Trade News

DETROIT — See if this sounds familiar: A start-up EV company is basically gifted a modern plant chock-full of world-class production equipment. To reduce product-development costs and time, its first vehicle uses thousands of proven off-the-shelf parts from major suppliers and established automakers.

Lordstown Motors is closely following Tesla's early playbook as it gears up to launch late next year the battery-powered Endurance, a full-size pickup with four electric motors, a 250-mile range and a starting price of about $52,000, before a federal tax credit of up to $7,500.

Flush with $675 million in cash from a reverse merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, Lordstown's path will veer in a different direction than Tesla's did once the Endurance starts rolling down the production line.

CEO Steve Burns told Automotive News during a brief test drive of the company's lone operational prototype in suburban Detroit that Lord…

Scott Painter, who founded used-vehicle subscription service Fair, said he is working to launch a new software-as-a-service platform to help subscription providers achieve scale and become profitable.

Painter, who stepped aside as Fair's CEO last year, said he has been quietly working since March on a new entity, NextCar Inc. NextCar will not be a consumer-facing subscription provider like Fair, he said, but rather help vehicle subscription companies grow and make money by providing services they'll need to operate, such as debt capital, insurance, access to inventory, maintenance capabilities, fleet management and digital servicing.

"It is all of the component parts of a subscription business, but we are not focused on building our own brand and going direct to the consumer," Painter told Automotive News.

"These are all things that when we started Fair just didn't exist, and we had to basically attempt to create all of those things,…

DETROIT — For the first time in a decade, General Motors will hire a CFO from outside the company.

The automaker on Friday said Paul Jacobson, CFO at Delta Air Lines Inc. since 2012, will take over the top finance position Dec. 1. GM's acting CFO John Stapleton, who has held the position since Dhivya Suryadevara's sudden departure in August, will return to his role as CFO of North America.

Jacobson, 48, will be the first CFO from outside GM since 2010, when the company hired Chris Liddell from Microsoft. The three CFOs since then — Dan Ammann, Chuck Stevens and Suryadevara — all held other roles with the company before taking the top finance job.

Jacobson has worked at Delta in a number of finance positions since 1997. He most recently helped the company navigate the coronavirus pandemic that has hit the airline industry particularly hard. He will report to GM CEO Mary Barra.

"Paul is a great addition to the GM senior leadership team and is dedica…

WASHINGTON -- A group of business leaders and public policy experts on Friday launched a new body to grapple with thorny questions surrounding the future of transportation including self-driving and electric vehicles.

The group, the Future of Mobility Commission, plans to propose a new regulatory framework to address a global transportation sector "on the cusp of a worldwide transition driven by shared, connected, autonomous, and electric technologies."

Alisyn Malek, the commission's executive director, told Reuters the goal is to tackle tough problems and improve safety.

"Let's bring everybody together to talk about how do we want the movement of people and goods to actually work," Malek said in an interview. Malek was named a 2019 Automotive News All-Star for her previous role as COO and co-founder at startup May Mobility. She parted ways with the company in January. 

Autonomous cars and delivery trucks, package-carrying drones, air taxis, …

SHANGHAI -- China needs to step up the recycling and repurposing of batteries for electric vehicles in order to ease supply strains and curb pollution and carbon emissions, environmental group Greenpeace said on Friday.

Though the deployment of EVs is an important environmental initiative, the manufacturing of batteries is energy- and carbon-intensive and puts the supply of key raw materials like lithium and cobalt under severe strain, the group said in a research report.

"We're about to see a tidal wave of old EV batteries hit China," said Ada Kong, Greenpeace East Asia's senior programme manager. "How the government responds will have huge ramifications for Xi Jinping's 2060 carbon neutral commitment."

Greenpeace said 12.85 million tons of EV lithium ion batteries will go offline worldwide between 2021 and 2030, while more than 10 million tons of lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese will be mined for new batteries.

Repurposed batteries could be…

Chinese automakers and their vast network of auto-parts suppliers need to become more competitive in order to fend off increasing competition from Tesla Inc. and foreign battery and chip manufacturers, an industry group said.

Although Asia’s biggest economy is home to the world’s biggest automobile market, it doesn’t have a competitive supply chain and not one local auto-parts maker is ranked among the top 500 companies globally, Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association, told an electric-vehicle battery forum in Ningxiang this week.

Tesla has triumphed over domestic players like Nio Inc. and Li Auto Inc. when it comes to controlling costs and lowering the price of EVs quickly to spur consumer demand, Cui said.

