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Veteran Stellantis designer Chris Benjamin has joined Scout Motors to lead design for the EV-focused Volkswagen brand that will specialize in utility vehicles and trucks.

Benjamin, most recently the interior design chief for Stellantis North America, becomes chief design officer at a critical time for Scout, which plans to begin vehicle production at a plant near Columbia, S.C., by the end of 2026. The brand said the first retail sales of its electric pickups and SUVs will start soon after. He has officially joined the company, a spokesperson said.

Volkswagen hatched plans to resurrect the Scout brand in 2022 and establish a firmer foothold in the expanding market for off-road vehicles in the U.S.

Benjamin graduated from Detroit's College for Creative Studies. He launched his automotive design career at Mercedes-Benz. After that, Benjamin did design work for BMW, Volvo and Stellantis, where he spent time in Europe and the U.S.

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Toyota’s Hino Motors and Daimler’s Mitsubishi Fuso are teaming up on heavy-truck development. Chipmaker Nvidia approaches a trillion-dollar valuation as investors applaud its aggressive growth targets. And Kumar Galhotra explains why he sees Ford Blue as a growth business – at least for now.

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Automotive Ventures raised $13 million for a new fund backed by dealerships hoping to invest in novel technology that could help them do their jobs better.

The firm's DealerFund is much smaller than originally intended, however. When fundraising began more than a year ago, the goal had been to raise as much as $50 million. The fund closed in April.

"The fundraising environment over the past year has softened significantly," Automotive Ventures CEO Steve Greenfield told Automotive News. "We had one commitment of $5 million pull out and a couple of other softer commitments that failed to materialize."

Angel and seed-stage startups have been able to raise money, but investors are more risk averse than they were "writing checks only to companies with strong fundamentals, healthy burn rates and solid strategies to preserve" a growth path, PitchBook said in its Q1 2023 US VC Valuations report.

At the same time, Greenfield noted, DealerFund attracted 48 …

General Motors' pair of midsize pickups — the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon — are retooled for 2023, and beyond a few common features, carve out separate roles.

The Colorado offers more powertrain choices and, with a lower base price, remains GM's mainstream midsize truck.

The Canyon is a more posh professional grade truck that adds more off-road chops. It is available only as a crew cab, like the Colorado, with rear- or four-wheel drive available. For off-road use, the 2023 Canyon is available in four trims, starting with Elevation, AT4 and Denali, that provide progressively increased ground clearance and capability, culminating in the new AT4X.

Riding on a new chassis, with what GMC bills as extra-wide track width, the Canyon's wheelbase has been stretched by 3.1 inches compared with the outgoing short bed crew cab. The reduced front overhang helps improve the truck's ability to approach steep inclines in off-road settings. T…

A question lingers about Tekion as it pursues market share for its cloud-based dealership management system: What happens next?

Automotive News recently told you how the DMS startup bought two auto dealerships and used them as laboratories for its Automotive Retail Cloud system. The system welds artificial intelligence and big data to streamline the retail sales process and interactions between automakers, retailers and consumers.

After three years, Tekion is putting those dealerships up for sale as the California company focuses on growing the commercial presence of its signature product.

It's not an easy task. As a venture-backed company, Tekion must deal with venture capitalists who eventually want a return on their investment.

Tekion, launched in 2016 by former Tesla Chief Information Officer Jay Vijayan, employs roughly 3,000 people and has raised $451 million in venture capital.

Previously, companies of its size and equivalence in mon…

A new collaboration between computing powerhouses could further enhance the way motorists interact with their vehicles.

Nvidia Corp., said Monday it has partnered with MediaTek, a Taiwanese company that makes semiconductors for wireless communications, to develop a platform that enhances automotive infotainment and cockpit features.

The two companies disclosed the partnership Monday at the Computex technology conference in Taipei.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Nor were potential automakers who intend to use the chipsets, though Danny Shapiro, vice president of Nvidia's automotive division, said the partners were already working with an automaker.

While one unnamed customer may already be in hand, he said the chips are intended to be used across mainstream and luxury models. The chips are expected to be in production in 2026 for model year 2027 vehicles.

"This is a new era of advanced user experiences for the software-defined car," Sh…

In this week's issue, and also next week's, we offer in-depth interviews with some of the top North American auto executives.

Every year, we sit down with the industry's North American chiefs to give readers a glimpse of the leadership thinking inside key brands.

This week, it's Jose Muñoz, CEO of Hyundai and Genesis Motors North America; Sebastian Mackensen, CEO of BMW North America; Kumar Galhotra, president of Ford Blue; and Pablo Di Si, CEO of Volkswagen Group of America.

That have a lot to talk about because each of their companies is in a state of change.

Hyundai is attempting to create a pipeline of U.S.-made electric vehicles, despite the headwinds the automaker is feeling from the U.S. government in the tax rules of the Inflation Reduction Act.

At BMW, Mackensen posed a question that's surely weighing on the mind of every manager in the auto business: "How do you do even more things simultaneously?" Just to name a few things, he po…

The vice president of homologation, vehicle safety and feature integration at Zoox describes the process the company used for self-certifying that its robotaxi conforms with federal standards and the status of the company’s self-driving deployments.

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North American auto leaders have a lot on their mind — and on their plate

In this week's issue, and also next week's, we offer in-depth interviews with some of the top North American auto executives.

Every year, we sit down with the industry's North American chiefs to give readers a glimpse of the leadership thinking inside key brands.

This week, it's Jose Muñoz, CEO of Hyundai and Genesis Motors North America; Sebastian Mackensen, CEO of BMW North America; Kumar Galhotra, president of Ford Blue; and Pablo Di Si, CEO of Volkswagen Group of America.

That have a lot to talk about because each of their companies is in a state of change.

Hyundai is attempting to create a pipeline of U.S.-made electric vehicles, despite the headwinds the automaker is feeling from the U.S. government in the tax rules of the Inflation Reduction Act.

At BMW, Mackensen posed a question that's surely weighing on the mind of every manager in the auto business…

The BorgWarner employee who has been detained in Russia since 2018 says he thinks progress is being made toward his release.

"I remain positive and confident on a daily basis that the wheels are turning," Whelan said in a phone call to CNN last week from his prison camp. "I just wish they would turn a little bit more quickly."

Whelan, a U.S. Marine who was BorgWarner's security director, was sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison on spying charges that he has denied. He was arrested in December 2018 while attending a wedding in Moscow after receiving a flash drive with government secrets that he says he thought contained holiday pictures.

He told CNN that he's more confident in the U.S. government's efforts to bring him home than he was last December, when Russia released WNBA player Brittney Griner.

More recently, however, Russia arrested U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich on charges of espionage, another case that th…

DETROIT — "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." — Buckminster Fuller

Fuller's quote was recited by Cheryl Thompson, founder and CEO of the Center for Automotive Diversity, Inclusion & Advancement, during the organization's Rev Up 2030 summit here this month at Wayne State University.

As the editor who has overseen Automotive News' diversity, equity and inclusion coverage during the past two years, this quote resonated with me. It is easy to fall into the trap of arguing with those who dismiss company DE&I initiatives as "woke nonsense" and "unfair," despite a mountain of rigorous, credible research that shows the positive business outcomes of such policies. The anti-DE&I sentiment in emails sent to us criticizing our coverage, as well as on social media and in state political offices, can be discouraging.

The unfortunate…