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Mercedes-Benz is dropping the Freightliner Sprinter van in the U.S. at the end of the 2021 model year, with output ending at a South Carolina plant in September 2021.

Sales are expected to end by Dec. 31, 2021, the company told Freightliner dealers this week.

Mercedes has sold the Sprinter van, redesigned in 2018, through two channels, Freightliner and Mercedes-Benz dealers, and will continue to build and market Mercedes versions.

The company cited multiple factors for the decision to drop the Freightliner van, introduced in the U.S. in 2001, including current and future economic conditions as well as the COVID-19 outbreak.

Mercedes-Benz is also reviewing its global product lineup to reduce costs and complexity.

"The high homologation costs for a single-market, low-volume product as the U.S.-only Freightliner Sprinter brand were central to this decision," Robert Veit, vice president and managing director of Daimler Vans, told dealers i…

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the company’s clarification of Speeks’ oversight of Mercedes-Benz Canada.

ATLANTA -- Nicholas Speeks, CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA, has taken a leave of absence as of Friday morning, the company said late Friday.

It's unclear what prompted the move and Speeks is not expected to return as CEO, said a person familiar with the situation.

Drew Slaven, Mercedes-Benz USA vice president of marketing, will be the CEO on an interim basis, the company said.

Speeks, 61, an outspoken Englishman, took over Mercedes' top job in North America last fall. The executive had steered Mercedes-Benz sales in China for more than six years.

Under his stewardship, Mercedes China grew at a 20 percent annual rate, significantly outpacing the industry and the premium market. Speeks previously ran Mercedes-Benz Japan and has worked for the company in Dubai, Vietnam and Germany.

The vacancy at the top comes as Mer…

Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer XPeng Inc. said it hopes to raise up to $1.1 billion in its initial public offering in New York, seeking to ride the enthusiasm for EVs even as U.S.-China relations remain strained.

The company said on Friday it intends to sell 85 million American depositary shares, each representing two class A ordinary shares, priced between $11 and $13 per share.

At the top end of the range, XPeng's valuation stood at $9.17 billion.

The IPO comes at a time when U.S.-listed Chinese companies are facing tightened scrutiny and strict audit requirements from U.S. regulators, as tensions escalate between two of the world's biggest economies.

The Chinese EV maker said existing investors Alibaba Group , Coatue, and Qatar Investment Authority had indicated interest in buying up to $200 million, $100 million and $50 million, respectively, of the depositary shares being offered.

Backer Xiaomi Corp. had also indicated interest …

Toyota might not be off the hook just yet in a lawsuit over soy-based wiring that some drivers say has attracted hungry rodents.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court's dismissal of the implied warranty claims, with a few exceptions, from a 4-year-old lawsuit against Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. in a decision filed Wednesday. The appeals court upheld the dismissal of state law fraud and consumer protection claims.

The lawsuit, filed in August 2016, alleges Toyota's switch to soy-based insulation for engine wiring — instead of petroleum-based insulation — is attractive to hungry rodents.

Lead plaintiff attorney Brian Kabateck filed the suit on behalf of Albert Heber in Indiana, who paid around $1,500 to fix the wiring of his 2012 Toyota Tundra that was chewed through three separate times. Several more plaintiffs came forward after Heber's claims. The suit says the company should cover the damages under warranty…

FRANKFURT -- German prosecutors are treating the death of a man believed to have played a role in a dispute between Volkswagen and Bosnian supplier group Prevent as a likely suicide, they said on Friday.

Prosecutors in the city of Braunschweig said last week they were looking into the death of the man found in a burned-out car for links to a Volkswagen employee suspended for allegedly illegally recording conversations.

Local newspaper Helmstedter Nachrichten, citing unidentified sources, said last week the dead person was a VW employee who had done business with the Bosnian supplier group and was being investigated for eavesdropping.

Prosecutors said on Friday initial evidence pointed to suicide, but the probe had not been concluded.

They would not comment on the identity of the deceased, saying only he was the owner of the car.

VW and the Bosnian supplier group fell out in 2016 in a disagreement over pricing, prompting Prevent subsidiaries…

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.

Upstream Security product chief Dan Sahar says automakers and suppliers are putting more measures in place and creating ''bigger solutions'' to monitor, detect and prevent potential cyberattacks in connected vehicles.

