Trade News

SAN FRANCISCO -- Tesla Inc. is calling some workers back to its lone U.S. vehicle-assembly plant starting this week, before San Francisco Bay area stay-home orders are scheduled to expire.

Supervisors told some staff in the paint and stamping operations of the factory in Fremont, California, to report to the facility on April 29. In messages seen by Bloomberg News, plant leaders ask workers to reply and say whether they plan to show up.

Tesla representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla had previously communicated to workers that it expected to resume normal production at its U.S. facilities on May 4, the day after Bay area health measures are slated to end. The EV manufacturer clashed with Fremont officials last month over whether its factory was an essential business or otherwise needed to shut down to comply with an Alameda County order issued in mid-March.

The Fremont plant builds every vehicle currently in Tesl…

As automakers and suppliers prepare to restart North American production over the coming weeks, they'll have more to worry about than just how to keep their parts supplies coming and how to keep their factories sanitized.

Among them: When the nation and the world are flying by the seat of their pants trying to deal with a deadly new virus, what is an employer's liability exposure if something goes wrong?

Attorney Chris Reynolds — who also happens to be head of manufacturing for Toyota Motor North America — says the industry as well as other employers are about to discover the answer to that question.

"What is the liability standard for a situation that is unprecedented? We will surely find out," Reynolds said as he laid out plans Thursday, April 23, for Toyota's plants in the United States and Canada to return to limited production beginning May 4.

"Nobody has a good fix on it, if I put my legal hat on. But what our…

CarMax CEO Bill Nash once shared an anecdote he said perfectly illustrated the company's personalized retail strategy. A customer who had had a baby didn't want to trek 60 miles to a CarMax location, so the company delivered a car to her.

Less than a year later, millions of Americans are barred from going to dealerships because of stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic. And while some traditional dealers have been forced to adopt an arm's-length sales strategy basically overnight, the crisis also led used-vehicle industry leaders such as CarMax and Carvana to tweak their approaches.

CarMax launched contactless curbside pickup at most of its stores that are open nationwide. At press time, about a third of the company's 217 stores were open for curbside pickup and by appointment only, and about 35 were closed for retail operations. Most of CarMax's service departments remain open, deemed an essential service by states.

Nash alluded to…

Marta Hall’s long-simmering frustrations over intellectual property disputes with Chinese rivals reached a breaking point in February.

In a torrent of tweets, the chief marketing officer and former president of Velodyne Lidar Inc. decried the “blatant theft” of the intellectual property behind lidar, the high-tech laser sensors that help self-driving vehicles detect obstacles and perceive the road ahead. She castigated automakers for purchasing knockoffs of this pivotal technology and implored the federal government to better protect U.S. tech companies from patent infringement by international rivals.

“We’ve gone to Washington, D.C., to explain this, but Washington is very busy these days,” Hall told Automotive News. “What do they do about it? What can they do about it? Not much right now. Whereas the  Chinese government has given their companies a lifeline. They fund the Chinese lidar. There’s a lot of money being put into that. It’s almost like the Chi…

TORONTO -- Autoworkers, many of whom are nervous about returning to work, won’t be urged to do so by union leaders until their health and safety concerns have been addressed by manufacturers, Unifor President Jerry Dias said Saturday.

“We’ve taken the position with the Detroit 3 that if our members aren’t comfortable going back to work, then there’s no way we’re going to allow any company to force people back to work,” Dias said. “We’re not giving any green light at all unless our local health and safety people and our committees are 100-percent convinced that everything is OK.”

The Canadian union chief’s comments follow those he made on Thursday, when he said he was “cautiously optimistic” that Canadian auto plants would be able to resume production on the early May timetable put forth by much of the industry. That stood in contrast to a statement by UAW President Rory Gamble, who said it would be “too risky” for workers to go back on the job at that time. Read more

Hertz Global Holdings Inc. could run out of cash as soon as this quarter due to a precipitous decline in revenue and the collapsing used-car market, Moody’s Investors Service warned as it downgraded the rental-car company three steps further into junk.

