Trade News

LAS VEGAS—Daimler Truck North America unveiled its SuperTruck II Wednesday, showing off an efficient diesel big rig intended to demonstrate fuel-saving technologies that can be deployed as the trucking industry pivots to zero-emission vehicles.

The sleek cab, painted in a pixelated rainbow livery to evoke a sense of effortless motion, is more of a proof-of-concept vehicle rather than the typical pie-in-the-sky concepts common in the auto industry.

"We focused on technologies and ideas that could be realistically implemented. We don't do science projects at DTNA," said Daimler Truck North America CEO John O'Leary.

The concept truck is based on Daimler's Freightliner Cascadia model, which with nearly 40 percent of the market is the leading seller among Class 8 trucks in the U.S.

The project's aim is to develop a tractor-trailer combination that demonstrates advances in aerodynamics, diesel engine technology, tire rolling resistance and other system…

Road trips in electric vehicles could soon become more feasible and easier to plan with Electrify America charging stations located at travel centers across the U.S.

Electrify America and TravelCenters of America detailed a new partnership Monday to install 1,000 chargers at 200 TravelCenters locations along major highways over the next five years. The companies plan to launch the first chargers this year.

The partnership will add Electrify America charging stations to major travel corridors, aiming to ease consumers' range anxiety on road trips, Rachel Moses, an Electrify America director, told Automotive News.

The installation will further expand access to EV chargers along highways. General Motors, EVgo and Pilot Flying J in July made a similar agreement with plans to install 2,000 chargers at 500 Pilot and Flying J travel centers.

The pace of installation and the locations of the chargers will depend on grant funds and utilization by region, …

Paul Meijer, host of "Sunday Night Live" on LinkedIn, and Robert Sebestyen of service department training company Gravitational Business spoke on Meijer's Jan. 29 show about selling customers new tires or brakes by talking about the improved safety aspects.

Sebestyen: "People buy improvements; they don't buy products. This is the feature, but what is the improvement to my life? The more you can articulate the impact for the client, the more they're going to see the value. If you don't articulate the value, it doesn't matter how good a deal it is, [the customer is] going to feel like it's not a good value, like [they're] overpaying."

Meijer: "It's not even about price. It's about understanding the value. If they understand the value, price becomes secondary."

There was a tie for the first time in the Women Driving Auto Retail video contest. Leslie Jefferson, an acquisition executive at Pohanka of Salisbury in Maryland, and Alicia Rivera, assistant service director at Trophy Nissan in Dallas, were named the winners at the NADA Show in Dallas last week.

The video contest, started in 2018, is part of the National Automobile Dealers Association's Women Driving Auto Retail initiative, which highlights women working in dealerships and encourages other women to pursue automotive careers. The contest celebrates women who work in all areas of the store.

The two women each received a $1,000 gift card and complimentary registration to the 2024 NADA Show in Las Vegas. The eight runners-up received $500 gift cards. Here are the videos from Jefferson, Rivera and the runners-up.

Jefferson was in a motor vehicle accident in 2020 that resulted in a spinal cord injury. But she made a remarkable recovery and was working full …

The Range Rover Velar, the most on-road-friendly vehicle in the Land Rover lineup, is getting a slight revamp for the 2024 model year.

The interior sports most of the revisions, which include a new and larger floating curved glass touch screen, available active noise cancelation, new upholstery and an optional air purification system.

The Range Rover Velar gets a new, more streamlined grille and headlights, plus a new lower rear bumper. Two engines remain available — a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder and a turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six with a mild hybrid system.

Prices, including shipping, range from $62,275 for the Velar P250 S to $79,675 for the Velar P400 Dynamic HSE.

Hyundai and Kia racked up another month of U.S. sales gains in January on improved inventory levels, higher fleet volume and electric-vehicle demand.

Volume rose 9 percent to 52,001 at Hyundai and 22 percent to 51,983 at Kia, the companies said Wednesday. It was the sixth consecutive month of year over year gains for the two brands, with Hyundai edging Kia by just 18 vehicles in January.

Hyundai said retail sales rose 1 percent to 48,247 last month. The company said it ended January with 45,158 cars and light trucks in stock, up from 37,379 at the end of December and 18,060 a year ago.

Kia set a January record and said five models – Niro, Sportage, Telluride, Carnival and Forte – also posted record deliveries for the month. Combined deliveries of Kia’s electrified vehicles jumped 128 percent.

Genesis also reported record January sales of 3,905, a 7.3 percent gain.

Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co., Subaru and Mazda were scheduled to rele…

Credit Acceptance Corp.'s net income fell 42 percent to $127.3 million during the fourth quarter, a decline driven primarily by a need to set more money aside for potential credit losses in light of changing cash flows.

