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Ford Motor Co. said Monday it hired a new software and chief information officer who will be tasked with generating new revenue streams and modernizing the company.

Vijay Sankaran, former CIO at trading company TD Ameritrade, begins Nov. 16 and will report to CEO Jim Farley. Sankaran was with Ford for 12 years until 2013, with his final role as Ford IT's chief technology officer.

The company says Sankaran will "help create and deliver new reasons for customers to choose and stay with Ford."

Ford said Sankaran, 47, led a digital revolution at TD Ameritrade that included the creation of "client-facing mobile applications, infusing capabilities enabled by artificial intelligence to deliver client personalization and self-service, and scaling its trading platform fivefold to accommodate the stock-trading boom spawned by the coronavirus pandemic."

As vehicles become more technologically complex, software is becoming increasi…

Aeva Inc., a Silicon Valley firm developing a lidar sensor for self-driving cars to perceive their surroundings, said Monday it has agreed to go public through a merger with special-purpose acquisition company InterPrivate Acquisition Corp.

The deal makes Aeva the third lidar technology developer to agree to go public this year through a deal with a special-purpose acquisition company, following Velodyne Lidar Inc. and Luminar Technologies Inc.

The merger with InterPrivate, which values Aeva at more than $2.1 billion, will give it a cash injection of more than $300 million to develop sensors for phones, tablets and other consumer devices.

InterPrivate is a SPAC led by private equity investor Ahmed Fattouh. It raised $210 million in an initial public offering in February.

A SPAC is a shell company that uses proceeds from an IPO to acquire a private company, typically within two years. For the company, merging with a SPAC is an alternative to going …

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.

Volkswagen brand's North American COO Johan de Nysschen discusses the automaker's recent strides in vehicle quality and why it will be a battle for each ID4 EV that's built. The longtime luxury brand executive also compares and contrasts the cultures at VW and his former employer, General Motors.

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A lot of dealers spend big bucks on things such as targeted ads and mailers to persuade people who are already their customers to come back through the door once they purchased a car.

But Paul Garavel knows there's an easier, cheaper and better way: It just takes a little effort, a lot of kindness and a few tchotchkes.

At his two stores in Norwalk, Conn. — Garavel Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram and Garavel Subaru, which are about 2 miles apart — customers go on what amounts to guided scavenger hunts through the dealerships as they wait to take delivery of their new vehicles.

Customers, with a small paper bag emblazoned with a dealership logo in hand, meet the leaders of each department during their hunt and receive a series of useful branded items with each interaction, including a key chain, an ice scraper and a coffee mug. Each gift is accompanied by a business card dropped in the bag.

The end result is a lot more than a bag of small gifts, says Gara…

<!--*/ */ /*-->*/ Like Dickens in reverse

North Carolina dealer Don Flow invoked Dickens with a twist last week. He was reflecting on the dramatic swings of fortune that auto retailers have seen since the pandemic hit in March.

"It was like the reverse of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities," he said on our "Daily Drive" podcast. "Instead of saying, 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'; it was the worst of times. And now, remarkably, you might actually say, it could be the best of times."

The theme carries into the pages of Monday's issue. Consider:

■ Ford and Fiat Chrysler posted robust third-quarter earnings. No one would have predicted that six months ago, when Ford was forecasting a $5 billion operating loss for the second quarter alone. As we note in a Page 1 story, Ford's profit margins came in at the strongest level in five years. FCA's North America profits were its highest ever.

■ Gentex, a maker of h…

Jennifer Haroon, chief operating officer at artificial-intelligence startup Nauto, discusses how driver-monitoring technology can help improve human driver habits, lower costs for fleets and anticipate and prevent collisions.

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DETROIT — Even as it spends $11.5 billion electrifying its vehicle lineup, Ford Motor Co. isn't aiming to be the next Tesla.

It wants to be the next Peloton.

The battery-electric E-Transit van, set to be unveiled this month, will be the latest example of Ford's ambitions under new CEO Jim Farley: selling electric vehicles to fleet buyers who may be more willing to consider a new propulsion system than the average retail customer, while expanding into telematics software and other analytics services that complement the vehicle.

Ted Cannis, general manager of Ford's North American commercial business, likened the approach to that of the fitness company that not only sells the popular stationary bike, but subscriptions for online exercise classes as well.

"We can go from being just the vehicle to the Peloton, if you will — the bike and the workout series," he told Automotive News. "We can have the whole system."

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OTTAWA LAKE, Mich. — Among automakers that prioritize safe testing on the promising road toward fully automated driving, Toyota is out standing in its field.

Or rather, driving out there, while simultaneously simulating one of the most densely packed areas of Tokyo in the middle of a field in southeastern Michigan and under the shadow of a set of 115-foot-tall grain silos.

Does that seem corny? Well, not anymore; this year's surrounding acres of corn have been harvested. Yet the work goes on at the Toyota Research Institute's Automated Vehicle Test Facility on the Michigan-Ohio border, where the automaker is trying to achieve a still-long-off industry goal of safe fully automated vehicle operation.

And had 2020 gone differently — say, without a devastating pandemic to muck things up — the Summer Olympics in Tokyo would have been a venue for demonstrating the progress the institute has made at its Ottawa Lake facility. Before th…

The latest online used-vehicle company preparing to go public has spotted the same trends its predecessors have: a highly fragmented market, relatively low e-commerce penetration and a consumer appetite for online shopping.

But CarLotz Inc., a consignment platform that expects to go public via a reverse merger this quarter, raising $321 million in cash, should be seen less as a merchant that buys low and sells high and more as a service that streamlines the used-vehicle selling process, its CEO told Automotive News. "We are consolidating all the middlemen into one middleman," said Michael Bor, who co-founded the company.

While competitors deal with auctions, wholesalers, buyers and other parties, "We're just collapsing all that" as a unified platform, he said.

Initially, CarLotz was meant to be an online platform that would help consumers sell their cars and trucks in a hassle-free way.

Bor, a former investment banker, got the idea for the compa…

As automakers seek to make their vehicles increasingly connected — especially given the myriad benefits that can be provided — there are still some wrinkles to iron out.

Chief among them? Cybersecurity threats, consumer data privacy concerns and the possibility of connectivity — or a lack thereof — affecting safety-critical functions of a vehicle.

In September, Tesla drivers experienced a brief network outage that left some unable to connect to the company's app and website. Drivers said the disconnection from the mobile app impacted their ability to open their car doors and access other services.

Though rare, the Tesla example — first reported by website Electrek — is a lesson to automakers and raises questions about the reliability of connectivity in today's vehicles. Though the outage affected mobile access and no operational or safety features were impacted, it's especially pertinent given that more than 500 million vehicles …

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…