Trade News

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…

AutoCanada Inc.’s net income fell in the final three months of 2022 as the company took a writedown on its used-vehicle inventory and saw floorplan financing costs climb with interest rates.

Canada’s only publicly traded dealership group last week reported (in Canadian dollars) net income of $14.8 million ($10.9 million USD) for the fourth quarter, down 79 percent from $69.4 million the year before.

Used-vehicle writedown provisions cost the company $12.4 million during the quarter, while added floorplan financing costs amounted to $13.3 million.

“These new hits to profitability impacted what was otherwise a historic quarter for AutoCanada,” said the company’s Executive Chairman Paul Antony on a conference call with financial analysts March 2.

Despite the lower net income, AutoCanada revenue hit a fourth quarter record of $1.4 billion, up from $1.2 billion in the same quarter of 2021. For the year, AutoCanada reported revenue of $6 billion for 202…

Q: The 2023 NADA Show is now solidly in the rearview mirror. What were some of your takeaways?

Alan Haig: At the NADA Show in Dallas, I had the pleasure of speaking with Bryan DeBoer, Chief Executive Officer, President and Director of Lithia Motors, for an hour onstage in Dallas during a conference Haig Partners helps organize.

I started by putting up a slide that showed that a $1,000 investment in Lithia on April 30, 2009, was worth $91,170 on January 26, the day of our discussion. This appreciation in value was far more than other auto retailers’ stocks and superior to the best-known tech stocks during that same period. The main reason? Lithia grew faster.

In 2008, Lithia generated $2.1 billion in revenue from 96 dealerships. By 2022 its revenue had jumped to more than $30 billion from 282 dealerships. Some of this revenue growth came from increases in same-store sales, due to improved operations. However, the large majority of it came from acquisiti…

A dealer acquired his second store, a daughter bought the majority share of a dealership from her parents and auto retailing groups acquired more stores to add to their holdings in third-quarter and fourth-quarter transactions last year.

Here's a look at the deals involving domestic and import brands and stores in Virginia, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota.

Dealer Jamar Brinkley last year acquired his second dealership, formerly known as Discovery Ford-Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram in the small central Virginia market of Altavista. The dealership has a separate Ford showroom but shares a common service area.

The selling dealer was Kevin Geagan, said Gerrick Wilkins, vice president for Dealer Support Network, a buy-sell brokerage firm. The transaction closed Sept. 17.

Wilkins was the buyer's representative in the deal, he said in a phone interview. Dealer Support Network has offices in Winnsboro, Texas, and Leeds, Ala.

Brinkley renamed the deale…

Lordstown Motors Corp. on Monday posted a bigger loss for the fourth quarter, as the electric-vehicle maker struggled with production costs and missed its delivery target for the Endurance pickup truck in the period.

EV companies such as Lordstown that went public in the past few years have been battling surging costs and challenges in securing supply of parts to make enough vehicles to meet the sector's burgeoning demand.

The company said Monday that its net loss widened to $102.3 million from $81.2 million a year earlier. The results included an impairment charge of $36.5 million caused mainly by a decrease in its stock price.

At the start of commercial production in September, the company had set a target to deliver 50 vehicles in 2022 and more in 2023 out of the planned first batch of 500 units.

However, it suspended production last month due to performance and quality issues with some components and reported sales of only six vehicles. The su…

Tesla Inc. slashed prices of its Model S sedan and Model X crossover in the US late Sunday night by $5,000 and $10,000 respectively as the company seeks to goose demand in the final month of the quarter.

The Model S all-wheel drive is now $89,990, down 5.2 percent from $94,990, according to the company's website. The Model S Plaid is now $109,990, down 4.3 percent from $114,990. Te Model X all-wheel drive is now $99,990, down 9.1 percent from $109,990. The Model X Plaid is now $109,990, down 8.3 percent from $119,990.Tesla sells its cars direct to consumers and often tweaks its pricing. The latest moves come even though Tesla drastically cut prices in January in a broad bid to boost sales.

At the company's March 1 investor day, held at Tesla's factory in Austin, Texas, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and other leaders emphasized manufacturing efficiency and cost cutting.

"The desire for people to own a Tesla is extremely high," said Musk. "The limitin…