Trade News

DETROIT — After the bungled launch of the 2020 Explorer, Ford Motor Co. executives made clear that the automaker couldn't afford to stumble with its next round of high-profile vehicles, including the Mustang Mach-E electric crossover. Now, officials are going the extra mile to make the Detroit 3's first serious challenger to Tesla's electric vehicles a success.

Ford has proactively compensated buyers for delivery delays as production ramps up. It is even giving some buyers in New Jersey an extra $5,000 discount to make up for a state incentive that expired before their Mach-E was ready.

Meanwhile, Ford's public relations staff has been scouring the Internet to respond to owner complaints early on, with one official personally talking down dealerships that were demanding thousands of dollars over sticker price to leverage early demand.

Some of the tactics are new territory for a company with more than a century of experience in customer service. At stake…

The push to widen the adoption of electric vehicles in the U.S. is driving the conversion of utility poles and streetlights into EV charging destinations.

Installing streetlight and pole- mounted stations is part of a growing movement to create more curbside EV charging options in urban areas. The idea is to enhance the feasibility of owning and operating electric vehicles in areas where drivers are less likely to have access to off-street garages, driveways or parking lots.

Kansas City, Mo., plans to install EV chargers on 30 to 60 streetlights or utility poles before the end of this year as it prepares for the shift from combustion-powered vehicles to EVs. The initiative, part of a federally funded pilot project with Metropolitan Energy Center, an environmental nonprofit group, is aimed at testing curbside charging of EVs at existing on-street parking locations, to expand EV access for renters, multifamily building residents and taxis.

Later, federal investigators will determine the details of the latest fatal Tesla crash with autopsy-like precision.

They'll answer the specific questions. Such as whether Autopilot was engaged. Or whether it had been in the seconds before the Model S veered off the road, slammed into a tree and killed two people. Or whether the driver-assist system had been engaged but inadvertently deactivated when the driver climbed into the front passenger seat.

Yet the biggest mystery related to the crash, which occurred April 17, in Spring, Texas — what on Earth would compel the driver to abdicate responsibility for driving and physically move from behind the wheel — may already be solved.

"We have witness statements from people that said they left to test drive the vehicle without a driver, and to show the friend how it can drive itself," Mark Herman, constable of Harris County Precinct 4, told Reuters last week.

Of course, Tesl…

BERLIN -- German prosecutors have charged 15 executives from Volkswagen Group and a supplier in connection with the diesel emissions scandal that emerged in 2015, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office said Saturday.

The suspects are accused of aiding and abetting fraud in combination with tax evasion, indirect false certification and criminal advertising, said Klaus Ziehe from the prosecutor's office in the northern city of Braunschweig.

The scandal saw more than nine million vehicles of the VW, Audi, Seat and Skoda brands sold to consumers with a so-called defeat device which helped to circumvent environmental tests of diesel engines.

The prosecutor's office did not name any of the charged executives, who are accused of bringing cars onto the market in a condition that was not officially approved, meaning they were illegal and advertised misleadingly, Ziehe said.

He added the indictment had now reached 1,554 pages.

The prosecutions were …

MILAN -- Alfa Romeo's new CEO, Jean-Philippe Imparato, said his passion for the Italian sports-car brand led him to accept what could be the toughest role of his career.

Imparato, a veteran of PSA Group, was chosen to lead Alfa's Romeo's latest turnaround by Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares in January after Alfa owner Fiat Chrysler Automobiles merged with PSA.

The French executive said he had no problem in switching from the much larger Peugeot brand, which he had led successfully, to the same role in Alfa Romeo, a company that has gone through numerous failed turnarounds. The brand currently faces steeply slumping sales and a delay in launching its crucial compact crossover.

At Peugeot, Imparato was in charge of a few thousand employees. At Alfa he said he has "a very agile team of 49 people."

"It's like a start-up, we can take decisions in five minutes," Imparato told journalists during in a media roundtable on April 19.

His move from Fran…

ZF Friedrichshafen has designed a new-generation active kinematics control active rear-axle steering, referred to as AKC, that the German supplier believes represents improvements on several fronts.

The driving system offers customers, even in the heavy-duty market, better maneuverability, autonomous driving applications and benefits in trailering and parking, ZF said.

The technology will appear on the GMC Hummer EV pickup, scheduled to go on sale this fall.

ZF's innovation is a steer-by-wire application that the supplier says supports advanced driver-assistance features and automated driving functions. The second-generation design also enhances the system's vehicle motion control properties, the company said.

ZF's first-gen AKC went into production on the Porsche 911 in May 2013. The second generation is based on a new electronic architecture, with enhancements for both battery-electric vehicles and heavy-duty truck pl…

Ford's European cars in the late 1980s and early '90s — the Sierra, Escort, Orion and others — were just OK. Generally, they sold well most years, a favorite of bargain-minded company car fleet purchasers but not really competitive with the best-in-class offerings from Peugeot, Volkswagen, Rover and others.

