Trade News

General Motors CEO Mary Barra is being called out by leaders of Black-owned media companies for refusing to meet with them.

The group of media owners -- which include Byron Allen, founder and CEO of Allen Media Group; rapper and actor Ice Cube, who owns the pro-basketball league Big3, production company Cubevision and Contract with Black America; Roland Martin, CEO of Nu Vision Media; and Junior Bridgeman, owner of Ebony Media -- took out a full-page ad in the Detroit Free Press on Sunday accusing Barra of ignoring multiple requests to meet, and the automaker of allocating less than 0.5 percent of their ad spend to Black-owned media. GM said that figure isn't accurate.

“Mary, you have asked us to meet with your Chief Marketing Officer, Deborah Wahl. We have absolutely no interest in that because when Deborah was Chief Marketing Officer of McDonald’s, in our opinion, Black Owned Media was, once again, severely neglected, minimized and discriminated against. To …

A Toyota store on the ground floor and residential units above it. Price Simms Auto Group CEO Adam Simms discusses the proposed $279 million mixed-use project in Walnut Creek.

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What does Zeekr even mean? The word can’t be found in any dictionary yet Zhejiang Geely likes it so much that it’s applied for several dozen sub-brands under the moniker, commercial registration data show.

One of those brands is for an electric vehicle. That makes sense -- while Geely is China’s biggest manufacturer of local-branded conventional automobiles, it’s plowing resources into EVs, like all carmakers. But it’s also applied to use the Zeekr name for air conditioners, clothing, furniture, fast food, beer and even firecrackers. What is the company playing at?

Geely isn’t changing direction, quite the contrary. The Hangzhou company is making a renewed push into EVs under the Zeekr brand, and may absorb its existing Geometry EV brand into the mix as part of that. But just as Tesla aims to create an aura and lifestyle around its brand, so too does Geely wish to snare consumers and convert them. Imagine, a Zeekr car owner could wear a Zeekr hoodie while driv…

Volkswagen said its new Amarok pickup will be clearly different in design from the next Ford Ranger pickup it will be based on.

VW's commercial vehicles division has released a sketch of the new pickup, which it will launch next year.

The design hints at a beefy, off-road performance version in line with the Raptor top-spec model of the current Ford Ranger.

The Amarok will be developed and built by Ford as part of a wider agreement between the two companies.

"It's not going to be just a fantastic pickup. It's going to be a genuine Volkswagen too -- with clear DNA in both technology and design," VW Commercial Vehicles CEO Carsten Intra said during the unit's annual media conference on March 25.

The pickup will be "exactly what our customers would want," Intra said.

Ford said in January that it will build the Amarok at its plant in Silvertown, South Africa, where it is investing $686 million to raise annual production capacity to 200,0…

BEIJING -- Great Wall Motor Co., China’s biggest maker of SUVs, plans to roll out its first hydrogen-powered SUV this year.

The company will also deploy its hydrogen-powered cars during the Winter Olympics in China next year, Zhang Tianyu, head of FTXT Energy Technology Co., a Great Wall subsidiary, said in the city of Baoding on Monday during a media briefing to outline the automaker’s hydrogen strategy.

Great Wall has invested 2 billion yuan ($305 million) over the past five years to develop hydrogen power-related technologies that can be used for vehicles as well as marine and rail transport, Zhang said. Founder Wei Jianjun added that Great Wall will invest another 3 billion yuan over the next three years and plans to become a top-three seller of hydrogen-powered automobiles by 2025.

“Development of the hydrogen-related industry will move forward as quickly as that for electric vehicles,” Wei said.

Great Wall has been stepping up spending to tr…

MILAN -- Stellantis will halt production at its plant in Melfi, southern Italy, between April 2 and April 12 because of low demand triggered by the COVID-19 crisis, and not because of the global chip shortage, the UILM union said on Monday.

A spokesman for Stellantis confirmed the plant would be closed during this period. All of Melfi's more than 7,000 workers will be put on a furlough scheme during this time.

Production at the plant, which makes Jeep Renegade and Compass models and the Fiat 500X utility vehicle, has been repeatedly disrupted due to weak demand and semiconductor supply shortages.

The FIM CISL union said last week the company was considering permanently closing one of its two production lines at the Melfi plant to address excess capacity in Italy.

UILM spokesman Gianluca Ficco said on Monday the company told unions the latest Melfi production freeze was specifically due to low demand and not a result of the global chip shortage.<…

<!--*/ */ /*-->*/ 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…