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TURIN -- Spanish executive Alejandro Mesonero-Romanos will be Alfa Romeo's new design chief, sources said, as the troubled brand heads for a turnaround under its new owner, Stellantis.

Mesonero will join Alfa's design team based in Turin in July, people familiar with the matter told Automotive News Europe.

Mesonero, 53, will replace Daniele Calonaci, who will continue to lead Jeep design for Stellantis in Europe.

Stellantis was formed in January by the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA Group.

Mesonero quit as design boss at Renault's Dacia budget brand earlier this month after just six months in the post. He had been recruited to Renault by CEO Luca de Meo. He had worked under de Meo at Seat, Volkswagen Group's Spanish brand.

Mesonero's appointment to Alfa was first reported by Auto & Design magazine.

A Stellantis spokesman declined to comment on the appointment to ANE.

Mesonero strengthens the top management t…

Volvo has signed an agreement to provide cars to the autonomous driving technology unit of China's top ride-hailing firm, Didi Chuxing, for its self-driving test fleet.

Volvo will provide XC90 crossovers equipped with backup steering and braking systems that DiDi Autonomous Driving will integrate with DiDi Gemini, its new self-driving hardware platform, the automaker said in a statement on Monday.

Didi is currently working toward an initial public offering with a valuation of at least $100 billion.

Last week self-driving startup Cruise, which is backed by General Motors, said it had raised $2.75 billion in its latest funding round from investors including retail giant Walmart, taking its valuation to more than $30 billion.

Volvo, which is owned by China's Zhejiang Geely Holding, will initially provide Didi with hundreds of vehicles, with the aim of adding more as the self-driving test fleet expands, head of strategy Alexander Petrofski told Reuter…

A 6-foot-5 "mountain of a man" who turned down a college basketball scholarship for the chance to study engineering.

A "brilliant mind" who brimmed with enthusiasm and held ingenious ideas on engineering the EV1, the first auto of the modern age designed from the ground up as an electric vehicle.

A "true gentleman" who loved extravagant dinners, bold wine selections and big expense reports.

Byron McCormick heard all about Jon Bereisa, his new General Motors colleague. As he slunk into a corner booth at a Disney World-area restaurant during a GM executive retreat, finally getting a chance to meet Bereisa, he wondered whether the man would match his companywide legend. The ensuing conversation between two leading engineers did not disappoint.

"All of a sudden, we were just going back and forth, and the faster I'd go, the faster he'd go," McCormick said. "There was stuff flying every which way. I went, 'Oh, my God, every…

A Tesla Inc. electric car that “no one” was driving crashed late Saturday in Texas, killing the two passengers, according to local media reports.

One of the victims was in the front passenger seat and the other was in the rear, according to KPRC 2, an NBC affiliate in Houston. The car ran into a tree and burst into flames in the Carlton Woods subdivision near The Woodlands after traveling at high speed and failing to navigate a turn, the television station reported.

“No one was driving,” Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman told the station, which didn’t report whether the Autopilot feature was engaged.

Authorities said it took 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish the fire because the car’s batteries kept reigniting, according to the TV station. Tesla and representatives for Harris County Precinct 4 didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.

Federal officials have criticized Tesla for fire risks related to the battery pa…

<!--*/ */ /*-->*/ 10 things you (maybe) didn't know about GM's EV1

This spring marks 25 years since General Motors built its first EV1. In a 13-page section in Monday's issue, we'll put a spotlight on the groundbreaking electric car and its role in shaping the automaker's charge into an all-electric future. Here are 10 things you may not have known about the short-lived two-seater:

1. The lead-acid battery pack in the early EV1 accounted for nearly 40 percent of the car's weight.

2. About 40 engineers on the original EV1 team still work for GM.

3. Not all the cars ended up crushed or in museums. GM has a functional EV1 at its Global Technical Center in Warren, Mich. There's even a dedicated engineer who keeps the car running.

4. Some early planning took place in the basement of a church near the Tech Center. Team members referred to their gatherings as "come-to-Jesus meetings."

5. The concept that preceded the EV1, the Im…

Mercedes-Benz is adopting the boxy styling of its rugged G-Class off-roader with its latest battery-powered vehicle, the EQB.

The compact utility will offer seating for up to seven people and is targeted at families who want a greener alternative to the GLB combustion engine model on which it's based.

The EQB's driving range is 478 km (260 miles) under Europe's WLTP testing regime, Daimler said in a statement Sunday, ahead of the crossover's unveiling at the Shanghai auto show.

