Trade News

TURIN – Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares has told Italian unions that he will work with them to improve competitiveness and cut production costs at factories in Italy, where they currently are up to four times more than in France or Spain for a similar model.

Tavares, who met with union representatives at two former Fiat Chrysler factories in the Turin area this week, said the problem was primarily not labor costs but production costs on models that did not sell in anticipated numbers.

Unions have been worried that the merger of PSA Group and FCA to form Stellantis, which was finalized last month, could result in job losses, especially in Italy. Tavares has pledged not to close any assembly plants in Europe as a result of the merger.

A union source who attended the meeting told Automotive News Europe that Tavares gave workers several examples of the cost discrepancy between the Turin-area plants and those at PSA plants in Europe.

Tavares said the Ma…

In committing billions of dollars to their Ontario assembly plants, the Detroit 3 have signaled that they see Canada as central to their electrification plans — thanks in part to enhanced government incentives.

In January, General Motors committed to a $781 million investment in CAMI Assembly in Ingersoll, Ontario, to build its new BrightDrop EV600 all-electric cargo vans starting in November. That announcement came just a few months after Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, now Stellantis, vowed to spend up to a combined $2.58 billion on two of their plants to build electric vehicles this decade.

"It's part of the whole package of Canada becoming an electric vehicle center," said Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting for AutoForecast Solutions. "There's a wave of investment going into Canada now to become a center of excellence for electric vehicles."

But that wave was not inevitable. Indeed, until recently, ma…

It's been a year of storms for Greg Luther.

The first one hit his immune system in January, when the body shop director at Helfman Dodge-Chrysler-Jeep-Ram-Fiat in Houston missed three weeks of work after contracting COVID-19.

Luther had to stave off severe headaches and congestion while losing his abilities to taste and smell.

He was still bouncing back from that episode when another storm hit, this one carrying a load of snow, ice and astoundingly frigid temperatures to Texas that devastated the region's power and water systems in mid-February.

It also left Luther with burst pipes that caused flooding at his ranch-style home an hour's drive north of Houston — a place that became unreachable for a few days after the winter blast.

"I'm 47 years old and lived here my entire life and don't recall anything like this," Luther told Automotive News. "Our government just wasn't set up, or whoever's responsible to m…

Range anxiety remains a potential roadblock to the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. It's a situation brought into sharp relief during disasters such as the recent power outages in Texas, which may keep drivers from accessing charging stations, thus limiting their ability to travel long distances to evacuate stricken areas.

A J.D. Power survey issued in January found that EV drivers cite range as the major factor in their purchase decisions.

"It's still about peace of mind," said Brent Gruber, the company's senior director of global automotive. "Even though most owners drive less than the stated range of their vehicle's battery, they still want to know that the actual battery range is close to the stated battery range."

J.D. Power's U.S. Electric Vehicle Experience Ownership Study said that range accuracy accounts for 20 percent of customers' overall satisfaction in their EVs, rising above other metrics such as charging options, driving enjoyme…

Self-driving tech company Aurora is firming up plans for manufacturing lidar sensors at scale.

The company on Friday said it agreed to acquire lidar-on-chip startup OURS Technology, a move intended to pave the way for producing large quantities of the sensors, which allow vehicles to perceive their environment and detect obstacles in their path.

Aurora, in a statement, said the planned acquisition will help it move past basic development of its lidar technology and toward an automotive-grade commercial product. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Aurora said it expects to close on the acquisition in a matter of weeks.

This won't be Aurora's first purchase of a lidar startup. In May 2019, the company purchased Blackmore, a Montana lidar company that helped pioneer a particular lidar technology called frequency modulated continuous wave.

The FMCW lidar enabled Aurora's vehicles to perceive objects at distances of more than 300 meters, a critical e…

Jaguar Land Rover will slash its manufacturing capacity by 25 percent over five years and write off investment in products it’s decided to scrap under new CEO Thierry Bollore.

The British carmaker will take a non-cash charge of about 1 billion pounds ($1.4 billion) in the quarter ending in March related to higher previous spending and projects it won’t complete, according to an investor presentation. The company said last week it was calling off plans to build a battery-powered replacement of the Jaguar XJ sedan.

The Tata Motors Ltd.-owned manufacturer’s new business plan under Bollore, 57, includes making the Jaguar marque all-electric within four years while giving the Land Rover SUV brand more time to make the jump. On Friday, the carmaker said it has lowered its breakeven point to about 400,000 vehicles a year, from 600,000.

JLR’s pivot away from the internal combustion engine is the latest seismic shift in the auto industry driven by stricter emissi…

Jaguar Land Rover will look outside the company to find a platform for new full-electric Jaguar models, CEO Thierry Bollore said.

The UK automaker plans to make its Jaguar brand all-electric starting in 2025, dropping combustion engines as the marque’s sedans and crossovers reach the end of their life cycles. Land Rover will get its first battery-powered vehicle in 2024 but will not be electric-only in the new future.

The plan includes giving Jaguar its own standalone electric platform, which would be expensive to produce in-house for a brand that is expected to remain low-volume, below even the 103,000 vehicles it sold worldwide last year. 

Bollore said the automaker has started the process to find a company willing to partner with Jaguar on the architecture. “Naturally there is massive appetite to work with us,” he told financial analysts during an investor day on Friday.

The decision to work with a partner “was a matter of scale and speed …

Join Automotive News Publisher Jason Stein for a daily podcast series about the coronavirus crisis. He’ll speak with industry experts, insiders and Automotive News reporters about how the virus is impacting and reshaping the automotive industry.

He didn't plan on becoming a car dealer, but his stores helped build AutoNation. Maroone USA CEO Mike Maroone reflects on the legacy of his father, who died last week at the age of 98.

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FRANKFURT -- Volkswagen Group said it expects revenues and deliveries to rebound strongly in the current year, shrugging off the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The automaker also said its operating profit, stripping out special items related to the diesel scandal, fell 45 percent to 10.6 billion euros ($12.9 billion) last year.

VW is projecting an operating margin of 5 percent to 6.5 percent for 2021 and aiming for the higher end of that range, according to a statement issued after the automaker's supervisory board meeting on Friday.

"We intend to carry over the strong momentum from the significantly better second half into the current year," CFO Frank Witter said in the statement. "The programs for reducing our fixed costs and in procurement will make us more robust in the long term," he said.

VW Group's vehicle deliveries fell 15 percent to 9.3 million last year.

The company cautioned that intense competition, volatile commodity…

SEOUL -- Hyundai Motor Co. has so far avoided a chip shortage that has plagued global automakers, largely maintaining its stockpile of chips last year and even accelerating purchases towards the end, three people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

The shortage has forced production cuts worldwide, including at Volkswagen Group and General Motors, prompting Germany and the U.S. to ramp up efforts to resolve the shortage.

Other than Japan's Toyota Motor Corp., which said this month it had enough chip inventory to last it about four months, Hyundai and its sister firm Kia Corp. are the only global automakers to have maintained a stockpile of low-tech chips that helped them keep up production.

If it doesn't ease soon, though, the shortage could hit Hyundai too, as tight capacity on factory floors starts pressuring production of even high-tech auto chips, said two of the people, who are familiar with the company's purchases.

The South Korean au…