Trade News

The Nissan GT-R is renowned worldwide as the Japanese brand's top-tier image car, a 600-hp mean machine with a hand-built engine, stratospheric sticker and legions of rabid fans.

Now, Nissan's fast car is also selling fast food.

As of last week, McDonald's Japan has been packing a toy version of the GT-R into its Happy Meals as a giveaway goody. Nissan announced the tie-up while unveiling a 2022 model-year special edition of the GT-R's Nismo high-performance version.

Among the upgrades — a clear-coated carbon-fiber hood to cut weight and lend a track-ready look. Also, a new Stealth Gray body color. It also is adorned with Nissan's minimalistic restyled brand logo.

A limited number of the special-edition GT-R Nismo vehicles — the real one, not the McDonald's freebie — will go on sale this fall in North America.

The toy version is made by Tomica, Japan's answer to Hot Wheels or Matchbox.

Also off…

Maybe you've seen the videos of Lee Wong, chairman of the board of trustees in West Chester Township, Ohio.

On March 23, the 69-year-old Asian American removed his coat and tie before standing up during an address at a council meeting.

For too long, Wong said, he had put up with fear, intimidation and insults because of the way he looked. He had been afraid to speak out. Not anymore.

"In the last few years, things are just getting worse and worse," he said. "There are some ignorant people that will come up to me and say that I don't look American or patriotic enough."

"Here is my proof," he added, as he lifted his shirt to expose a row of scars on his chest, remnants of his U.S. military service. "Now is this patriot enough?"

I think Grace Huang can relate. Huang, 46, is the president of Manheim, the auto auction giant.

Last fall, we named her one of the 100 Leading Women in the North American…

TOKYO — Beyond its sleek space shuttle-like profile and minimalistic, Apple-gadget design aura, Hyundai's new Staria people mover offers a peek at the automaker's future.

The van also captures Hyundai's strategy for repositioning itself as a "smart mobility solution provider" for an era of ride-sharing, on-the-go workspaces, eco- delivery models and a whole new segment that the company calls purpose- built vehicles, or PBVs.

The real change starts on the inside.

At a time when companies routinely pitch concept cars as living rooms on wheels with ultraspacious, flexible interiors, Hyundai has taken a step to actually deliver all that in the Staria.

"Staria provides a preview of the space innovations, which will be an inherent part of our purpose-built vehicles in the future mobility era," Chief Marketing Officer Thomas Schemera said at last week's launch. "Vehicles in the future mobility era will be used in various way…

Before the pandemic, Jamie Tilley looked closely at the business development centers at Modern Automotive Group's 14 dealerships in North Carolina.

Some of the business development representatives were excelling, said Tilley, director of BDC operations for the Winston-Salem- based retailer. Others were struggling. Even with training and coaching, he said, there came a point at which the group would part ways with some BDC employees because of poor performance.

It cost tens of thousands of dollars each time Modern Automotive Group needed to recruit, hire and train a new BDC employee, Tilley said. That was on top of the costs associated with spreading leads across fewer employees and closing fewer sales while short-staffed. Because the centers play an important role in completing deals, the group needed to ensure that the people in those roles were working to their maximum potential.

One store in particular — a Chevrolet dealership in Winston-Salem — had …

Editor's note: It's been 25 years since the GM EV1 rolled into showrooms and launched the electric vehicle in the modern era. This article is part of a special report Automotive News will publish on Monday.

If you really want to know who killed the electric car, we'll tell you. It's Charles Kettering, and he did it with — surprisingly — an electric motor.

At the dawn of the automotive era, three energy sources were battling for supremacy to drive the automobile: gasoline, electricity and steam. Each had major drawbacks.

Gasoline was expensive, hard to find and dangerous to handle. Worse, cars with gasoline engines had to be hand-cranked, a risky, potentially bone-breaking activity.

Electric cars use batteries to store energy, which is fed to a motor that drives the wheels. But the lead-acid batteries used in early electric vehicles were heavy; driving range was extremely limited — maybe 50 miles max — the vehicles were extremely slow; and chargin…

After years of cleaning up the recall crisis over faulty Takata airbag inflators, the company that now owns the former supplier's factories is taking that cleanup to its core.

