Trade News

DETROIT — Penske Truck Leasing has ordered 750 Ford E-Transit electric cargo vans, the latest high-profile company to buy in following the vehicle's February launch.

Penske plans to take delivery of the first several vans in the coming weeks, it said in a release. Those vans will be made available to customers in Southern California, while customers elsewhere in the U.S. will have access to them later in the year for both short-term rentals and longer-term leases.

The company chose to order the vans after it received a preproduction model as well as access to telematics services late last year as part of Ford Motor Co.'s commercial business pilot program.

"We're excited to help bring these new vehicles to market as both a rental and full-service lease option for our customers," Art Vallely, president of Penske Truck Leasing, said in a statement. "We continue to expand and diversify our fleet of electric vehicles and to offer new options for customers se…

The $3.96-billion battery plant destined for Windsor, Ont., is the largest single automotive investment in Canadian history and is expected to spark the country’s electric-vehicle revolution with a new supply chain and thousands of jobs.

“I describe this as being as big as the transformation from the horseless carriage to the internal-combustion engine,” said Drew Dilkens, mayor of the city that will host Canada’s first large-scale battery factory.

“And, perhaps even larger when we consider the environmental factors.”

The plant is the result of a joint venture between Stellantis (49 percent) and South Korea-based LG Energy Solution (51 percent). It’s expected to employ about 3,200 people. At 4.5 million square feet it will be one of largest battery plants in North America.

The project and its details were announced at a March 23 press conference by senior company officials and government. Windsor assembled the land package for the site in the cit…

Derrick Monet and his wife, Jenna, were driving on an Indiana interstate in 2019 when their Tesla Model 3 sedan operating on Autopilot crashed into a parked fire truck. Derrick, then 25, sustained spine, neck, shoulder, rib and leg fractures. Jenna, 23, died at the hospital.

The incident was one of a dozen in the last four years in which Teslas using this driver-assistance system collided with first-responder vehicles, raising questions about the safety of technology the world’s most valuable car company considers one of its crown jewels.

Now, U.S. regulators are applying greater scrutiny to Autopilot than ever before. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has the authority to force recalls, has opened two formal defect investigations that could ultimately lead Tesla Inc. to have to retrofit cars and restrict use of Autopilot in situations it still can’t safely handle.

A clampdown on Autopilot could tarnish Tesla’s reputation with co…

China’s quarterly production of semiconductors shrunk for the first time since early 2019 as consumer electronics demand softened and COVID-triggered lockdowns in regions including Shanghai disrupted output.

Output of integrated circuits dropped 4.2 percent in the first three months of the year as chipmakers reported a steeper decline in March, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. It was the worst quarterly performance since the first quarter of 2019 when the country’s chip output slumped 8.7 percent.

China has put Shanghai, a key chipmaking hub, into a month-long lockdown as Xi Jinping’s administration tries to stop the spread of Covid infections. The nation’s biggest chip manufacturers, from the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. to Hua Hong Semiconductor, have struggled to source some components due to traffic controls imposed by local authorities. Chip production dropped 5.1 percent in the month of March.

A number o…

MEXICO CITY -- A Mexican union said on Monday it will ask the U.S. government to investigate a Panasonic automotive components plant for alleged worker rights abuses, the latest in a series of disputes seeking to leverage a new trade deal to improve workplace conditions in Mexico.

In a petition to U.S. labor officials, to be filed on Monday and shared with Reuters, Mexican union SNITIS said a Panasonic plant in the border city of Reynosa violated the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement by signing a contract with a rival union behind workers' backs and firing several dozen employees who protested.

"It's important to keep the U.S. government informed that worker rights are being violated," said Rosario Moreno, head of SNITIS, an independent union that grew out of worker dissatisfaction with traditional labor groups in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

"They were given a contract they didn't even know about," Moreno said of the Panasonic deal with r…

SHANGHAI – Automakers including Tesla Inc. were poised Monday to reopen their Shanghai plants as China's most populous city speeds up efforts to get back to normal after a nearly three-week Covid shutdown.

