Trade News

Volkswagen Group's dramatic move to oust its combative CEO, Herbert Diess, was set in motion a week ago, when his backing from the billionaire Porsche and Piech family began to crumble.

Unwavering support from the reclusive clan that majority-owns VW had helped Diess survive frequent clashes with powerful worker representatives. But as key project failures combined with worker discontent, the family concluded he had to go.

The decisive day was July 20, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

The top committee of VW’s supervisory board, comprising family representatives, officials from the German state of Lower Saxony officials and labor leaders, determined that Diess's time was up. He learned this around lunchtime the next day, still jet-lagged from a visit to the automaker’s assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.

In the end, Diess's undoing is a brutal reflection of the challenges facing leaders of industrial behemoths trying to mode…

Forty years ago, American Honda Motor Co. built an assembly plant in rural Marysville, Ohio, and began a trend that would alter the trajectory of the U.S. auto industry — and contribute to a modern-day problem.

It wasn't just that company founder Soichiro Honda had chosen to build an assembly plant in the U.S. — the first Asian automaker to do so, following earlier and less successful European efforts from Rolls-Royce in the 1920s and Volkswagen in the 1970s. It was where he chose to do it: in rural central Ohio, where cornfields far outnumbered subdivisions and land was cheap and plentiful.

Honda's pioneering new factory meant that many of his cars would no longer have to be imported. But its location 30 miles outside Columbus also meant that many employees would commute long distances from cities and towns across a vast region.

It worked, and since the first Honda Accord rolled off the line in 1982, that strategy has been replicated by automakers acr…

DETROIT — The UAW's constitutional convention this week offers a chance to reset for a troubled union desperate to move beyond its corrupt past by providing top officials a platform to tout reforms and rally support from members who now have the direct power to choose their next leaders.

But a harsh report by the union's court- appointed monitor days before the gathering challenges the notion that the UAW has learned from its past misdeeds and may fuel long-simmering demands from disgruntled rank-and-file workers for more substantial turnover at the top.

Monitor Neil Barofsky described efforts by the UAW to obstruct and interfere with his office's investigations by allegedly concealing evidence and excluding the monitor's office from key International Executive Board meetings. President Ray Curry and other leaders became cooperative only after the Department of Justice was called in to discuss possible breaches of the UAW's six-year consent decree, the report …

For UAW, the more things change ...

A lot has changed since UAW officials from plants and offices around the country last gathered in Detroit for a constitutional convention four years ago.

The president they elected almost unanimously at that convention, Gary Jones — who had promised a "clean slate" to move the union past a federal corruption scandal — wound up in prison, as did his predecessor, Dennis Williams.

The UAW narrowly avoided being taken over by the federal government by making a deal that puts it under the oversight of a court-appointed monitor for six years.

And rank-and-file members approved a referendum that gives them the power to vote for the union's next leaders directly. That means the decision of whether to keep current President Ray Curry in office for four more years won't be up to those attending this week's constitutional convention; the members they'll report back to next weekend get to make that choice.

But one …

Cadillac gave $5,500 discounts to some early buyers of its new Lyriq crossover in exchange for letting the luxury brand track how they use it. The customers also can't tell friends and family anything about their experience owning Cadillac's first electric vehicle.

About 20 customers were chosen for the program, Cadillac spokesman Michael Albano told the Detroit Free Press last week. Participants had to sign a nondisclosure agreement that prohibits them from discussing their Lyriq with anyone outside General Motors.

"As we transform our business, the launch of our first all-electric vehicle, Lyriq, provides Cadillac some unique learning opportunities," Albano told the Free Press. "Therefore, we have engaged a small group of early customers who agree to share their vehicle information and customer behaviors. Cadillac will use these learnings to elevate the experience for all our customers."

Albano wouldn't reveal how customers were selected for the progra…

A surge in thefts of Hyundai and Kia vehicles is plaguing cities across the country, with potential thieves being shown on social media how to bypass security features in some models.

In St. Paul, Minn., Fox 9 reported that almost a quarter of 2022's auto thefts so far have been Hyundais or Kias. In Grand Rapids, Mich., MLive reported Hyundai and Kia models made up about 45 percent of the city's auto thefts in June. In St. Louis, thefts of Kias and Hyundais have more than tripled in 2022, Spectrum News reported in early June.

