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Fresh from college in the early 1990s, Jim Adler landed his first engineering job: working on avionics systems for spacecraft at General Dynamics in Southern California.

"You play with these amazingly huge toys that are worth billions of dollars," Adler recalled. "Best job you could ask for."

But an entrepreneurial spirit simmered and soon pulled him on a trajectory that included founding companies and guiding startups. Now in charge of Toyota Ventures, the automaker's venture capital arm, Adler finds his thoughts are once again turning toward space.

Toyota Ventures' latest activities, announced late last month, include investments in two space companies, Xona Space Systems and Near Space Labs.

Toyota isn't interested in a mammoth endeavor comparable to Elon Musk's SpaceX, manufacturing and launching its own missions. These are more niche space explorations. Xona Space Systems aims to launch a constellation of satellites that provides an alternat…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann agree: Ferraris are too much fun to drive to put a robot in charge.

For that reason, they said in an appearance at Italian Tech Week, the luxury sports-car brand shouldn't deploy automated driving technology.

The two billionaires found other common ground, according to Bloomberg. They're bullish about nuclear power and agreed that solar energy is the best long-term solution. Musk said the world should be building more nuclear power plants, or at least not closing existing ones, calling them "quite safe."

"We're seeing how energy prices are just going up — in gas, coal, uranium — everything is going up," Elkann said. "Nuclear is a solution that exists, it's one that we know, it's one that is secure and one that we should absolutely develop strongly."

Uranium prices are rising because China, India and other countries are nuclearizing, Elkann said, which is "a very s…

Anyone can see the contrast between Ford CEO Jim Farley's big investment announcement last week to make battery cells, battery packs and electric vehicles in Tennessee and Kentucky and his predecessor's strategy of buying batteries from suppliers — "off the shelf," so to speak.

One could easily deride the former chief, Jim Hackett, as a fool who failed to recognize that batteries and motors are the engines and transmissions of the next generation of vehicles.

He may have been a successful as CEO at Steelcase, one might say, but he was a neophyte in the byzantine knife fight that is the global auto industry.

Sure, he may have been wrong, but he wasn't dumb.

When Tesla built its so-called Gigafactory in Nevada with Panasonic in 2014, it was in part because there was no other efficient way to get the battery supply the company needed.

Half a decade later, with so much of the global industry pivoting to electric vehicles, Hackett might have s…

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the National Auto Auction Association to conduct yet another presidential transition remotely. As with so many facets of every sector and life in general, the pandemic has altered not only the traditional changing of the guard for the NAAA, but the wholesale business in general. Staff Reporter David Muller discussed these topics with incoming President Charles Nichols and CEO Tricia Heon, and also communicated via email with outgoing President Julie Picard. Here are edited excerpts.

Q:Do you have specific legislative priorities that are top of mind?

A: Heon: Just general advocacy. It'll be nice to get back into Capitol Hill, have the [Congress] members' offices open again, because we do have a new administration, and with a new administration, we have not been able to visit in person. [Political action committee] events have been put on hold. [It's] so different in person than it is to do one of those meetings virtually.

TOKYO — As an indication of the Japanese legal battle facing former Nissan director Greg Kelly, consider this grim fact: The judge presiding over Kelly's case just sentenced a 90-year-old former senior government bureaucrat to five years in prison for negligence in a deadly car crash.

Veteran chief judge Kenji Shimotsu, who has overseen Kelly's trial involving alleged financial misconduct for more than a year, handed down the punishment in that trial to a former government official who was found guilty of mistaking the accelerator for the brake as he plowed through a crowd in Tokyo, killing two people and injuring nine.

The judge said he was being lenient because the driver was at least not inebriated at the time, local media reported.

Even in law-and-order Japan, the sentence was deemed harsh.

Now, as Tokyo prosecutors made their closing argument against Kelly last week, they are asking Shimotsu to sentence the American to two years.

Kel…

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — J.B. Straubel spent the better part of the past two decades at Tesla Inc. attempting to disrupt the auto industry and push incumbent automakers such as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors to get serious about electric vehicles.

Now he's CEO of Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company, and is partnering with Ford to make its EVs more sustainable. Redwood plans to be involved in the company's Blue Oval City campus outside Memphis, and Straubel was on hand for Ford's announcement here last week, when he shared his thoughts on a range of topics with reporters. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: Ford recently partnered with you on battery recycling, and GM has made similar announcements. Has addressing that part of the manufacturing process become table stakes for automakers electrifying their fleets?

A: It's amazing how quickly it's become well accepted that having a closed-loop supply chain and addressing end-of-life problems right up front i…

CASA GRANDE, Ariz. — In many ways, electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors, which began manufacturing luxury EVs here last week, is following in the footsteps of its successful rule-breaking competitor Tesla.

