Trade News

Elon Musk said Friday his $44-billion deal for Twitter Inc was temporarily on hold, citing pending details on spam and fake accounts.

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 percent of users," Musk said in a tweet.

Shares of the social media company fell 20 percent in premarket trading. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company had earlier this month estimated that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.

It also said it faced several risks until the deal with Musk is closed, including whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter.

Musk had said that one of his priorities would be to remove "spam bots" from the platform.

YOKOHAMA, Japan — Nissan Motor Co., fresh off unveiling plans to add electric vehicle production at a second U.S. assembly plant, is now contemplating building a third "factory," possibly for EVs, in the region by 2030.

Chief Operating Officer  Ashwani Gupta said the Japanese automaker would likely need a new "factory" by the end of the decade under its Ambition 2030 long-term plan.

Gupta did not specify that the new facility would be geared exclusively toward EVs, but the context of his discussion revolved around EVs.

"The way we are progressing, I do believe we will need a new plant," Gupta said on Friday at Nissan's global headquarters here.

He said the move fits with the trend toward localization as Nissan makes electrification a focal point of future growth.

Last November, Nissan said it will invest 2 trillion yen ($16.4 billion) in the next five years to amp up an electrified vehicle push with 23 new entries worldwide by the end …

Problems on top of problems have complicated life for automakers and retailers. The great COVID-19 pandemic overturned business plans in early 2020, sent work forces and suppliers fleeing to safety for a year, overturned semiconductor sourcing plans for two years, delayed vehicle development programs and market launches, and resulted in scrambled inventory plans and an industrywide uncertainty about how many vehicles factories might actually be expected to deliver.

And yet life goes on.

Through all this — despite it all — automakers have delivered a wave of products to showrooms since last fall. Significant products, most of them. Big-volume products, some of them. Electric vehicles, many of them. But eagerly awaited products, all of them.

Ford is expected to have the first of its hotly anticipated electric F-150 Lightning pickups in driveways this month.

GMC's Hummer EV pickup, a truck that's one part performance and one part workhorse, made it t…

<!--*/ */ /*-->*/ How will disabled drivers access EV chargers?

The federal government will spend billions of dollars building a nationwide network of 500,000 electric vehicle chargers. Will drivers with disabilities be capable of accessing them?

That's a question with few firm answers.

As a push for infrastructure that supports a shift to EVs accelerates, advocates for disabled people worry their needs beyond the vehicles themselves are barely being recognized at this formative stage.

"It just shows you how fundamental the changes are that need to occur," said Henry Claypool, technology policy consultant for the American Association of People with Disabilities. "If you have a personal vehicle, how are you going to charge it if you have difficulty getting around the car?"

Claypool's remarks came during a wide-ranging discussion on transportation and innovation hosted by United Cerebral Palsy this month. (Full disclosure: I moderate…

Shakespeare was wrong when Romeo rhetorically asks, "What's in a name?"

The answer is not irrelevant — it's money. In fact, Volkswagen is banking on that fact.

The German automaker is moving ahead with plans to resurrect the Scout name that it acquired last year when its heavy-truck brand merged with Navistar and, in the process, acquired the rights to the long-dormant name used by International Harvester for its off-roader from 1960 to 1980. VW reportedly is targeting 250,000 annual U.S. Scout sales — an SUV and a pickup — when the badge is revived in 2026.

But beyond the badge — which still carries some level of cachet among an aging generation of off-road enthusiasts, much like the also-Indiana-built Avanti does among performance aficionados — VW's plan is for a "rugged" SUV and pickup which are, right now, completely outside its wheelhouse.

I could be proved wrong, but I'm skeptical that tomorrow's Scout will be the same type of true off-road …

Elon Musk is in talks to raise enough equity and preferred financing for his proposed buyout of Twitter Inc. to negate the need for a $6.25 billion margin loan linked to his Tesla Inc. shares, people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg.

The billionaire’s advisers, led by Morgan Stanley, have begun soliciting interest from potential investors for as much as $6 billion in preferred equity financing, the people said, asking not to be named discussing a private transaction.

Musk had originally teed up a $12.5 billion margin loan. However, that loan was halved to $6.25 billion after he said last week that he secured $7.1 billion in equity commitments from investors including Larry Ellison, Sequoia Capital, Qatar Holding and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, with the latter rolling his Twitter stock into the deal. Since then, he’s received commitments for another $1 billion in equity, and is in talk for more, one of the people said.

That, on top of the …

The U.S. light-vehicle market, hobbled by parts shortages and other production bottlenecks, has stalled in what is normally a robust spring selling season.

But the exotic and ultraluxury market is rolling on and revving up.

