Trade News

BEIJING -- Volkswagen Group said Friday it expects its China sales to fall a single-digit percent this year as new SUVs and premium models help it recover from a sales slide in the world's biggest auto market.

The automaker sold 1.59 million vehicles in China in the first six months of 2020, down 17 percent from 1.92 million units in the same period last year. For all of 2019, VW sold around 4.23 million vehicles in the country.

VW is China's biggest foreign automaker, followed by U.S. rival General Motors.

The country's overall auto sales, which include passenger cars and commercial vehicles, dropped 17 percent in the January-June period. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers has forecast full-year sales to fall 10 percent to 20 percent.

VW China chief Stephan Woellenstein said the automaker's sales in the second half this year will likely be level with same period last year, though a possible second wave of the novel coronavirus outb…

Tesla Inc.’s march to a $275 billion market capitalization has been pretty galling for Germany, the birthplace of the automobile. But the pain is felt most acutely at Daimler AG, which used to be a large Tesla shareholder.

Had the owner of the luxury Mercedes-Benz brand held the almost 5 million shares it offloaded in 2014, they would now be worth about $7.3 billion by my calculation -- a sum that’s equivalent to two-thirds of Daimler’s current net industrial cash position.

In the annals of ill-timed investment decisions, that stake sale doesn’t quite match the U.K.’s flogging off a big chunk of its gold reserves when prices bottomed out around the turn of the millennium. It still hurts, particularly at a time when industrial companies are counting every last cent.

Fortunately there’s some good news to console Daimler’s long suffering shareholders.

The company’s performance in the most recent quarter was a lot better than expected. Instead of burn…

NEW YORK -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday said an investment program that would allocate $750 million to build charging stations and other electric-vehicle infrastructure as part of the state's long-term goal to reduce emissions.

The measure is set to create more than 50,000 charging stations and will largely be funded by the state's investor-owned utility companies, with the total budget capped at $701 million through 2025.

An additional $48.8 million is allocated from a 2017 settlement with German carmaker Volkswagen Group over its diesel emissions cheating scandal to fund electric school and transit buses, as well as charging stations.

New York's announcement comes on the heels of a similar measure by Florida, which on July 10 announced an $8.6 million investment to expand charging stations.

While electric vehicle sales have gradually increased over the past few years, they still made up less than 2 percent of all U.S. vehicle sales in 2019, ac…

Lyft Inc. said Friday it would distribute some 60,000 vehicle partition shields to its most active drivers as a protection against the coronavirus and begin selling the custom-made protective barriers to other drivers later this summer.

The ride-hailing company began in May to require both passengers and drivers to wear a mask during trips and said it had provided North American drivers with more than 150,000 sanitizing products and masks since the outbreak of the pandemic.

Lyft began designing the semi-rigid partition shields, made out of a polycarbonate material, several months ago and has since piloted it with a group of ride-hail drivers to solicit feedback, a spokeswoman said.

"It was critical to us that the design met the needs of rideshare drivers specifically, accommodated a wide range of vehicle models, could be self-installed and easily removed, and could be produced at a price point far lower than what is currently available in the market," th…

WASHINGTON -- Carlos Ghosn insists his wife and four adult children played no part in his dramatic escape from Japan in a crate that was smuggled aboard a private plane.

"I alone arranged for my departure," the former Nissan chairman said in January. "My family had no role whatsoever."

But according to evidence gathered by Japanese prosecutors, Ghosn spent some of his final hours in Tokyo with at least one family member -- his daughter Maya, 27, who works in California. The two had lunch together the day he fled, before she delivered luggage to a hotel where she met with one of Ghosn's alleged accomplices.

Those details were included among hundreds of pages of travel documents, witness statements and security-camera images in Japan's formal request to the U.S. government for the extradition of the two Americans accused of engineering the escape: former Green Beret Michael Taylor and his son Peter.

The previously undisclosed documents include refe…

FRANKFURT -- Daimler said a late-quarter recovery in demand spared the automaker from losing as much money as analysts were expecting.

The company reported a preliminary second-quarter loss of 1.68 billion euros ($1.9 billion) before interest and taxes in a statement Thursday.

Daimler said that this was an improvement on the consensus estimate for 2.1 billion euros ($2.4 billion), and that free cash flow and liquidity also held up better than expected.

Daimler and its peers were decimated by the coronavirus pandemic, with measures to contain the disease sending production plunging to levels last seen in the wake of World War II.

Although plants and showrooms have now largely reopened, business is returning unevenly, with car sales in Europe coming back more slowly than North America or China.

