Trade News

Kia Motors America has tapped automotive industry veteran Michael McHale to lead its U.S. brand experience endeavors, the automaker said Monday.

The role is new, according to the company. McHale will take the title of director of brand experience and lead "all aspects" of Kia Motors America public relations and external communications, which includes events, auto shows and strategic partnerships. He started in the job effective Monday, Kia said.

McHale's 25 years in the industry made him ideal for the position, Kia said in a statement. From 2007 to 2018, he was director of corporate communications for Subaru of America. He also has held roles in the communications divisions of the BMW, Land Rover and Mini brands.

McHale presided over corporate communications for Rivian Automotive, an EV startup based in Irvine, Calif., from 2018 to 2019.

"As the industry shifts to electrification, Michael's experience will be instrumental to our communications eff…

BEIJING -- China's Great Wall Motor will launch a new standalone brand for its off-road vehicles, chairman Wei Jianjun said, as automakers pursue new segments when sales in the world's biggest car market pick up.

Wei said Great Wall, the country's top pickup maker, plans to launch the "Tank" brand during the Shanghai auto show this year in April.

Baoding-based Great Wall earlier this year also launched a new standalone brand for electric and smart vehicles. It's also building an EV factory with BMW in China.

TOKYO -- Toyota, Nissan, Honda and other Japanese carmakers scrambled on Monday to assess the impact on their production of a fire at a Renesas Electronics chip plant that could aggravate a global semiconductor shortage.

Renesas has said it will take at least a month to resume production at a 300mm wafer line at its Naka plant in northeast Japan after an electrical fault caused machinery to catch fire on Friday and poured smoke into the sensitive clean room.

The fallout on carmakers could spread beyond Japan to auto companies in Europe and the U.S. because Renesas has about a 30 percent share of the global market for microcontroller unit chips used in cars.

"We are gathering information and trying to see if this will affect us or not," a Honda spokesman said. Other automakers including Toyota and Nissan said they too were assessing the situation.

Two-thirds of production at the affected line is automotive chips. Renesas also has a 200mm wafer line…

In the nascent truck wars, Detroit won’t need tents.

In the summer of 2018, when Tesla needed to quickly ramp up production at its Fremont, Calif., factory, the company erected a big top the size of two football fields in the parking lot. The strategy brought into stark relief the difficulty of taking a vehicle from the drawing board to the end of an assembly line.

The future of the auto industry in America will be largely determined by a parade of new electric trucks — at least four from Detroit incumbents facing off against at least six from Tesla Inc. and other upstarts. The newcomers will be building pickups for the first time, but they also will be building truck factories for the first time, which is arguably a more difficult task. Not only have Ford Motor Co., General Motors, and Stellantis NV refined the blocking and tackling of building and tooling a factory, they have scads of them sitting empty or ticking away at reduced capacity.

“A distinct …

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Americas CEO Martin Fritsches says the company's expanding product portfolio, close relationship with dealers and one-one-one approach with customers are driving the brand forward. 

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British exotic automaker McLaren Americas has signed on with Chase Auto as its exclusive banking partner, both companies said Monday.

Chase will finance loans and leases for the automaker and is the banking partner through which the manufacturer disseminates customer incentives, according to the agreement.

The relationship will focus on McLaren's leasing business, which is a key component of the automaker's long-term strategy to open the brand to consumers at different price points.

McLaren had a corporate financial arrangement with J.P. Morgan Chase before inking this private-label agreement. Creating a customer-centric experience that would appeal to high-end clients was an important factor in selecting the lender for its financial services business, said Nic Brown, McLaren's vice president of sales.

"We are always looking at unique experiences that we can offer [our customers] above and beyond the vehicle experience," he said. "With Chase, it w…

WASHINGTON -- California's two U.S. senators are urging President Joe Biden to set a firm date to phase out gas-powered passenger vehicles as the White House grapples with how to rewrite vehicle emissions rules slashed under President Donald Trump.

In an unreported letter going to Biden on Monday, U.S. Sens. Alex Padilla and Dianne Feinstein -- both of them California Democrats -- called on Biden "to follow California’s lead and set a date by which all new cars and passenger trucks sold be zero-emission vehicles." They also urged Biden to restore California's authority to set clean car standards.

In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, signed an executive order directing the state's air resources agency to require all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California to be zero-emission by 2035.

Biden's campaign in 2020 declined to endorse a specific date to end gas-powered vehicle sales, but he has vowed to dramatically boost EVs and…

<!--*/ */ /*-->*/ A closely watched metric, often ignored

For a metric that's so important, it sure doesn't get much popular attention.

It's called sales per franchise. The ranking is a key part of our annual dealer census, to be published in Monday's issue.

There's nothing fancy about it. It measures how many new vehicles are sold in the U.S. by the average franchise of a particular auto brand. As this year's tally shows, the numbers are all over the map. Toyota is at the top, with 1,483. Exotic brands such as Aston Martin and Lamborghini typically fill out much of the bottom, this year in the 40- to 50-sales-per-franchise range.

And while the rankings don't get much media focus, you can bet they're closely watched inside corporate offices. For example, five of the six most-liked brands in the National Automobile Dealers Association Dealer Attitude Study for winter 2019 were among the top six in the Automotive News sales-per-franchise…

In its goal to eclipse Tesla as the world's dominant electric vehicle manufacturer, Volkswagen appears to embrace "if you can't beat them, join them."

The German behemoth revealed plans last week to dramatically expand its EV operations both upstream and downstream, deciding to itself manufacture at least a sixth of its European battery cells sourced from six cell plants in the region as well as link with partners to operate a massive network of fast chargers across the continent.

Much like Tesla and its 4680 cylindrical cells, Volkswagen chose to concentrate on one "unified" cell to drive down the price of a kilowatt-hour to well below €100 ($119). By switching from the pouch format and focusing on prismatic, the plan does away with the need for modules, reducing costs.

Automakers had underestimated just how critical a role the battery played in differentiating EVs, say experts. BMW, for example, saw its core competence in buildi…

The CEO of Optimus Ride discusses his company's strategy of placing self-driving shuttles in campus environments, its plans to raise additional capital and the transition to full autonomy.

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