Trade News

Leon Edwards, a former president of the National Automobile Dealers Association who led the group when it agreed to a decade of antitrust oversight by the U.S. Justice Department, died Saturday. He was 89.

Edwards, a Chevrolet dealer from Birmingham, Ala., was NADA president in 1995. During his tenure, NADA agreed to the antitrust settlement that called for 10 years of monitoring after the organization was accused of making illegal efforts to limit price competition in car sales to consumers.

At the time, NADA leaders, including Edwards, said they opted to settle with the Justice Department rather than face litigation that they said would have cost at least $1 million to defend, according to an October 1995 article by Automotive News.

Edwards and other NADA leaders denied that the association's actions violated antitrust laws. But the cost to fight the allegations in court could have been "crippling," Edwards said in a letter to NADA…

As expected, Volkswagen Group of America has ended production of the Golf at the automaker's plant in Puebla, Mexico, which supplied U.S. dealers, as the base-model hatchback is wound down in the U.S.

A new eighth-generation Golf R and Golf GTI, manufactured in Germany, will be imported into the U.S. for the 2022 model year as the Puebla plant transitions to new products, including the Taos subcompact crossover, VW of America said today.

Since the vehicle first went on sale in the U.S. in 1974 as the VW Rabbit, the German brand has sold nearly 2.5 million Golf hatchbacks in the states, including the latest generation, which debuted for the 2015 model year. It switched to the Golf nameplate, used elsewhere globally, in 1985, returned as a Rabbit from 2006 to 2009, and finally stayed with the Golf name from 2010 onward.

U.S. sales of the base-model Golf actually rose 7.4 percent in 2020 to 6,063 vehicles. But as a small hatchback, the …

Gerald Wiegert, the entrepreneur born in the Detroit area who for three decades aimed to build an American supercar faster and sexier than anything out of Europe, died Jan. 15 in California. He was 76.

The Vector W8 was the most successful of Wiegert's automotive projects, but just 23 of the low-slung road rockets were built in the early 1990s. Wiegert, like the other automotive mavericks who came before him — such as Preston Tucker, Malcolm Bricklin and John DeLorean — faced insurmountable financial obstacles.

Born in Dearborn in 1944, the son of a machinist attended Detroit's College for Creative Studies, completed an internship at General Motors' Technical Center and then graduated from ArtCenter College of Design in California, according to an article in Hagerty magazine. In the 1970s, as he worked as a freelance designer, Wiegert began raising money to build an American supercar to take on those from Lamborghini and Ferrari.

After a few failed attem…

A Ford Motor Co. safety recall is being investigated after NHTSA received 11 complaints that the 2019 power tailgate remedy did not work.

The recall affected 300,000 2017-20 Super Duty pickups: the F-250, F-350 and F-450.

The defect was caused by water entering the electrical wiring system causing a short circuit resulting in the unintended switch activation and release of the tailgate latches.

The remedy was the addition of jumper pigtails to the tailgate release control circuits and the installation of a new tailgate handle release switch, according to a NHTSA document.

The Associated Press reported that complaints received by NHTSA reveal the trucks are still experiencing the issue.

The NHTSA investigation could lead to another Ford recall to correct the defect.

Sumitomo Electric Wiring Systems of Farmington Hills, Mich., was the supplier of the tailgate.

A Ford spokeswoman had no…

Chase Auto forged its first direct-to-consumer private label automaker partnership with Rivian Automotive Inc., both companies said last week. The program is slated to launch early this year, ahead of expected June deliveries of Rivian's all-electric R1T pickup.

Chase's digital capabilities drew the battery-electric automaker to the bank, which strives alongside the traditional automotive industry to create a fully online purchase experience, said Jagdeep Dayal, head of partnerships for Chase Auto. Rivian was in talks with several of Chase's competitors leading up to its U.S. launch, he said.

"They choose us for the capabilities we have as a captive and, quite frankly, the digital capabilities that we will be able to bring to bear in this fully digital environment," Dayal said.

Established in 2009, Rivian has yet to sell a vehicle. The company has raised about $6 billion from backers, including Ford Motor Co. and Amazon. It plans …

In deciding to nominate Federal Trade Commission member Rohit Chopra to oversee the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, President Joe Biden tapped a vocal advocate of regulation by enforcement.

Chopra's appointment as head of the federal watchdog comes at a particularly sensitive time for the auto industry, where subprime customers face heightened scrutiny when applying for auto loans and are all but vanishing from the new-vehicle market.

