Trade News

With a lineup of only SUVs and crossovers, Land Rover must move into electrification with surgical precision.

Vehicles such as the Defender are engineered for off-road use, and many are used for overlanding. The $100,000 Range Rover already has a gross vehicle weight of nearly 7,400 pounds, and the upcoming battery-electric model won't weigh any less. Somehow, it must perform as well as the combustion-powered Rover and deliver a decent driving range between charges.

JLR, parent company of Jaguar and Land Rover, is investing $19 billion in new products and facility upgrades through 2028 to transform most of its vehicles to full electric power.

"By 2030, all nameplates will offer pure-electric options that are expected to account for 60 percent of our retail sales," the company said.

Range Rover: An electric version, using the MLA platform, arrives late in 2024. The Range Rover will have two motors, one for each axle. The estimated range is 300 mi…

Volvo Cars and its Geelycontrolled affiliate Polestar are on a battery-powered juggernaut. JLR, meanwhile, is charting its own path toward electrification.

Polestar launched in 2017 as a Volvo-affiliated all-electric performance brand. But that distinction is blurring as Volvo vows to go all-electric by the next decade.

"Volvo will not sell a single car that is not full-electric after 2030, regardless of market," the brand's chief commercial officer, Björn Annwall, told Automotive News in June. "There's no ifs, no buts."

Volvo said all new models will be electron-powered only. The Swedish automaker has told dealers that it expects to launch seven new and redesigned electrified models, including five battery- electric vehicles.

The fossil-fueled lineup will, however, hang around but don't expect new engines or model redesigns.

According to Annwall, the combustion engine models "will get a bit of love."

"We're not inv…

The best part about attending this month's Management Briefing Seminars in Traverse City, Mich., was picking up the industry buzz.

Every year, smart people take the stage a few hours' drive north of Detroit to give presentations during the dayslong MBS, which has been hosted for years by the Center for Automotive Research.

But if you're a regular attendee, you know it's really the buzz in the hallways and coffee breaks and evening receptions that provide a barometer of what auto industry executives think, what they know, what they want and sometimes even what they quietly fear about the business' near-term future.

This year — no surprise — the biggest buzz around the gathering was the worldwide shift to electric vehicles. EV sales outlooks, EV battery technologies, EV charging networks and the technical challenges entwined in all of it.

The chatter fell into three camps.

Camp No. 1 was a segment of people w…

Before the end of the year, JLR says it will give an early look at the first of three new all-electric Jaguars that will begin appearing in 2025.

Although JLR officials updated the progress on their plan to reinvent Jaguar as a low-volume, super-premium luxury brand cast more in the mold of Bentley and Aston Martin than BMW and Audi, there are still more questions than answers as the 2023 model year winds down.

Will there be just one new Jaguar in 2025 until JLR builds out the lineup? JLR has said one new EV model will be launched each year after 2025. If all of the current lineup dies in 2025, Jaguar showrooms are likely to be largely empty and lonely places with just one model.

What will the U.S. Jaguar dealer network look like? This year, JLR has been encouraging Jaguar dealers to terminate their franchise agreements in exchange for a greater allocation of hot-selling Land Rovers.

JLR officials have not been forthcoming with many of those and…

Volvo Cars is cruising through a product transformation as it steers toward an all-electric future by the start of the next decade.

The Swedish automaker has told dealers that it expects to launch seven new and redesigned electrified models, including five battery-electric vehicles.

The first two are due next year and will bookend Volvo's crossover lineup.

Volvo's newest flagship, the EX90 large crossover, arrives on a new all-electric platform in the second half of next year. Software development issues related to the platform have delayed start of production by five or six months.

But first, Volvo will deliver its smallest, most affordable and fastest accelerating vehicle in the first half of 2024.

The EX30 compact crossover starts at $36,145 including shipping, and its performance variant can zip from 0 to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds. Also in the pipeline are all-electric versions of the XC60 midsize crossover and S90 large sedan.

Whi…

Chance Mayfield argues that automotive dealerships are still missing a lucrative opportunity — reaching the ever-growing number of Spanish-speaking customers.

He is the founder of Carfluent, a startup designed to help address this. The Dallas-based company formally debuted its artificial intelligence software in June, with a pitch the technology would publish additional search, inventory and vehicle detail pages on dealership websites with highly accurate Spanish translations. It is designed to be a plug-in that is compatible with dealerships and their dealership management systems, allowing them to be "instantly bilingual" with their Spanish-speaking customers, Mayfield said.

