Trade News

Two online car shopping websites are tapping artificial intelligence technology to enhance the consumer vehicle search experience.

U.S. car shopping resource Edmunds and research and shopping website CarGurus both announced Monday separate versions of a ChatGPT plug-in to assist consumers looking for a new vehicle.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbotdesigned to produce human-like conversational interactions. The automotive industry is increasingly using generative AI tools, as seen with Carvana's AI-generated video histories and General Motors exploring using ChatGPT in new vehicles.

The Edmunds ChatGPT plug-in helps consumers in their car purchasing decisions by offering access to original expert vehicle reviews and local inventory. It is available now to all ChatGPT Plus users in the ChatGPT plug-in store under the name "Edmunds Cars."

Once the Edmunds plug-in is enabled, users can converse with ChatGPT as usual. When a car shopper a…

SAE International on Tuesday said it will develop manufacturing, performance and reliability standards for Tesla's North American Charging Standard connector.

"Standardizing the NACS connector will provide certainty, expanded choice, reliability and convenience to manufacturers and suppliers and, most of all, increase access to charging for consumers," said Frank Menchaca, president of Sustainable Mobility Solutions, an innovation arm of SAE's parent company, Fullsight.

General Motors, Ford Motor Co., Rivian and Volvo have said they are adapting Tesla's NACS plug by 2025, enabling non-Tesla EV drivers to use Tesla's rapidly growing network of chargers. Stellantis and Hyundai Motor Group are considering a similar move.

The move to Tesla's NACS system won't affect the federal government's funding of a nationwide charging network.

For federally funded EV chargers, including the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, "CCS and NACS connect…

U.S. consumer interest in purchasing electric vehicles is growing fast, but Americans still remain less confident in the technology than their overseas counterparts, according to a study by the EY consulting and accounting firm.

More than 20 percent of Americans surveyed by EY in March and April said they would consider a battery-electric vehicle for their next car purchase, up 15 percent from a year earlier, the most significant leap in the study. Nearly half said they'd consider an electrified vehicle — which includes plug-ins and hybrids — up 19 percent from a year earlier, also the biggest increase in the category of the 2023 EY Mobility Consumer Index. The index included responses from 15,000 consumers globally. About 1,500 respondents were U.S. consumers.

EV-friendly policies in the U.S., such as the Inflation Reduction Act, have accelerated interest, EY said, but the U.S. still trails much of the world in EV consideration. Car buyers in Norway, China, S…

Volvo has little tolerance for failure, except when it comes to investing in startups.

"We know we are not going to have a 100 percent success rate because then we are not taking risks," said Alexander Petrofski, who is CEO of the Volvo Cars Technology Fund.

"Realistically, if we can be somewhere between 50 and 75 percent when it comes to our success rate when it comes to implementation, then I think we are in a good spot."

He said the company's corporate venture capital arm needs to have a high tolerance for uncertainty.

"If we don't explore the areas that could be pivotal to the industry, who will?" he said. "We should be in that frontier."

Launched in 2018, Volvo's tech fund currently has 20 companies in its portfolio.

In 2022, Petrofski's team of roughly 10 people met with 500 companies and decided to invest in seven of them. It also made follow-up investments in three startups in the portfolio.

Volvo's number of investm…

Chevrolet is launching sales of the 2024 Silverado electric vehicle with three trims — two work trucks, or what Chevy calls WTs, aimed at fleet customers and a special launch edition for retail buyers.

And fleet buyers will be the first to grab the wheel of the Silverado EV featuring General Motors' Ultium batteries, and engineered and built from the ground up.

The work trucks are less flashy and equipped and designed for basic and simple duties you might find at a loading dock or construction site.

There are two big screens: an 8-inch instrument cluster to monitor speed and other performance metrics located behind the steering wheel and an 11-inch display for audio, climate and navigation settings, stacked above the center console.

Without a center drivetrain tunnel, the center console and storage under rear seating is more abundant.

There are physical controls for volume, fan speed, temperature and air circ…

The world’s largest electric vehicle market is putting its crowded infancy stage behind it.

The explosive industry in China — supercharged by government subsidies more than a decade ago — now spans about a hundred manufacturers  churning out pure-electric and plug-in hybrid models. While that’s down from roughly 500 registered EV makers in 2019, the end now looks to be in sight for scores more.

