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DETROIT -- Toyota Motor Corp. has committed to investing $6 million over the next five years to expand vehicle testing at the American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti.

The Japanese automaker will invest $3.5 million to build out and lease new vehicle labs and office space, as well as $2.5 million in additional usage of the test track, Toyota said Wednesday.

It marks the first new construction at the proving grounds since it opened in 2018. Toyota became a "founder-level sponsor" for the center with a $5 million investment in 2017. Other founding sponsors include AT&T, Ford Motor Co., Hyundai America Technical Center Inc. and Visteon Corp.

Toyota will expand from 7,000 square feet to around 13,000 square feet, with construction expected to be complete by next summer. The automaker, whose North American research and development headquarters is in nearby Saline, plans to station up to a dozen engineers at the center, where they will develop automated a…

Global automakers are planning to spend more than half a trillion dollars on electric vehicles and batteries through 2030, according to a Reuters analysis, boosting investments aimed at luring car buyers away from fossil-fuel vehicles and meeting increasingly tough decarbonization targets.

Less than three years ago, a similar analysis by Reuters found car companies planned to spend $300 billion on EVs and related technologies. But looming zero-carbon mandates in cities such as London and Paris and countries from Norway to China have lent additional urgency to the industry's EV-related investment commitments.

The most recent analysis shows automakers planning to spend an estimated $515 billion over the next five to 10 years to develop and build new battery-powered vehicles and shift away from combustion engines.

But industry executives and forecasters remain concerned that consumer demand for EVs could fall well short of aggressive targets without substa…

FTI Consulting’s Neal Ganguli sees huge opportunities with EVs – and big concerns, too. Among them: Shortages of raw materials and the ability of the charging infrastructure to keep pace.

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The U.S. auto safety regulator announced on Tuesday its first-ever whistleblower award, handing out more than $24 million to a former Hyundai Motor Co. employee who provided key information about safety lapses at the South Korean carmaker.

The award to former Hyundai Motor engineer Kim Gwang-ho is the biggest ever in a whistleblower case in the auto sector globally, according to law firm Constantine Cannon, which represented the whistleblower.

It comes as the U.S. regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the U.S. Department of Transportation prepare to propose regulations related to an automotive whistleblower program Congress created in 2015.

Kim reported to NHTSA in 2016 that Hyundai was failing to address a design flaw linked to its Theta II engines, which were prone to seizing up and even catching fire.

"This award is the maximum percentage allowed by law ... and is the first award NHTSA has issued under its a…

Every major semiconductor company has pledged to comply with a U.S. request for information pertaining to the global chip shortage, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on the day of a deadline set by the government.

"The past two weeks, I personally have called the CEOs of all the major chip producers in the U.S. and overseas, and every CEO has assured me that they will be complying and will be giving us the data that we've asked for," Raimondo said in an interview Monday.

While she hadn't yet seen the information provided by the companies, Raimondo said she's "optimistic that they are giving us robust submissions" and that the U.S. won't need to invoke the Defense Production Act -- a Cold War-era national-security law -- to force manufacturers to comply, a threat she reiterated on Monday.

"I'll know a lot more after we go through the data that we receive today," Raimondo said in Chicago. "I hope we don't have to use the Defense Act to require, but we…

The seasonally adjusted annual sales rate increased slightly from September to October, indicating a more positive outlook on the semiconductor shortage.

Eleven years after Tesla Inc. went public with a market value of less than $2 billion, one of its most closely watched competitors is following in its tire treads with a much richer valuation.

Electric-truckmaker Rivian Automotive Inc. will price its initial public offering on Tuesday, seeking to raise as much as $10 billion in a listing that could give it a fully diluted valuation of more than $70 billion. If shares are sold at the top of their marketed range, it’ll be the seventh-biggest U.S. IPO on record, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Investors will be buying into the promise of a class of EVs that mirror the gas-powered vehicles that dominate the passenger market: larger, bulkier vans and pickup trucks that are a sharp contrast to Tesla’s sleeker sedans. The company also has Amazon.com Inc.’s backing – the internet giant owns a 20 percent stake in Rivian and has placed an order for 100,000 of its delivery vans.

As is the case with many richly va…

TOKYO -- Nissan Motor Co. on Tuesday reported a quarterly operating profit of 63 billion yen ($560 million) as revenue rebounded from a pandemic slump.

The automaker was able to lower incentives in the key U.S. market and boost margins in the fiscal quarter that ended Sept. 30 because of growing demand coupled with tight supplies of vehicles due to production cutbacks amid the global chip shortage.

"Two years ago, we had a problem of how to sell, and that is not the problem today," COO Ashwani Gupta told a news conference.

Nissan had also benefitted as it revamps its aging model line-up as part of a business plan to improve profitability by reducing global production and model types by a fifth, he said.

Gupta cautioned that the lack of chips remained "a challenge" as competition for the key component grows among automakers and electronic device makers.

CFO Stephen Ma said Nissan's break even point is now around 3.7 million vehicles a year,…

AutoNation Inc. on Monday closed on the purchase of nine Maryland dealerships from Priority 1 Automotive Group in a deal the auto retail giant announced last month.

Lou Cohen, president of Priority 1 Automotive of Towson, Md., confirmed the closing to Automotive News.

AutoNation previously said the acquisition, which includes three collision centers, will add $420 million in annual revenue. It comes in a region where the nation's largest new-vehicle retailer has several stores.

This transaction of luxury dealerships marks AutoNation's second large dealership purchase of the year. To date, AutoNation has acquired 20 dealerships in 2021. In September, AutoNation closed on the acquisition of 11 dealerships in South Carolina and Georgia from Peacock Automotive Group.

Three Priority 1 stores were renamed: AutoNation Acura Hunt Valley, AutoNation Cadillac Hunt Valley and Mini of Towson. The other six — Audi Ownings Mills, BMW of Bel Air, BMW of Rockvi…

Automakers have used radar in vehicles for more than two decades. But there's more startups than ever wringing innovation out of that legacy technology.

The latest is Spartan Radar, which closed a $15 million Series A round earlier this week. The round was led by Prime Movers Lab, and it quickly follows a $10 million seed round secured in August.

Emerging from the aerospace and defense industries, Spartan Radar executives claim their radar systems make substantial advances in resolution, allowing for lidar-like levels of obstacle detection for driver-assist systems and self-driving vehicles.

The company's chief product, "Biomemetic Radar," parallels the manner in which humans perceive and process information. It can lead to a lower rate of false-positive detections, company executives say.

"Spartan Radar's innovative systems engineering and edge-processing expertise inherently gives the company a strategic advantage," said Grayson Brulte, a mobili…