Trade News

PARIS — Europe's car sales, slam-med by the coronavirus crisis in 2020, were supposed to bounce back this year. But instead, registrations fell by 26 percent in January.

The declines more closely resembled the dark days of last spring, when factories were closed and Europeans were confined to their homes in an effort to combat the coronavirus. Last month's sales in Spain took a 51 percent hit, Britain's fell 40 percent — to a low last seen in 1970 — and mighty Germany, Europe's biggest market, lost 31 percent.

At the same time, sales in China rose 30 percent. And demand in the U.S. held up, too, with the seasonally adjusted annual sales rate just under pre-pandemic levels of 17 million.

So what happened in Europe?

Initial optimism over COVID-19 vaccines faded as countries descended into infighting over supply and bureaucratic snags. With vaccine rollout slow and new virus variants discovered in Britain and other coun…

Thierry Bollore, the former Renault CEO who took the wheel at Jaguar Land Rover in September, last week ripped the covers off his new global strategy. If his plan is successful, JLR will shrink and grow at the same time — and build a stronger identity for troubled Jaguar.

The shrinkage will come from fewer nameplates and lower volume for Jaguar. JLR is abandoning its goal of 1 million global sales per year, a strategy put in place by Bollore's predecessor, Ralf Speth, who stepped down last fall from the CEO role and now is nonexecutive vice chairman. The company also announced last week that it is shrinking its global salaried work force by 2,000 employees.

JLR's growth will come in efficiencies gained from producing its vehicles on fewer architectures and deriving more revenue per vehicle by selling connected services and from subscriptions. "As a business we will be focused on value creation, on delivering quality and profits over volume," Bo…

Several public retailers that largely sat on the sidelines during the dealership acquisition action of the past few years say they are getting back in the game.

AutoNation Inc., Penske Automotive Group Inc., Group 1 Automotive Inc. and Sonic Automotive Inc. each indicated this month that they again are shopping for franchised dealerships and looking to expand store counts.

The plans by the four dealership groups come amid a recent surge in stock prices for public auto retailers and as competitors such as Lithia Motors Inc. and Asbury Automotive Group Inc. have snapped up stores. Dealership buy-sell activity has broadly skyrocketed following the early months of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when deals came to a short-lived standstill.

"We definitely have a lot of conversations going on, a lot of negotiations," Mike Jackson, CEO of AutoNation, the largest U.S. new-vehicle retailer, said last week. "I fully expect we'll have some…

Self-driving vehicles hold the potential to deliver a safer and more efficient era of transportation, but merely replacing human drivers with automated ones only takes progress so far.

Although autonomous vehicles are engineered to function largely without reliance on the outside world, there may be benefits unlocked — both for AV companies and society at large — by connecting the two. What if they acted not as lone rangers on the road, but as voluntary contributors to a larger traffic information network?

That's a question Argo AI sought to answer with a fellow Pittsburgh tech company, Rapid Flow Technologies, in a pilot project completed late last year. Findings were published this month, and they hint at what the future could hold.

On its own, Rapid Flow Technologies has deployed software on traffic lights to passively analyze vehicle, bicycle and pedestrian traffic at intersections and adapt signals. That can reduce delays by …

LOS ANGELES — Mazda's CX-30 subcompact crossover was called on to do some heavy lifting when it was offered for the 2020 model year. Its sales of just more than 38,000 last year kept the automaker in the black, with a 0.2 percent rise in deliveries across its seven-vehicle lineup, despite the pandemic.

But for 2021, the CX-30 has an even bigger challenge: to take on brands such as BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz in the small-crossover segment where labels still mean a lot.

Mazda engineers have armed the CX-30 with a new turbocharged engine, all-wheel drive and an upscale interior for the heavy lift.

The CX-30 2.5 Turbo, launched last month, is Mazda's strongest play yet as it seeks to move the brand upmarket without losing its mainstream buyers. The crossover sits on a new platform, with new infotainment software, high-end materials such as red leather and a full standard safety suite.

"We know the CX-30 has had great success in its current positioni…

DETROIT — At first glance, it can be tough to see much difference between the Chevrolet Bolt EV and its new crossover variant, the Bolt EUV, even though General Motors says the two electric vehicles have no exterior sheet metal in common.

But GM thinks it has differentiated the EUV from its smaller sibling just enough to address some of the shortfalls that have held back the Bolt EV. The EUV is 6 inches longer and has 3 inches of additional rear legroom, a change Bolt EV customers had requested, said Jesse Ortega, the vehicles' executive chief engineer. According to GM's specs, the front seats and cargo areas are almost exactly the same size.

