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MARANELLO, Italy -- Ferrari is refusing to call its first four-door vehicle, the Purosangue, an SUV or a crossover, despite its higher stance and all-wheel drive.

Instead, CEO Benedetto Vigna says, "The Purosangue is a sports car, something unique and distinctive, which is uncompromised on design and engineering."

At starting price of 390,000 euros ($391,000) in Italy, the V-12 Purosangue will be the second-most expensive normal production Ferrari, below the SF90 range, which starts at 440,000 euros. (Limited production models cost more than 1 million euros, with the latest Daytona SP3 at 2 million euros.)

Ferrari plans to begin Purosangue deliveries in the second quarter of 2023 in Europe, in the third quarter in the U.S. and by year’s end in other markets.

To protect the exclusivity of the brand as well as sales of its core range of coupes, roadsters and convertibles, Ferrari will cap Purosangue output at no more than 20 percent of annual…

MARANELLO, Italy -- Ferrari could soon close the order book for its first four-door production model, the Purosangue, because of overwhelming demand, executives said.

"We risk not being able to satisfy demand, and maybe we will need to close the order intake very soon," Ferrari’s chief commercial and marketing officer, Enrico Galliera, said at a media preview of the Purosangue at company headquarters in here on Sept. 8.

Galliera declined to say how many pre-orders Ferrari had received ahead of the Purosangue’s public debut on Tuesday, when orders officially open. 

He said that demand for the 390,000 euro ($397,000) Purosangue went beyond Ferrari’s expectations. Limited-edition models are normally sold out before they are publicly unveiled, but those models have total runs of a few hundred units rather than the thousands a year planned for the Purosangue.

To protect the exclusivity of the brand as well as sales of its core range of coup…

This is not going to be your father's Detroit auto show, nor is it going to be your grandfather's auto show.

Apologies for any misapplied generational assumptions, but you get the gist. The long-awaited return of the Detroit auto show — with a painfully convoluted new name — is sadly nothing like the sometimes awe-inspiring North American International Auto Show events from 1989 to (generously) 2019.

Nor is 2022 a return to the semicomic/semitragic, fully sexist past, when pretty women in skimpy attire lured attendees to display stands hoping their distracted brains would associate the brand or vehicle with the good feelings they had about the talent on stage.

This year's North American International Detroit Auto Show, like its peers around the world, is now a regional event — designed for consumers to come see lots of cars and make them want to buy these cars and feel good about it all.

Once again and for the record, I am sad about this. The au…

Autonomous vehicle software supplier Aptiv plc has agreed to acquire Intercable Automotive Solutions for around $600 million.

The bolt on of the Bruneck, Italy-based manufacturer of busbar and battery cell technology would bolster Aptiv's high voltage power portfolio and strengthen its standing in Europe.

The deal, expected to close before the end of the year, is for an 85 percent equity stake in the company, according to a Tuesday statement. The Mutschlechner family will retain 15 percent ownership in the company they founded in 1972.

"The combination strengthens our position as a full system supplier for electric vehicle manufacturers," Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark said in the release. "In addition, Intercable's differentiated technology design and manufacturing capabilities enable a more efficient and cost-effective vehicle assembly operation for our customers."

Intercable Automotive Solutions will operate as a standalone unit of Aptiv. The company's …

AutoNation Inc., the nation's largest new-vehicle retailer, on Aug. 30 sold its BMW dealership in Mount Kisco, N.Y., north of New York City, to DARCARS Automotive Group, DARCARS confirmed.

BMW Mount Kisco is the second luxury vehicle dealership sold by AutoNation in August. On Aug. 15 AutoNation sold Audi Owings Mills in Maryland to publicly traded auto retailer Sonic Automotive Inc. AutoNation purchased that dealership in November 2021 as part of a nine-store acquisition from Priority 1 Automotive Group.

This marks the first BMW store for the DARCARS group. The store was renamed DARCARS BMW of Mt. Kisco. DARCARS also has a Lexus dealership in Mount Kisco, astore it acquired in 2020.

