Trade News

DETROIT -- A union-affiliated pension fund advisor pressing Rivian on human rights and environment concerns in the electric vehicle startup's battery supply chain ahead of a blockbuster initial public offering said on Monday the company's response fell short of expectations.

SOC Investment Group Executive Director Dieter Waizenegger said he was disappointed in the lack of substance in the Irvine, California-based company's Oct. 29 response to earlier concerns the fund manager raised. SOC provided a copy of the letter to Reuters.

"They sent us a lot of words, but it's really raising a lot of questions and we expect more substance than aspirations," Waizenegger said in an interview. "It's particularly lacking on firm commitments to address critical environmental and human rights risks."

As issues of environmental, social and corporate governance take on growing importance with investors, automakers have come under pressure to prove that such minerals as li…

Automakers have used radar in vehicles for more than two decades. But there are more startups than ever wringing innovation out of that legacy technology.

The latest is Spartan Radar, which closed a $15 million series A round this week. The round was led by Prime Movers Lab, and it quickly follows a $10 million seed round secured in August.

Spartan Radar executives claim their radar systems, emerging from the aerospace and defense industries, make substantial advances in resolution, allowing for lidarlike levels of obstacle detection for driver-assist systems and self-driving vehicles.

The company's chief product, Biomemetic Radar, parallels the manner in which humans perceive and process information. It can lead to a lower rate of false-positive detections, company executives say.

"Spartan Radar's innovative systems engineering and edge-processing expertise inherently gives the company a strategic advantage," said Grayson Brulte, a mobility strat…

The Illinois legislature has passed a series of tax incentives for makers of electric vehicles that lawmakers hope will turn the state into an EV assembly hub.

The Illinois General Assembly passed House Bill 1769, which includes state income tax credits for EV makers and suppliers of either 75 percent to 100 percent of payroll taxes for new employees they hire for up to 15 years. It also includes tax credits for hiring construction workers and training employees, among other incentives.

"It is the intent of the General Assembly that Illinois should lead the nation in the production of electric vehicles," the bill reads. "Illinois must aggressively adopt new business development investment tools so that Illinois is more competitive in site location decision-making for manufacturing facilities directly related to the electric vehicle industry." The bill passed both houses of the legislature on Oct. 28 and was sent to Gov. J.B. Pritzker for his signature.

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Apple Inc., bolstering its car-development efforts, hired a former engineer from Tesla Inc. who drew controversy this year for remarks about that company’s Autopilot feature.

The iPhone maker tapped Christopher “CJ” Moore for its team working on a self-driving car, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Moore is working on the effort’s software, reporting to Stuart Bowers, another former Tesla executive who joined Apple at the end of last year. Bowers had led Tesla’s Autopilot team before departing in mid-2019.

The move suggests Apple is plowing ahead with attempts to develop self-driving technology, a high-stakes race with automakers such as Tesla. Moore is joining a division known for its secrecy -- Apple has never publicly laid out its car plans -- and frequent turnover. The head of Apple’s car project, codenamed Titan, departed the company earlier this year to lead technology efforts at Ford Motor Co.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., d…

Elon Musk proposed selling 10 percent of his Tesla Inc. stock on Twitter Saturday, and took a poll of people on the social network to see if they supported it.

Musk said he would “abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.”

The amount of stock in play is valued at about $21 billion, based on his holdings of 170.5 million Tesla shares. The stock, which surged 74 percent this year to a record on Thursday, closed 0.6 percent lower at $1,222.09 on Friday.

The number of shares Musk could be set to offload based on the Twitter poll is equivalent to 80 percent of the average daily trading volume for Tesla in the past three months.

As of Saturday night, more than 55 percent of the 2 million users who had voted supported Musk selling his shares. The poll will end around 3 p.m. on Sunday.

Musk, the world’s richest person known for his tongue-in-cheek tweets, cited recent discussion of the wealthy hoarding unrealized gains to avoid pay…

Bose, chief technology officer of U.K. startup Humanising Autonomy, describes how AI helps AVs understand the intentions of pedestrians, how pedestrian behavior differs among cultures and how that intelligence can lead to safer streets.

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Penske Automotive Group Inc. has been largely quiet in this year's dealership acquisition spree by U.S. public auto retailers, but it does see a sizable opportunity to grow — in Japan, where it just bought the remaining stake in a group of luxury stores.

The Bloomfield Hills, Mich., auto retailer took full ownership of the Nicole Group in October, nearly six years after investing in the Tokyo-area stores.

"We said we would go in with 49 percent, help build it, which we did, and then we'd have the opportunity to buy the balance after a certain period of time," Penske CEO Roger Penske told Automotive News. "We certainly exercised that at very reasonable pricing here in the last few weeks."

Penske didn't disclose what he paid for the 51 percent stake, but his description contrasts with the high dealership prices he said he's seeing in the U.S., where dealership buy-sells and consolidation have accelerated. Many of Penske's auto retail competitors have anno…

MOAB, Utah — Designers working on the fifth-generation Jeep Grand Cherokee didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

They chose to refine it and build upon its legacy, said Mark Allen, Jeep brand's head of exterior design.

But there was a new challenge because they had to craft designs for a traditional two-row model, which arrives at dealerships by year end, as well as the nameplate's first three-row variant, which is already on sale.

Allen, 58, spoke with Staff Reporter Vince Bond Jr. at a media event here for the redesigned two-row Grand Cherokee. He discussed juggling the two-row and three-row designs and the approach to the Grand Cherokee 4xe, a plug-in hybrid due in early 2022. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: With the new platform, were you tempted to do something totally different with the design?

A: No. Grand Cherokee, to me, has to be a refinement of the car. Grand Cherokee means so much to us. It doesn't need to be blown up. It's not brok…

The House late Friday passed the biggest U.S. infrastructure package in decades, marking a victory for President Joe Biden and unleashing $550 billion of fresh spending, including $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations and $65 billion for upgrades to the nation's electric grid.

The vote was 228-206 and sends the legislation to Biden for his signature. Thirteen Republicans supported the bill and six Democrats voted against it, a sign of the intraparty strains that nearly derailed the legislation. It would not have passed without GOP votes.

Passage capped a day in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to deal with a last-minute standoff between party progressives and moderates that took hours of intense negotiations and the president's intervention to resolve.

The president, in a statement early Saturday, called the bill's passage "a monumental step forward as a nation."

Pelosi and Biden, however, were unable to land a House vote at th…