Trade News

WASHINGTON — NHTSA has opened an investigation to assess potential safety issues in nearly 605,000 heavy-duty Ram diesel trucks from the 2019 and 2020 model years.

The agency's Office of Defects Investigation said it has received 22 complaints from vehicle owners and two field reports alleging incidents of stall or loss of power as a result of high-pressure fuel pump failures in Ram 2500, 3500, 4500 and 5500 heavy-duty trucks from those model years. The trucks are equipped with 6.7-liter Cummins turbodiesel engines.

Federal investigators found that most of the incident allegations occurred at speeds faster than 25 mph and resulted in "permanent disablement of the vehicle," according to a NHTSA document.

The investigation was opened Oct. 14 and made public Monday. As part of the investigation, NHTSA will assess the scope, frequency, root cause and potential safety-related consequences of the alleged defect.

FCA US, now part of Stellantis, issued a…

Stellantis entered a preliminary agreement with battery maker LG Energy Solution to produce battery cells and modules for North America, as the automaker rolls out its 30-billion-euro ($35 billion) electrification plan.

Stellantis and LG will form a JV to produce battery cells and modules at a new facility that will have an annual production capacity of 40 gigawatt-hours, the automaker said in a statement Monday.

The batteries produced will be supplied to Stellantis' assembly plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico for installation in hybrid and full-EVs, to support its goal of having more than 40 percent of its U.S. sales as electric by 2030.

The announcement comes weeks after Stellantis and its partner TotalEnergies agreed to open up their battery cell JV ACC to Daimler, to expand their European sourcing of battery cells.

The new North American plant is targeted to start by the first quarter of 2024.

The location of the plant is under revie…

LONDON/ COLOGNE -- Ford has picked the UK over Germany for its first electric vehicle components factory in Europe.

The automaker said it is investing 230 million pounds ($316 million) to convert its transmission plant in Halewood, northwest England, to produce electric drive units for future Ford full-electric passenger and commercial vehicles sold in Europe.

Production will begin in 2024, Ford said in a statement on Monday. Capacity is planned to be around 250,000 units a year. The investment will safeguard about 500 jobs at the factory.

An electric drive unit combines the electric motor, invertor and transmission and replaces the engine and gearbox in a combustion engine car.

Ford did not comment on whether it would build each element at the plant or source from suppliers and assemble them into a single unit on site.

Labor bosses at Ford's German operations criticized Ford's choice of the UK factory for the investment instead of converti…

Toyota Motor North America said it will invest $3.4 billion in the U.S. over the next nine years to develop and localize automotive battery production, including those for electric vehicles which would be made locally instead of in Japan.

The U.S. investment — part of a previously announced $13.5 billion program globally by the automaker for battery development and production — will include a $1.29 billion lithium ion battery plant, built in partnership with Toyota Tsusho, that will begin producing batteries by 2025. They will go in upcoming localized EVs as well as hybrids.

Toyota did not provide a location for the proposed plant nor details of its business model but said it would result in the creation of 1,750 new American jobs. The plant's production would focus first on batteries for hybrids but would then begin to produce battery packs for U.S.-built EVs, a spokesman confirmed.

Toyota also did not say where it plans to build its EVs for North Amer…

The supply crunch of semiconductors for carmakers will likely continue through 2022, though the shortage may become less severe than what was seen in the past summer, according to a senior executive of Bosch China Investment.

Chip producers were only able to meet about 20 percent of clients’ orders in July and despite some improvements in the situation in August, more than half of the demand still couldn’t be satisfied, Jiang Jian, a vice president of Bosch China, said on the sidelines of the China Auto Supply Chain Conference.

The squeeze is expected to extend through next year, with the gap falling to about 20 percent of the levels seen in the first half of this year, he said.

The worldwide shortage of semiconductors that’s been going on for almost 12 months now may deplete light-vehicle production in China by as many as 2 million units this year, an official of the China Machinery Industry Federation said earlier.

The policy counsel for the Future of Privacy Forum discusses the potential risks of sharing information from dockless scooter rides, the emerging debate over AI and driver monitoring cameras, and the words that "make privacy nerds bristle."

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The most nerve-racking moment of Carlos Ghosn's daring getaway from Japan came as airport security in Osaka debated whether to X-ray the trunk in which he was hiding.

Ghosn, scrunched up inside, could hear the officials deliberating but couldn't tell which way the decision would go. They were speaking Japanese.

If they scanned that trunk, he'd be sunk.

Ghosn took a deep breath. The talking stopped, and the trunk resumed its rolling. Only then did he realize he finally made it. Ghosn was loaded onto a private jet and spirited to freedom.

"This is the single most important decision that had an impact on my life," Ghosn told Automotive News of that make-or-break moment to wave his box through. Because of that decision, the international fugitive says he is now free to start rehabilitating his reputation.

In a wide-ranging video interview from Lebanon last week, the ousted Nissan Motor Co. chairman said he is…

The most interesting part of the Rivian saga — for me — is the engineering and manufacturing of the R1T pickup, R1S SUV and Amazon delivery van.

Launching three new-from-the-wheels-up vehicles in close succession is a major challenge for an established automaker. It's far beyond difficult for a startup whose vehicles use proprietary technology and in-house-developed electronics, and when the tens of millions of lines of code for all the computers were written in-house, too.

This is the automotive equivalent of a moonshot. Yet Rivian, born in Florida within earshot of where Apollo rockets launched for the moon, just may pull it off.

I recently got a close look at Rivian's futuristic Amazon van at work in a suburban Detroit neighborhood. And last week, I spent around 45 minutes test driving an early-production R1T around the Detroit area.

Here's what I can tell you: Rivian has set the bar high for all competitors. The R…

Despite the pandemic, despite the global irritation of microchip shortages and supply chain snarls for the rest of the industry, it's been a very good year for Rolls-Royce.

CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös says that since September 2020, orders and production have been "flying." The BMW Group subsidiary has been unaffected by the semiconductor shortage because its parent has given the low-volume British brand's high-margin models priority when it comes to chips. As a result, Rolls-Royce is on pace to top its global sales record of 5,152 vehicles set in 2019.

Müller-Ötvös, 61, says Rolls-Royce has increased revenue per vehicle by emphasizing personalization. In addition, Rolls this year added a bespoke program called Coachbuild that will offer limited-edition multimillion-dollar models every other year.

But another way Rolls-Royce is maintaining its strong balance sheet is by declining to expand the brand into nonautomotive areas. The aim is to protect Rolls-Ro…