The results are "consistent with a generally improving commentary from German manufacturers in recent weeks," Philippe Houchois, a Jefferies analyst …

DETROIT — A federal court magistrate Thursday granted a request by former Volkswagen executive Oliver Schmidt to carry out the remainder of his seven-year prison sentence for his role in the automaker's massive diesel emissions fraud in his native Germany.

Schmidt, 51, appeared via video conference before Magistrate Judge Elizabeth A. Stafford of the U.S. District Court in Detroit from the federal penitentiary in Milan, Mich., west of Detroit.

The former Volkswagen engineer — who at one time headed up the automaker's compliance office in suburban Detroit and admitted to plotting with other company executives to cover up its cheating on diesel emissions — has been in prison since his arrest at the Miami-Dade County Airport in January 2017 while returning from a Christmas holiday in Florida. He pleaded guilty in December that year before U.S. District Court Judge Sean Cox to two felonies, a violation of the Clean Air Act and conspiracy to defraud the United State…

Penske Automotive Group said its U.S. vehicle sales improved from May to June and the nation's second-largest new-vehicle retailer expects to post a profit when second-quarter results are planned for release July 29.

The retailer said Tuesday that it expects second-quarter earnings per share from continuing operations to range from 52 cents to 57 cents. The company, whose business was hampered early in the quarter amid the coronavirus pandemic, said improved June franchise business in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, expense management and robust sales upon reopening used-vehicle supercenters last month aided results.

"I am encouraged by the significant improvement in our operations during the month of June," Penske CEO Roger Penske said in a statement. "Our performance in June is the result of a strong operational focus to control costs, manage vehicle inventory and maximize gross profit."

Penske said it plans to repay $300 million in senior debt notes …

DETROIT -- Autopilot, ProPilot, CoPilot.

Automakers have many names for new systems that allow for hands-free driving, but no safety or performance standards to follow as they roll out the most significant changes to vehicle technology in a generation.

Spurred by Tesla Inc.'s success and eager to start profiting from billions spent on autonomous driving research, automakers are accelerating plans to automate routine driving tasks such as cruising on a highway and make them widely available within five years, industry executives said.

Most traditional automakers until recently had resisted allowing drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel for extended periods, concerned about product liability claims. Now, hands-free driving systems offer a new and sorely needed source of profit for automakers and suppliers such as Aptiv, especially when this technology is packaged with other extra-cost options.

"Consumers are willing to pay extra -- som…

For years, two knocks against Tesla were that a constant churn of executive turnover would catch up to Elon Musk, and that an onslaught of electric models from Volkswagen Group and others would put him in his place.

Now, the tables have turned.

VW's electric offensive has sputtered, with software issues plaguing its full-electric ID3 model.

And it's the German giant whose executive suites are turning over: in a matter of days, its trucks chief resigned, the leader of its van unit was demoted, and its head of software was reassigned.

Even CEO Herbert Diess's job looked insecure for a moment before VW's supervisory board settled on stripping him of responsibility for the company's namesake division.

The circumstances of each individual's cases vary, and VW continues to have a massive advantage over Tesla in many respects. But some investors are concerned it might not be coincidence that all four VW executives in question were external hires …

TOKYO -- Nissan Motor Co. is planning a 30 percent year-on-year cut in global vehicle production through December as falling demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic complicates its turnaround efforts, two people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

Japan's No. 2 automaker plans to produce around 2.6 million vehicles between April and December, down from 3.7 million during the same period last year, the people said. Nissan made 4.6 million cars in the financial year ended March.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public. Nissan, which has yet to announce a sales forecast for this financial year, declined to comment on its production plans.

Global automakers are struggling after factories were shuttered earlier this year to stem the spread of the pandemic.

Car dealerships were also closed in many countries, pummelling vehicle sales in March through May, although the fall in sales slowed in June as economies start…

BMW has signed a deal with Northvolt for 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion) to supply battery cells to power the automaker's electric vehicles.

Northvolt, a Swedish company started by two former Tesla executives, will manufacture the cells using renewable electricity at a new plant in northern Sweden and deliver them starting in 2024 as part of a long-term contract, BMW said in a statement Thursday.

Local access to batteries is becoming key for automakers trying to become less dependent on dominant suppliers in Asia.

Northvolt will become BMW's third major supplier for the technology, along with China's Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. and South Korea's Samsung SDI.

The deal is also meant to aid BMW's push into electric cars. The automaker plans to introduce five new battery-powered vehicles through next year and offer more than 12 electric models by 2023.

BMW unveiled the iX3 SUV Tuesday, the brand's first electric vehicle to use its flexib…