It's a strategy that has worked for GM recently with the Buick Encore and Encore GX and the Chevy Trax and Trailblazer. Chevy also has successfully sold the Tahoe alongside the longer-wheelbase Suburban for a quarter century. In each case, the automaker effectively divided one segment between two entries f…

LOS ANGELES — Corporate changes at Honda Motor Co. are not only happening in Japan with a new CEO announced Friday, but also at the company's U.S. headquarters in California with a new vice president of operations and new sales chief at the Acura division.

Mamadou Diallo, 36, assistant vice president of national sales at Acura, has been promoted to vice president of auto operations starting April 1. Replacing him in the sales post will be Emile Korkor, 43, currently assistant vice president of Acura Sales and Marketing in Canada, the company told Automotive News.

Diallo joined American Honda Motor Co. in 2001 and has received regular promotions within the Acura sales division. He was named to his current post in October 2019. Korkor started at Honda Canada in finance in 1990 before moving to product planning and Acura sales. He has been in his current post since April 2019.

In a message to Acura dealers, Diallo said the organizationa…

German auto supplier Continental will not propose any dividend for 2020 because it had chalked up a net loss for the year, it said Friday.

The company, which is due to release preliminary full-year results on March 9, added that it remained committed to a mid-term dividend policy of paying out 15-30 percent of net income to shareholders.

Continental, of Hanover, Germany, ranks No. 4 on the Automotive News list of top 100 global suppliers, with 2019 sales to automakers of $35.3 billion.

Slippery roads. Cold. Burst pipes. Days of wintry weather and its effects have left Texas dealerships reeling as they try to return to normal business operations.

Historic snow, ice, water shortages and below-freezing temperatures forced dealerships and manufacturing plants in Texas and throughout the country to close during the week. In Texas, residents are dealing with water outages and a power grid that collapsed under a spike in energy demand.

It's not unlike the aftermath of a hurricane, said Darren Whitehurst, president of the Texas Automobile Dealers Association.

"The dealerships that have been open — I don't think they've been getting much traffic," he said.

Much of Texas is under boil-water notices, Whitehurst said. Dealerships in the region are looking forward to warmer temperatures slated to arrive over the weekend, he added.

"There's certainly a resiliency, and they do a lot in their communities," Whitehurst said. "I think you'l…

Al Maroone, the son of Lebanese immigrants who founded a dealership group that became a major building block of megaretailer AutoNation Inc., died Wednesday at his Florida home. He was 98.

Maroone, who grew up in a poor section of Buffalo, N.Y., with six siblings, purchased a small Ford dealership in nearby Middleport in 1955, pooling money borrowed from his father's life savings, his sister's pension and his father-in-law's remortgage. Maroone focused on ways to differentiate his dealership from competitors and eventually expanded Maroone Automotive Group in Buffalo and into South Florida.

By 1997, the dealership group operated seven stores generating $700 million in annual revenue, and Maroone was running the business with his son, Mike Maroone, when Florida businessman Wayne Huizenga came calling. Huizenga, a legendary entrepreneur who built Waste Management and Blockbuster Video into behemoths by acquiring a string of mom-and-pop businesses, was applying th…

Apple Inc. is in discussions with multiple suppliers of self-driving car sensors known as lidar, according to people familiar with the matter, a key milestone toward development of its first passenger vehicle.

The technology giant is in active talks with a number of potential suppliers for these laser-based sensors that allow a car’s computer to “see” its surroundings, said the people, who asked not to be identified due to the private nature of the discussions. The company has been working on a driverless vehicle project for several years and has developed on its own most of the necessary software, underlying processors and artificial intelligence algorithms needed for such a sophisticated system.

As it’s done with the iPhone, Apple is looking to outside vendors to supply critical hardware for a planned autonomous vehicle, the people said. The ongoing discussions are a sign that Apple has yet to settle on a preferred supplier for lidar and that it’s likely mul…

Renault CEO Luca de Meo warned that a global shortage in semiconductors could result in more plant closures and dent the French carmaker’s production this year.

Securing enough chips is “a daily fight,” de Meo said Friday when presenting the company’s full-year results. The semiconductor bottleneck is expected to peak in the second quarter and could shave 100,000 cars off Renault’s output this year, the company said. Renault sold 2.95 million vehicles in 2020.

Renault is the latest automaker to warn of lasting effects from the supply-chain snarls that are reverberating throughout the industry, idling factories and adding to damage from the pandemic. The French company has already idled plants in Europe and northern Africa this year.

General Motors has predicted the shortage will shave $1.5 billion to $2 billion off its adjusted earnings in 2021. Ford Motor Co. said first-quarter production could be cut by as much as a fifth and reduce adjusted earnings b…