Trade News

General Motors plans to shift all of the employees at its Customer Care and Aftersales World Headquarters in Grand Blanc, Mich. — about 900 — to work at its technical center in Warren, Mich.

A number of employees at the Renaissance Center in Detroit, the automaker's global headquarters, will also shift to the 710-acre Warren campus. GM spokesman David Caldwell said the exact count of Renaissance Center employees making the shift will be determined later this year.

Not all employees may physically move to Warren. Though the company plans to bring back its remote work force in the summer, some degree of remote work is likely to continue, Caldwell said.

"We're working on those details currently. The future will be more flexible," Caldwell said in an email. "We are seeking to maintain the benefits of remote work, while also ensuring our teams get the benefit of in-person collaboration."

The automaker also plans to hire tech …

Volkswagen Group this week hatched an ambitious road map to hike global battery output at the same time its China unit declared a goal to sell 1.5 million electrified vehicles annually by 2025. 

The target represents a giant leap from where VW Group stands now on China’s electrified battlefield: The largest carmaker in China remains a small player. 

How can the German auto giant achieve the lofty goal? Details of the plan VW Group China CEO Stephan Wollenstein and his management team disclosed Tuesday via social media: 

VW Group will expand annual production capacity of vehicles based on the MEB EV platform to 600,000 annually at its joint ventures with China FAW Group Corp. and SAIC Motor Corp.  15 MEB-based models will be produced under various VW Group brands locally as of 2025, which are expected to generate 35 percent of total annual vehicle sales that year.  VW Group is setting up two additional joint ventures majority owned b…

Faraday Future, the Los Angeles electric-vehicle startup founded by Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting, has recruited Chen Xuefeng, a former senior executive at Jaguar Land Rover’s China joint venture, as CEO of China operations. 

Chen is “a critical hire” who will help the company realize its “U.S.-China dual home strategy” and will “accelerate the implementation” of business operations in China, Faraday’s global CEO Carsten Breitfeld, said in a statement Wednesday. 

Chen, 45, was previously executive vice president at Chery Jaguar Land Rover Automotive Co., JLR’s partnership with state-owned Chinese automaker Chery Automobile Co.

Faraday this week said it completed the second season of winter testing and validation for the pre-production version of its first product, the FF 91 electric crossover, in Baudette, Minn., and Flat Rock, Mich. 

Faraday plans to produce the FF91 at a plant in Hanford, Calif. It expects to launch sales in th…

While you may see an occasional self-driving vehicle going down the street in some cities, public roads have not been the prime proving grounds for the technology. It's been simulated environments.

As many companies cover millions of miles of ground in simulation, however, they've realized they still need to verify their simulated results in the real world.

Humanetics, the safety testing company perhaps best known for building crash-test dummies, has partnered with Israeli auto-tech startup Fortellix to build a bridge between those physical and simulated worlds.

The two companies said Tuesday they're melding together a system that uses Foretellix's verification platform with Humanetics' control software. It can be used to validate test results for both driver-assist and fully autonomous driving technologies.

"There needs to be some correlation between what happens in the real world and what happens in the virtual world, …

SEOUL -- Lordstown Motors Corp. said Wednesday it received a request for information from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regarding a report by short-seller Hindenburg Research, and the company is cooperating with the inquiry.

The Ohio-based electric pickup-truck startup said on an earnings conference call that its board of directors has formed a special committee to review the matter.

Shares of Lordstown Motors were down 3.9 percent to $14.50 in after-hours trading.

On March 12, Hindenburg Research revealed that it had taken a short position in the electric truckmaker, accusing the company of misleading the public with "fake" orders and claiming that its upcoming truck is three to four years away from production.

The company, which in 2019 acquired a shuttered General Motors plant in Ohio, reiterated on Wednesday that it remained on track to begin building its Endurance electric pickup truck in September as planned.

ACV Auctions Inc., a fast-growing digital wholesaling firm, expects to raise some $314 million in an initial public offering, set for March 24.

The IPO would give it a market value of $3.1 billion, according to a release.

Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show the company is offering 16,550,000 shares of Class A common stock. It plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the "ACVA" ticker symbol. In the filing, ACV estimates the IPO price will be between $18 and $20 per share.

The company has been growing fast while reporting losses, the SEC filing shows.

In 2015, the online auction platform sold about 1,000 units. Last year, it sold more than 391,000 units. Even before the coronavirus pandemic caused a mass shift to digital operations in the automotive world, the Buffalo, N.Y.-based company was growing quickly: It sold 241,000 units in 2019, up from 90,000 the year before.

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WASHINGTON/DETROIT -- When President Joe Biden flies to Georgia Friday, he will land in the middle of an increasingly politicized battle between two South Korean electric vehicle battery makers and the state and federal politicians who want to prevent their feud from costing American jobs.

The companies, LG Chem and rival SK Innovation Co, are trying to take advantage of past and promised U.S. investments, and ties to politicians in Georgia, Ohio and Tennessee, to win the end game in a long-running legal dispute over intellectual property and access to the growing U.S. electric vehicle market.

The Biden Administration, through the U.S. Trade Representative's office, may ultimately pick a winner by the early April deadline. Both declined to comment.

The global auto industry is racing to develop EVs. Batteries made by LG, SK and other suppliers are critical to meeting the target of building zero-emission vehicles.

Georgia is the center of action. Un…

How the coronavirus pandemic disrupted fixed ops in 2020 will continue to dominate discussions in 2021. One topic of interest is what service-related things will go back to how they were pre-pandemic and what changes are here to stay.

Todd Marcelle, vice president and founder of kiosk vendor GoMoto, said he thinks the new contactless ways customers have used to check in and out of service appointments -- and paid for repairs using mobile phone apps or kiosks -- will stick around. Or more accurately, Marcelle believes dealership service departments will be making a mistake if they don't keep these conveniences.

Well, of course, you say, the kiosk guy recommends we keep using kiosks. Big surprise. But Marcelle emphasizes that service departments should embrace all new technology, including mobile phone apps. Besides, that's just not him talking — it's service customers in survey after survey last year talking about how much they want the convenience technology gi…

STOCKHOLM -- Volvo Cars, which is owned by China's Geely Holding, will temporarily stop or adjust production in China and the United States for parts of March due to a global shortage of semiconductor chips, it said Wednesday.

"We expect the situation to become critical during the second quarter and have therefore decided to take measures to minimize the impact on production while working daily to improve the situation," Volvo Cars said in an e-mailed statement.

"Volvo Cars will temporarily stop or adjust production in some of its car factories (in the United States and China) during the month of March," it said.

The Swedish automaker said last month it had so far not lost volumes due to the chip shortage, but added there was a "big risk" it could happen during the first quarter.

The shortage has hit automakers globally and stems from a confluence of factors as automakers compete with the consumer electronics industry for chip supplies.