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WASHINGTON — Automakers represented by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation have joined nearly 350 business, labor and trade groups urging Congress to pass a permitting reform bill before summer's end.

In a letter sent Monday to congressional leaders, the diverse coalition — led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — called on lawmakers to pass "meaningful and durable" legislation that would modernize the permitting process for a variety of domestic energy projects, including critical mineral mining to support the production of electric vehicle batteries.

The groups, which include state and local chambers as well as the American Clean Power Association, American Gas Association, Business Roundtable and National Mining Association, argue the U.S. permitting process is outdated, with federal permits taking up to seven and a half years on average to be approved depending on the project.

"Our permitting system is fundamentally broken, and it is delaying the inv…

Lucid Group, Inc. is recalling several hundred electric vehicles due to a glitch that may cause its flagship model to lose power while being driven.

The startup said flawed electrically activated switches could affect the 2022-2023 model years of the Lucid Air, triggering the recall of 637 vehicles, according to a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

"This may lead to a loss of propulsion without pre-warning and may increase the risk of a crash," the company said in the filing, which was submitted to the regulatory agency on March 23.

The Newark, Calif.-based company delivered 4,494 Lucid Air vehicles as of the end of last year. Lucid said in the filing that its service centers will update the vehicle software and replace the problematic switches for free. It didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Chinese new-vehicle dealers are struggling to stay afloat after efforts to clear gasoline-fueled cars before tougher emissions standards taking effect later this year are upended by a bruising price war.

Auto sales — especially of internal combustion engine light vehicles — haven’t bounced back from pandemic restrictions even with hefty discounts doled out by major carmakers including BYD Co., Chery Auto, Toyota Motor Corp. and Ford Motor Co. New-vehicle sales fell 20 percent in the first two months of the year, with deliveries of gasoline-fueled cars dropping 30 percent.

With the next phase of China’s emissions standards to be implemented in July, dealers could be left with hundreds of thousands of cars that would become non-compliant, according to a March 23 article by the country’s Auto Dealers Chamber of Commerce, which has since been deleted from its WeChat account. The price war may have brought higher foot traffic, but showrooms that didn’t offer discou…

Stress test for the EV transition

A business' survival is dependent on smart risk management. As the auto industry takes its biggest risk in the era of mass production — the electrification transition — this week's Automotive News highlights the magnitude of the bets being made.

Ford Motor Co., for example, for the first time publicly disclosed how much money it lost in its Model E electric vehicle division last year ($2.1 billion) and how much it expects to lose this year ($3 billion). Offsetting these large losses, if Ford's projections hold true, will be large profits from its Ford Blue internal-combustion arm and its Ford Pro commercial business. A cynic might say Ford is chasing bad money with good, as the company plows those divisional profits into EV-related investments such as new factories and R&D on alternative battery chemistries. But that is a risk the company is willing to bear, and it is confident the payoff is not far away.

Newcomer …

DETROIT — The election of Shawn Fain as the UAW's fifth president in five years could upend what are already expected to be difficult contract negotiations between the union and Detroit 3 automakers later this year.

But his razor-thin margin of victory over incumbent Ray Curry — Fain won by fewer than 500 votes and received the support of less than 7 percent of the UAW's membership — could make it tough to rally a disgruntled membership eager to move beyond the union's troubled past.

"No one can declare they have a mandate," said Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who specializes in labor issues. "The membership is obviously divided. I think the No. 1 challenge facing Fain is to unite the membership behind a bargaining strategy."

Fain, who was sworn in on Sunday, will have to hit the ground running. Union leaders from around the country will gather this week for a special bargaining convention, where they'll vote o…

The CEO of NIU Technologies discusses the growth of the micro-mobility market and the public’s changing perceptions of solutions like bikes and scooters. The technology’s cool factor, he said, encourages new users but might have a downside.

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I've covered the auto industry for a long time, but mostly from the factory, automaker, supplier or Wall Street perspective. Before I got to Automotive News, I probably wrote more about the consumer experience than the dealer experience. That all made sense when I was writing for general interest newspapers or a financial wire service.

But I've always admired the entrepreneurial spirit of auto dealers, and I'm glad to have more exposure to them since I joined Automotive News almost four and a half years ago.

I remember David Hult, CEO of Asbury Automotive, before the pandemic talking about buying a used car from Carvana, just to learn what the experience was like and gauge how it stacked up against trying to do the same on his brand's site. Compared to hiring a consultant whom you may or may not fully trust, the return on investment of that experience had to be off the chart.

So it's through the lens of that example that I look at…

In the last two months, Automotive News and other publications have reported on tensions between automakers and their dealers. This doesn't involve all automakers, but recent statements from a few have put many dealers, state and metro dealer associations and the National Automobile Dealers Association on high alert:

What is going on here?

Tension between automakers and their dealers is not new. There will always be differences of opinion on how best to take care of customers and win in the marketplace. In fact, automakers and dealers that address these differences head-on and have open dialogue regarding their resolution have proven over time to be the most successful.

Today's tensions are different. They are not rooted in the conventional give-and-take over cost shifts or how the earnings pie is divided, but rather in threats that go to the very core of the franchise system that underlies the factory-dealer relationship.

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Technology is making in-vehicle digital cockpits more intelligent by using deeper machine-learning capabilities to create more robust occupant monitoring features and other systems.

The advancements were on display at the InCabin Phoenix conference held this month.

The three-day event, hosted by AutoSens, drew companies from around the world to share new in-cabin technology, spanning deeper machine-learning capabilities to more robust occupant monitoring systems.

Novelic, a radar and sensor company in Serbia, was at InCabin Phoenix to highlight the capabilities of its radar automotive cabin monitoring system.

The system, currently undergoing testing in Europe and the U.S., can detect a child left in the car and includes other safety features such as an intruder alert and the specific location of other passengers sitting in the vehicle.

The company's radar system can provide a suite of in-cabin monitoring …

The $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act from late 2021 captured public attention for funding a wave of electric vehicle charging services. But buried deeper inside was also a mandate for a new technology that has nothing to do with EVs.

The law calls for a final rule to be issued next year requiring all vehicles sold in the U.S. to have the ability to passively detect when drivers are under the influence of alcohol and prevent them from driving.

That's a piece of technology that does not exist yet — at least, not as a commercialized market-friendly original-equipment vehicle component.

So the auto industry is scurrying to come up with the technology. And one global supplier, Asahi Kasei, may have a head start in the race.

The Japanese chemical and electronics company has conveniently had a Swedish subsidiary working on alcohol and gas detection sensors for other applications for 25 years.

Asah…

Swiss instrument supplier Inficon has been detecting air leaks for years — on air conditioners, refrigeration, airbags and transmission housings — to look for manufacturing flaws and toxic chemicals. Now the auto industry is asking the company to find leaks in a booming new segment: electric vehicle batteries.

And it's not about air getting out. It's about the possibility of water getting in.

Rainwater splashing into a battery enclosure from the road surface or lake water seeping in while the owner of an electric SUV launches a fishing boat can potentially ruin a big battery.

The question facing automakers and battery suppliers all over the world now is how to make sure something the size of a mattress hasn't ended up with a tiny leak in its seal during mass production.

Inficon's solution is to apply a technology it's been using for years on other products to batteries coming down the assembly line. It pumps helium into …