Trade News

DETROIT — General Motors on Friday said it is recalling more than 68,000 Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles, a month after regulators began investigating whether they were at risk of catching fire.

GM said it has identified five Bolt fires — two more than NHTSA cited in opening a preliminary evaluation of the matter. The fires possibly relate to high-voltage batteries produced by LG Chem in South Korea, GM said.

The automaker and NHTSA are still working to determine the cause of the issue, but GM plans to have a remedy as soon as possible after the first of the year, Jesse Ortega, the Bolt's executive chief engineer, told reporters.

In October, NHTSA said it had received two complaints claiming "the vehicles caught fire under the rear seat while parked and unattended." NHTSA also found a 2017 Bolt with a similar pattern.

GM and NHTSA found two cases of smoke inhalation related to the fires but there are no other known injuries.

The recal…

Velodyne Lidar Inc. said Friday it would introduce a new lidar unit, a key sensor in self-driving cars, with a target price of less than $500 and no moving parts.

Velodyne became a public company in September and is one of the several companies vying to supply automakers with lidar, a sensor that generates a three-dimensional map of the road ahead. Velodyne was an early entrant into the market and its units have powered research operations for many automakers.

Some of those early research units were bulky, contained many moving parts and cost well above $10,000. For mass production in passenger vehicles, automakers and their major suppliers seek units that are sleek enough to fit into attractive car designs and cost well below $1,000.

An increasing number of devices, such as Apple's new iPad Pro and iPhone 12 Pro models, include lidar sensors that help with applications such as augmented reality, in which digital content is overlaid on the real world. Read more

Ford Motor Co. is considering manufacturing battery cells for electric vehicles as a way to offset potential job losses as a result of products that require fewer parts to build, CEO Jim Farley said Friday.

Speaking at a Reuters Automotive Summit, Farley said Ford plans to transition its work force from building internal combustion engines to assembling inverters and electric motors, but that may not be enough. The UAW in recent years has raised concerns about employment levels should most automakers transition to products that aren't as complicated to build.

"The fact of the matter is electric vehicles have 40 percent less parts, and that means they're a lot easier to put together," Farley said. "We do have to solve for the reality that when electrification becomes 25 percent or 50 percent of our industry in the coming years, what are we going to do about the jobs? One of the obvious choices is going into cell production."

So far,…

General Motors is temporarily suspending its planned overtime production at its SUV plant in Arlington, Texas, The Detroit News reported Friday.

GM spokesman David Barnas told the newspaper, "Due to a temporary parts supply issue, Arlington will cancel its planned overtime production this coming Saturday, Nov. 14. Regular production is not impacted, and the plant will resume normal operations on Monday, Nov. 16. GM's supply chain, engineering and manufacturing teams continue to work closely with our suppliers to minimize any parts disruption."

Barnas told Automotive News in an email that GM is not providing details on the interruptions with supplier partners and is not releasing the names of impacted parts.

Arlington Assembly builds the GMC Yukon and Yukon XL, Chevrolet Suburban and Tahoe and Cadillac Escalade and Escalade ESV.

This is the second GM plant experiencing production halts this week. The Bowling Green Assembl…

A year ago, Nio Inc.’s dwindling cash and sputtering sales had the electric-vehicle upstart on the brink of doom. Fast forward, and the stock’s 11-fold gain in 2020 has pushed the Chinese company’s market value past General Motors Co.

No other company better illustrates the swift shift in consumer and investor perception of EVs than Nio. Skepticism over the technology’s viability has turned into a race to pick the winners, with Nio and main rival Tesla Inc. among the top candidates.

With China’s EV market expected to expand rapidly over the coming years, investors are betting that Nio will thrive even as competition intensifies. Yet success is far from guaranteed: Nio’s sales volumes are still minuscule compared with bigger auto-industry rivals, the company has never turned a profit as development and marketing costs rise, and price pressure is getting tougher.

“Another wave of price cuts for premium electric vehicles in China may be on the horizon, stir…

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.

LMC Automotive's Jeff Schuster says the firm is forecasting 15.7 million U.S. light-vehicle sales next year and fewer pandemic-related disruptions. He also believes the used-vehicle market will remain a key part of the industry's rebound.

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WASHINGTON -- NHTSA said Thursday it identified the 18th U.S. death tied to a Takata airbag inflator rupture after the review of a recent BMW crash.

The safety agency said it had concluded a Takata airbag inflator rupture during a September crash in Arizona had led to fatal injuries of the driver.