Richard Parry-Jones changed that.

When he became Ford's chief of vehicle engineering in Europe in the early '90s, Parry-Jones focused on making fun-to-drive Fords that consumers actually wanted to buy. RPJ, as he was known within Ford, made his name by focusing hard on getting a vehicle's chassis right and by taking an interest in every part of the car as a customer would.

He died April 16 in a tractor accident on his farm in Wales at age 69.

"I worked with Richard for many years on developing Ford 'DNA metrics' to characterize everything from how the steering should feel, to the comfort of the seats and the cupholder design!" Joe Bakaj, Ford…

Having enough used vehicles to sell has been a challenge for most auto retailers in 2021, even those such as Carvana with national supply chains.

CEO Ernie Garcia said the digital used-vehicle retailer has been struggling to get its inventory sale-ready since the coronavirus began spreading in the U.S. last spring.

"We pulled back massively, operationally, early in the pandemic, and then demand came racing back," Garcia said in an installment of Automotive News' Congress Conversations series, which aired Thursday, April 22.

Then, through three successive waves of the pandemic, it was difficult for Carvana to ramp up its reconditioning capacity and subsequently have enough sale-ready cars and trucks on its website to keep up with demand.

The company said in its fourth-quarter letter to shareholders that sales outpacing reconditioning drove sale-ready inventory down from about 25,000 vehicles to about 10,000 since the onset of the pandemic. The com…

Gentex Corp.'s sales and profit margin grew in the first quarter of 2021 despite vehicle production levels taking a hit because of shortages of electronics and other parts.

The Zeeland, Mich., supplier of dimmable rearview mirrors, digital vision and other electronic components posted net income of $113.5 million for the first quarter, a 27 percent bump from the same period a year earlier.

That was driven by a quarter-over-quarter increase in sales, an improved product mix, higher gross margins and the effects of cost-saving structures put in place in the second quarter of 2020, according to Gentex.

The parts shortages caused North American light-vehicle production levels to drop by 12 percent in the quarter, Gentex said. Production levels in the European, Japanese and Korean markets were also affected. The company indicated the shortages and modifications to production that resulted from them reduced revenue by about $45 million during the quarter.

Key Auto Group of Portsmouth, N.H., on Wednesday acquired its second dealership in a little over a week.

The group bought Newcastle Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram in Maine from Randy Miller. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but the store has been renamed Key Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram of Newcastle.

Miller, who owned the dealership for 24 years, is staying on as general manager, according to Nancy Phillips Associates, a dealership buy-sell firm in Exeter, N.H., that handled the transaction for both parties.

The acquisition gives Key Auto its second dealership in Maine after Key Ford of York. The group now has 16 dealerships in New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and Florida, as well as three used-car stores and a heavy-truck dealership.

On April 13, Key Auto bought Newport Chevrolet-Buick-GMC in New Hampshire.

Last year, Key acquired Port City Chrysler-Dodge-Ram in Portsmouth and a Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram store in Rocheste…

General Motors is revamping its model for working with diverse-owned and diverse-targeted media, including hosting its own advance "upfront" briefings dedicated to these outlets, creating a new $50 million incubation fund and rethinking measurement criteria.

The new plan follows GM’s conversations with Black-owned media outlets led by the likes of Byron Allen among others, who called for the automaker to sit down with group after claiming the company had ignored such meeting requests in the past.

“This action plan will transform our engagement model with diverse media in a sustainable way,” Deborah Wahl, GM global chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “Over the course of several weeks, we met with many diverse-owned media organizations. We are grateful for the transparency and spirit of collaboration, which helped us frame this inclusive approach.”

Upfront meetings are important events in the advertising business. They allow media comp…

STOCKHOLM -- Sweden's Autoliv , the world's largest producer of airbags and seatbelts, on Friday said it more than doubled its first-quarter net income amid strong sales growth across all its regions.

Autoliv, which rivals ZF and Joyson Safety Systems, said that although the pandemic was still affecting it in some ways, organic, or like-for-like, sales growth reached 17.9% in the first quarter.

The company said net income surged 110 percent to $157 million during the quarter. Revenue improved 21 percent to $2.24 billion.

Shares in Autoliv gained 6.8 percent to $104.77 in midday trading.

CEO Mikael Bratt said a global shortage of materials, including semiconductors, had limited light vehicle production.

"And we expect this situation to continue in the second and third quarter of this year," Bratt said in a statement.

Autoliv said in January that the semiconductor shortage, which has impacted vehicle makers across the world, could have…