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Miami nice: Ford and Argo use self-driving tech to keep fresh food on kids' plates

Before the pandemic struck, Miami-area nonprofit The Education Fund distributed fresh food to students at 26 schools, ensuring they and their families had enough to eat.

With some kids no longer attending school in person, organizers sought a safe way to keep them and their families stocked with healthy groceries.

Enter Ford Autonomous Vehicles and its self-driving technology partner, Argo AI. Miami happens to be where the two companies have been kicking the tires on their autonomous driving technology and, in parallel, developing the foundation of a commercial ride-hailing and delivery business.

The companies and The Education Fund embarked on a pilot project in late October that will conclude by the end of this month. The team is using self-driving test vehicles — with human safety drivers behind the wheel — to deliver food directly to 50 students who attend Mia…

SHANGHAI -- China is expected to sell 80 million internal combustion engines annually in the next five years, in line with previous years, an engine industry association said on Thursday, amid a broader industry transformation toward electrification.

Internal combustion engines still dominate China's auto industry and are also used in motorcycles, agricultural machinery, ships and power generators, according to the China Internal Combustion Engine Industry Association.

Xing Min, secretary general at CICEIA, said the industry expects the sources of fuel for engines to increasingly diversify to include gasoline, natural gas, methanol and more, and to improve thermal efficiency in the next five years to lower overall carbon emissions.

China, the world's biggest vehicle market, is accelerating development of electric vehicles. Carbon dioxide emissions from China's auto industry were expected to peak around 2028, and drop to 20 percent of peak levels by 2035.…

New-vehicle sales in China kept growing at a double-digit pace for the third straight month in November, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers estimates.

Automakers in China delivered some 2.73 million vehicles last month, up 11 percent from a year earlier, the industry trade group said this week, using a preliminary tally.

Sales of new light vehicles including sedans, crossovers, SUVs, multi-purpose vehicles and minibuses rose 9.3 percent. Demand for new commercial vehicles including trucks and buses advanced 14 percent, the group estimates. 

In the first 11 months, industrywide new-vehicle sales dipped 3 percent to some 22.4 million, according to CAAM’s estimates, with light-vehicle demand dropping 7.8 percent and commercial vehicle deliveries jumping 20 percent. 

The industry group didn’t disclose separate volumes for commercial vehicles or light vehicles for November or the first 11 months. It is expected to release those…

Hefei, the provincial capital of east China’s Anhui province, will become the third Chinese city to host a plant for Volkswagen Group’s electric vehicles developed on a new EV platform MEB. 

Production of MEB-based EVs at a joint venture with Jianghuai Automobile Co. will begin in 2023, VW Group China said this week. 

The joint venture will start expanding an existing EV plant next year. 

With the expansion, which is due to be completed at the end of 2022, the annual production capacity at the site will rise to 350,000 vehicles. 

VW Group and JAC this week also unveiled an r&d center at the joint venture in Hefei. The center will employ some 500 people by 2025, according to VW Group China.

VW Group didn’t disclose details on products to be built at the Hefei plant. 

The German group also runs China joint ventures with SAIC Motor Corp. and FAW Group Corp. 

VW Group China said last month that pr…

Qi Yumin, the former chairman of Huachen Automotive Group — parent of BMW Group’s joint venture partner Brilliance Automotive Holdings — is being investigated for violating regulations by an anti-corruption panel under the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

Information on the probe was posted on the CPC’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection website last week. Details on the investigation or Qi’s misconduct have not disclosed.

Qi, 60, is a CPC member. He retired from Huachen Auto in March 2019 after serving as chairman of the state-owned automaker since 2005. 

The probe of Qi was disclosed shortly after Huachen Auto sought bankruptcy protection. 

After defaulting on a 1-billion-yuan ($153 million) bond in October, the company was approved for bankruptcy protection on November 20 by a court in the northeast China city of Shenyang. 

Huachen Auto, based in Shenyang, also runs a light commercial vehicle joi…

Toyota Motor North America will promote a longtime marketing executive to group vice president for Toyota marketing, succeeding Ed Laukes, who announced his retirement in November.

Lisa Materazzo, 52, vice president of Lexus marketing for Toyota Motor North America, will succeed Laukes on Jan. 4. She will be responsible for Toyota Division's market planning, advertising, merchandising, sales promotions, incentives, NASCAR and motorsports, as well as all social and digital media, the Japanese automaker said Thursday. She will report to Toyota Division General Manager David Christ, whom she worked with at Lexus when he led the luxury division.

