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Automotive News' Hans Greimel discusses his new book about the rise and fall of the former Nissan boss and the empire he led.

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These challenging times bring new demands for ways to communicate and sell to your customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was originally created to build customer relationships and help communicate with new and existing customers. Now, CRM software has evolved; it could help integrate all your customer data, from all sources, in one place. From customer phone calls to service history to email engagement and accounting data, you could get a 360° view of each customer, in a single system. Plus, CRMs also make it easy to reach out to customers with your latest financing offers to help encourage them to purchase. This can help you identify your best customers and help drive increased sales across your entire customer base. Every business is different, with different CRM needs. Here are some tips from Synchrony to help you pick your best CRM tool.

What business problems are you trying to solve? Typically, the biggest challenge is how to pull your data…

BERLIN -- Robert Bosch opened a 1 billion euro ($1.2 billion) chip plant in Germany on Monday, in a record investment by the supplier as it gears up for the latest electric and self-driving cars.

The plant, located in a semiconductor hub near Dresden, enters service at a time of very tight supply and will increase Bosch's ability to serve automakers directly and rely less on third-party manufacturers.

"Every chip that we make here in Dresden is one chip less that is lacking. That helps," management board member Harald Kroeger told Reuters.

The specialist plant will not, however, make much of a dent in the global supply crunch that has forced many automakers to idle production and is expected by industry leaders and analysts to extend into next year.

"The fab (chip fabrication plant) may help to insulate Bosch and its key customers somewhat," said Asif Anwar at Strategy Analytics.

"But it is unlikely to serve as a gap filler to the current …

Since last July, a little-known automaker in China’s southwest has dominated the world’s largest electric car market, outselling bigger players and even Tesla Inc. almost every month with a tiny, bare-bones EV that starts at just $4,500.

The Hongguang Mini is the brainchild of SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co., a joint venture between SAIC Motor Corp. and Guangxi Automobile Group Co., two state-backed automakers, and U.S. giant General Motors.

Based in the city of Liuzhou, known for its limestone mountains and river-snail soup, the company -- which has sold some 270,000 of the cars within nine months, making it the best-selling EV in China -- has even bigger ambitions for the future. It’s aiming for annual sales of 1.2 million vehicles next year, almost equal to the number of EVs churned out by China’s carmakers in 2020 combined.

It’s an eyebrow-raising target, but even before the Hongguang Mini, Wuling had a track record for producing winners in a market th…

<!--*/ */ /*-->*/ As dealers thrive, dangers lurk

No, these aren't quite the best of times and the worst of times.

But as we note in Monday's issue, it is a great time to be an auto dealer — and also an unsettling one.

The great part is easy to explain: Sales are on the rebound and dealer profits are high.

Yet the alarms are sounding for more reasons than the inventory shortages caused by the microchip crisis.

As one of our Page 1 stories will explain, once the current supply-and-demand frenzy straightens out, the underlying tensions in the dealer community that were simmering pre-pandemic will return with greater force. Namely, the shift to electric vehicles, digital sales, and direct-to-consumer transactions.

We'll explore each of those issues over the next three weeks, beginning with a spotlight on the move to EVs. It's playing out it in a number of ways at dealerships, including:

⬛ Dealer margins: Despite autom…

Hemant Sikaria, CEO and co-founder of Sibros, sheds light on how automakers can handle complex software in cars, his role in helping Tesla pioneer over-the-air updates and how to distill meaningful insights from vehicular data.

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Apple Podcasts: “Shift: A podcast about mobility” is available on the iTunes Store and through the ‘Podcast’ app pre-installed on all iOS devices. Click here to subscribe.

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The days of carrying a red gallon gasoline jug down the highway are numbered. But the need for roadside refueling will not go away even as the world shifts to electric vehicles, which is why a new generation of mobile EV chargers is arriving.

The closest experience to the old-school red jug is likely Blink Charging Co.'s portable emergency EV charger. The Miami Beach, Fla., company introduced the mobile unit in 2020. It's basically a gasoline generator with a 25- foot, 240-volt AC charging cord attached. It offers charging at up to 9.6 kilowatts, enough to put up to a mile of charge into a stranded EV each minute, Blink says.

