Trade News

Longtime California dealer Adam Simms has a familiar and growing problem: He needs to upgrade a store in Silicon Valley, where the dirt below is worth more than the thriving business above.

His creative solution is not for those with a thin wallet or an aversion to risk: It's a $279 million project that can be summed up as "go big and go home."

Welcome to tomorrow's Toyota of Walnut Creek, a world away from the busy but dated dealership in the heart of Silicon Valley.

If all goes according to plan, it will become a modern 165,000-square-foot full- service Toyota store by 2026. It will more than double its service bays to 54, including eight for quick-lane operations, and will have nearly 800 display and storage parking spaces for inventory on about 7.5 acres of prime downtown real estate.

But another revamped Toyota store is not the story — it's what is planned to rise above it that makes Toyota of Walnut Creek so int…

Tesla has given the auto industry a steady stream of competitive shocks over the past decade. But one that has probably gone unnoticed by consumers has occurred in the decidedly unglamorous world of factory construction.

Tesla has been building its auto plants at jaw-dropping speed.

Case in point: Tesla Gigafactory Texas, its $1.1 billion assembly plant now under construction in Austin.

The site was chosen in July. Construction began immediately on the project, consisting of three parallel buildings totaling 4 million square feet. Barely two months later, Tesla estimated the plant would be substantially completed by May. CEO Elon Musk said in January he expected production to start by the end of this year.

Auto plants typically take twice that long to build from raw ground to consumer sales. Tesla's pace represents a new benchmark for U.S. automakers, said Sandy Munro, a former Ford engineer who consults on manufacturing issues as CEO of Munro &a…

Bosch says it is making headway on one of the key barriers to the auto industry's adoption of hydrogen fuel cells: the high cost of manufacturing them.

Producing fuel cells is expensive largely because of the cost of hydrogen — especially the sourcing of green hydrogen, according to the German megasupplier.

To offset that expense and bring down the cost of the emerging technology, Bosch is focusing its efforts on its manufacturing processes. The company is devising new production efficiencies in how the chemistry of the cells is managed, how metal is processed and how the units will be assembled.

The company is not revealing details of its factory innovations yet. But they will be critical in making the fuel cells more affordable, said Sujit Jain, regional president of powertrain solutions for Bosch North America.

"If one is looking to have a CO2-free society down the road, then it behooves us to make sure that the h…

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…