Trade News

As the 117th Congress winds down, the Senate on Thursday evening passed bipartisan legislation that would provide dealers LIFO tax relief.

"Senate passage of the bill is great progress to provide dealers on LIFO much needed relief due to the pandemic and supply chain issues," Mike Stanton, CEO of the National Automobile Dealers Association, said in a statement Friday morning.

However, the House did not vote on its version of the LIFO relief bill on Friday, instead focusing on a nearly $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package that will avert a federal government shutdown. That bill was passed by the House and sent to the White House before Congress adjourned.

A new Republican-majority Congress will convene at the beginning next year.

In April, U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., introduced a bill — the Supply Chain Disruptions Relief Act — which would allow dealerships that use the "last in, first out" inventory accounting to wait until 2025 to replace …

A conversation with Automotive News Senior Editor Dan Shine about the biggest stories and issues affecting the dealership service drive, as well as the finance and insurance office in 2022.

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Auto exports from China have surged this year as domestic automakers look to establish themselves beyond their home market.

Through September, a total of 2.2 million passenger cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles were exported from China. That is up 54 percent from the same period last year and already more than double the average from 2012 through 2020.

Electric vehicles are the biggest contributor to the surge, with 342,000 passenger EVs exported in the first three quarters of the year.

That is 29 percent of all vehicle exports in this segment and a big increase from 2019, when EVs accounted for just 2 percent of exports.

There are several factors driving China’s EV export growth. Its dominance of EV battery and materials supplies has allowed domestic auto markets to ramp up production.

Western automakers are using the country’s lower production costs and established supply chain to churn out EVs for customers around the globe as inter…

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Has your innovation been sold to an OEM? Is your innovation commercialized? The Automotive News PACE Award is the program for you. With more than a quarter century of history recognizing innovations driven by automotive suppliers, the PACE Award is recognized in the global automotive industry for identifying and celebrating the latest game-changing innovation from the plant floor to the product to the showroom floor.

Do you have an early-stage innovation not yet sold to an OEM customer? PACEpilot is the program for you. PACEpilot enters its third year in 2022. It is designed to recognize post-pilot pre-commercial innovations in the automotive and future mobility space. These represent product, software/IT system or process and idea incubators that have the potential to revolutionize an automaker's business and products.

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Now in its second year, Automotive News’ Notable Champions of Diversity features 18 executives in the industry who've demonstrated their commitment to improving diversity, equity and inclusion. They were selected by a panel of editors and reporters from nominations submitted by our readers. The honorees work in auto manufacturing, supply chain, marketing, retail, finance, technology and mobility. Their personal experiences inform their approaches to DE&I and fuel their passions.

Head of diversity, equity and inclusion and communications

Continental North America

Tesla Inc.'s soaring stock price produced a nearly $23.5 billion windfall for Elon Musk last year, making him the highest-paid CEO at publicly traded U.S. companies in the auto industry by far, according to the Automotive News/Equilar CEO Compensation study.

Most other CEOs in the industry got sizable pay increases in 2021 as well, even though none came remotely close to matching the value of Musk's stock options alone. The median for all CEOs was $12.3 million, which represents a 78 percent increase over the median of those same CEOs on last year's list, which was $6.9 million.

For CEOs who have been in their positions for at least two years, median compensation rose 90 percent from 2020, said Courtney Yu, Equilar's director of research.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who topped last year's survey, ranked No. 2 behind Musk with total compensation of $560.9 million. Huang's compensation, which included $996,216 in salary and $506.8 million in stock option gai…

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I never liked the term "new normal." What's "normal" is always changing, ever-new, like a new model year.

But sometimes we see more tectonic shifts: The $5 day. The Flint sit-down strike. The chicken tax. Nader. Transplants. Tesla. COVID-19.

We're not done with COVID, but it's become less of an immediate threat, individually or economically — at least in the West. China is another story.

We're not done with the chip shortage, either, but like COVID, it's becoming a less acute pain point. After more than 10 million light vehicles of production were lost for lack of semiconductors in 2021, fewer than half that many were lost in 2022, according to AutoForecast Solutions.

Looking back, though, this was not the recovery year I had anticipated. Russia's invasion of Ukraine took the legs out of European production, which remains a significant part of the globally integrated auto industry.

And although production c…

Auto retail giant AutoNation, large privately owned Ken Garff Automotive Group and two other auto retailers expanded their dealership portfolios with acquisitions in third and fourth quarters.

Here's a look at the deals involving domestic, luxury and import dealerships and stores in Colorado, Ohio, North Dakota and Arizona.

Two transactions involved an auto retailer ranked on Automotive News' top 150 dealership groups list.

AutoNation adds four Colorado stores

Auto retail giant AutoNation Inc. has closed on the acquisition of four Colorado dealerships, a purchase the company announced in October, as it expands its presence in the Centennial State.

AutoNation in a Dec. 5 Twitter post said it had added two locations in Colorado Springs: AutoNation Acura Colorado Springs and AutoNation Dodge-Ram Colorado Springs. And on Dec. 9, in a tweet, it said it had added AutoNation Dodge-Ram Broadway and AutoNation Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram Cañon City. Read more