Trade News

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…

Carlos Ghosn, the Nissan executive-turned-fugitive who escaped Japan to avoid trial for financial crimes, promised new revelations into collusion between the automaker, prosecutors and the government in a forthcoming book.

“Wait until I publish my book,” Ghosn said Friday in a live video conference link from Beirut, where he has been living since the end of last year. “You will understand much more about the facts. We have a lot of people talking behind the scenes.”

Arrested in November 2018 in Tokyo on charges of financial misdeeds and then freed on bail, Ghosn made a dramatic escape to Lebanon in December with the help of a former Green Beret. He has denied the charges, saying they were part of a conspiracy to prevent further integration between Nissan Motor Co. and Renault.

A former high-flying CEO with homes around the world, he has been holed up in Lebanon, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Japan. A spokeswoman confirmed Ghosn is working…

DETROIT -- Before the coronavirus outbreak shut them down, U.S. auto factories were hectic workplaces where men and women worked side by side along fast-moving assembly lines, ate in crowded break areas, and jostled in and out of gates as they changed shifts.

That is not what auto factories are like in the era of COVID-19. A General Motors operation set up in a shuttered transmission factory near Detroit in Warren, Mich., to assemble face masks provides a glimpse of what manufacturing will look like for the foreseeable future.

People entering the plant rub their hands in sanitizer made by a Detroit brewery. A surgical face mask and safety glasses are required equipment. They stand while a security guard points a temperature scanner at them.

GM's face mask factory sits in a sprawling maze of abandoned transmission gear machining stations. Automakers have compared their crash programs to manufacture medical equipment for the COVID-19 outbreak to the 'Arsen…

Hertz Global Holdings Inc. brought in restructuring advisers to rework the rental-car company’s debt amid a bleak outlook for business trips and vacations.

Management is seeking advice from restructuring bankers at Moelis & Co. on ways to boost liquidity and avoid filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to people familiar with the situation.

One of the options that has been under discussion with bankers is raising cash by issuing new debt, Bloomberg previously reported. The maneuver would need an amendment to a secured debt facility, the people said, asking not to be identified while discussing a private matter. The situation remains fluid and plans could change, depending on market conditions and federal support.

A representative for Hertz, based in Estero, Fla., declined to comment. Andrea Hurst, a spokeswoman for Moelis, declined to comment. Hertz has $1 billion in liquidity and no significant corporate debt maturities until June 2021, accordi…