Trade News

Aeva Inc, a company founded by former Apple Inc. engineers to supply a key self-driving car sensor, said Tuesday it had reached a deal to supply the sensors for self-driving heavy duty trucks being developed by TuSimple.

Aeva makes a lidar unit that helps give vehicles a three-dimensional view of the road and is in the process of becoming a publicly trade company through a merger with InterPrivate Acquisition Corp.

It has announced deals with automotive suppliers ZF Friedrichshafen and Denso Corp. to supply sensors to automakers for passenger vehicles.

But the deal with TuSimple represents Aeva's first move into the world of self-driving trucks.

Based in San Diego, TuSimple has minority-stake backing from Volkswagen's commercial trucking unit Traton to develop self-driving trucks. United Parcel Service In.c also has a minority stake in the startup, which is developing self-driving trucks with Navistar International Corp. slated to start production…

STOCKHOLM -- Swedish supplier Autoliv on Tuesday reported a 34 percent jump in fourth-quarter operating profit, boosted by a recovery in vehicle production following lockdowns to fight the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

Autoliv, the world's largest producer of airbags and seatbelts, said it expects around 20 percent organic sales growth and an adjusted operating margin of about 10 percent in 2021.

"Although the pandemic is not yet behind us, I am confident that our performance in the second half of the year shows that we have built a solid platform to move towards our mid-term targets," CEO Mikael Bratt said in a statement.

Autoliv reported a fourth-quarter operating profit of $307 million compared with $229 million in the year-ago quarter and a mean forecast of $283 million based on a poll of analysts published by the company.

On an adjusted basis, operating earnings were $311 million, up from $242 million a year earlier, the company said. Q…

SEOUL -- A Hyundai Kona EV caught fire last week in the first-ever known case of a recalled Kona catching fire, prompting authorities to investigate the adequacy of the recall, a South Korean transport ministry official said.

A series of fires prompted mass recalls of Hyundai's best-selling Kona EV in South Korea in October.

The latest Kona fire, on Saturday in the city of Daegu, is among 11 reported so far in the country. But this incident was different as it was the first Kona EV to catch fire after undergoing the recall process, the official said on Tuesday.

In South Korea, Hyundai has recalled 25,564 Kona EVs built during September 2017 to March 2020 due to the risk of short circuit possibly caused by faulty manufacturing of its high-voltage battery cells.

Recalled Kona EVs in South Korea get software updates and some receive battery replacements after inspection.

The recalled Kona that caught fire had only received a software update bu…

STOCKHOLM -- Veoneer and microchip giant Qualcomm have signed a collaboration deal to develop a software and chip platform for advanced driver-assistance systems, Veoneer said in a statement Tuesday.

The companies said in August that they would cooperate on the technology. Their joint platform will seek to rival companies such as Intel's Mobileye.

Veoneer, which also makes radars and vision systems, said it had formed Arriver, a dedicated software unit for the development of the complete perception and drive policy software stack.

"Today's agreement with Qualcomm Technologies and the creation of Arriver are key milestones in Veoneer's development," Veoneer CEO Jan Carlson said in the statement.

In December, Carlson told Automotive News Europe that the company was aiming to initially provide Level 2 autonomy with the product.

Veoneer said that Arriver software is already functional on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride Platform, "which will be avail…

SEOUL -- Hyundai Motor said on Tuesday it expects sales in U.S. and China to surge this year, driven by the launch of new electric vehicles and crossovers, after reporting its best quarterly profit in more than three years.

Fourth-quarter profit jumped 57 percent to 1.3 trillion won ($1.2 billion) on demand for high-margin crossovers and its premium Genesis cars, but vehicle sales fell 4.7 percent amid a broader economic weakness due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But profits were hurt by a strong won. The South Korean currency rose about 7 percent against the dollar in the three months to December. A stronger won erodes the value of overseas sales for South Korean companies, and North America is Hyundai's biggest market.

