Trade News

<!--*/ */ /*-->*/ Sales bounce back, mostly

You can expect some outsized scrutiny as the pundits try to make sense of the U.S. sales numbers coming out Thursday.

Comparisons to what happened a year earlier will be skewed. That's because sales tanked after the coronavirus shut down the U.S. in mid-March of 2020.

To cite just two reminders of a month we'd rather forget: Toyota sales dropped 37 percent and American Honda plunged 48 percent. Only three brands posted gains for the entire quarter. And this was after January and February gave a strong start to the year.

"There's not much use in looking at last March," said Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox Automotive.

For what it's worth, Cox projects a 50 percent increase in light-vehicle sales for the month and an 8.7 percent gain for the first three months of the year.

But there are always trends worth noting below the big numbers. And here are some that Chesbrough …

Pedestrian deaths have risen by nearly 50 percent over the past decade. The executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association analyses the long-running challenges and provides fresh details on a troubling rise in fatality rates during the first six months of COVID.

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BERLIN -- Volkswagen Group has issued a recall for premium subsidiary Audi that affects more than 150,000 A3s in the U.S. on concerns that their passenger airbags might not activate, according to a filing to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The recall is expected to affect 153,152 units of the compact car that were built between 2015 and 2020, including the sedan, e-tron and cabriolet variants, as well as certain S3 sedans.

The system that detects whether the passenger seat is occupied might malfunction and switch off the airbag even if a person is sitting there, the filing said.

VW will write to owners of the affected vehicles by May 21 and will contact them again once a solution to the problem has been found.

What else can possibly go wrong in the global auto industry supply chain?

A massive container ship became stuck sideways in the busy Suez Canal last week, the latest symbol of a supply chain stretched to its limits as additional assembly lines shut down because of an unabating worldwide shortage of microchips.

The mishap now combines with a global shortage of shipping containers, U.S. port congestion and a March 19 fire at the vital Renesas Electronics semiconductor factory in Naka, Japan, to increase the pressure on U.S. vehicle inventories. Honda, Nissan and Toyota said last week they were assessing what effect the shutdown of the Renesas plant would have on their production.

The Suez Canal may be half a world away, but the impact will be felt on the U.S. auto industry, warned Mark Fulthorpe, executive director of global light-vehicle production forecast at IHS Markit.

The blockage of the canal — a vital logistics l…

The landscape is changing for Jeep.

The venerable brand hasn't faced serious off-road competition for the better part of a decade or more.

But with the Ford Bronco and Hummer — reimagined and electrified under the GMC brand — set for comebacks, Jeep is upping its game and green cred with new concepts.

Jeep has combined electrified power and the internal combustion engine with off-road prowess to engineer the set of custom-built Wrangler and Gladiator concepts.

The Easter Jeep Safari in Moab, Utah — running Saturday, March 27, to Sunday, April 4 — is the testing ground for the newest 4x4s, capped by the first battery-electric vehicle from Jeep — the Magneto — another milestone in Jeep's quest to become the greenest SUV brand.

The Magneto, based on the two-door Wrangler Rubicon, is equipped with a custom-built axial flux electric motor that revs up to 6,000 rpm. The motor is connected to a six-speed manual t…

TOKYO — A clique of Nissan colleagues worked secretly to investigate their chairman at the time, Carlos Ghosn, before taking their findings directly to prosecutors, a witness testified this month in the Tokyo trial of former Nissan director Greg Kelly.

Hidetoshi Imazu, Nissan Motor Co.'s statutory auditor at the time and the man who initiated the probe into potential misconduct, said he began looking into matters concerning Ghosn's travel expenses in July 2017, more than a year before the chairman's arrest in Japan.

Imazu, now retired, also said he went to authorities with little forethought about possible fallout for the company or its shareholders. The ensuing scandal triggered a massive slide in Nissan's market capitalization and rattled relations with French partner Renault.