"With the all new EQB we have created an iconic electric SUV that takes the heritage of our boxy off-road vehicles and transforms this into the future," Daimler's design chief, Gorden Wagener, said in the statement.

The EQB is positioned between the EQA and EQC in Mercedes' expanding range of full-electric vehicles. It will be a rival to models such as the Audi Q4 e-tron and VW ID4. Neither of those competitors offers seating for seven. The larger VW ID6, which is also de…

The company's chief commercial officer discusses the rebirth and future of supersonic air travel and a partnership-minded approach to creating a “global mobility network.”

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After years of cleaning up the recall crisis over faulty Takata airbag inflators, the company that now owns the former supplier's factories is taking that cleanup to its core.

Joyson Safety Systems, the airbag producer owned by China's Ningbo Joyson Electronic Corp. but globally headquartered in suburban Detroit, is introducing a strict new operating system at its more than 50 plants, requiring local managers to adopt standardized quality and reporting practices and waste- reduction programs.

It is a long-term rollout of a new rulebook that began last year under the direction of Detroit supplier veteran Silvano Restiotto, vice president of the Global Joyson Production System. With a small team of administrators, Restiotto is moving plant by plant, from Brazil to Hungary to China to Mexico to the U.S., to convert all of the company's plants — and possibly its 12 global engineering centers — to the new system.

"When we bought Takata…

The beach town of Santa Cruz, Calif., is known for world-class surfing spots such as Steamer Lane and the picturesque mountains that separate it from Silicon Valley to the north. Biking and hiking are a way of life, as are long commutes "over the hill" to San Jose and beyond.

Hyundai's attempt to distill that moderately rugged lifestyle into a crossover-based pickup also carries the Santa Cruz name. It goes on sale this summer as a compact four-door with a smaller footprint and presumed price advantage over midsize pickups that have grown larger and more plush.

Car-based pickups have rarely spelled big sales. But Hyundai hopes to capture the growing market for light trucks that has heated up after a year of pandemic sheltering. Hyundai's plan is not so much to take on the pickup market as to lean into its crossover success.

"Especially now, as we're entering a post-pandemic phase, people really want to go out — back to nature, camping, biking," said Gil…

Editor's note: It's been 25 years since the GM EV1 rolled into showrooms and launched the electric vehicle in the modern era. This article is part of a special report Automotive News will publish on Monday.

If you really want to know who killed the electric car, we'll tell you. It's Charles Kettering, and he did it with — surprisingly — an electric motor.

At the dawn of the automotive era, three energy sources were battling for supremacy to drive the automobile: gasoline, electricity and steam. Each had major drawbacks.

Gasoline was expensive, hard to find and dangerous to handle. Worse, cars with gasoline engines had to be hand-cranked, a risky, potentially bone-breaking activity.

Electric cars use batteries to store energy, which is fed to a motor that drives the wheels. But the lead-acid batteries used in early electric vehicles were heavy; driving range was extremely limited — maybe 50 miles max — the vehicles were extremely slow; and chargin…

Volkswagen is expanding its electric vehicle family with two versions of a production-ready, three-row, seven-passenger crossover that it will begin producing in China with two joint-venture partners.

A version of the Atlas-sized ID6 — the latest in the automaker's global lineup of EVs, following the debut last year of the Golf-sized ID3 and Tiguan-sized ID4 — is likely to be added to VW's U.S. lineup and built locally, but not for several years. The ID6 variants, VW brand's biggest production EVs to date, were unveiled on the eve of press previews for the Shanghai auto show.

The ID6 X and ID6 Crozz, each built by one the Chinese joint ventures, are expected to play a crucial role in China, where vehicles large enough to carry members of an extended family are popular.

The ID6, based on the automaker's MEB modular electric platform, will be available in China in one of four configurations, with a range of up to 365 miles and up to 342 hp, VW said. The …

Editor's note: It's been 25 years since the GM EV1 rolled into showrooms and launched the electric vehicle in the modern era. This article is part of a special report Automotive News will publish on Monday.

As president of General Motors from 1990 to 1992, Lloyd Reuss was an early champion of the Impact, the concept car that became the EV1. Among other things, Reuss, now 84, helped put in place the engineering team that created the Impact.

Thirty years later, Reuss' son, Mark, 57, is now GM president, and he's leading the automaker's efforts to meet an aggressive goal: to transform its entire light-duty lineup to electric vehicles by 2035.

Mark and Lloyd discussed the legacy of the Impact and the EV1 for Automotive News. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation.

On the creation of the Impact:

Mark: A lot of people thought GM only did the Impact to show how we could meet California's strict ZEV standards, not to encourage our own tech…