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WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Energy Department on Monday plans to announce it intends to loan a joint venture of General Motors and LG Energy Solution $2.5 billion to help finance construction of new lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing plants, officials told Reuters.

The conditional commitment for the loan to Ultium Cells LLC for facilities in Ohio, Tennessee and Michigan is expected to close in the coming months and comes from the government's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan program, which has not funded a new loan since 2010.

The program previously provided loans to Tesla Inc., Ford Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co.

This would be the Energy Department's first loan for a battery cell manufacturing project under the vehicle program.

President Joe Biden has set a goal of 50 percent of U.S. auto production by 2030 being electric or plug-in electric hybrid vehicles.

"We have to have vehicle manufacturing capacity but also battery man…

Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla Inc. executive JB Straubel, said on Monday it plans to spend $3.5 billion on a battery-materials factory in northwest Nevada.

The auto industry has been ramping up production of electric vehicles to meet a demand surge, driving up orders for batteries and raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, etc.

Five-year-old Redwood Materials is ramping up production of anode and cathode components to 100 gigawatt-hours by 2025, enough to supply batteries for 1 million EVs a year, then to 500 GWh by 2030, enough to supply 5 million EVs a year or more.

Redwood Materials, whose partners include automaker Ford Motor Co. and EV battery maker Panasonic Holdings Corp., is building a closed-loop battery ecosystem aimed at lowering EV costs by cutting dependence on imported materials, while also reducing the environmental impact.

The Nevada plant, under construction outside Reno, is expected to be one of the first U.S. facili…

SHENZHEN -- The Chinese city of Shenzhen told 100 major companies including EV giant BYD and iPhone maker Foxconn to set up "closed-loop" systems as it battles COVID-19, according to a document attributed to the local government circulating online on Monday.

While Reuters could not independently verify the document, a notice at a Shenzhen office of oil giant CNOOC seen by Reuters said that the building would be closed for seven days until July 31, with staff to work from home and continue with daily COVID testing.

A CNOOC spokesperson did not have an immediate comment.

The Shenzhen government did not respond to a request for comment.

Taiwan-based Foxconn said that operations at its Shenzhen facilities were "normal" and that it would follow government guidelines to ensure safe production.

The order attributed to Shenzhen's department for industry and information said that major companies, including BYD Co., Huawei Technologies Co., and ZTE C…

Tesla Inc has received a second subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over CEO Elon Musk's 2018 tweets about taking the company private, the EV maker disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday.

The company said it received the subpoena June 13 and will cooperate with the government authorities. The regulator did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

In November last year the regulator had subpoenaed Tesla related to a settlement requiring Musk's tweets on material information to be vetted.

Musk had in 2018 settled a lawsuit by the regulator over his go-private tweets, agreeing to let the company's lawyers pre-approve tweets with material information about the company.

In June, Musk appealed a judge's refusal to end this 2018 agreement with the SEC.

Separately, Tesla said it has converted about 75 percent of its bitcoin holdings into fiat currency and has recorded a $170 million impai…

TOKYO -- Toyota Motor Corp. will not unilaterally press its suppliers for lower prices for the second half of its fiscal year and is also considering supporting their energy bills, an executive said on Monday.

The move reinforces an attempt by the world's largest automaker by sales to shoulder more of the burden faced by suppliers as global supply chain woes continue and energy costs soar.

Like other automakers, Toyota has been battered by the global shortage of semiconductors and COVID-19-related lockdowns, prompting repeated cutbacks in vehicle production and frustrating suppliers.

Toyota initially sent out a request for lower prices for the July-September period to some suppliers, but the company decided not to make a request to cover the October-March period since its production plan has yet to stabilize, said Kazunari Kumakura, Toyota's purchasing group chief. It also did not make a request for the April-June period.

"As other automakers are …

Volkswagen Group's dramatic move to oust its combative CEO, Herbert Diess, was set in motion a week ago, when his backing from the billionaire Porsche and Piech family began to crumble.

Unwavering support from the reclusive clan that majority-owns VW had helped Diess survive frequent clashes with powerful worker representatives. But as key project failures combined with worker discontent, the family concluded he had to go.

The decisive day was July 20, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

The top committee of VW’s supervisory board, comprising family representatives, officials from the German state of Lower Saxony officials and labor leaders, determined that Diess's time was up. He learned this around lunchtime the next day, still jet-lagged from a visit to the automaker’s assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.

In the end, Diess's undoing is a brutal reflection of the challenges facing leaders of industrial behemoths trying to mode…

Forty years ago, American Honda Motor Co. built an assembly plant in rural Marysville, Ohio, and began a trend that would alter the trajectory of the U.S. auto industry — and contribute to a modern-day problem.

It wasn't just that company founder Soichiro Honda had chosen to build an assembly plant in the U.S. — the first Asian automaker to do so, following earlier and less successful European efforts from Rolls-Royce in the 1920s and Volkswagen in the 1970s. It was where he chose to do it: in rural central Ohio, where cornfields far outnumbered subdivisions and land was cheap and plentiful.

Honda's pioneering new factory meant that many of his cars would no longer have to be imported. But its location 30 miles outside Columbus also meant that many employees would commute long distances from cities and towns across a vast region.

It worked, and since the first Honda Accord rolled off the line in 1982, that strategy has been replicated by automakers acr…

DETROIT — The UAW's constitutional convention this week offers a chance to reset for a troubled union desperate to move beyond its corrupt past by providing top officials a platform to tout reforms and rally support from members who now have the direct power to choose their next leaders.

But a harsh report by the union's court- appointed monitor days before the gathering challenges the notion that the UAW has learned from its past misdeeds and may fuel long-simmering demands from disgruntled rank-and-file workers for more substantial turnover at the top.

Monitor Neil Barofsky described efforts by the UAW to obstruct and interfere with his office's investigations by allegedly concealing evidence and excluding the monitor's office from key International Executive Board meetings. President Ray Curry and other leaders became cooperative only after the Department of Justice was called in to discuss possible breaches of the UAW's six-year consent decree, the report …

For UAW, the more things change ...

A lot has changed since UAW officials from plants and offices around the country last gathered in Detroit for a constitutional convention four years ago.

The president they elected almost unanimously at that convention, Gary Jones — who had promised a "clean slate" to move the union past a federal corruption scandal — wound up in prison, as did his predecessor, Dennis Williams.

The UAW narrowly avoided being taken over by the federal government by making a deal that puts it under the oversight of a court-appointed monitor for six years.

And rank-and-file members approved a referendum that gives them the power to vote for the union's next leaders directly. That means the decision of whether to keep current President Ray Curry in office for four more years won't be up to those attending this week's constitutional convention; the members they'll report back to next weekend get to make that choice.

But one …