Testifying last week in Tokyo District Court, Imazu said his probe picked up speed in March 2018 and eventually expanded to look into corporate outlays for Ghosn's housing and ot…

When Lucid Motors broke ground on its first assembly plant in North America at the end of 2019, the upstart electric automaker was frugal with the limited cash it had.

That year, Lucid had received a $1 billion-plus investment from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. But those funds would need to cover not just building the first phase of its Arizona plant and launch of production, but also the final engineering and testing of its product — the luxury Lucid Air sedan — as well as the rollout of its retail strategy.

"It's not like we've got money to burn," Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson told Automotive News last October. "We've been super careful with it."

Building the Casa Grande, Ariz., factory alone could have easily eaten up $1 billion or more, given that Lucid is vertically integrated from powertrain manufacturing to final assembly, company executives said. Instead, the first phase that was completed in December cost only about $700 milli…

YOKOHAMA, Japan — The spunky MX-30, Mazda's first mass-market electric vehicle, has quirky design details galore thanks to its one-size-fits-all approach.

It rides on a versatile platform engineered for a variety of electrified drivetrains, including a mild-hybrid version and a full-electric variant. And next up will be a rotary engine-powered offering that can run as a series hybrid or possibly a plug-in. The U.S. is expected to get both the EV and rotary versions as early as next year.

But the MX-30 is also a compromise car.

It is not quite a crossover, nor a hatchback. It technically has four doors, but it aims for a coupe feel, with rear doors that swing backward. And it comes in both all-wheel drive and front-wheel drive.

A test drive of the e-Skyactiv full-electric version here highlighted some of the design compromises of trying to serve multiple segments.

For starters, there is the wasted space.…

Electric vehicle batteries cannot be recharged at consistently high rates of power because of a phenomenon that occurs when a cell is stressed, known as lithium plating. Nanoscopic needlelike formations called dendrites grow, and over time they can puncture the separator, causing a short circuit in lithium ion batteries that use conventional liquid-based electrolytes.

StoreDot, an Israeli battery startup, believes it has the solution: Substitute the carbon in the graphite anode with atoms such as silicon that are in the same group on the periodic table. These exhibit similar properties because of one unifying trait — no matter how many protons they have, they all have four electrons available that can each react to form a distinct chemical bond, just like carbon. StoreDot CEO Doron Myersdorf, 58, spoke with Automotive News Europe Correspondent Christiaan Hetzner about why this helps battery cells fully charge in five minutes. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: Extr…

Automakers are expanding and extending production cuts at some North American plants as they cope with a worsening global shortage of semiconductors.

Chips for use in cars and trucks have been harder to come by as semiconductor makers have allocated more capacity to consumer products.

The pandemic has caused a surge in orders for smartphones, TVs and computers as people try to make extended life at home more bearable, leaving less capacity for a stronger-than-expected rebound in vehicle demand. Recent weather-related disruptions of petrochemical supplies in the southern U.S. and a fire at a chipmaking plant in Japan have exacerbated the shutdowns.

Consultant AlixPartners has said the global chip shortage could cost automakers $61 billion in lost sales this year. The recent setbacks could further delay an expected second-quarter recovery in output.

“Production is shrinking, not increasing, so the balance between supply and demand is only getting wo…

CHICAGO -- Illinois car dealers sued electric truck maker Rivian in another salvo against upstart vehicle manufacturers' direct-to-consumer sales model.

Two trade groups that are plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Thursday in Cook County Circuit Court say they acted after the Illinois Secretary of State’s office “turned a blind eye” to their complaints over several years.

Amazon-backed Rivian, which plans production at a plant near Normal, Ill., had no immediate comment. The Irvine, Calif.-based company has promised that deliveries of its first pickup will begin in June.

Another defendant is Lucid Motors, a California-based electric-vehicle company.

The two companies are opening showrooms in Chicago and Oak Brook, Ill., according to the lawsuit, whose plaintiffs include the Illinois Automobile Dealers Association and the Chicago Automobile Trade Association.

Conflict between manufacturers and dealers has been brewing nati…