Still, most workers will have to continue living onsite, and there was no immediate word how factories will deal with disrupted supply lines and closures ordered by authorities in other cities. Port and trucking problems remained a concerned as well.

The city's shutdown and China's measures to control the pandemic elsewhere have hurt the economy and rattled global supply chains. Shanghai's 25 million people have struggled with income losses, lack of steady food supplies, separation of families and poor conditions in quarantine centers.

Beijing said last week it had drawn up a "white list" of 666 firms prioritized to reopen or keep Shanghai operations going, including Tesla, Volkswagen and its Chinese partner SAIC Motor, as well as semiconductor and med…

Executive Editor Jamie Butters gives you the top headlines and talks about New York's return to the auto show circuit with Automotive News Reporter Vince Bond Jr.

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In a wide-ranging interview that aired Sunday night on CBS newsmagazine "60 Minutes," Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess spoke to Leslie Stahl about the automaker's challenges in the U.S., turmoil in Ukraine, criticism in China and, naturally, its electrification ambitions and competitive pressure from Tesla, which has set up shop on VW's home turf of Germany.

Following are edited highlights from the broadcast. You can read/watch the interview in its entirety here.

Stahl: In the '60s and '70s everybody in the United States knew about Volkswagen. The Beetle, the Minibus. But since then Volkswagen has not done well in the United States. Why is that, do you think?

Diess: It's difficult. First of all, I have to accept, we lost ground here in the U.S. I think we didn't take the U.S. customer seriously enough. No? We tried to sell the European product here in the U.S.

Stahl: Volkswagen does brilliantly in China, in Europe, in Latin America. I mean, wh…

The cumulative electric-only range on vehicles sold worldwide in 2021 was more than 1 billion miles for the first time, according to consulting firm AlixPartners.

As sales climbed and efficiency improved, e-range — as AlixPartners calls the electric-only range metric — stood at 1.2 billion miles in 2021.

Approximately two-thirds was added in the second half of the year. The figure represents the total electric range of battery-electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles, as well as electric range on plug-in hybrids that have separate internal- combustion engines.

The figure reflects both rising sales and the longer ranges of EVs sold today.

The average range of a BEV sold in 2021, for example, was 238 miles, up 126 percent from the average battery-electric vehicle sold in 2013, AlixPartners said. The firm's annual "Electrification Index" report was issued last week.

The e-range metric is useful for measuring how ma…

Adrian Lund spent decades pushing automakers to improve the crashworthiness of their vehicles.

Last year, the retired president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety experienced what he watched crash test dummies go through countless times — and says he avoided serious injury largely because he was in a car that got top ratings on all of its tests.

"This was a high-speed crash — one that probably 10 years ago, I wouldn't be here to talk to you about it," he said in a video IIHS released last week.

Lund, who retired from IIHS in 2017, was driving in the Interstate 95 express lanes near his Virginia home last August when a vehicle going the wrong way struck his 2020 BMW 540i, causing it to spin and roll over. The wrong-way driver was ejected and died.

His BMW was an IIHS Top Safety Pick, having earned "good" ratings in all six categories that IIHS assesses, including the small overlap front and roof strength test…

Hyundai Motor Group grabbed the spotlight at an under-attended New York auto show last week to unveil product and manufacturing plans for the Hyundai, Kia and Genesis brands while also revealing plans to invest in U.S. electric vehicle manufacturing.

Many automakers skipped the return of the show — canceled since the outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020.

So Hyundai, Kia and Genesis — all brands that appear to be weathering the current downturn in new-vehicle sales — seized the opportunity.

Speaking at the Automotive Forum in New York on the eve of the show, Hyundai Motor America CEO Jose Muñoz announced the automaker will build the hybrid version of the Hyundai Santa Fe midsize crossover and the Genesis Electrified GV70 compact crossover at its plant in Montgomery, Ala.

On Automotive News' "Daily Drive" podcast, Muñoz said the company will also build an assembly plant in the U.S. for EVs and batteries.

The moves are part of a $7.4 billion …