This was the first reported Takata death in a BMW vehicles after 15 U.S. deaths in Honda Motor Co. vehicles and two in Ford Motor Co. vehicles since 2009.

BMW said its "engineers will work closely with federal investigators to inspect the vehicle and to understand the details of the incident."

The defect, which leads in rare instances to airbag inflators rupturing and sending metal fragments flying, prompted the largest automotive recall in U.S. history of about 100 million inflators by 19 major automakers worldwide.

More than 290 U.S. injuries are also tied to faulty Takata inflators and at least 27 deaths worldwide. The issues especially affects…

Millennials will lead the car ownership boom over the next six months, as the world continues to reel from the impacts of the pandemic on personal mobility.

There is a growing trend toward personal car ownership as a result of COVID-19, and people ages 24 to 39 will lead the push, according to consulting group EY's 2020 Mobility Consumer Index, released Thursday.

Millennials will represent 45 percent of the nearly one-third of people without a vehicle who intend to buy one in the next six months, the study predicts.

"The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the marketplace," John Simlett, EY global future of mobility leader, said in a statement. "Millennials leading the increase in global car ownership would have been unthinkable a year ago, particularly in terms of buying non-electric cars. The industry should recognize that there is a new market out there that didn't exist until very recently."

Of those non-owners seeking a new vehicle, 71 percent are…

Jaguar Land Rover is moving to streamline its management structure and oversight in a key market by allowing China CEO Pan Qing to take the helm of all local operations.

The change is designed to allow the luxury brand, owned by Tata Motors, to respond to market and consumer shifts, while leveraging company assets, in a more timely manner. 

China is the world’s top market for luxury vehicles, with sales dominated by Mercedes, Audi and BMW, with Lexus, Cadillac, Lincoln and Tesla also making major gains.

“Effective today, all business operations under Jaguar Land Rover in China will be decided by Mr. Pan Qing, president and CEO of Jaguar Land Rover China, including marketing, human resources, and partial procurement,” the company said Thursday on its social media platform in China.

The move will allow the company to “fast and proactively respond to market environment changes and optimize all existing operations” in China, Jaguar Land Rover CEO…

Demand for used vehicles gained more momentum in October, rising nearly 17 percent to approach 1.48 million. 

It was the highest increase over the past four months, according to figures released this week by the China Automobile Dealers Association.

Robust demand for secondhand commercial vehicles and sedans continued to drive market growth in October. 

Deliveries of used trucks advanced 32 percent to some 138,200, while deliveries of buses grew 15 percent to 126,900.

Used-sedan deliveries surged 22 percent to around 896,100, while secondhand multipurpose-vehicle demand gained 4.9 percent to approximately 82,300. 

But total sales of used SUVs and crossovers dipped 3.1 percent to some 138,300. Deliveries of minibuses also slid, by 0.7 percent to roughly 32,900. 

The association didn’t disclose sales of other types of used vehicles, such as pickups. 

Despite the strong recovery f…

FRANKFURT -- Daimler will be a smaller company five years from now, focused on capturing recurring revenues with software-based services as Mercedes-Benz seeks to redefine luxury in an era of electric and self-driving cars, CEO Ola Kaellenius said.

The Stuttgart-based company founded by Carl Benz, who patented the first gasoline-powered car in 1886, is accelerating plans to shift the automaker beyond combustion-engine vehicles, a step which will result in job losses.

"The next five years we will become a smaller company," Kaellenius told a Reuters Events broadcast on Thursday. "We will have a fundamental change in the industrial footprint on the powertrain side," he said.

Jobs will disappear because it takes less time to build an electric car than a conventional gasoline or diesel version.

That's because an electric car's battery and motor have only 200 components, compared with at least 1,400 parts found in a combustion engine and transmission, a…

If all goes according to plan, Rivian will launch its long-awaited R1T battery-electric pickup and its R1S electric SUV next summer. The pickup comes first, in June, with a price tag of $75,000. The R1S follows two months later, priced at $77,500.

Only one variant of the R1T and R1S will be available at the start, both called Launch Edition. Each has a 300-mile range.

In January 2022, Rivian will start rolling out additional variants at the lower and upper ends. The entry-level R1T and R1S will have a 250-mile range, while the most expensive versions will have 400-mile battery packs.

Both vehicles will be offered with Explore and Adventure packages starting in January 2022. All Rivian vehicles come standard with Driver+, an assist feature that enables hands-free driving in certain situations. The system uses 11 cameras, five radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors.

When ordered with the four-motor option, the R1T can reach 60 m…