But former Tesla employees who are helping to launch Lucid say the new automaker is cutting its own path, including adopting more traditional industry processes to ensure quality and safety.

"It's not always black and white," said Eric Bach, a former Tesla engineer who now is Lucid's chief engineer. Speaking during the production launch of the Lucid Air sedan last week at its new plant outside Phoenix, Bach said he has different views from his famous former boss, Elon Musk, about the processes of automaking.

"There are good processes, and there are maybe a couple of bad ones. So what did we do? We said, they're not fundamentally bad. We want to use robust processes."

To get up and running, Lucid adopted traditional industry practices in safet…

Rivian Automotive Inc., the maker of EVs backed by Amazon.com Inc., disclosed a net loss of almost $1 billion in the first half of the year in its initial public offering paperwork.

The Irvine, Calif.-based startup in a filing Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission listed the size of the offering as $100 million, a placeholder that will change when terms of the share sale are set.

Rivian was seeking to be valued at about $80 billion in a listing, Bloomberg News reported in August when the company announced that it had filed confidentially for an IPO.

The company’s IPO plans come as EV makers are scaling up, angling for a bigger slice of the growing market. With $10.5 billion raised from backers including Amazon and Ford Motor Co., an established factory in Illinois and thousands of reservation holders for its R1T truck and R1S SUV, Rivian is among the most serious competitors lining up to take on electric-vehicle leader Tesla Inc. …

With only so many semiconductors to work with, Stellantis is putting electric cars before combustion-engine vehicles as consumers respond to sweeteners including significant subsidies.  

"We will continue to manage all powertrains together but EVs come first," Anne-Lise Richard, Stellantis’s head of e-mobility, said in an interview in Milan. "We see more costumers that are willing to buy EVs now."

Demand for EVs has accelerated particularly in Europe, where generous government incentives have made the models attractive relative to traditional cars.

While programs on offer vary from country to country, buyers in Germany can expect to slice 9,000 euros ($10,438) off the sticker price of a fully electric car. 

Stellantis, formed from the merger of PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler this year, is spending 30 billion euros on EVs and software to compete with a wave of new electric models from competitors like Volkswagen.

All Stellantis b…

TOKYO — Honda Motor Co., which will phase out internal combustion products by 2040, has now unveiled plans to reinvent the company in business areas that are truly out of this world.

Under a road map unveiled last week, the automaker said it will branch into electric air mobility vehicles, avatar robots and even reusable rockets to launch satellites into space.

Topping the list of new directions, which will be handled by Honda R&D, is electric vertical take-off and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft. It is a sector increasingly being explored by rival automakers, including South Korea's Hyundai Motor Group.

But with Honda, it parlays nicely with the company's long-standing jet business.

To overcome the limitations of short-range battery-powered flight, Honda will equip its eVTOL aircraft with a gas turbine hybrid power unit. Honda wants to conduct a test flight in 2024 and decide on the viability of the business by 2025. If it gets the green light, …

John Komar and Greg Long, Faulkner Automotive Group's fixed operations directors, are on the front lines of recruiting technicians in Philadelphia's brutally competitive market. Each of Faulkner's 28 dealerships need at least one tech.

It's not easy, quick or inexpensive for them to find and hire techs. According to consulting firm DealerStrong of Evansville, Ind., franchised new-car dealers spend as much as $10,000 to recruit new technicians — a figure that covers the hiring process from writing the job description through onboarding.

So, the last thing Komar and Long want to see is a new tech fail. To help ensure that doesn't happen, Komar and Long, working with the group's service managers and master technicians, relaunched Faulkner's technician mentor program in 2019. Newly hired technicians — most of whom are just out of school — are paired with master technicians for their first nine months. The new techs are eased into their jobs in a cadence designed t…

Editor's note: This story is part of a special "Help Wanted" section running in the Oct. 4 edition that details the lengths auto companies are going to find new workers.

The auto industry has been talking about "reshoring" in recent years as if it were a kind of patriotic movement — pulling manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. from China, Indonesia and Mexico as way to bolster the American economy.

Garry Craft wishes it were that simple.

"We just transferred a lot of business from Mexico to our plant in Gadsden, Ala., because the company there couldn't get enough people to do the work," said Craft, director of sales at Koller-Craft South. "They were having problems getting employees. And once their product got to the border, the trucks were sitting there for five to seven days because of staffing issues at the border."

Koller-Craft, a Tier 2 molder and assembler of components that include interior trim pieces, decorative parts, cupholder assemblie…