As an FTC commissioner, Chopra has been an outspoken critic of how some dealerships are compensated for arranging customer financing.

Chopra aired his views on indirect auto lending as part of a particularly egregious case of unfair and abusive practices the FTC pursued against New York dealership Bronx Honda.

The retailer agreed last May to pay $1.5 million to settle a gamut of FTC charges, from deceptive advertising to double-charging consumers taxes on vehicle purchases.

In particular, allegations tha…

As the calendar flipped to 2021, my email inbox became littered with story pitches from experts and analysts about how to make the new year great. Some of the pitches were tied to the service lane and typically included a bullet-point list of how to make 2021 remarkable.

Somewhere on just about every list was the advice, "Forget about 2020."

I completely understand the sentiment, but the year did have some redeeming qualities.

Jim Henne is general manager at Performance Toyota in Sinking Spring, Pa., 90 minutes northwest of Philadelphia. His service business was off 40 percent last April, and he had to furlough 70 percent of his staff at the start of the pandemic and deal with customers afraid to come in. He'd be right to want to forget 2020.

But Henne thinks about the things he and his staff accomplished against enormous odds, efforts that will be an important part of their 2021 operations. Expanding service pickup and delivery. Initiating contac…

SEOUL -- Kia Corp. said on Wednesday it's reviewing cooperation on self-driving electric vehicles with multiple foreign firms, making no mention of a report linking it to a project with tech giant Apple Inc.

Kia's comment, issued in a regulatory filing as its shares surged nearly 20 percent in Seoul, came after domestic online publication Edaily reported late on Tuesday that Kia's parent, Hyundai Motor Group, had decided Kia would be in charge of proposed cooperation with Apple on EVs. The report cited unnamed industry sources.

Hyundai Motor declined to comment. Apple was not immediately available for comment outside of U.S. business hours.

Kia's sister company Hyundai Motor Co. said earlier this month it was in early talks with Apple, after local media reported the firms were discussing an EV and battery-tie up, sending Hyundai shares up nearly 25 percent. Apple declined to comment at the time.

In December, Reuters reported that Apple was moving …

WASHINGTON -- President-elect Joe Biden will order U.S. agencies on Wednesday to revisit fuel efficiency standards as well as rules governing emissions from airplanes, and appliance and building energy efficiency standards, the transition team said.

The Trump administration in March finalized a rollback of U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to require 1.5 percent annual increases in efficiency through 2026, well below the 5 percent yearly boosts in Obama administration rules it discarded.

The Trump administration said the rollback would result in about 2 billion additional barrels of oil being consumed over and at least 867 million metric tons of carbon dioxide being emitted over the life of the vehicles.

During the campaign, Biden vowed to "establish ambitious fuel economy standards" and to negotiate them with workers, environmentalists, automakers and states.

Biden is also directing agencies to reconsider Trump's 2019 decision to revo…

Volkswagen has lost tens of thousands of cars in production in China due to the global chip supply shortage that is hitting automakers around the world.

"It was hurting us already in December and we lost some 10,000 cars since then simply because we lost 50,000 cars in production in December because of some chips," VW's China head, Stephan Wollenstein, said during an online media briefing Wednesday.

Wollenstein said the chip shortage is mainly impacting models using the automaker's Electronic Stability Program, a system of sensors that works with a car's Anti-lock Braking System to prevent the wheels seizing up after an unexpected swerve.

Some other components may also be affected, he said, without providing further detail.

"You see how vulnerable our industries are if only one chip is missing," Wollenstein said. "This will unfortunately continue in the first quarter." The company is in the process of contacting chipmakers worldwide to better sho…

Departing President Donald Trump pardoned Anthony Levandowski, saving the engineer from more than a year in prison for stealing trade secrets from his former employer, Alphabet's Waymo.

The pardon was supported by venture capitalist and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, virtual-reality developer Palmer Luckey and former Walt Disney executive Michael Ovitz, among others, according to a statement from the White House on Tuesday.

In August, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ordered Levandowski to spend 18 months in prison, concluding one of the highest-profile criminal cases to hit Silicon Valley and describing it as "the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen."

Levandowski had pleaded guilty to trade secret theft.

Levandowski was an autonomous vehicle pioneer, helping the Google car project, now known as Waymo, during its early years.

Uber Technologies hired him to run its self-driving initiative and Levandowski allegedly downloa…