Her promotion comes as TMNA plans a flurry of new, redesigned or refreshed vehicles that will hit U.S. dealer lots within the next 16 months.

Materazzo is in her second stint at Toyota Motor North America. She joined the company in 1998 as a senior product planner after working for eight years at investment brokerage…

Join Automotive News Publisher Jason Stein for a daily podcast series about the coronavirus crisis. He’ll speak with industry experts, insiders and Automotive News reporters about how the virus is impacting and reshaping the automotive industry.

J.D. Power's Chris Sutton says the firm's latest U.S. Sales Satisfaction Index shows digital retailing is contributing to a better car-buying experience. Plus, Lincoln delivers in more ways than one.

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"If you go into an entry-class car, you probably end up with 20 to 50 sensors that use semiconductors," Frank Findeis, vice president for automotive sensors at German semiconductor maker Infineon, told Automotive News in August, 2020. "If you go to a high-end car, you easily end up with 100."

"If you start looking into the car where the sensors are hidden it's amazing, really, the number of applications is going through the roof," Findeis added.

A recent study by consulting firm McKinsey estimated that the overall sensor market will grow by 8 percent a year into 2030, making it by far the fastest growing segment in automotive componentry. This despite the fact that the company says the market sensors for internal combustion engines will decline overall. It’s body, chassis, and most of all driving assistance sensors that are booming.

The upside is easy to see. The vast amounts of information those sensors produce presents the opportunity to build safer, …

WASHINGTON/SEOUL -- The U.S. International Trade Commission on Wednesday delayed a decision in a trade secrets case involving South Korean battery makers LG Chem and SK Innovation to Feb. 10.

LG Chem, an EV battery supplier for Tesla Inc. and General Motors, filed its trade complaints against SK Innovation last year in the United States over allegations of trade secret theft, seeking to block SK from producing battery cells in the U.S. and importing the components necessary to make the cells. SK denied wrongdoing. The decision had been expected on Thursday.

An adverse ruling by the ITC could lead to an import ban on SK Innovation's batteries and necessary components, potentially causing setbacks for Volkswagen Group and Ford Motor Co. as they move to build new EVs.

SK Innovation is building its first battery factory in Georgia which is set to begin production in 2022 and could be affected by an adverse ruling. The factory with capacity of 9.8 G…

Cruise has joined the growing ranks of self-driving technology companies removing human safety drivers from at least part of their test fleets. But those safety operators won’t be going far. No longer behind the wheel, they will remain nearby – in the passenger’s seat, company officials said Wednesday   “We recognize this is both a trust race as well as a tech race,” a Cruise spokesperson said. “We will maintain a safety operator in the passenger seat. The safety operator has the ability to bring the vehicle to a stop in the event of an emergency, but does not have access to standard driver controls.” Meanwhile, executives at the General Motors-backed company lauded the removal of humans from behind the wheel as signal of progress. It comes after five years of testing in San Francisco in which Cruise vehicles accumulated more than 2 million real-world miles of testing. Cruise said the first ride with no human behind the wheel occurred on a…

California tech company Huddlebots, producer of what its website calls "nanorobotic machines," is breaking new scientific ground. But Huddlebots' technology is not to be confused with the fictional nanobots described in science fiction writer Michael Crichton's novel Prey. Instead, Huddlebots' nanorobots are "molecules with a unique property that enables them to be programmed to carry out a specific task" thanks to "exploiting programmable self-assembly properties of nucleic acids."

Alas, like much of the science described on the site, Huddlebots doesn't actually exist. Nevertheless, the company has shown up nearly a dozen times as an employer on auto loan applications.

According to San Diego fraud company Point Predictive, Huddlebots' website is fake, established to trick lenders into accepting fraudulent employment information about a potential borrower. It's one fraud method contributing to the massive jump in income misrepresentation at auto lenders that Po…

Low interest rates and longer loan terms have been a saving grace for vehicle sales, according to Experian's latest State of the Automotive Finance Market report. Affordability remains a challenge, however, and consumers with the top credit backgrounds are returning to the used-vehicle market for deals.

Melinda Zabritski, Experian's senior director of automotive financial solutions, said the third quarter saw a return of higher-credit customers to buying used vehicles. Those buyers were enticed in the second quarter by generous automaker incentives, but those deals are waning as the year progresses.

Prime and above borrowers made up 55.3 percent of used vehicles financed in the third quarter, a new high for the report. Still, while new-vehicle loans were more expensive, longer terms and a low interest rate kept monthly payments down.

"Rates are over a percentage point lower than where they were last year. We're seeing the terms go u…