Cui’s admonition comes as EV sales in Europe jump as governments there stoke sales via incentives and subsidies. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said last week that many of the home-grown companies tha…

DETROIT -- American Axle and Manufacturing Holdings said Friday the coronavirus pandemic cost the supplier about $87 million in the third quarter.

Sales for the third quarter slipped 16 percent to $1.41 billion, as repercussions from the pandemic continued to impact some parts of the global supply chain.

Still, net income for the third quarter was $117.2 million compared with a net loss in the same quarter last year of $124.2 million. The net loss last year included the impact of a $225 million pretax impairment charge. The UAW strike at General Motors also impacted the supplier last year.

American Axle joined several other suppliers this week that reported third-quarter earnings as the coronavirus crisis lingers — with some suppliers experiencing rebounds and higher-than-expected results compared with earlier this year. More companies are set to report earnings in the coming weeks.

American Axle also reported that third-quarter adjusted earnings,…

Lear Corp. produced strong third-quarter results as the seating and electronics systems supplier caught up from COVID-19 related closures during the last quarter.

The supplier on Friday said net income fell 19 percent to $174.4 million while revenue ticked up 1 percent to $4.9 billion.

Even though net income fell year-to-year, the net gain was a dramatic swing from the $294 million net loss posted amid the pandemic in the second quarter.

The improvement in sales is hinged on increased market share, considering global production for Lear declined 3 percent during the quarter compared with a year earlier. Global vehicle production declined 4 percent in the quarter, with North American and China being the bright spots with production up 1 percent and 9 percent, respectively, as automakers race to catch up from COVID-19 related shutdowns in both countries.

Lear's e-systems segment was the main driver in better sales as the supplier increased third qua…

Executives and engineers pioneering self-driving technology have long believed autonomous vehicles hold the potential to dramatically reduce the number of traffic deaths and collisions.

Waymo has offered what might be a first glimpse into how those reductions occur.

The company, the commercial offspring of Google's autonomous-vehicle project, issued a report Friday that contains a trove of safety-related insights distilled from 6.1 million miles of real-world driving data in its metro Phoenix test hub since the start of 2019.

The data includes information on 47 collisions — both actual and simulated — that Waymo identified from January 2019 through September 2020.

Waymo and other industry experts say the report is the first of its kind in terms of the breadth of detailed information provided, and it could set a benchmark for an industry in which federal regulators have otherwise merely asked companies to file voluntary safety reports.

"I t…

Daimler’s truck unit is investing in a laser-sensor startup to bolster its development of self-driving trucks in the U.S. less than a week after striking a deal to use driverless technology from Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo.

Daimler Truck said Friday it will take a minority stake in Luminar Technologies Inc., a lidar developer that plans to go public via a reverse merger. The world’s biggest commercial-vehicle maker joins other investors including tech billionaire Peter Thiel and an arm of Volvo Car in an equity financing ahead of the startup’s public-market debut.

The announcement comes just days after Daimler agreed to incorporate self-driving technology from Alphabet unit Waymo in its Freightliner Cascadia trucks to be sold to U.S. customers.

Daimler plans to use technology from Luminar, which makes laser-based sensors that allow a vehicle to “see” its surroundings, for its in-house effort to develop automated heavy-duty trucks.

Trucks not taxis

DETROIT -- Ford Motor Co. said on Friday it expects to sell 100,000 cars and trucks equipped with the company's new hands-free driving system in the first full year of availability.

The catch is, only the system hardware will be installed. The software will not be ready for nearly another year, Ford said.

The automaker's Active Drive Assist will be offered first on the redesigned F-150 pickup and the new Mustang Mach-E electric crossover, both of which go on sale later this year. But the feature will not be activated until the third quarter of 2021, the company said.

Customers can order a Mach-E or an F-150 with the Co-Pilot360 advanced driver assistance package, which includes the hardware for Active Drive Assist. That feature will be switched on via a wireless over-the-air update when the software is finalized next year, Ford said.

Active Drive Assist will be standard on selected high-end models and available as an option on others, priced from …

Fisker Inc. said Thursday it completed a deal to go public by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company, with the proceeds funding operations and development of its first electric vehicle through the start of production in late 2022.

Shares of the combined company are expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange starting Friday under the ticker symbol FSR.

The transaction with Spartan Energy Acquisition Corp. is expected to give Fisker more than $1 billion of cash on the balance sheet and no funded debt, the company said. Spartan is a SPAC, or a shell company, that raises money through an initial public offering to buy an operating entity, typically within two years. SPACs have emerged as a quick route to the stock market for companies, particularly auto technology startups.

Fisker this month cemented an agreement with Canadian supplier Magna International Inc., which will supply the vehicle platform and build the electr…