Some city governments have blamed Hyundai and Kia for selling some models without engine immobilizers, which prevent the engine from starting without a digitally coded key or fob. According to some reports, users on applications such as TikTok and YouTube are giving detailed instructions on how to steal vehicles without immobilizers.

YouTube user El Mechanic, for example, posted a video in November 2021 demonstrating how to steal a …

A Chevrolet Silverado is hauling a tiny house with a big porch across six cities this fall in a search for new stories.

The 2022 heavy-duty pickup will tow the house across the South for the Moth's first pop-up porch tour, sponsored by General Motors, as the storytelling nonprofit celebrates its 25th anniversary.

During the tour from Sept. 21 to Oct. 30, the Moth will be looking for stories in Tulsa, Okla.; Dallas; Jackson, Miss.; New Orleans; Birmingham, Ala.; and Atlanta. The stories will be shared on the Moth's Mainstage, Radio Hour and podcast.

GM worked with the Moth last year to bring storytelling to its employees. The collaboration is part of GM's mission to become the most inclusive company in the world.

To push its new supercharged, off-road F-150 Raptor R, Ford is using a rabid wolf, rattlesnakes, a scorpion, bats and a monster.

Those creatures star in a video for the pickup that is meant to look more like a trailer for a horror movie than a truck ad. The two-minute film, called "Scary Fast," comes from Wieden+Kennedy New York. The star of the video is the Raptor R, which has a 700-hp, 5.2-liter V-8 engine.

The ad shows a helmet-wearing man driving the pickup through the desert night at high speeds, evading hazards such as the wolf and rattlesnakes, as well as a burning cactus and a monster, which at one point grips the truck's side mirror.

The ad is airing nationally in theaters in advance of the Jordan Peele horror movie Nope. The media buy also includes YouTube and Hulu. The ad was directed by Lauren Sick, whose recent work includes the dark music video for Dove Cameron's "Boyfriend."

The Ford ad was shot in the style of grindhouse movies, …

A South Dakota man spent the day he was released from prison smashing 18 vehicles at two dealerships with an ax, police said.

The man was captured on video hacking holes through windshields, hoods and body panels. Dealership officials said they've had a tough time getting inventory and now are scrambling to obtain a long list of replacement parts.

"Imagine a car, not being able to get a car — and that's parts put together," Kyle Kneip, new-vehicle sales manager at Audi Sioux Falls, told TV station KELO. "Now we can't get the parts for the cars that they can't even build. So now sourcing the windshields and the hoods and the bumpers is something our body shop will have a fun time doing."

Police arrested the man, who had been in prison for damaging property in a nearby county.

General Motors' promise to build an electric vehicle for every buyer will begin to materialize in 2023.

By the end of next year, GM plans to have launched at least three mass-market EVs powered by its Ultium batteries. By 2026, the automaker could have close to a dozen mainstream electric options. A year later, GM expects to begin working with Honda Motor Co. to produce millions of affordable EVs.

At the moment though, GM's mass-market EV entries, underpinned by its proprietary Ultium batteries, lag competitors such as Ford Motor Co., which launched the F-150 Lightning electric pickup this year.

GM opted to start its Ultium-powered EV rollout with high-performance, luxury models: the GMC Hummer EV pickup and the Cadillac Lyriq crossover.

The early EV launches are meant to show the automakers' EV prowess — through the Hummer pickup's 1,000 hp and 329 miles of range, for example — and prove that the Ultium platform can go beyond th…

The principal research analyst at Guidehouse Insights discusses the state of the robotaxi industry, his annual autonomous-vehicle leaderboard rankings and whether consumer are ready to embrace electric vehicles.

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Herbert Diess took over at Volkswagen Groupfour years ago when the German automaker was in crisis, under pressure to make dramatic changes in strategy and culture, and the former BMW executive offered a new vision.

Prominent among them, Diess's effort to create a Germany-centered software business, CARIAD, within Volkswagen, and a promised stock market listing for the Porsche luxury brand designed to help fund VW's electrification investments.

Diess was not like prior VW chief executives in either his approach to business or his personal style. In 2018, that made him appear to be just the executive to lead Volkswagen out of its diesel emissions scandal.

Diess was focused more on what investors wanted than pleasing Volkswagen's labor unions. He believed in investing heavily in electric vehicles for the future. He cultivated a playful presence on social media, and he set electric vehicle leader Tesla as Volkswagen's benchmark, not traditional rivals such…