The charger, called the IQ 200-M, weighs about 350 pounds and holds up to 10.9 gallons of gasoline. Roadside assistance providers are the target buyers for the $6,500 units.

Lightning eMotors, of Loveland, Colo., is targeting commercial EV fleets with its 3,700-pound mobile charging station, called Lightning…

PLANO, Texas — As automakers large and small rush into the battery-electric business, they face what may be an even trickier issue than where they're going to get all their batteries: setting residual values on vehicles without a lot of history.

For companies with captive finance arms such as Toyota — which will reenter the BEV market in the U.S. next year with a production vehicle based on its RAV4-sized bZ4X compact-crossover concept — the residual value equation can present challenges.

The biggest one: estimating future demand for vehicles that now represent less than 2 percent of the overall market.

"We've been financing [electrified vehicles] for over 20 years, so we're not scared about financing them," said Mark Templin, CEO of Toyota Financial Services. "The only tricky part is setting residuals, because you don't know what the future value of those BEVs is going to be in the marketplace."

It's not a small problem. There are more than 100…

A new book on Carlos Ghosn, Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire, will be published on June 22. It is co-written by Asia Editor Hans Greimel, who has covered Ghosn since joining Automotive News in 2007.

This first of two excerpts focuses on the immediate aftermath of Ghosn's arrest on Nov. 19, 2018. Chaos and confusion reigned at Nissan and Renault, both led by the jailed celebrity executive. The man tasked with relaying just exactly what had happened to the French side was Philippe Klein, a high-ranking French executive at Nissan. This portion of Chapter 10, "Makings of a Conspiracy," describes the fog of competing narratives in those early days and details how Klein broke the news amid spiraling suspicions in France about a Japanese corporate coup to take out the alliance's boss.

In Japan, the undoing of former Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn seemed like a straightforward case of greed and hubris. But half a world awa…

BERLIN -- Volkswagen Group Chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch will seek reelection at the automaker's annual general meeting.

Poetsch, VW's former finance chief,  became chairman of the supervisory board in 2015, weeks after the start of the diesel emissions scandal in which VW in 2015 acknowledged using illegal software to rig diesel engine tests in the United States.

Poetsch, 70, was instrumental in averting a leadership crisis at VW last year. He brokered a truce after VW Group CEO Herbert Diess clashed with the company's labor leaders over Diess's plans to boost profits and cut costs.

A VW spokesperson said on Saturday that the company's supervisory board recommends to the upcoming annual shareholder meeting "that it elect supervisory board chair Hans Dieter Poetsch for a full five-year term."

The date of the meeting has not been announced.

Tesla has lost another top manager from the automaker's new European plant under construction near Berlin, according to a report in Automobilwoche, the German affiliate publication of Automotive News.

Marcel Jost, head of general assembly, left the automaker last month while Tesla CEO Elon Musk was visiting Germany, Automobilwoche said. The reason for his departure is not known and Jost was not available for comment, the magazine said.

Jost had previously worked at Daimler, serving most recently as the automaker's head of safety and environmental management in Stuttgart. He had also worked for Daimler in China for several years. He became Tesla's senior quality manager in Germany in March 2020.

Jost's departure follows that of Evan Horetsky, project manager of the plant in Gruenheide near Berlin. Horetsky left Tesla in October 2020. Horetsky has since joined Swedish hypercar manufacturer Koenigsegg. Another top Daimler executive, Rene Reif, was due to re…

Aiming to capitalize on the growing trend of offering remote services, Alderman's Chevrolet-Buick-GMC in Rutland, Vt., in 2011 began delivering newly sold vehicles across New England free of charge. Similar practices were enabled in the service department, where some employees were engaged full time in picking up and returning customer vehicles in need of repair and maintenance.

The goal was convenience and customer satisfaction. Up to 30 percent of the 1,100 new and used vehicles the dealership sells annually were delivered across state lines.

But Mark Alderman, the store's general manager, noticed a trend. Most of the dealership's hottest vehicles were shipped out of market, and those customers wouldn't return for their next purchase or even for service work.

"What we were doing was really spreading ourselves thin, not executing as well and raising expenses," Alderman said.

Another casualty of free delivery was finance and insurance revenue. O…