Trade News

DETROIT — The auto industry winnowed from hundreds of companies from its beginnings a century ago to the Detroit 3 in the U.S.

There once were a dozen or so popular search engines. The number dwindled to, charitably, two.

Chris Urmson, one of the founding members of Google's self-driving car project more than a decade ago, and now the CEO and co-founder of Aurora Innovation, sees the self-driving industry unfolding in similar fashion.

"I've been saying for six to seven years that we're going to see consolidation," he said Monday. "It doesn't mean that it's not an interesting space. It just means some people had the combination of capabilities, capital and technology, then made the partnerships to go and succeed."

Urmson spoke during the Automotive News Congress Monday in Detroit.

His remarks came at a time the self-driving industry is facing renewed self-reflection. In October, Argo AI, a self-driving tech company funded by Ford Motor Co. a…

DETROIT — The ongoing digital transformation of the auto industry has not only changed the way vehicles are retailed but the relationship between consumers and automakers as well, according to two executives leading that transformation.

"The cloud is as important a component as the wheels on the vehicle," Scott Miller, vice president for software defined vehicle and operating system with General Motors, told attendees here at the Automotive News Congress.

Miller said GM will begin rolling out the first foundational systems to eventually enable its vision of fully connected vehicles, Ultifi, next year.

Ultifi is GM's in-vehicle customer experience platform. The automaker sees that ecosystem eventually extending decades into the future, changing and adapting even through subsequent owners and connecting consumers to a digital world through their vehicles.

The "once-a-century" transformation of the auto industry is underway but will change "every asp…

Mercedes-AMG is poised to raise the vroom ante with the 2023 S 63 E Performance.

The S-class sedan features performance hybrid technology from Formula 1 with an AMG 4.0-liter V-8 Biturbo engine at the front and a 188 hp electric motor at the rear axle.

Also on board is a 13.1-kilowatt-hour, high-performance battery.

The sedan delivers combined output of 791 hp and can sprint from 0-to-60 mph in about 3.2 seconds. Also, for the first time, an S-Class sedan bears the AMG-specific radiator grille with vertical louvers and a large central star.

WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — Pierce College inaugurated a $22.3 million Advanced Automotive Technology building in mid-October to expand its automotive service technology program. Community colleges such as Pierce are a vital source of service technicians for auto dealerships.

The job of automotive service technician is evolving, and funding is pouring into programs to meet the need for technicians who can work on electric and autonomous vehicles. But the job's image is still stuck in its grease and grime past, and that needs to change to help attract more young people to the field.

"People don't want their kids to be auto mechanics," says Tom Fortune, associate professor of automotive service technology and a faculty advisor at Pierce. "They want them to be doctors and dentists and lawyers."

The new 21,233-square-foot building includes bays specifically designed for teaching curriculum related to alternative fuel vehicles, including advanced diagnostics. …

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Training self-driving vehicles to handle unexpected situations is one of the biggest challenges to commercialization.

Autonomous technology companies frequently showcase how their self-driving software responds to unusual events and edge cases in general traffic, but few demonstrate what happens when something is physically amiss with the autonomous vehicle itself.

Flat tires, for example, can result in catastrophic consequences for self-driving trucks. At highway speeds, big rigs can be difficult to control when one of the tires they used for steering suffers a blowout.

That's one safety skill Kodiak Robotics Inc., a self-driving trucking startup, has been refining and demonstrating in closed-course testing. The company recently showed video from a test in which one of its Class 8 tractor-trailers driving at 35 mph runs over a device designed to puncture tires.

Within microseconds, it respon…

Economists are keeping an eye out for signs of a U.S. recession. But one early indicator of business conditions ahead is signaling that the auto industry is moving into some good times.

Orders for vehicle tooling — an activity that reveals when vehicle programs are stirring — are rising and will likely experience 13 percent compound annual growth from next year through 2025, according to a forecast from Harbour Results Inc.

The increase is significant because automotive tooling activity has been on a downward curve for the past three years.

The coming change is not a reflection of the pandemic's disappearance from automaker business plans, but rather a sign that companies are preparing for redesigns and variations of bread-and-butter products such as full-size pickups, said Laurie Harbour, CEO of Harbour Results, which tracks activity and trends among tool-and-die and mold makers across North America."It's not electric vehicles tha…

What will automotive F&I see in 2023?

This year started with the Fed's benchmark interest rate at 0.1 percent and a new car's APR at 4.3 percent. New-vehicle inventories were down and used vehicle prices were up year-over-year.

Nearly 12 months later, 2022 is ending with the Fed's rate likely to reach or exceed that 4.3 percent itself as the central bank seeks to attack persistent inflation. New-vehicle interest rates sit at about 6.4 percent. Inventories are rebounding — at least for some automakers. And used-vehicle prices are down compared with last year.

Such conditions are bound to shake things up for finance-and-insurance offices, which have enjoyed record profits per vehicle this year.

So where do things go from here?

That's what we're exploring with this quarter's F&I special section.

In it, you'll find analysts concluding F&I profits per vehicle are due for a fall in 2023, but dealerships shouldn't necessarily …

The ICE age is waning and the EV wave is coming.

While the timing still is in flux, there is no denying that every aspect of the transportation industry is unavoidably moving toward electrification. And the time to prepare for it, from sales training to service contracts, is now.

We've all seen the headlines — OEMs are investing hundreds of millions in R&D to advance their inventory changeover from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles in large part because of aggressive fuel emission standards and other legislation. There also is a growing consumer movement to take actions that reduce our carbon footprint, and EVs help fill that need for many drivers. So great is this groundswell, in fact, that in 2022 Audi, Volkswagen, General Motors and Jaguar Land Rover all announced they will phase out ICE vehicles by 2036.

Forward-looking dealers are not sitting on the sidelines. Many are already taking action to refin…

When the car wash they owned across the street from their Stellantis dealership in New York needed expensive upgrades to keep operating, brothers Bob and Larry Siracusano decided to go a different direction.

They tore down the car wash and built a 1950s-themed ice cream shop.

The brothers opened Sawyer Ice Cream Co. this fall in Saugerties, a town along the Hudson River 100 miles north of Manhattan.

For Bob Siracusano, who has spent the past year giving out free ice cream to local kids from his 1967 Ford Good Humor truck, the new venture is about doing something fun, not making a profit.

"If I break even, I'll be happy," he told Forbes for a story last week. Bob Siracusano, 72, wouldn't answer a reporter's question about how much the two-story shop cost to build, saying, "If I tell you, my wife will find out."

The business does have a benefit for the Sawyer Motors dealership, which the Siracusanos have owned f…