Trade News

BERLIN -- German environmental groups have filed an official objection to a provisional permit from the Brandenburg environmental authority for the construction of a Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin, the groups' lawyer said on Friday.

The objection is based on the claim that Tesla has not sufficiently clarified what precautions it will take to prevent highly poisonous gas from escaping from the factory, the objection document showed.

It said Tesla had also changed its application documents to produce battery cells at the site, for which it has not yet obtained the necessary permit.

The groups, Gruene Liga and NABU, said they will go to court if the state authorities fail to file for a permit suspension by June 16.

The Shyft Group Inc. is developing its first all-electric chassis platform to meet growing demand from major parcel delivery customers including Amazon, FedEx and UPS.

The specialty vehicle manufacturer (NASDAQ: SHYF) plans to begin production on the first electric Class 3 chassis platforms in mid-2023 and make anywhere from 500 to 1,000 units in the first year and another 1,500 or so in the second year, scaling up as necessary, said CEO Daryl Adams.

The suburban Detroit company plans to invest between $50 million and $75 million to design, develop and launch the platforms.

"Earlier this year, some of our larger customers (came) to us and said, 'Hey, we need your help. We have our own company green mandates that are out there, and we're not seeing a chassis in the public domain that we feel will work,'" Adams said.

Last year, Amazon announced its goal of operating 10,000 electric delivery vehicles by 2022 and 100,000 by 2030 to help meet its ple…

Apple Inc. has hired Ulrich Kranz, a former senior executive at BMW AG’s electric car division, to help lead its own vehicle efforts, according to people familiar with the situation.

The technology giant hired Kranz in recent weeks, about a month after he stepped down as CEO of Canoo Inc., a developer of self-driving electric vehicles. Before co-founding Canoo, Kranz was senior vice president of the group that developed the i3 and i8 cars at BMW, where he worked for 30 years.

Kranz is one of Apple’s most significant automotive hires, a clear sign that the iPhone maker is determined to build a self-driving electric car to rival Tesla Inc. and other carmakers. Kranz will report to Doug Field, who led development of Tesla’s mass-market Model 3 and now runs Apple’s car project, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter.

Apple has become the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of more than $2 trillion, by sel…

The gap between how quickly automakers replace their annual volume with new models is reaching its widest point in recent auto industry history.

Honda and Toyota lead in model replacement rates while Stellantis and General Motors trail the pack, according to a study of U.S. product pipelines in the latest annual study "Car Wars."

At the same time, the arrival of new vehicle models across the industry is ramping up to its highest level of activity in at least two decades, John Murphy, senior auto analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which publishes the annual Car Wars study, said Thursday.

Murphy said automakers will launch roughly 240 new models over the next four model years, averaging 60 a year. Over the past 20 years, new launches have averaged just 40 a year.

That should be good news for retailers, according to the study: Due to a mix of competitive pressures between rival automakers, the entry of newer manufacturers into the business, …

DETROIT — Gary Jones strode onstage in downtown Detroit for the first time as president of the UAW in June 2018 to the Rocky theme song, thrusting his fist into the air and promising members that he'd "fight for you."

He didn't pick the music himself — some union leaders later complained it wasn't as enthusiastic as they'd have liked — but if anyone in the UAW fancied Jones the Italian Stallion, they were sorely mistaken. In this movie, he's the bad guy who gets knocked out at the end.

His 28-month prison sentence for embezzlement and tax evasion handed down Thursday proved that the only thing Jones had in common with Rocky Balboa were connections to the criminal underworld. If you remember, Philly's favorite fictional boxer started off as muscle-for-hire for a local mob boss to make ends meet.

Jones had bigger illicit ambitions.

The 63-year-old certified public accountant hoodwinked auto workers out of millions from 2010 to 2019, prosecutors disc…

SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile, General Motors’ light-vehicle joint venture, plans a nine-seat passenger vehicle after the Chinese government decided last month to allow married couples to have up to three children.

The vehicle will feature two sliding side doors and a 2+2+2+3 seating layout to ensure it is “comfortable to ride” and “convenient to get on and off” by large families, the company said on its social media accounts.

It will arrive “soon” under the Wuling brand, GM added, without revealing additional details about the vehicle.

Beijing announced the relaxed birth control policy on May 31 after the latest national census shows China population continues to age rapidly. 

In the late 1970s, the Chinese government implemented the one-child policy. In 2016, it loosened the rule to permit a couple to have two children. 

Due to decades-long strict birth controls and rapid urbanization, people aged 60 and above accounted for 18.7 per…

Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings is forming an r&d program to create a driverless truck for its logistics business. 

The program will be led by Alibaba’s research institute and its logistics unit, Cainiao Network Technology Co., Chen Li, Alibaba’s CTO said Thursday at a conference on smart logistics held in the east China city of Hangzhou. 

Chen didn’t disclose additional details on the unmanned trucks the company is developing. 

The truck will become Alibaba’s second self-developed unmanned vehicle, following a small, full-electric van. 

Since it was launched in 2020, the van, jointly developed by Alibaba’s research institute and logistics unit, has been in operation at 15 universities and some residential areas in major cities such as Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, Chen said at the event.

Electric vehicles are more environmentally friendly than their gasoline-fueled counterparts.

But they run on electricity generated in power plants, which produce their own emissions. That's made it more difficult to discern the actual climate benefits EVs deliver over cars equipped with internal combustion engines.

A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists brings greater clarity to that question. At a time when the Biden administration is touting electric vehicles as a means to blunting climate change, the report finds that across the country, electric vehicles are more environmentally beneficial than ever.

With power-plant emissions considered, driving an EV is equal to or better than driving an ICE car getting 50 miles per gallon, and that's the case across 97 percent of the U.S., according to the report.

From an emissions standp…

Great Wall Motor Co., a major private Chinese light-vehicle manufacturer with global ambitions, launched production this week at a Thailand factory purchased from General Motors. 

The factory, located in Rayong of eastern Thailand, was renovated after Great Wall acquired it from GM in November.

It will initially build up to 80,000 vehicles a year, with 60 percent of output to be sold in Thailand and the rest to be exported to other Southeast Asia countries, Great Wall said. 

The first product assembled at the factory is the hybrid variant of the H6, a compact crossover marketed under the Haval brand. It will be followed by an Ora-badged full electric sedan. 

Over the next three years, Great Wall plans to build seven other products at the plant, most of which will be all-electric vehicles. 

It is the Chinese company’s second assembly plant outside China, following a factory it opened in the Tula Oblast region of central R…

PSA Peugeot Citroen, bidding to jumpstart lagging sales in a key global market, started mass production of the Citroen brand’s new flagship model, the C5 X, at a plant it operates with Chinese partner Dongfeng Motor Group in the southwest China city of Chengdu. 

The crossover wagon, equipped with PSA’s 360 THP turbocharged gasoline engine and a eight-speed automatic transmission supplied by Aisin Seiki, will hit the Chinese market in September, Dongfeng said this week.

The C5 X is produced only at the Chengdu plant and Citroen says it will be exported to Europe and other Asian countries.

The Citroen C5 X “is a unique combination of the elegance of a saloon, the dynamism of a station wagon and the elevated stance of an SUV,” Citroen said when unveiling the vehicle at the Shanghai auto show in April.

The Chengdu factory will also build a plug-in variant of the vehicle, according to Citroen.

PSA, now part of Stellantis, needs new products…