Fourth-quarter revenue rose 5.1 percent to 29.2 trillion won ($26.4 billion), Hyundai said.

For the full year, Hyundai reported a net profit of $1.9 billion, down from $2.9 billion in 2019.

Hyundai said it expects 2021 sales to…

WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden on Monday vowed to replace the U.S. government's fleet of roughly 650,000 vehicles with electric models as the new administration shifts its focus toward clean energy.

"The federal government also owns an enormous fleet of vehicles, which we're going to replace with clean electric vehicles made right here in America made by American workers," Biden said Monday

Biden criticized existing rules that allow vehicles to be considered U.S. made when purchased by the U.S. government even if they have significant non-American made components.

Biden said he would close "loopholes" that allow key parts like engines, steel and glass to be manufactured abroad for vehicles considered U.S. made.

The White House did not immediately answer questions about over what period Biden planned to replace current vehicles. It could cost the U.S. $20 billion or more to replace the fleet.

Biden's "Buy America" executive order signed M…

A former Tesla Inc. software engineer was ordered to appear before a federal judge to face allegations that three days into his job, he started stealing confidential files and transferring them to a personal storage account.

During his two-week employment ending Jan. 6, Alex Khatilov stole more than 6,000 scripts, or files of code, that automate a broad range of business functions, Tesla argues in its trade-secret theft complaint filed in U.S. District Court for Northern California.

Tesla convinced U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, Calif., that the threat posed is serious enough that she granted a restraining order Friday requiring Khatilov to immediately preserve and return all files, records and emails to the company and appear before her, remotely, on Feb. 4.

Elon Musk’s EV maker has aggressively pursued lawsuits against other former employees and rival companies that it has accused of poaching engineers and stealing proprietary d…

TAIPEI -- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. plans to prioritize production of auto chips if it is able to further increase capacity, Taiwan's Economics Ministry told Reuters, amid a global shortage that has hampered car production.

A ministry official said Minister Wang Mei-hua spoke to senior company executives on Sunday about the issue.

TSMC had told the ministry it will "optimize" the production process of chips to make it more efficient and prioritize auto chip production if it is able to further increase capacity, the ministry said.

TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, said current production capacity is full, but had assured the ministry that "if production can be increased by optimizing production capacity, it will cooperate with the government to regard automotive chips as a primary application."

TSMC, in a statement to Reuters, referred to comments from its CEO C.C. Wei on an earnings call this month.

"Other than con…

Panasonic Corp. has spent the past six months developing a battery cell with higher energy density and better fast-charging performance.

But taking an electric vehicle battery to a new level requires more than a tweak, said Celina Mikolajczak, vice president of battery technology at Panasonic Energy North America. The current innovation involves changes in design, materials and manufacturing processes.

"People like to envision a cell as kind of a commodity product," Mikolajczak said. But a lithium ion cell is not a commodity product, she told Automotive News.

"Every design has its own challenges. It has its own strengths. It has its own demerits. I make a cell that's optimized for one customer, a different customer wants a different optimization," she said.

The product in question, known as Panasonic's 2170 cell, supplies power to the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y batteries that are made at the Gigafactory in Reno, Nev.,…

People in the self-driving tech industry have long been fascinated with a psychological thought experiment known as the trolley problem, in which participants must make ethical choices among grim fictional scenarios.

Standing beside a lever that could alter the path of a runaway trolley, should you let it continue unabated and run over five people tied to the tracks ahead? Or save those five people by throwing the switch, and instead sacrifice two bystanders who otherwise wouldn't have been harmed?

Various permutations of the trolley problem exist, and the latest comes from an unexpected place: the outgoing White House administration.

In his final hours as president, Donald Trump issued a pardon to Anthony Levandowski, the self-driving engineer who pleaded guilty to a single count of stealing a trade secret from Google and bringing it to his new job at Uber.

A White House announcement of the pardon noted "his sentencing…