Trade News

Last month, Mel Hambelton Ford in Wichita, Kan., found itself at the center of a coronavirus cluster.

Five confirmed cases of the respiratory illness caused by the virus were connected to the dealership, the health department in Sedgwick County, Kan., news release.

It is an event that illustrates the anxiety of many retailers at the moment, with employees, customers, managers and local officials all caught up in an unfamiliar crisis.

The county health department stepped in to issue a public notification because of potential customer exposure to a dealership employee who contracted COVID-19 but couldn't identify every recent contact.

Kansas had deemed dealerships to be essential functions that could operate during the coronavirus threat. And the store remained open despite the confirmed cases, a decision county public health officials said is usually left to individual businesses. But working with health department g…

Toyota's massive truck plant near San Antonio had a one-week head start on its Detroit 3 competitors when its workers returned to their jobs May 11, but that didn't translate into an extra week's worth of new Toyota Tundras and Tacomas.

In fact, the plant didn't produce a single vehicle for three days.

After meticulous preparations and the retraining of 3,000 workers and supervisors to do their jobs within new social distancing protocols after a seven-week shutdown, the plant built just five pickups May 14 and 10 the next day, said Kevin Voelkel, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas.

"It's not about building trucks; it's about building trust. And if I can build trust, then building trucks is easy," Voelkel told Automotive News last week.

Toyota had planned a slow start to retrain its workers after shutting down all 14 of its active assembly and parts plants across North America on March 23 because of the COVI…

ATLANTA — Mercedes-Benz USA has ordered its 875 headquarters employees to work remotely for the remainder of the year.

The directive could extend into 2021.

"Working remotely was the exception — for the foreseeable future, it will become the norm," Mercedes-Benz USA CEO Nicholas Speeks told Automotive News last week.

Several corporations, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon, have extended the remote-work plans they imposed this year as employees remain skittish about possibly contracting the coronavirus.

Mercedes' metro-Atlanta headquarters emptied in mid-March as schools closed and Georgia went into lockdown, but business has continued from living room couches, kitchen tables and patio chairs. Speeks said it is actually going smoothly.

"We are able to function effectively and it gives people an opportunity" for better work-life balance, the CEO said.

He described the work-from-home poli…

LONDON -- Jaguar Land Rover is in talks with the British government about a request for temporary state funding of more than 1 billion pounds ($1.22 billion), Sky News reported.

The loan request had been lodged with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Sky News report said on Saturday.

The report cited a source close to JLR whose parent company is Tata Motors.

JLR said the report was "inaccurate and speculative." Tata Motors did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, JLR said it was in "regular discussion with government on a whole range of matters and the content of our private discussions remains confidential."

Sky News, citing a company spokesman, said about 20,000 JLR employees had been furloughed under the British government's emergency wage subsidy program.

Sky News said the government's position on JLR's latest loan request was unclear.

On May 1, rating agency Fitch…

LONDON -- Jaguar Land Rover is seeking government aid package to weather a collapse in car sales brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, reports said.

The U.K.-based automaker is in talks to borrow more than 1 billion pounds ($1.2 billion) through the British government's emergency lending program, Bloomberg and Sky News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

JLR is also seeking tax breaks, research grants and other subsidies, which could bring the total value of the state support to more than 2 billion pounds, one of the people told Bloomberg.

The full amount is still being negotiated and no decisions have been made, the person said.

JLR is seeking temporary state funding of "well over" 1 billion pounds, Sky News reported on Saturday. A JLR spokesman told Sky News that suggestions that the amount was as high as 2 billion "inaccurate and speculative."

The automaker said it is in "regular discussion with government on a whole rang…

BEIJING -- Tesla Inc. is seeking Chinese government approval to build model 3 vehicles in the country equipped with lithium iron phosphate batteries, a document on the website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology showed.

Reuters reported in February that Tesla is in advanced talks to use LFP batteries from CATL that contain no cobalt -- one of the most expensive metals in electric vehicle batteries -- in models made at its China plant.

