Trade News

CarMax has completed its exit from the franchised new-vehicle dealer business with the sale of CarMax Kenosha Toyota in Wisconsin to Rydell Co. of Sioux Falls, S.D.

The sale was completed at the end of last month for an undisclosed amount. Haig Partners was the sell-side adviser to CarMax in the transaction.

CarMax confirmed earlier in the year to Automotive News that it was divesting its few remaining new-vehicle franchises to focus on the huge, highly fragmented used-vehicle market.

Now the largest used-vehicle retailer in the U.S., CarMax in the mid-1990s was still a division of Circuit City Stores Inc. Then Chrysler Corp. announced it would give the fledgling retail operation a new-vehicle franchise.

CarMax began shifting away from new-vehicle franchises around 2003, and by 2006 it had just six such locations.

It still had two new-vehicle franchises heading into this calendar year. In January, Sheehy Auto Stores of Virginia announced …

Sonic Automotive Inc. has hired two executives, including a former Mazda marketing boss, for newly created positions at its rapidly expanding EchoPark brand of used-vehicle stores.

Sonic named Dino Bernacchi as chief marketing officer and Thien Truong as chief revenue officer of EchoPark Automotive, reporting to Sonic President Jeff Dyke. The moves are effective Monday.

Bernacchi, 51, had been senior vice president of marketing for the NFL's Cleveland Browns, Sonic noted. Prior to that position, Bernacchi had been Mazda North American Operations' chief marketing officer for nearly three years before he resigned in March 2020.

He had worked as marketing director of Harley-Davidson Motor Co. prior to Mazda. Bernacchi has also worked at General Motors, Visteon Corp. and Detroit-based advertising firm Campbell Ewald.

"His vast expertise in brand development and marketing is a natural fit with our goal of making EchoPark a nationwide household name syn…

Fresh from college in the early 1990s, Jim Adler landed his first engineering job: working on avionics systems for spacecraft at General Dynamics in Southern California.

"You play with these amazingly huge toys that are worth billions of dollars," Adler recalled. "Best job you could ask for."

But an entrepreneurial spirit simmered and soon pulled him on a trajectory that included founding companies and guiding startups. Now in charge of Toyota Ventures, the automaker's venture capital arm, Adler finds his thoughts are once again turning toward space.

Toyota Ventures' latest activities, announced late last month, include investments in two space companies, Xona Space Systems and Near Space Labs.

Toyota isn't interested in a mammoth endeavor comparable to Elon Musk's SpaceX, manufacturing and launching its own missions. These are more niche space explorations. Xona Space Systems aims to launch a constellation of satellites that provides an alternat…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann agree: Ferraris are too much fun to drive to put a robot in charge.

For that reason, they said in an appearance at Italian Tech Week, the luxury sports-car brand shouldn't deploy automated driving technology.

The two billionaires found other common ground, according to Bloomberg. They're bullish about nuclear power and agreed that solar energy is the best long-term solution. Musk said the world should be building more nuclear power plants, or at least not closing existing ones, calling them "quite safe."

"We're seeing how energy prices are just going up — in gas, coal, uranium — everything is going up," Elkann said. "Nuclear is a solution that exists, it's one that we know, it's one that is secure and one that we should absolutely develop strongly."

Uranium prices are rising because China, India and other countries are nuclearizing, Elkann said, which is "a very s…

Anyone can see the contrast between Ford CEO Jim Farley's big investment announcement last week to make battery cells, battery packs and electric vehicles in Tennessee and Kentucky and his predecessor's strategy of buying batteries from suppliers — "off the shelf," so to speak.

One could easily deride the former chief, Jim Hackett, as a fool who failed to recognize that batteries and motors are the engines and transmissions of the next generation of vehicles.

He may have been a successful as CEO at Steelcase, one might say, but he was a neophyte in the byzantine knife fight that is the global auto industry.

Sure, he may have been wrong, but he wasn't dumb.

When Tesla built its so-called Gigafactory in Nevada with Panasonic in 2014, it was in part because there was no other efficient way to get the battery supply the company needed.

