Trade News

The supply chain crisis that roiled automakers and suppliers during the COVID-19 pandemic provided costly lessons about pinpointing vulnerabilities, increasing visibility and improving communication across tiers.

Those lessons have been top of mind as the industry builds a new supply chain around electric vehicles, automotive executives said during a roundtable discussion Monday.

"Last year and the year before, the supply chain was broken," said Bob Young, group vice president of purchasing supplier development at Toyota Motor North America Inc. "I would say today, it's fragile."

Young was joined by Jonathan Jennings, vice president of supply chain for Ford Motor Co.; Jeff Morrison, vice president of global purchasing and supply chain for General Motors Co.; Ray Scott, president and CEO of Lear Corp.; and David Dauch, chairman and CEO of American Axle & Manufacturing.

The roundtable was part of the Automotive Golf Classic, an annual event ho…

WASHINGTON — Sen. Joe Manchin is once again criticizing the U.S. Treasury Department for how it is implementing the Inflation Reduction Act's tax credit for new electric vehicles.

In public comments submitted Sunday to Treasury, the West Virginia Democrat further detailed his concerns over the department's handling of the provision known as Section 30D, arguing that it "has seriously misconstrued the plain language and clear purpose of the critical minerals and battery component requirements."

Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said proposed guidance released by Treasury in March "deviates from the will of Congress in at least three major respects," including its interpretation of the critical mineral requirement and free-trade agreement.

"My comment is simple: Follow the law," he wrote in an 11-page letter to Treasury, explaining that the tax credit's purpose is "no longer to promote the purchase and use of [EVs] ..…

The EV battery's circle of life

EV batteries. You have to build them, charge them, recycle them — and make sure there's enough of them.

This week's Automotive News covers a variety of topics surrounding the batteries that power electric vehicles, from their birth to their useful life to their disposition to their rebirth.

One story goes in-depth about a relatively obscure provision of the Inflation Reduction Act: Section 45X. While most of the attention has been on the federally funded incentives granted to consumers of certain EVs, the advanced manufacturing production tax credit has the potential to be a boon to U.S. battery manufacturers and their automaking partners. The credits they can receive through 2032 — in some cases, as direct payments from the federal government — could be substantial. But with billions of dollars on the table, Section 45X has come under criticism from Republican lawmakers.

We also examine a watershed moment in the …

EV batteries. You have to build them, charge them, recycle them — and make sure there's enough of them.

This week's Automotive News covers a variety of topics surrounding the batteries that power electric vehicles, from their birth to their useful life to their disposition to their rebirth.

One story goes in-depth about a relatively obscure provision of the Inflation Reduction Act: Section 45X. While most of the attention has been on the federally funded incentives granted to consumers of certain EVs, the advanced manufacturing production tax credit has the potential to be a boon to U.S. battery manufacturers and their automaking partners. The credits they can receive through 2032 — in some cases, as direct payments from the federal government — could be substantial. But with billions of dollars on the table, Section 45X has come under criticism from Republican lawmakers.

We also examine a watershed moment in the brief history of the…

The deputy assistant secretary provides a status report on the DOE’s Hydrogen Hub initiative, the role of the national laboratories in researching new battery technology and progress toward electrification across America.

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Before becoming Automotive News' retail technology reporter this year, I wrote about biotech, health care, medical devices and property and casualty insurance startups, as well as the venture capital driving each sector.

The most prominent investors typically came from large VC firms in Silicon Valley in California, New York or emerging startup hubs such as Austin, Texas, or Washington, D.C. International firms from places including Tel Aviv, Isarel; Paris; or London committed money to companies in the U.S. or are about to expand here.

Some large hospital groups, medical device firms, biotech companies and property and casualty insurers also joined the investment party through venture funds they created. Their strategy: to back promising technology they might acquire someday or at least use in their operations.

Some of those strategies carry over to auto technology and auto retail technology investing, but with interesting twists. Read more

Assembly plants in each auto-building region of the world cut vehicles from their production schedules because of microchip shortages last week, according to AutoForecast Solutions.

Plants in China were the most impacted, with 14,013 vehicles lost due to a lack of semiconductors. 

Still, the total number of vehicles expected to be cut by year’s end stayed steady at about 2.82 million — a sign that the chip situation is slowly improving, if “sometimes painfully so,” said Sam Fiorani, AutoForecast Solutions vice president of global vehicle forecasting.

Source: AutoForecast Solutions Inc. autoforecastsolutions.com

MEDFORD, Ore. — Dealership acquisitions, already a hallmark of Lithia Motors Inc.'s long-term growth strategy as it became the country's largest seller of new vehicles, will play an even bigger role in an update to its audacious plan to reach $50 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2025.

CEO Bryan DeBoer said Lithia's network development, or acquisition, target is now $25 billion in revenue, up from the previously stated $20 billion.

The change stems from Lithia pulling back on its overall revenue target for Driveway, its online sales platform, by $5 billion, DeBoer said.

"We just hit 75 percent of the way through our initial network development plan," DeBoer said in a wide-ranging interview last week at the auto retail giant's headquarters here. "And we had just reached [the] halfway point of the 2025 plan. So we thought that was an easy give."

Lithia bought 25 U.S. franchised dealerships last year, down from 67 in 2021, according to data tr…

When a 14-year-old boy showed up at an Arizona dealership this spring asking for a job, he was told that the store normally doesn’t hire minors.

Josh Ozga’s persistence led Henry Brown Buick-GMC in Gilbert to not only hire him but also to raise enough money to send his family on a dream vacation. Managers learned that Ozga wanted a job to help pay the bills that had accumulated since his younger brother, Luke, was diagnosed with cancer four years ago.

“We’d moved just out of our house because we couldn’t afford it anymore and went into a two-bedroom apartment across the street,” their mother, Heather, told Fox 10 in Phoenix. Josh “left one day saying he was going to go look at cars, because he loves cars, and he came back and said he had a job interview.”

The dealership raised more than $9,000 to send Josh and his family deep-sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and help pay the rent on their apartment. It revealed the trip to them during a scavenger hunt arou…

DETROIT — How can an electric vehicle owner charge at home without a garage? Can an EV go through a car wash?

General Motors said it has heard these questions from consumers interested in learning more about electric vehicles. And it's taking a virtual approach — supported by humans — to provide answers and overcome misconceptions about EV ownership.

Seven days a week, electric vehicle specialists walk through a brightly lit studio holding smartphones in one hand while talking to consumers, dealers, commercial customers and others who connect through a virtual tour. Called EV Live, the studio is a nearly year-old effort to help people understand everything from battery architecture to how to charge an EV at home and on the go.

On a weekday afternoon this month, one EV Live specialist talked to a caller about charging options by showing them several units set up in a display while another climbed into the driver's seat of a GMC Humme…

Auto dealerships are beginning to explore the use of customer data platform technology — a digital innovation that multiple industries have employed for years.

Better late than never, auto dealerships are starting to understand its potential to enhance customer interactions, said John Campos, automotive industry managing director at Acxiom, a data company focused on customer intelligence.

"We are seeing growing demand and interest," Campos told Automotive News. "It is really in that exploratory phase right now."

Designed to grab customer data from multiple sources, the software has the capacity to use it to personalize every customer interaction. It is an efficient alternative to Internet browser cookies, which are being phased out.

A customer data platform enables retailers to combine data collected from a customer relationship management platform with that taken from a data management platform and other sources, after…