Trade News

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…

Renault has hired Luc Julia, a global expert in artificial intelligence and one of the inventors of Apple's Siri voice assistant, as its chief scientific officer.

Julia will oversee R&D of future technologies and innovations such as AI, man-machine interfaces, connectivity, and software at the automaker.

Julia's "exceptional track record in artificial intelligence, data and object connectivity will be key to accelerating the deployment of our strategy and becoming a tech company that integrates vehicles," Renault CEO Luca de Meo said in a statement.

Julia, from Toulouse, France, has a degrees in mathematics and computer science from two universities in Paris.

He began his career in 1994 at the Stanford Research Institute International, a U.S.-based non-profit research institute, where he helped to launch Nuance Communications, a world leader in speech recognition, and also co-founded several start-ups in Silicon Valley. 

In 19…

Ryan Gamble, president of software systems company Intraratio, says the Industry 4.0 technology uses data to prevent chip defects during the manufacturing process.

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Mitsubishi Motors Corp. will cut production by as many as 16,000 cars globally next month due to the chip shortage, according to a company spokesperson, the latest automaker to succumb to the malaise that’s gripped the world’s automobile industry.

The Japanese automaker produced 90,745 units globally in January and 88,754 cars in February, according to its website, so that trim represents almost one-fifth of total output. Mitsubishi said in March that it would reduce its domestic output of vehicles by 4,000 to 5,000 units that month and was reviewing its production plans for April.

The list of carmakers idling factories around the world over the global semiconductor shortage is growing, a sign the supply-chain challenge is only intensifying. Jaguar Land Rover Automotive Plc on Thursday said it will halt production at some plants in the U.K. while French manufacturer Renault SA said the bottleneck’s effects could last beyond this quarter. German parts maker Robe…

Mitsubishi Motors Corp. will cut production by as many as 16,000 vehicles globally next month due to the chip shortage, according to a company spokesperson, the latest automaker to succumb to the malaise that’s gripped the world’s automobile industry.

The Japanese automaker produced 90,745 units globally in January and 88,754 cars in February, according to its website, so that trim represents almost one-fifth of total output. Mitsubishi said in March that it would reduce its domestic output of vehicles by 4,000 to 5,000 units that month and was reviewing its production plans for April.

The list of carmakers idling factories around the world over the global semiconductor shortage is growing, a sign the supply-chain challenge is only intensifying. Jaguar Land Rover on Thursday said it will halt production at some plants in the U.K. while French manufacturer Renault SA said the bottleneck’s effects could last beyond this quarter. German parts maker Robert Bosch Gm…

Bart Reagor, a co-principal of Reagor Dykes Auto Group in Texas leading up to its collapse in 2018, has been charged with lying about using business loans for personal expenses.

The U.S Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas said Thursday that Reagor has been indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a bank insured by the FDIC.

Reagor is set to appear before a federal judge at 2 p.m. CDT on Monday.

If convicted, he faces up to 90 years in federal prison and will be required to forfeit any property traceable to the alleged offense, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

The federal indictment alleges that one of Reagor Dykes' floorplan lenders did an audit in the first quarter of 2017 that showed the auto group was in a weak cash position.

A limited liability company was formed to hold Reagor Dykes' real estate assets while getting cash fo…

WASHINGTON -- The Biden administration proposed Thursday spending $15 billion to install 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations along roads, parking lots and apartment buildings, as part of its infrastructure plan now before Congress.

Some of the money would go toward grants and incentive programs for state and local governments as well as private companies to install the chargers, according to a fact sheet from the White House that spelled out the program in detail.

But $10 million would be devoted to research into ways to lower the cost of the chargers themselves, while $20 million would go community projects -- like switching to electric school buses -- that can pave the way to wider deployment.

The Transportation Department also issued guidance showing how nearly $42 billion of existing federal financing programs could be used for EV charging infrastructure.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced the plans during a news con…