Trade News

While Electric Last Mile Solutions Inc. gives the ax to nearly a quarter of its headcount after the EV startup's stock crash last month, it is padding the fall of its former top executives behind the turmoil.

Chairman Jason Luo and CEO James Taylor were forced to resign their positions effective Feb. 1 after an internal investigation found they purchased shares of the company at a discount to market value just before it went public in June.

While stripped of their C-suite statuses, Luo and Taylor entered settlement agreements that come with protection from liability and lawsuits, the guarantee of some bonus money and retention of common stock, and in Taylor's case a $300,000-per-year consulting job.

Their voluntary resignations were reported in a regulatory filing last month that restated the company's financial performance and signaled alarm bells for investors. Terms of their settlement and consulting agreements were laid out in a regulatory filing las…

A former dealership owner was sentenced to six years in federal prison on March 3 after being found guilty of defrauding Toyota out of more than $4.3 million.

James Pinson owned Big Blue Motor Sales, a used-vehicle dealership in Louisa, Ky. Pinson, 46, was convicted in December of three counts of wire fraud, six counts of mail fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft and two counts of conspiring to commit money laundering.

Court documents said Pinson took advantage of a Toyota customer support program that bought back trucks with excessive rust from customers for 150 percent of the Kelley Blue Book value. The program was only available to customers and not dealerships.

Court documents state that between 2013 and 2015, Pinson bought 350 trucks at wholesale price at auction. He obtained copies of random residents' driver's licenses and titled the vehicles in their names.

He took the trucks to Love Lexus Toyota in West Virginia and bribed the se…

TOKYO – Mazda pulled the wraps on the upcoming CX-60 crossover, the brand’s first plug-in hybrid that will be part of a new series of crossovers based on a large-size vehicle platform.

The Hiroshima-based automaker plans to introduce the CX-60 in Europe and Japan. It will be the lead-off model for a line of four crossovers built on a newly developed architecture for large vehicles that can accommodate inline 6-cylinder engines and rear-wheel drive setups.

Two of those vehicles, the CX-70 and CX-90, are expected to land in the United States. All the vehicles, to be made at Mazda’s Hofu plant in Japan, will be introduced by the end of 2023.

Mazda, teasing the European-spec CX-60 Tuesday in Europe and in Japan on Wednesday, said it will be equipped with an e-Skyactiv PHEV drivetrain that marries a 2.5-liter in-line four-cylinder gasoline engine to an electric motor.

Mazda describes it as a two-row midsize crossover good for everyday driving and long…

BEIJING — U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc. sold 56,515 China-made vehicles in February, including 33,315 for export, the China Passenger Car Association said on Tuesday.

Tesla, which has made Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers in Shanghai since 2019, sold 59,845 China-made vehicles in January.

Chinese NEV maker Nio Inc. delivered 6,131 cars in February, up 9.9 percent year over year. Li Auto delivered 8,414 and Xpeng Inc. delivered 6,225 vehicles, rising year over year by 266 percent and 180 percent, respectively.

CPCA said passenger car sales in February in China totalled 1.27 million, up 4.7 percent from a year earlier.

Ed Morse Automotive Group has expanded into Iowa, buying three domestic brand dealerships.

The dealership group, of Delray Beach, Fla., on Monday bought a Ford-Lincoln-Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram rooftop and a Chevrolet-Buick-GMC dealership in Muscatine, plus a Chevrolet-Buick-GMC dealership in DeWitt, from Krieger Auto Group.

The dealerships were renamed Ed Morse Ford-Lincoln-Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram Muscatine, Ed Morse Chevrolet-Buick-GMC Muscatine and Ed Morse Chevrolet-Buick-GMC DeWitt. The transaction also included a NAPA Auto Parts store in Muscatine. In total, the Ed Morse group said it is adding nearly 125 employees to its team.

Muscatine is located along the Mississippi River and the Illinois border. DeWitt is northeast of Muscatine.

"To be able to expand our automotive footprint into the great state of Iowa is tremendously exciting for our organization," Teddy Morse, CEO of Ed Morse Automotive, said in a statement. "We look forward to makin…

A federal judge on Tuesday postponed a decision on a lawsuit filed by automakers represented by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation over updates to Massachusetts' right-to-repair law.

The alliance filed the federal lawsuit against Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey in November 2020 after voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that revised and expanded the state's existing law.

U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock, in a court filing, cited "unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances" as a reason for the delay.

"The competing demands of those and other matters, at a time when the court generally ... and my individual session are attempting to reconstitute to resume orderly in-person proceedings, proved that March 7, 2022, was too soon to issue the fully developed filing by me that the complexities of this case require," he wrote.

Woodlock said he expected to issue a ruling no later than April 15.

Massachusetts' revised la…

J.D. Power has launched a digital retailing platform that will enable vehicle shopping, payment calculations and electronic contracting.

The analytics giant said Tuesday that Shop With Ease, its digital-retailing-as-a-service platform, is supported by Darwin Automotive, the finance and insurance software provider J.D. Power acquired last year.

The platform will enable vehicle financing and purchasing from within the website of dealerships and manufacturers, J.D. Power said. Shop With Ease will power such capabilities as shopping by payment, payment calculations including taxes and fees, instant trade payoff information, vehicle reservation, trade-ins and vehicle sourcing, F&I products and e-contracting.

Phillip Battista, J.D. Power's president of dealership technologies, told Automotive News that the company is providing the technology that can underpin a customized, branded experience for automakers, dealership groups and even lenders.

"Innov…