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The Swedish battery cell maker Northvolt has received a $525 million loan guarantee from the German government for a pilot plant.

Northvolt, set up by two former Tesla executives, has assembled more than $3 billion in debt and equity to finance production in its native Sweden, targeting battery-cell output equal to about 40 gigawatt-hours of capacity. 

The company said it is aiming for a 25 percent share of the European battery market, which has been dominated by Asian companies, including LG Chem, Samsung and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co.

Last month Northvolt announced that it had raised $1.6 billion in debt financing from a group of banks, pension funds and other public institutions. It raised $1 billion in equity capital in 2019 from investors including BMW Group and Volkswagen Group. 

The guarantee from the German government is a stepping stone to Northvolt’s plan to operate with VW a “Northvolt Two” plant in Salzgitt…

Japanese government officials tried unsuccessfully to bring Nissan Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. together for merger talks earlier this year, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The idea, first put to the companies at the end of 2019, was rejected before it reached the boards of both sides.

Nissan, Honda and the prime minister’s office declined to comment.

Government officials feared Nissan's alliance with Renault might collapse, leaving the company exposed, people familiar with the matter told the paper.

SHANGHAI -- China's Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., a Tesla supplier, is developing a new type of electric-vehicle battery that contains no nickel or cobalt, a company executive said Saturday.

Nickel and cobalt are key ingredients in the batteries that power EVs. Battery makers from Japan's Panasonic Corp. to South Korea's LG Chem are lowering the use of expensive cobalt in their nickel-cobalt-aluminium  batteries or nickel-cobalt-manganese batteries.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk last month urged miners to produce more nickel, warning the current cost of batteries remained a big hurdle to the company's growth.

CATL makes NCM batteries and supplies lithium ion phosphate batteries to Tesla. It has partnerships with Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. and supplies Germany's Volkswagen Group and Daimler.

The new battery type will be different from existing NCA, NCM and LFP batteries and will have no expensive metals like nickel or cobalt, …

SHANGHAI -- China's Geely Automobile Holdings on Monday booked a 43 percent drop in half-year profit as the coronavirus outbreak continues to trouble the world's biggest auto market.

The result come as China's overall auto sales slowly recovers from a virus-blighted start to the year. Sales climbed for the fourth consecutive month in July yet are still down 13 percent for the year to date.

China's highest-profile automaker -- due to group investments in Volvo Cars and Daimler -- posted January-June net profit of 2.3 billion yuan ($331 million), it said in a statement.

The automaker sold 530,446 vehicles, down 19 percent on year, leaving revenue down 23 percent at 36.82 billion yuan, meeting analyst estimates.

To curb expenses, Geely reduced its workforce by about 12 percent during the first half to 38,000.

"Geely's 1H20 earnings are largely in line with our expectation, thanks to its significant cost cut efforts, especially in wages and inv…

Senior analyst Mike Ramsey discusses his consulting firm’s latest transportation-tech Hype Cycle report, realistic timelines for widespread self-driving vehicle deployments, the prospect of air taxis, and the new Jim Farley era at Ford.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of the annual Automotive News “Future Product Pipeline” series.

Volvo Cars is trading its diesel-powered past for an electron-charged future.

Globally, every new Volvo model will have an electric motor as part of the Swedish automaker's plan to make all-electric cars account for half of its global sales by 2025 — with the rest being hybrids.

The first of those all-electric models will roll into U.S. dealerships this fall.

The XC40 Recharge P8 is an electric version of Volvo's fastest-selling model — the XC40 crossover. The dual-motor EV delivers up to 408 hp and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 4.7 seconds. Volvo estimates that it will have an EPA-rated range of "more than 200 miles."

Another new sporty electric crossover — the C40 — is expected to arrive next year, followed by a battery-powered XC90 crossover.

Meanwhile, Volvo has a new plus-size luxury crossover in the works. The XC100, built on the nex…

LOS ANGELES — Hyundai Motor Co. is the latest major automaker to plan a distinct brand to contain its coming onslaught of electric vehicles.