The cutthroat market formally transitioned from over-crowed to moderately concentrated in the first quarter, based on the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a metric used by academics and regulators to evaluate competition and measure market concentration. The biggest winners are players already at the top, like BYD Co. and Tesla Inc., which have been consolidating their power.

According to Wang Hanyang, an auto analyst at Shanghai-based 86Research Ltd., “80 percent of the new energy vehicle startups, if we count all of them since the initial subsidies, have exited…

DETROIT — Ford Motor Co. plans to fire hundreds of salaried workers, primarily engineers, in the U.S. this week to boost profit and lower costs amid a $50 billion shift to electric vehicles, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

The automaker is cutting engineers in all three areas of its business, EVs, traditional internal combustion-engine models and commercial vehicles, said T.R. Reid, a company spokesman. The workers will be informed Tuesday and Wednesday.

“We’re not cost competitive,” Reid said in an interview. “We have specific priorities and ambitions that have implications for skills, assignments and staffing needs. These changes are consistent with that. They’ll make us cost effective.”

Ford didn’t say how many workers it is cutting, but people familiar with the actions, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters, said it was in the hundreds.

CEO Jim Farley said earlier this year that Ford needed 25% more engine…

Software safety expert Dan O’Dowd has some words about Tesla’s automated driving technology. The giants grow larger in Automotive News' annual rank of global auto suppliers. And General Motors raises the starting price of the Chevy Silverado EV.

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Nobel laureate John Goodenough, a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries that today power millions of electric vehicles around the globe, died on Sunday just a month short of his 101st birthday.

The American was “was a leader at the cutting edge of scientific research throughout the many decades of his career," said Jay Hartzell, President of the University of Texas at Austin where Goodenough was a faculty member for 37 years.

Goodenough was 97 when he received the 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry — along with Britain's Stanley Whittingham and Japan's Akira Yoshino, for their respective research into lithium-ion batteries — making him the oldest recipient of a Nobel Prize.

"This rechargeable battery laid the foundation of wireless electronics such as mobile phones and laptops," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on making the award.

"It also makes a fossil fuel-free world possible, as it is used for everything from po…

Pent-up demand may buoy internal combustion engine vehicle sales through 2024, but an inevitable decline is on the horizon, consulting firm AlixPartners' Mark Wakefield predicted in an annual Global Automotive Outlook released Monday.

"Really we have an ICE melting situation where there really isn't a return to past ICE levels," Wakefield said.

As they navigate the electric vehicle transition, automakers also continue to contend with material and labor costs, supply constraints and inflation.

To add to the challenge for Western automakers, Chinese EV brands are dominating domestically and may become much more influential players in the Western market in the next three to five years, AlixPartners' Stephen Dyer said.

AlixPartners predicts global vehicle sales will rise 5 percent this year, reaching 92 percent of pre-COVID levels, with North America up 10 percent, Europe up 6 percent and China up 3 percent.

Pre-COVID sales volume may never r…

As the world moves toward a more sustainable future, transitioning to electric vehicles is one of the most effective ways for fleets across the globe to reduce emissions and improve air quality. According to a study by the International Energy Agency, electric vehicles could reach 60 percent of new-car sales globally by 2040, which would significantly reduce carbon emissions from transportation. Additionally, with regions across the United States, Canada, Europe and others announcing plans to ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel vehicles, the transition to EVs is expected to accelerate even more rapidly.

This EV adoption trend is proving true within commercial fleets, too, as demands for carbon reduction from municipal and state governments, C-suites and shareholders are catalyzing a switch to zero-emission transportation. In a recent Geotab/Bobit Media study, we found that 92 percent of business leaders see long-term decarbonization as a priority, and 73 percent o…

Automotive News’ annual ranking of the world’s biggest original equipment suppliers shows a dramatically evolving reality for the industry.

Despite three years of auto production mayhem, many parts companies are growing thanks to an emphasis on new technologies. The makers of components for electric vehicles — particularly battery producers — are making rapid incursions into the industry’s top ranks.

The 2023 ranking makes it clear that even in an era when automakers and Tier 1 suppliers are tapping into small startups for innovative solutions, the giants are continuing to get bigger.