVs, more recently by embracing sportback styling.

The Accord, a mainstay of Honda's lineup and the midsize sedan market, is redesigned for 2023 with sportier handling, a more tech-forward cabin and a hybrid-dominated lineup.

The newest body has been stretched 2.8 inches, with front-to-back upper character lines along the side, and a longer hood. The fastback roofline remains but with cleaner lines.

The Accord is now available in six trims: LX, EX, Sport, EX-L, Sport-L and Touring — down from 10 on the outgoing model.

Honda's turbo 2.0-liter, inline four-cylinder engine, mated to a 10-speed automatic, has been …

DETROIT — General Motors isn't promising that Ultra Cruise, its hands-free driving system for city streets, can handle every situation right away.

Ultra Cruise, which debuts in 2024 on the Cadillac Celestiq, will tell the driver to take over through roundabouts and other intersections requiring complicated maneuvers, said Jason Ditman, the system's chief engineer. It also will relinquish control at the threshold of destinations such as a grocery store parking lot or the owner's driveway, Ditman said.

"Over time, we'll grow this to where we're covering nearly every paved road," he told reporters.

The limitations that GM is revealing for the system — and its repetition of the phrase "safely deploy" — show that the automaker is taking a different tack than Tesla, which is under investigation for accidents involving the semiautonomous features it calls Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. GM said Ultra Cruise can tackle 95 percent of driving scenarios.

I…

Installing electric vehicle chargers at dealerships is proving to be complicated and costly.

There are problems with utilities and city planning departments. There are different types and numbers of chargers to install. Dealers are finding there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

"The more we dig into this whole shift, it's becoming more and more apparent that it's not cheap. And it's complicated. And it's time-consuming," said Rinaldi Halim, president of Sierra Automotive Group, which has six stores selling Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, Subaru, Honda and Chevrolet vehicles in Los Angeles and Monrovia, Calif.

While dealers have extensive experience with facility upgrades, the technical nature of installing chargers at commercial scale is often beyond their expertise. Depending on the age of the building, the proximity and capacity of their current transformer and other factors, dealers must develop custom solutions to meet their brands' requirements.

SAN FRANCISCO - Rivian Automotive plans to sell bonds worth $1.3 billion, it said on Monday, as weakening demand and lofty costs tighten a cash crunch around electric vehicle makers.

Rivian shares fell nearly 7 percent in after-hours trading.

Initial investors will get an option to buy an additional $200 million of the bonds for settlement 13 days after the bonds are issued, Rivian said in a statement.

The capital from this offering will help facilitate the launch of Rivian's smaller R2 vehicle family, a Rivian spokesperson told Reuters, adding that convertible debt was "optimal cost of capital versus selling equity at today's levels."

Irvine, California-based Rivian, which makes R1T electric pickup trucks and R1S crossovers, has said its cash balance will fund its operations through 2025. It reported cash and cash equivalents of $11.57 billion at the end of December, down from $13.27 billion a quarter earlier.

In an effort to cut costs, th…

Another major publicly traded auto retailer has found an accounting issue related to an acquisition.

Asbury Automotive Group Inc. “has not maintained effective internal control over financial reporting” at Larry H. Miller Dealerships and Total Care Auto, acquired in December 2021, auditor Ernst & Young said last week.

Despite the imperfect processes, the results in Asbury’s most recent earnings report report are accurate, Ernst & Young said.

Minor accounting problems sometimes crop up after an acquisition and can be quickly remedied. In October, Sonic Automotive Inc. said it identified an accounting error at a recently acquired dealership. Analysts described the issues as minor.

At Asbury, the insufficient information technology controls relate to the design of user access reviews and appropriate administrative access for certain applications, Ernst & Young wrote.

Glenn Chin, an equity analyst at Seaport Research Partners, said…

Cadillac stores scored highest in the annual Pied Piper PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness Study measuring speed and quality of responses to Internet customer inquiries of dealerships.

Pied Piper said it submitted inquiries to 5,428 dealership websites, posing specific questions, and gave a score out of 100 based on how well each store responded over the next 24 hours.

Cadillac received a score of 72 this year, an increase of seven points over last year. Infiniti, last year's top brand, was second, its score increasing two points to 69. Lucid placed at the bottom, with a score of 30, Pied Piper said in a Monday statement.

Scores have a correlation with sales numbers, Pied Piper CEO Fran O'Hagan told Automotive News. Dealerships that score over 80 sell about 50 percent more units for the same quantity of customers coming through the website than stores that score below 40.

Ford was a standout among mass-market brands for its 10-point improvement thi…