The bruised credit auto lender said Tuesday it expected to collect smaller percentages of the indirect loans it obtained from dealerships in 2021 and 2022, resulting in a $41.1 million decline in forecasted net cash flow.

Credit Acceptance predicted its loans from each of the years 2018 to 2020 as of Dec. 31, 2022 were on track to perform more than a percentage point better than it had originally expected. However, its portfolio of loans written in 2022 looked to return 66.3 percent of all the principal and interest theoretically due the company, down 1.2 points from the yield Credit Acceptance originally expected. (However, loans from the fourth quarter were tracking 0.3 points better than expected.)

Chief Treasury Officer Doug Busk tol…

Battery startup Our Next Energy Inc. raised $300 million in its series B funding round, the company said Wednesday.

The investments valued the Michigan company at $1.2 billion.

The company intends to use the funds for building the second phase of a $1.6 billion battery-cell factory slated for completion in 2024, company founder and CEO Mujeeb Ijaz told Automotive News.

Coupled with $220 million in grants from the state of Michigan, the company, known as ONE, now has received more than $500 million to fund the Van Buren Township, Mich., battery cell factory. Workers completed construction of the factory's exterior in December 2022.

The company's long-term approach relies on developing batteries not dependent on hard-to-source rare earth elements and instead relies upon a lithium iron phosphate chemistry. That technical strategy attracted investors despite a high interest-rate environment, said Ijaz, a veteran of Ford Motor Co. and A123 Systems.

…

Jimmy Powell is the fixed operations director at Horne Auto Group in Gilbert, Ariz.

First car: Dodge Avenger (trash)

First concert you attended: Linkin Park

Name a pet peeve: Professionally, an unprofessional service adviser 🙂

Most thrilling/adventurous thing you've done: Nothing stands out; this question made me realize how boring I am.

Your personal hero: Jesus Christ

First job: Lifeguard

Something on your bucket list: Wouldn't mind traveling to a few different football stadiums to watch our Arizona Cardinals.

One thing you learned on the job you never forgot: As a manager, we are to remove obstacles for our employees.

If you could pick up a new skill, what would it be? Woodwork/framing

What did you want to be when you were a kid? NFL quarterback

Do you collect anything? Baseball cards

You're king for a day — what's your …

Self-driving technology firm Aurora Innovation Inc. appointed Ossa Fisher as its first president.

The move comes as part of the company's efforts to prepare for a commercial launch of autonomous trucks.

Fisher joins Aurora from Istation, an education-technology company based in Dallas. She oversaw engineering, product, sales and marketing divisions in her role as Istation's president and COO, a position she held since 2019.

At Aurora, Fisher will play a central role in scaling operations and maintaining relationships with key partners like FedEx Corp., Uber Freight, Werner, as well as truckmakers such as PACCAR and AB Volvo.

She will stay in Dallas, the company's growing operational hub. Aurora had less than 20 employees in Dallas at the end of 2020; that number rose to nearly 120 by the end of 2022, according to a company spokesman.

That's a small fraction of the company's overall 1,600 employees, currently spread out over the country in M…

GM Financial's profit is expected to normalize this year after high used-vehicle prices during the past two years contributed to strong earnings results, executives said.

The company said Tuesday that net income fell 33 percent to $605 million in the fourth quarter compared with the same time last year as the lender experienced the effects of lower net leased vehicle income and higher interest costs. Earnings before taxes also fell 33 percent, to $800 million compared with a year earlier.

General Motors' captive lender reported originating $3.5 billion in leases in the quarter ended Dec. 31, up 26 percent from the same period a year earlier, and $8.3 billion in retail loans, a 12 percent bump.

For all of 2022, GM Financial's net income fell 19 percent to $3.1 billion, and its earnings before taxes slid 18 percent to $4.1 billion.

"At GM Financial, the strong credit performance and historically high used-vehicle prices resulted in extraordinary re…

TOKYO – Toyota Motor Corp. has come under fire for what critics call foot-dragging on pure electric vehicles. Now the world's biggest automaker is fighting back with its most robust retort.

Its message to those who say EVs are the only way forward in the global battle to cap carbon dioxide emissions: Science says you're wrong.

Toyota is rolling out new facts and figures to back its strategy of taking a multipronged approach, blending EVs with hybrids and other green technologies.

Toyota insists new data shows that EV-only strategies, all the rage in some corners, fall short.

Toyota's Chief Scientist Gill Pratt made that pitch in a presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos this month. More recently, he repeated the message from Tokyo.

"Time will show that our point of view is actually the correct one," Pratt said at a roundtable here. "One way or the other, there will be a diversity of powertrains used throughout the world."

<…