It will be a mission of brand identity and awareness as Hyundai brings the venture to life.

Hyundai pulled the name Ioniq from its existing eco-friendly compact hatchback, which comes in hybrid, plug-in hybrid and EV versions. The low-volume Ioniq was pitched as something of a rival to Toyota's hybrid Prius, a nameplate that also was parlayed into a distinct brand effort at Toyota.

Hyundai said it is creating the Ioniq brand "in response to fast-growing market demand" as the company plans to "lead the global EV market."

Analysts say it's really a subbrand at best. The automaker confirmed that it will keep the Hyundai badge on the new Ioniq products and sell them through existing dealers. That's different from Hyundai's Genesis luxury brand, which has a separate identity and growin…

Bailout talks between Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Steel with the U.K. government have ended, leaving both companies to rely on private financing to overcome the impact of coronavirus on business, the Financial Times reported.

Talks for an emergency funding fell through as Jaguar Land Rover did not qualify for taxpayer support, the paper said.

Jaguar Land Rover also was unwilling to accept decarbonization requirements that would have forced the automaker to accelerate its program of vehicle electrification and phase out the diesel cars that still make up most of its fleet, the Financial Times said, citing a source with knowledge of the discussions.

The bailout plan, titled "Project Birch," had been authorized by U.K. Finance Minister Rishi Sunak in May to rescue companies that are seen as strategically important, with the Treasury saying it may step in to support crucial businesses on a "last resort" basis after other options run out.

The report, ci…

As Bentley prepares to launch its freshened 2021 Bentayga, the automaker knows the ultraluxury and exotic SUV segment it helped create five years ago looks much different — and bigger — in 2020.

But getting to the market first has its perks. Case in point, the updated Bentayga will arrive as or before competitors launch their initial SUV offerings.

Bentley plans to put its head start to use, especially in the U.S., one of the automaker's largest markets and one of the biggest markets for the Bentayga worldwide. The nameplate accounted for 45 percent of the brand's 11,006 global sales in 2019.

The SUV went on sale in the U.S. in 2016, two years before the launches of the Rolls-Royce Cullinan cross- over and Lamborghini Urus SUV. U.S. deliveries of Aston Martin's DBX SUV are set to begin this summer, and the Mercedes-Maybach GLS 600 is also scheduled for this year. Ferrari's Purosangue SUV is set to arrive around 2022.

C…

Most of his counterparts in the self-driving industry chase a moonshot, making enormous efforts to develop systems capable of handling complicated traffic scenarios in an almost-limitless number of areas.

Gautam Narang has no such ambitions.

Instead of building an automated driving system that operates in all conceivable situations, the co-founder and CEO of Gatik, a short-haul autonomous trucking company, aims to build one that works extremely well for a specific use case. The most vexing challenges in the broad AV realm? Leave those for others.

"We don't care about solving hard problems in the autonomy space," Narang said. "We don't care about that. What we care about is introducing all the constraints that we can. Whatever helps us constrain the problem, we do that."

Since Gatik's inception in 2017, the Palo Alto, Calif., company has defined that problem as the "middle mile." Somewhere between long-haul trucking o…

Electric vehicle batteries require cobalt.

Most cobalt comes from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Congo is a nation plagued by instability and a lack of rule of law that allows some mining companies to exploit their workers.

Welcome to the challenge of auto industry supply chain ethics.

Supplier disruptions caused by the pandemic are being amplified by concerns about how to ethically source critical automotive materials.

The drive has given a new urgency to supply chain transparency. But the work is both labor-intensive and unreliable. Automakers and many Tier 1 parts makers have been trying to peel back the layers of their parts and material sourcing for nearly a decade, especially since a combined earthquake and tsunami in Japan made getting some key materials impossible.

"We have gone through every step of the supply chain to the cobalt mine to make sure it's ethically correct," V…