“The company’s cash burn could exhaust its cash resources during the second quarter,” Moody’s analysts wrote Friday. Hertz probably needs relief from lenders, which may include asset-backed security creditors who fund its rental-car fleet, according to Moody’s, which dropped its rating to Caa3 from B3.

Hertz is seeking advice from restructuring bankers at Moelis & Co. on ways to boost liquidity and avoid filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, people familiar with the situation said Thursday. One of the options that’s been under discussion with bankers is raising cash by issuing new debt, Bloomberg News reported earlier. The maneuver would need an amendment to a secured debt facility, the people said, asking not to…

MEXICO CITY -- Volkswagen Group will extend until at least May 18 a suspension on operations at its Puebla production plant in Mexico due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the company said in a statement on Friday.

The German automaker's Silao plant in Mexico is also temporarily down, and the company said it has not yet determined when it might resume operations.

The eventual restart at both plants will be "gradual and under strict hygiene measures," the statement added.

Volkswagen is among manufacturers worldwide who are responding to a steep fall in demand, as well as supply chain challenges following public health measures adopted by governments to rein in the pandemic.

Any vehicle is a tough sell in China these days, given the lingering COVID-19 pandemic there. But pickups are weathering the storm better than most, as Chinese automakers draw from the American playbook.

Great Wall Motor Co., by far China's top pickup manufacturer, is booking big orders for its new P pickup, thanks to a strategy of pitching it as a vehicle for families.

Great Wall has been averaging 6,000 sales of the P a month since launching the pickup in October, notes Alan Kang, a senior market analyst at LMC Automotive. The P, called the Pao in Chinese, comes in three grades: a standard comfort-oriented passenger setup, an off-road version and a commercial variant. The passenger offering gets a softer ride, comfy interior and high-tech gadgetry.

"It is the first-ever pickup from a Chinese brand to be classed as a passenger vehicle and is positioned at the upper end of the market," Kang wrote in a report this month that looked at the likelihood of C…

Some of the smartest engineers and academics around the world have spent years pioneering artificial intelligence and seeking breakthrough advances.

Maybe they should leave the work to toddlers.

That's the premise of Cartica AI, an Israeli company taking a childlike approach to rethinking artificial intelligence. Rather than conventionally train machine-learning systems with reams of information, the company's technology trains systems by mimicking the way the human brain develops.

"If you are a newborn and you look into this world, you have no idea what you see," Karl Thomas Neumann, former Opel CEO who is a board member and investor in the company, tells Automotive News. "But you start structuring things — lines, curves, relationships."

Cartica calls those simple structures "signatures," and with remarkably few of them strung together, the company believes AI systems can make intelligent inferences about what's in …

USMCA — the trade deal replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement — will enter into force July 1, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said Friday.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer notified Congress that Canada and Mexico "have taken measures necessary to comply with their commitments under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement."

"The crisis and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that now, more than ever, the United States should strive to increase manufacturing capacity and investment in North America," Lighthizer said in a statement. "The USMCA's entry into force is a landmark achievement in that effort."

The announcement comes after reports last month that the Trump administration was considering a June 1 start date, stirring concern among automakers, parts suppliers and trade groups that said the deadline could disrupt a smooth transition from NAFTA to the new trade deal, especially a…

AutoNation Inc., the nation's largest dealership group, returned $77 million in loans it received through the federal government's Paycheck Protection Program for 83 stores across the country, while Penske Automotive Group Inc. also returned loans it received, the companies told Automotive News on Friday.

The Washington Post was first to report Friday that AutoNation would return the loans. The Post said AutoNation had received nearly $95 million in loans, citing internal documents and company employees.

AutoNation Chief Marketing Officer Marc Cannon told Automotive News that the figure cited by The Post was incorrect and that the correct loan amount was $77 million. He said AutoNation held a board meeting at 11 a.m. EDT Thursday, shortly after new guidelines from the Small Business Administration were issued, and decided to cancel all of the retailer's loan applications and return all funds by May 7.

Penske Automotive Group, the nation's secon…