Rolls-Royce and Bentley are coming off record sales in 2021 and on pace for more gains in 2022.

Those two companies — along with Tesla, BMW, Mini and Genesis — were the only brands to post higher U.S. sales in the first quarter.

Alan Haig, president of Haig Partners, a dealership buy-sell advisory firm, said combined U.S. sales at seven exotic and ultraluxury brands — Lamborghini, Maserati, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, McLaren and Aston Martin — jumped 5 percent from 2018 to 2021.

"The market is far less volatile and more lucrative today because of the rise in affluent households," Haig said. "And the manufacturers are responding with new product and higher prices."

Steady gains in real estate values and on W…

Carvana Co.'s disclosure Tuesday that it shed 2,500 employees set off a ripple of reactions in the stock market and among social media users who said they were employees included in the layoffs.

On Twitter and Reddit, several people who said they worked at Carvana wrote that they received little or no heads-up from the company that they would be let go Tuesday. Some posted screenshots of an apparent companywide email Carvana CEO Ernie Garcia III sent early Tuesday morning, before official layoffs occurred later in the day.

The email, which Carvana did not confirm or deny to Automotive News, said the layoffs come as the company is grappling with financial fallout from high inflation and interest rates, dwindling consumer and investor confidence and supply chain disruption.

"The impact of all of these forces on our industry has been severe," Garcia said in the email. "All-time-high car prices are slowing sales to recession levels. We…

Self-driving truck developers are promising they'll launch commercial service as soon as next year.

One of the key remaining engineering hurdles involves safely coaxing these 80,000-pound robots to the side of the road when things don't go according to plan.

As driverless-deployment timelines draw nearer, many of the leading companies are focused on perfecting this particular fail-safe maneuver — even more than on expanding their routes or solving other edge-case scenarios.

"We can talk until we're blue in the face about technology capabilities and the maneuvers a truck can handle and the way it interacts with traffic and all that stuff," said Don Burnette, CEO and co-founder of Kodiak Robotics. "But at the end of the day, in order to launch this technology safely, when there is something that isn't quite right, there has to be that capability to then safely pull the truck over to the side of the road."

For a variety of reasons, this can be a com…

CDK Global Inc. is being sued in federal court by a shareholder who alleges the company left out key information in its solicitation statement following its announced sale to Brookfield Business Partners.

CDK and Brookfield unveiled the planned $8.3 billion deal on April 7. Brookfield agreed to purchase all of CDK's outstanding shares for $54.87 per share when the sale is completed this year.

Morgan Stanley & Co. and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison were financial and legal advisers for CDK, and Davis Polk & Wardwell was legal adviser for Brookfield.

The lawsuit — filed May 4 in the U.S. Eastern District of New York — names the automotive technology company and all nine of its board of directors as defendants. Matthew Hopkins, who owns CDK common stock, is listed as the plaintiff.

The suit alleges that following the announcement of the sale, the defendants on April 22 filed a statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Co…

TOKYO – Nissan Motor Co. bounced back into the black in the latest quarter as the recovering automaker clawed through the pandemic and semiconductor crises to post its first full-year profit in three years, after tanking in the wake of the arrest of former Chairman Carlos Ghosn.

The rebound underscored Nissan’s progress in regaining financial health after a period of management upheaval when it slumped to the largest operating loss in the company’s history.

For the just-ended fiscal year, which finished March 31, Nissan erased that red ink as operating profit surged to 247.3 billion yen ($2.03 billion).

The advance brings Nissan closer to achieving CEO Makoto Uchida’s goal of delivering a sustainable 5 percent operating profit margin.

The automaker’s margin finished at 2.9 percent in the 12-month period to March 31, beating Uchida’s target of 2 percent for the fiscal year under his mid-term revival plan.

Uchida in 2020 staked his job on a…

TOKYO -- Electric vehicle laggard Subaru Corp. will step up its pace in the battery-car race by adding a dedicated in-house EV assembly plant in Japan from about 2027.

The move is part of a multibillion-dollar investment in electrification over the next five years.

Subaru’s outlay shows the all-wheel drive specialist is finally turning its focus to full-EVs after introducing its first serious contender, the Solterra crossover EV, only this year.

Unlike the Solterra, the EVs produced in the latter half of this decade will be manufactured directly by Subaru.

The Solterra, which shares a Toyota-developed EV platform with the Toyota bZ4X, is made at Toyota’s Motomachi assembly plant on the same line as the sibling nameplate.

Subaru CEO Tomomi Nakamura outlined the plans on Thursday while announcing fiscal year earnings.

Subaru will begin making its own EVs in mixed production with internal combustion vehicles at its Yajima plant in Jap…