Trade News

Trouble continues to simmer for Hyundai Motor America and Kia America despite developing a free fix for owners to protect certain older-model-year Hyundai and Kia vehicles from being hotwired.

On Feb. 14, the Korean automakers, both owned by Hyundai Motor Group, launched a service campaign in the form of a software update for 8.4 million Hyundai and Kia vehicles that lack a crucial anti-theft device called an engine immobilizer.

An engine immobilizer electronically tethers a vehicle to its key fob and prevents it from starting without the device present.

The software update extends the length of the vehicle's existing alarm from 30 seconds to one minute and requires the key in the ignition for the vehicle to be turned on. The announcement of the campaign also came from NHTSA.

But one day after the service campaign was issued, the city of Columbus, Ohio — which calculated a near 500 percent increase in thefts of Kia and H…

Customers and auto dealers continue to be miles apart in their perceptions of transparency in the car buying process, according to Capital One.

Only 21 percent of consumers called car shopping very or fully transparent, compared with 68 percent of dealership owners and staffers surveyed, the 2023 Capital One Car Buying Outlook study reported.

"For the right dealerships, this is a huge area of opportunity," Sanjiv Yajnik, president of financial services at Capital One, said at a Jan. 18 webinar discussing the study results.

Capital One called the perception gap between the groups similar to that a year earlier, when 26 percent of buyers and 77 percent of dealers called car buying significantly transparent.

"It's a very, very simple thing," Yajnik told Automotive News during the American Financial Services Vehicle Finance Conference on Jan. 26. "The customer lives in a different world than the dealer."

A customer visiting a site like Amazon…

A camouflaged crossover photographed while undergoing testing in Michigan could be a three-row electric Cadillac.

The outline of a Cadillac badge is visible on the liftgate and the stacked, vertical lighting appears similar to other Cadillac electric prototypes. Paul Waatti, manager of industry analysis for AutoPacific, said the vehicle could be similar, if not slightly larger, than the gasoline-powered XT6 large crossover and likely will be revealed this year, with output starting in 2024.

Rory Harvey, vice president of global Cadillac, said this month that the brand will reveal three EVs this year that should enter production in 2024 but declined to give more details. Cadillac plans to go all electric by 2030.

Ford Motor Co. is extending the downtime at an F-150 Lightning plant in Dearborn, Mich., for an additional week following a battery fire in a truck earlier this month.

The automaker, in a statement, said battery-supplier SK On has made some manufacturing changes and restarted production at its plant in Georgia.

“The teams worked quickly to identify the root cause of the issue,” Ford spokeswoman Jennifer Flake said in an email. “We agree with SK’s recommended changes in their equipment and processes for SK’s cell production lines.

"SK has started building battery cells again in Commerce, Ga. It will take SK time to ensure they are back to building high-quality cells and to deliver them to the Lightning production line. Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center will suspend production through the end of next week, and we’ll continue to provide updates.”

Flake said the hold on Lightning shipments to dealerships will continue an extra week.

The fi…

Ford Motor Co. promoted Sam Wu to head up its China business as the U.S. automaker seeks to reverse a more than five-year sales slump in the world's largest auto market.

Wu will move up to the role of president and CEO of Ford China from his current position as managing director and chief operating officer on March 1, Ford said in a statement. He takes over from Anning Chen, who will retire from the company on Oct. 1.

Chen, a former Ford engineer and chairman of Chery Jaguar Land Rover in China, was appointed in 2018. The U.S. automaker's China sales began to contract in late 2017, in part due to the lack of a popular SUV or crossover.

Since 2019, it has launched a series of new models in China but the recovery has been bumpy, in part due to the rise of local electric-vehicle competitors as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. Its partners in China are Changan Automobile Group and Jiangling Motors Group.

Sales last year across China's auto industry were…

For a company that not long ago had a higher valuation than Ford, Carvana has taken a mighty fall — to the edge of bankruptcy, according to many experts. Carvana's stock fell a whopping 98 percent in 2022 — and may not yet have seen bottom. Even if the company manages to rehabilitate itself, analysts are recommending that investors stay away from its stock.

Until recently, Carvana was the most popular online vehicle sales site in the U.S. enabling consumers to buy used cars. Seen as a disrupter in a very conservative industry, its innovations include towering vending machines that dispense purchased vehicles. Now, with Carvana facing a plunging stock price, a surplus of vehicles it can't sell and a cash crunch resulting from rising interest rates, it looks like the end for the online vehicle sales site.

Carvana apparently also made a lot of mistakes in the way it handled sales, but its online sales model was not one of them. Polls indicate cons…

SHANGHAI - Chinese battery manufacturer CALB has been given the go-ahead to become an official supplier to Japan's Honda Motor Co. in what the Hong Kong-listed company says is a key milestone to grow globally.

The development follows CALB's passing of audits jointly conducted by experts in both Japan and China, covering production capacity and quality assurance capability, and opens the door for CALB to begin officially supplying products for Honda's e:NP1 and e:NS1 models, according to a statement published on CALB's official WeChat account on Thursday.

"Becoming an official supplier of Honda Motors is another key milestone for the company to further develop overseas," CALB said.

CALB’s automotive customers already include electric-vehicle makers Xpeng and Nio and its international expansion marks a challenge to China's CATL, the world's largest battery maker, with 37 percent of the global market.

NEW YORK -- South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor Co. on Friday told shareholders that it would divest its controlling stake in a major Alabama auto parts plant where Reuters last year documented children as young as 12 were working.

In a Feb. 24 letter to shareholders from Hyundai CEO Jaehoon Chang, the company said recent audits at 29 of its direct suppliers across Alabama made it confident they are "now in full compliance with underage labor laws."

The audits began last August, after Reuters first reported on the issue, and were conducted by an outside law firm that reviewed documents and did on-site inspections.

Hyundai provided a copy of the letter to Reuters.

Hyundai also told investors it was implementing extensive new corporate measures, including a training program for its parts suppliers to begin next month in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), to prevent future child labor violations. DOL did not immediately respond …

For nearly as long as there have been warranties, automakers and auto dealers have battled over factory reimbursements for warranty work.

But now, it appears that dealers have opened up a successful new front in their decades-long struggle — this time on the terrain of accommodating state capitols, where friendly legislators in some states are introducing amendments to franchise laws that mandate much higher payments for covered repairs.

So far, dealers have been successful in a handful of states, including Illinois, Wisconsin and Montana, but already the impact has been dramatic: nearly $250 million in additional payments sent to dealers in just the first year after manufacturers in Illinois were required to pay retail labor rates for service, according to an automakers umbrella group.

Now additional states — Colorado, California, Texas and others — are lining up to introduce similar changes to their franchise laws to close the gap between factory-pay …