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President Donald Trump threatened Thursday that if he’s re-elected, he’ll impose tariffs on U.S. companies that refuse to move jobs back to the country from overseas.

“We will give tax credits to companies to bring jobs back to America, and if they don’t do it, we will put tariffs on those companies, and they will have to pay us a lot of money,” Trump said during a campaign event in Pennsylvania.

“So what are they going to do? They are going to bring the jobs back,” Trump said.

He offered no explanation about how such a system of tax credits and tariffs would work, and it isn’t clear if the White House is developing such a policy.

“The beauty of the Trump tariffs is that they represent a powerful inducement for investment in domestic production by both American companies that have offshored our factories and foreign companies that want to sell into the U.S. market,” Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said in a statement, without addressing whether …

TOKYO -- Toyota Motor Corp. on Friday said its domestic vehicle production would be 1 percent higher than initially planned in September, as its plants resume output levels following a steep drop because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company plans to produce roughly 2,300 more cars and trucks than its initial plan for around 230,000, Reuters calculations found.

Vehicle production at the world's No.2 automaker is recovering at home and abroad since global output fell by more than half year-on-year in April and May, when plants were shuttered to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Toyota declined to comment on global production plans for next month, but the company has said it expects global sales will be 15 percent lower in the July-September quarter from last year, and 5 percent lower in October-December. By early 2021, it expects sales will be 5 percent higher on the year.

Toyota plans to sell 7.2 million vehicles in the fiscal year to M…

Organizers of the Canadian International AutoShow have until early fall to decide whether the country’s largest consumer trade show will proceed as a live event during the pandemic or move entirely online.

“We will have an event in 2021,” said David McClean, CIAS director of marketing. “The technology exists today to build a virtual platform that allows [the public] to experience the manufacturers’ brands in a virtual environment.

"This ... could further be connected to a physical experience, either concurrently or later on.”

CIAS was developing digital options before COVID-19 and will be ready to host a virtual event on the scheduled dates of Feb. 12-21, McClean said. The development is taking place while assessing the viability of the show’s traditional format, he said.

An in-person Toronto show will hinge on the ability to balance visitor safety, government-imposed gathering limits and distancing requirements with cost reductions for automakers…

Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. were spared in a California appeals court Thursday from being forced to comply with a state law that, they say, would upend their business models. But the relief will be temporary.

The companies plan on using the ballot box to supplant a piece of legislation, already on the books, that requires Uber and Lyft to classify their drivers as employees, rather than independent contractors. Now, the companies have proposed a new law, to be decided in 11 weeks, that would grant additional protections to workers, but would not make them regular employees.

Both Uber and Lyft said they would suspend operations in California if they were forced to comply with the existing California labor law by Thursday at midnight, a court-imposed deadline. But on Thursday, hours before the companies were set to pull out of the state, an appeals court judge granted them additional time.

The judge instructed the companies to prepare detailed pla…

BERLIN/MUNICH -- Schaeffler hopes to raise as much as 1.3 billion euros ($1.5 billion) as the supplier looks to bolster its finances amid the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

The company will hold an extraordinary shareholders meeting on Sept. 15 to seek approval to issue as many as 200 million additional non-voting common shares, Schaeffler said Thursday.

The company said the money would strengthen its capital base and help it "take advantage of growth opportunities." One of the goals of the authorization, which will have a term of five years, would be to increase its free float, the supplier said.

"This is about going on the offensive," CEO Klaus Rosenfeld said in an interview. "We want to exit this crisis as a winner."

The company is open to expanding its portfolio with potential acquisitions in the areas of e-mobility and sustainability as well as bolstering its industrial business, Rosenfeld said.

Like most companies in the automot…

Two shareholders in self-driving car startup Zoox Inc. have sued the company, alleging that a rival bid would have been better for common stockholders than a $1.3 billion offer from Amazon.com announced in June.

The lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery filed Aug. 18 but publicly released Wednesday alleges that the Amazon deal created disproportionate rewards for executives and investors holding preferred shares at the expense of common stockholders.

Reuters reported last month that Amazon planned to create $100 million in restricted stock awards to retain Zoox's employees alongside a $125 million cash “transaction bonus pool” paid out in proportion to shares for current employees.

In the complaint, James Wei and Yanxin Zhang, two former employees who are common stockholders, alleged that those rewards "dwarfed" the proceeds that will be available to common stockholders, including employees who put in years at the company but left before May 2020. Zo…