The document does not show the name of the battery maker. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. car maker is building Model 3 vehicles at a new Shanghai factory. It uses EV batteries from Panasonic Corp. and LG Chem. CATL has said it would start supplying Tesla from July.

MEXICO CITY -- The Mexican state of Puebla said on Friday that conditions "do not exist" yet to re-start activities in its automotive industry due to the coronavirus pandemic, putting the brakes on carmakers rebooting their operations there.

Volkswagen Group and its Audi unit have major plants in the state southeast of Mexico City, but they have idled production due to the pandemic.

In an official decree issued on Friday night, the Puebla state government said its decision, which also applies to the local construction industry, would remain in place until sanitary and safety conditions permitted a restart.

"The worst is still to come, the wave of infections and the health risk is everywhere," Puebla governor Miguel Barbosa said in the decree, after a week in which new coronavirus infections and death tallies hit record daily totals in Mexico.

Barbosa, an ally of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said he wanted to reopen the state's economy "b…

After uncorking a flurry of discounts when the economy was cratering, automakers are going back to the drawing board on their incentive strategies as demand rebounds and some dealers' inventory shrinks to historic lows.

Arnaldo Bomnin's two Chevrolet stores in Miami were on track for a record May, but he worried that short supplies of some models could hamstring sales.

"I've been selling Chevys for 20 years, and I've never seen the levels of inventory that we have right now," Bomnin said.

As vehicle production ramps up after a two-month shutdown, automakers will reassess incentive programs that largely expire June 1. Analysts expect automakers, heading into the summer selling season, to shift their focus to cash rebates and discounts targeted to specific models and regions with sufficient inventory while backing off the wide-ranging financing deals that helped sell pickups and SUVs in April and May.

Bomnin's stock o…

Historically, electric motors have not been a good fit for the American work horse, the pickup.

Electric trucks were available at the dawn of the auto industry and more recently from General Motors and Ford Motor Co. in the late 1990s as the companies worked to comply with California's zero-emissions regulations.

Chevrolet's S-10 Electric and Ford's Ranger EV were limited in speed and range, and their cargo-hauling capabilities were diminished in part because they had to lug heavy battery packs. Today's advanced technology has greatly improved all facets of performance on the coming wave of electric pickups from Rivian, Tesla, Ford, GM and others.

But some issues remain: With the possible exception of the uniquely styled Tesla Cybertruck, pickups are aerodynamically inefficient, meaning it takes a lot of energy to move them. That affects driving range. A battery pack can and often does weigh more than a conventional internal-comb…

For automotive retail, positive signs of recovery amid the coronavirus pandemic may have come quicker than expected, but uncertainty still abounds in the months ahead. In the meantime, the retail and wholesale channels are likely permanently changed.

That's the sentiment of leaders in the sector who spoke with Automotive News Publisher Jason Stein for the sixth installment of the weekly "Congress Conversations" video series.

"In the past several weeks, we've seen a ramp-up in sales volume," said Doug Ekizian, managing director at PwC Consumer Finance Group. Whether the pace of the rebound continues over the next several months is a key question, he added. The recovery will differ based on geography and likely will be "much different" from that seen in other economic downturns, Ekizian said.

Cox Automotive CEO Sandy Schwartz said retailers are seeing pent-up demand. Dealers he's spoken with report their sales are 70 to 80 percent …

Hertz Global Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy in Delaware after sweeping travel restrictions and the global economic collapse destroyed demand for its rental cars.

The Chapter 11 filing allows Hertz to keep operating while it devises a plan to pay its creditors and turn around the business. The action includes the company’s U.S. and Canadian subsidiaries, but doesn’t cover Europe, Australia and New Zealand, according to a statement late Friday.

Hertz said it had $1 billion in cash to support its operations, which include Hertz, Dollar, Thrifty, Firefly, Hertz Car Sales, and Donlen. But it might need to raise more, perhaps through added borrowings while the bankruptcy process moves forward, Hertz said.

The court petition listed about $25.8 billion in assets and $24.4 billion of debts. Its biggest creditors include IBM Corp. and Lyft Inc., according to the document.

Hertz has traditionally been a leading buyer of fleet cars from the Detroit 3 and …