Half a decade later, with so much of the global industry pivoting to electric vehicles, Hackett might have s…

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the National Auto Auction Association to conduct yet another presidential transition remotely. As with so many facets of every sector and life in general, the pandemic has altered not only the traditional changing of the guard for the NAAA, but the wholesale business in general. Staff Reporter David Muller discussed these topics with incoming President Charles Nichols and CEO Tricia Heon, and also communicated via email with outgoing President Julie Picard. Here are edited excerpts.

Q:Do you have specific legislative priorities that are top of mind?

A: Heon: Just general advocacy. It'll be nice to get back into Capitol Hill, have the [Congress] members' offices open again, because we do have a new administration, and with a new administration, we have not been able to visit in person. [Political action committee] events have been put on hold. [It's] so different in person than it is to do one of those meetings virtually.

At least for the moment, North American auto plants appear to have stabilized their vehicle production schedules somewhat in the face of the worldwide semiconductor shortage, according to the most recent vehicle production estimates from AutoForecast Solutions.

North American factories cut just 9,075 additional vehicles out of their production plans as the supply crisis enters its fourth quarter, according to new AFS data. That compares with nearly 214,000 vehicles one week earlier. So far this year, the region’s auto plants have cut production plans by more than 2.9 million vehicles.

The newest estimate from AFS  forecasts that the industry could lose 10.3 million vehicles from planned production before the crisis ends.

Meanwhile, Europe was the worst-hit region, with auto plants there cutting 77,000 additional vehicles out of their schedules. Ford, Stellantis and Volkswagen said they would reduce production at plants there.

Source: AutoFo…

If there was any doubt a new era of dealership consolidation has arrived, Asbury Automotive Group Inc.'s announcement last week that it would buy Larry H. Miller Dealerships erased it.

The supersized deal — one of the largest ever in auto retail — follows two other megadeals disclosed last month: Group 1 Automotive Inc.'s pending acquisition of Prime Automotive Group and Sonic Automotive Inc.'s agreement to buy RFJ Auto Partners Holdings Inc. In April, Lithia Motors Inc. acquired Suburban Collection's 34 stores.

Those transactions, alongside a spate of smaller acquisitions this year, make 2021 the biggest year for dealership mergers and acquisitions in decades. But with the surge in activity by publicly traded groups and economic conditions ripe to support more sales, the big-deal era is just getting rolling, some market watchers say.

"I do expect that this is just the beginning of mega-transactions being announced over the next 12 months, assuming the…

TOKYO — As an indication of the Japanese legal battle facing former Nissan director Greg Kelly, consider this grim fact: The judge presiding over Kelly's case just sentenced a 90-year-old former senior government bureaucrat to five years in prison for negligence in a deadly car crash.

Veteran chief judge Kenji Shimotsu, who has overseen Kelly's trial involving alleged financial misconduct for more than a year, handed down the punishment in that trial to a former government official who was found guilty of mistaking the accelerator for the brake as he plowed through a crowd in Tokyo, killing two people and injuring nine.

The judge said he was being lenient because the driver was at least not inebriated at the time, local media reported.

Even in law-and-order Japan, the sentence was deemed harsh.

Now, as Tokyo prosecutors made their closing argument against Kelly last week, they are asking Shimotsu to sentence the American to two years.

Kel…

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — J.B. Straubel spent the better part of the past two decades at Tesla Inc. attempting to disrupt the auto industry and push incumbent automakers such as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors to get serious about electric vehicles.

Now he's CEO of Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company, and is partnering with Ford to make its EVs more sustainable. Redwood plans to be involved in the company's Blue Oval City campus outside Memphis, and Straubel was on hand for Ford's announcement here last week, when he shared his thoughts on a range of topics with reporters. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: Ford recently partnered with you on battery recycling, and GM has made similar announcements. Has addressing that part of the manufacturing process become table stakes for automakers electrifying their fleets?

A: It's amazing how quickly it's become well accepted that having a closed-loop supply chain and addressing end-of-life problems right up front i…