Carfluent is a young company with eight employees that formally launched in 2022. It is bootstrapped, or self-funded, so far. The company started generating revenue last year and has roughly 10 customers, including independent and franchised dealerships, Mayfield said.<…

The possibility of a recession seems less likely this year, GM Financial CEO Dan Berce said, adding he is "quite optimistic" industrywide sales volumes will stay strong to finish out 2023.

One potential headwind for the remainder of the year would be a downward trend in used-vehicle prices, Berce said, which have fallen steadily after rising this spring but slowed a bit in late July.

Berce told Automotive News that GM Financial is "set up pretty well" for the second half of the year.

"Everybody was predicting a recession sometime in '23. I think that's been pushed back to a soft landing," Berce said. "That bodes well for consumer performance in the second half of the year."

General Motors' captive lender has seen prices of 3-year-old GM vehicles coming off lease fall almost every week since late April, Berce said. GM Financial noted a steady decline in used-vehicle prices from June to late July.

"That bein…

The U.S. new-vehicle inventory rose slightly last month while staying in the same tight band it's been in all summer, according to data from Cox Automotive and the Automotive News Research & Data Center.

Cox estimated unsold inventory at 1,960,435 vehicles, or a 56-day supply, up 39 percent from the same point a year ago, and up slightly from 1,953,512 a month earlier. Cox uses the sales rate from the preceding 30-day period to calculate days' supply.

Unsold inventories crossed back over 1.9 million units in mid-May, according to Cox estimates, and have undulated in a small band all summer, despite strong sales, but they have yet to cross back over the 2 million benchmark they last hit in April 2021.

The broader trend lines that have emerged this year as the industry continues to recover production and inventories held true again in July, Cox said. The tightest stock levels again were among lower-priced vehicles and segments, wh…

Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley once called the company's commercial business unit, Ford Pro, its "secret weapon."

Today it's not so secret: Ford Pro turned a $2.4 billion profit in the second quarter and is on track to generate nearly $8 billion for the year. In addition to commercial vehicles such as the F-150 or Transit, Ford Pro offers fleet buyers financing through Ford Pro FinSimple, part of a push to become a one-stop shop for business owners.

FinSimple offers a commercial line of credit for fleets of any size, vehicle leasing and purchasing as well as charging infrastructure for commercial EVs. It also launched an insurance product this year.

Jim Drotman, executive vice president of Ford Pro FinSimple, spoke with Staff Reporter Michael Martinez about the business and its growth plans. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: What's the business case for creating Ford Pro FinSimple?

A: When Ford Pro was created, w…

Wanting to boost sales and fill an opening for a general manager, Bob Nouri borrowed an idea he first heard in the 1970s: Two are better than one.

"I had a mentor; his name was Bob Moore," Nouri told Automotive News. "He took a guy who was good at used cars and he took a guy who was good at new cars and made them co-GMs."

Nouri, co-owner of Nouri/Shaver Automotive Group, had two employees with similar complementary backgrounds at his Van Nuys Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram dealership in California.

"I did not want to go outside the organization to hire a general manager so I made them co-GMs," Nouri said.

Since Raed Malaeb and Jonathan Schwartz were promoted to co-general managers at the Van Nuys store in January 2021, more employees have stuck around.

In 2020, the dealership had a 35 percent turnover rate. That number in 2021 and 2022? About 10 percent, according to Nouri/Shaver CEO Armina Mgerian.

"Having two genera…

It's not that there aren't many electric vehicles at the $25,000 price point that Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares asserts is the sweet spot.

There are none at all, from Stellantis or any other manufacturer, with sticker prices below that mark today.

Whether Stellantis and other manufacturers can hit such an ambitious target on a wide scale in the coming years remains to be seen, but Tavares said producing EVs that are attainable for the middle class should be a topic of discussion during this year's UAW contract negotiations.

Reaching that price range, Tavares said last month, will be crucial to protecting jobs in the long run. Tavares has said in the past that Stellantis would need to absorb the additional costs that come with building EVs and not pass them onto consumers.

The company's imperative to reduce its fixed-cost structure in pursuit of more affordable EVs is clashing with the UAW's demands for higher wages and b…