Joyson Safety Systems, the airbag producer owned by China's Ningbo Joyson Electronic Corp. but globally headquartered in suburban Detroit, is introducing a strict new operating system at its more than 50 plants, requiring local managers to adopt standardized quality and reporting practices and waste- reduction programs.

It is a long-term rollout of a new rulebook that began last year under the direction of Detroit supplier veteran Silvano Restiotto, vice president of the Global Joyson Production System. With a small team of administrators, Restiotto is moving plant by plant, from Brazil to Hungary to China to Mexico to the U.S., to convert all of the company's plants — and possibly its 12 global engineering centers — to the new system.

"When we bought Takata…

The beach town of Santa Cruz, Calif., is known for world-class surfing spots such as Steamer Lane and the picturesque mountains that separate it from Silicon Valley to the north. Biking and hiking are a way of life, as are long commutes "over the hill" to San Jose and beyond.

Hyundai's attempt to distill that moderately rugged lifestyle into a crossover-based pickup also carries the Santa Cruz name. It goes on sale this summer as a compact four-door with a smaller footprint and presumed price advantage over midsize pickups that have grown larger and more plush.

Car-based pickups have rarely spelled big sales. But Hyundai hopes to capture the growing market for light trucks that has heated up after a year of pandemic sheltering. Hyundai's plan is not so much to take on the pickup market as to lean into its crossover success.

"Especially now, as we're entering a post-pandemic phase, people really want to go out — back to nature, camping, biking," said Gil…

Volkswagen is expanding its electric vehicle family with two versions of a production-ready, three-row, seven-passenger crossover that it will begin producing in China with two joint-venture partners.

A version of the Atlas-sized ID6 — the latest in the automaker's global lineup of EVs, following the debut last year of the Golf-sized ID3 and Tiguan-sized ID4 — is likely to be added to VW's U.S. lineup and built locally, but not for several years. The ID6 variants, VW brand's biggest production EVs to date, were unveiled on the eve of press previews for the Shanghai auto show.

The ID6 X and ID6 Crozz, each built by one the Chinese joint ventures, are expected to play a crucial role in China, where vehicles large enough to carry members of an extended family are popular.

The ID6, based on the automaker's MEB modular electric platform, will be available in China in one of four configurations, with a range of up to 365 miles and up to 342 hp, VW said. The …

At a time of social unrest stemming from incidents of police violence and questions of injustice, industries across the country are facing heightened concern over issues of diversity and inclusion.

The auto industry is no exception, a gathering of suppliers said last week.

From hiring practices to ad spending to minority-owned supplier procurement, the sector is coming under new fire for its results on industry diversity. Automakers and their suppliers have long been criticized for a lack of diversity, particularly in leadership roles.

General Motors CEO Mary Barra was sharply criticized last month for failing to meet with media companies about GM's spending levels with Black-owned media. Meanwhile, Piston Group, the nation's largest minority-owned auto supplier, had its minority business enterprise status revoked in February — a decision currently under appeal — for its lack of minority management. That decertification could, in turn, pose challenges f…

As president of General Motors from 1990 to 1992, Lloyd Reuss was an early champion of the Impact, the concept car that became the EV1. Among other things, Reuss, now 84, helped put in place the engineering team that created the Impact.

Thirty years later, Reuss' son, Mark, 57, is now GM president, and he's leading the automaker's efforts to meet an aggressive goal: to transform its entire light-duty lineup to electric vehicles by 2035.

Mark and Lloyd discussed the legacy of the Impact and the EV1 for Automotive News. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation.

On the creation of the Impact:

Mark: A lot of people thought GM only did the Impact to show how we could meet California's strict ZEV standards, not to encourage our own technological advancements and capabilities in all-electric vehicles.

Lloyd: It was meant to do both, really. And to show the world that we could actually do something like that. But when I was able to introduce…