Trade News

Volta Inc. said on Wednesday that a Shell Plc subsidiary would take over the electric vehicle charging network operator in an all-cash deal valued at about $169 million.

Shell USA Inc will acquire all outstanding shares of Class A common stock of Volta for 86 cents apiece in cash in a deal that is expected to close in the first half of the year, Volta said.

Shell and other companies such as France's EDF and Norway's Statkraft have been investing in EV charging infrastructure to cash in on the growing demand for electric vehicles.

The announcement follows other investments in the EV charging infrastructure space, including Mercedes-Benz, which is poised to invest billions of dollars to build 10,000 fast-charging points in North America, Europe and China by 2030.

As part of the deal, Shell USA will also provide loans to Volta to help the company through the closing of the deal.

The acquisition of Volta — which installs chargers with large vid…

The Illinois Automobile Dealers Association filed an appeal in Chicago challenging a December court ruling that allows Rivian Automotive and Lucid Group to continue direct EV sales in the state.

The appeal, filed Friday, had been expected.

In the Dec. 19, 2022, ruling, Associate Judge David Atkins decided the Illinois secretary of state was correct in issuing dealer licenses to the EV startups, as it previously had for Tesla Inc. The ruling opens the door for manufacturers to follow Tesla's direct-sales model. Joe McMahon, the association's executive director, previously told Automotive News the decision gives special treatment to EV makers.

Direct sales from manufacturers result in a monopoly with no price benefit, McMahon said in a Jan. 5 statement.

The state's dealer association, which represents 700 dealerships, cited the Illinois Vehicle Code and Illinois Motor Vehicle Franchise Act as stating that public vehicle sales must be made through li…

PARIS -- Stellantis and Terrafame have struck a deal for the Finnish company to supply the automaker with nickel sulphate over a five-year period, starting from 2025 onwards.

"This agreement is part of the key raw material sourcing to fit with our electrified vehicle battery pack needs,” Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said in a statement.

Stellantis wants 100 percent of its European passenger car sales and 50 percent of its U.S. passenger car and light-duty truck sales to be full-electric vehicles by 2030.

The automaker said the agreement with Terrafame "will cover a significant portion of the needs for sustainable regionally sourced nickel."

Last week, Stellantis struck a deal with Australian miner Element for the supply of manganese sulphite, the latest in a series of accords for the procurement of raw materials for electric batteries.

"I quit from a dealership environment, and I went and ran an independent facility, and that was a huge education for me. I got to learn the parts, I got to learn the payroll, the hiring, the taxes — all of these things I would have never gotten to learn had I just stayed an adviser." — Fixed Ops Director Shawn Butler of Bristol Honda in Tennessee on what he learned from running an independent repair facility on the Jan. 9 episode of the "What the Fixed Ops?!" podcast. Butler's turnaround of the Bristol Honda service department was the subject of two Automotive News reports last year.

A former service adviser who was replaced after several hospitalizations has sued a Kalamazoo, Mich., dealer group for disability discrimination and violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Heather Crummel's suit, filed Dec. 21, accuses Maple Hill Auto Group of illegally discharging her without warning while on medical leave and without showing the leave posed any problems for the store. The company has Subaru, Hyundai, Volvo, Volkswagen, Genesis and Audi franchises.

Owner and general manager Jim VandenBerg told Automotive News he couldn't comment on the case.

The store hired Crummel as a service adviser in October 2017, and she was initially hospitalized in early 2019, according to the complaint. Maple Hill notified her that she was eligible for medical leave under FMLA, and she used it several times before her December 2019 termination, it said.

The month before the termination, management gave her high job perfor…

Auto technicians getting ready to graduate from training programs, or established technicians looking for new opportunities can now compare data to see which U.S. states might be the best fit for them.

The website FindTheBestCarPrice.com compiled data from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. examining such factors as the number of people working as technicians, auto technician jobs per 1,000 jobs, annual median salary and the cost of living. Each state is ranked on how well it fares overall.

Oklahoma is the top state for technicians looking for work. Median annual salary for auto techs there is $46,180 — almost $10,000 more than the median pay across all jobs in the state. Additionally, Oklahoma has the second-lowest cost of living of all 50 states, and job opportunities for technicians are better than average, with 4.9 mechanic jobs per 1,000 jobs.

In contrast, Washington, D.C. ranks last in the survey. While it has the highest m…

Lisa McIntyre is CEO of the Greater Pittsburgh Automobile Dealers Association.

First car: Pontiac Sunbird

First concert: Shaun Cassidy (Yep, I am that old.)

Pet peeve: Adults using emojis

Most thrilling/adventurous thing you've done: I threw out the first pitch at a Pittsburgh Pirates game.

Personal hero: My mom. She is 88 and still inspires me every day.

First job: Making burgers at Wendy's

Something on your bucket list: Sitting in the gallery at the Waste Management Open

One thing you learned on the job you never forgot: In sales, merely following up sets you apart from the majority of the competition.

Three people you'd invite to dinner, living or dead: My dad (deceased), my husband and my daughter ... there is no one I would rather have at my dinner table!

What did you want to be when you were a kid? Newspaper reporter (Yep, I am that old.)

BEIJING — Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD is embarking on a rapid global expansion to challenge Tesla but for now it's stuck in the slow lane on its rival's home turf.

While BYD has not fully articulated its global ambitions in public, a concerted worldwide push has become the single most important strategic focus for China's biggest EV maker, four sources familiar with BYD management's thinking said.

Besides a drive into some European markets already underway, BYD spent much of last year conducting a study on how to set up a U.S. distribution network for its latest electric models, two of the sources said.

They described the study as advanced and serious, with specific recommendations from Detroit consultancy Urban Science on how many outlets in each state and city BYD would need, as well as formats for the brick-and-mortar stores.

The momentum was building toward an announcement at this year's global CES tech show in Las Vegas, where BYD was…

A 2016 video that Tesla Inc. used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.

The video, which remains archived on Tesla’s website, was released in October 2016 and promoted on Twitter by CEO Elon Musk as evidence that “Tesla drives itself.”

But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, said in the transcript of a July deposition taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a 2018 fatal crash involving a former Apple engineer.

The previously unreported testimony by Elluswamy represents the first time a Tesla employee has confirmed and detailed how the video was produced.

The video carries a tagline saying: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything…

Automotive News reporter Audrey LaForest talks about the confusion and unanswered questions surrounding new EV tax credit rules in the U.S. Used-vehicle sales in 2022 tumbled to their lowest numbers in nearly a decade. White hat hackers gain access to data from seven automakers. And Ford scales down its EV partnership with VW.

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