Trade News

The Chevrolet bow tie is finally disappearing from the jerseys of the Manchester United soccer club, marking the end of an expensive, eight-year debacle that cost Joel Ewanick his job as General Motors' chief marketing officer. GM signed the nearly $600 million deal in 2012, a year before it decided to pull Chevy out of the European market.

Man U's new sponsorship deal with German software company TeamViewer, effective at the start of the 2021-22 season, is worth about $20 million a year less than the GM contract. Still, the five-year arrangement is reported to be the Premier League's most lucrative jersey-only deal and the largest sponsorship signed by any sports team during the coronavirus pandemic. The club is in discussions to add a new automotive sponsor as well, according to the Manchester Evening News.

Although Ewanick called the sponsorship he orchestrated "the biggest no-brainer I've ever seen," former GM CEO Dan Akerson allegedly ouste…

Along with everybody else in the global auto industry, Dave Gardner has been dealing with one manufacturing and supply chain headache after another this year.

In an era of wildly changing plans and rapidly emerging new technologies, those challenges are sure to continue.

Gardner, American Honda Motor Co.'s executive vice president of national operations, has been trying to get vehicles from factories to dealer lots to cash in on the reawakening U.S. retail market. But he says he has been fighting developments on multiple fronts.

There has been COVID-19, of course, the international health crisis that halted assembly lines and supply chains across North America, Asia and Europe. And there have been issues with individual pandemic-affected parts suppliers that are struggling to get their volumes back up to customers' expectations.

There are lingering tariff and other trade issues that preceded the pandemic, still complicating the flow and price of…

What else can possibly go wrong in the global auto industry supply chain?

A massive container ship became stuck sideways in the busy Suez Canal last week, the latest symbol of a supply chain stretched to its limits as additional assembly lines shut down because of an unabating worldwide shortage of microchips.

The mishap now combines with a global shortage of shipping containers, U.S. port congestion and a March 19 fire at the vital Renesas Electronics semiconductor factory in Naka, Japan, to increase the pressure on U.S. vehicle inventories. Honda, Nissan and Toyota said last week they were assessing what effect the shutdown of the Renesas plant would have on their production.

The Suez Canal may be half a world away, but the impact will be felt on the U.S. auto industry, warned Mark Fulthorpe, executive director of global light-vehicle production forecast at IHS Markit.

The blockage of the canal — a vital logistics l…

The landscape is changing for Jeep.

The venerable brand hasn't faced serious off-road competition for the better part of a decade or more.

But with the Ford Bronco and Hummer — reimagined and electrified under the GMC brand — set for comebacks, Jeep is upping its game and green cred with new concepts.

Jeep has combined electrified power and the internal combustion engine with off-road prowess to engineer the set of custom-built Wrangler and Gladiator concepts.

The Easter Jeep Safari in Moab, Utah — running Saturday, March 27, to Sunday, April 4 — is the testing ground for the newest 4x4s, capped by the first battery-electric vehicle from Jeep — the Magneto — another milestone in Jeep's quest to become the greenest SUV brand.

The Magneto, based on the two-door Wrangler Rubicon, is equipped with a custom-built axial flux electric motor that revs up to 6,000 rpm. The motor is connected to a six-speed manual t…

Electric vehicle batteries cannot be recharged at consistently high rates of power because of a phenomenon that occurs when a cell is stressed, known as lithium plating. Nanoscopic needlelike formations called dendrites grow, and over time they can puncture the separator, causing a short circuit in lithium ion batteries that use conventional liquid-based electrolytes.

StoreDot, an Israeli battery startup, believes it has the solution: Substitute the carbon in the graphite anode with atoms such as silicon that are in the same group on the periodic table. These exhibit similar properties because of one unifying trait — no matter how many protons they have, they all have four electrons available that can each react to form a distinct chemical bond, just like carbon. StoreDot CEO Doron Myersdorf, 58, spoke with Automotive News Europe Correspondent Christiaan Hetzner about why this helps battery cells fully charge in five minutes. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: Extr…

When Lucid Motors broke ground on its first assembly plant in North America at the end of 2019, the upstart electric automaker was frugal with the limited cash it had.

That year, Lucid had received a $1 billion-plus investment from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. But those funds would need to cover not just building the first phase of its Arizona plant and launch of production, but also the final engineering and testing of its product — the luxury Lucid Air sedan — as well as the rollout of its retail strategy.

"It's not like we've got money to burn," Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson told Automotive News last October. "We've been super careful with it."

Building the Casa Grande, Ariz., factory alone could have easily eaten up $1 billion or more, given that Lucid is vertically integrated from powertrain manufacturing to final assembly, company executives said. Instead, the first phase that was completed in December cost only about $700 milli…

YOKOHAMA, Japan — The spunky MX-30, Mazda's first mass-market electric vehicle, has quirky design details galore thanks to its one-size-fits-all approach.

It rides on a versatile platform engineered for a variety of electrified drivetrains, including a mild-hybrid version and a full-electric variant. And next up will be a rotary engine-powered offering that can run as a series hybrid or possibly a plug-in. The U.S. is expected to get both the EV and rotary versions as early as next year.

But the MX-30 is also a compromise car.

It is not quite a crossover, nor a hatchback. It technically has four doors, but it aims for a coupe feel, with rear doors that swing backward. And it comes in both all-wheel drive and front-wheel drive.

A test drive of the e-Skyactiv full-electric version here highlighted some of the design compromises of trying to serve multiple segments.

For starters, there is the wasted space.…

Automakers are expanding and extending production cuts at some North American plants as they cope with a worsening global shortage of semiconductors.

Chips for use in cars and trucks have been harder to come by as semiconductor makers have allocated more capacity to consumer products.

The pandemic has caused a surge in orders for smartphones, TVs and computers as people try to make extended life at home more bearable, leaving less capacity for a stronger-than-expected rebound in vehicle demand. Recent weather-related disruptions of petrochemical supplies in the southern U.S. and a fire at a chipmaking plant in Japan have exacerbated the shutdowns.

Consultant AlixPartners has said the global chip shortage could cost automakers $61 billion in lost sales this year. The recent setbacks could further delay an expected second-quarter recovery in output.

“Production is shrinking, not increasing, so the balance between supply and demand is only getting wo…