"Since we opened our Lexus dealership in Mount Kisco in 2020, we've looked for an opportunity to become a bigger part of this incredible community," DARCARS CEO John Darvish said in a statement. "We want to better serve our employees, customers and supporters in the New Yor…

Trevor Milton lied to investors again and again to make the electric truck company he founded, Nikola Corp., look better than it was, a prosecutor told the jury in his criminal trial.

“This is Trevor Milton,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos told the jurors in his opening statement Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. “He repeatedly lied to investors about his company, and he made a billion dollars by doing so. He started a company that was supposed to make zero-emission trucks, and he lied about all the important parts of the business.”

Milton did it “to lure innocent investors into buying more of his company’s stock,” Roos said.

It didn’t take long for Roos to get to the details of a 2016 event at which Milton unveiled the debut version of what he said was a hydrogen-powered truck. Roos said the truck was missing key parts and had never been functional. The symbol for hydrogen was stenciled on the side even though there was no fuel cell in the ve…

Reporters love data. Numbers offer evidence to back up anecdotal stories and put emerging trends in context, which makes them incredibly useful as we try to make sense of what's happening around us.

Yet data is just a snapshot. The numbers tell a story of what's happening at a particular moment in time. Often, they provide us with potential explanations, rather than conclusions, about the significance of new trends and behaviors.

At the start of this year, I wrote about a new Cox Automotive survey that found that U.S. consumers who purchased or leased vehicles in 2020 and 2021 were happier with their overall shopping experience than buyers in 2019, before the pandemic. Consumers were happier with the process last year — even with high prices and a shortage of inventory — than they were pre-pandemic.

A data point from that survey pulls back a layer of the onion: In general, consumers who completed more than half of a vehicle purchase online were more sati…

The UAW and Stellantis reach a tentative agreement in Indiana. Large dealership groups are pulling ahead in online customer service. Elon Musk promises big product launches for Tesla next year. Plus, University of Michigan researcher Jeff Sakamoto talks about how close the industry is to scaling up the manufacturing of solid-state batteries.

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Self-driving technology company Argo AI is rolling out an all-inclusive collection of autonomous vehicle products and services designed for commercial use to fit fleets and all vehicle types.

Besides self-driving technology, products from the company based in Pittsburgh include a vehicle and fleet management system and a data analytics platform for vehicles used in ride-hailing and delivery services.

Argo, primarily funded by Ford Motor Co. and Volkswagen Group, is testing self-driving technology on public roads in Pittsburgh; Detroit; Austin, Texas; Miami; Palo Alto, Calif.; Munich; and Hamburg, Germany. The company is also conducting public pilot programs with Lyft in Miami and with Walmart in Austin and Miami.

Argo is using Ford Escape crossovers and Ford Fusion Hybrid sedans in U.S. tests and electric VW ID Buzz vans in Germany.

"Argo's product ecosystem offers businesses the customizable tools and solutions they need to integrate autonomous v…

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation are at odds over the next steps in an ongoing lawsuit concerning updates to the state's "right to repair" law.

Automakers represented by the alliance filed the lawsuit against Healey in November 2020 after voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure revising and expanding the state's existing law.

The revised law — referred to as the Data Access Law in the lawsuit — requires makers of vehicles sold in Massachusetts to use a standardized, open-access data platform for telematics-equipped vehicles beginning with the 2022 model year. It also gives vehicle owners and independent repair shops access to real-time information from the telematics, such as crash notifications, remote diagnostics and navigation.

U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock this month asked Healey and the alliance for further submissions on two outstanding issues in the case — their interpretation o…

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Representatives for Carvana Co. and the Illinois secretary of state met Wednesday in Illinois court for a scheduled hearing — the latest step in a legal challenge that's unfolded over the online retailer's license to sell used vehicles in the state.

The matter arose in early May, when the secretary of state suspended Carvana's dealer license. The regulatory agency said its police unit had investigated several consumer complaints and discovered a pattern of Carvana failing to properly transfer titles for vehicles it sold and misusing the issuing of out-of-state temporary registration permits. The agency stayed the suspension order May 26, saying Carvana could sell vehicles as long as it followed "strict guidelines."

When additional consumer complaints emerged, the secretary of state again attempted to suspend the online retailer's license in July, at which point Carvana filed for injunctive relief. That request was granted July 29 by Judge Bonnie Wheaton of the…