Trade News

SAN FRANCISCO — Ford Motor Co. knows its customers' electric vehicle charging experience is less than perfect, and it's deploying an army of "angels" to fix it.

The automaker offers customers some 63,000 plugs across the country in what it calls a "network of networks," made up of stations from Electrify America, ChargePoint and others. That patchwork collection of third-party chargers has occasionally been problematic for Mustang Mach-E owners looking to power up on the road.

"There are a lot of plugs out there, but some of them are old and they don't have the quality or reliability we want," Darren Palmer, Ford's general manager of battery electric vehicles, told Automotive News during a media drive program in San Francisco. "Over 99.5 percent of customers go into a charger and get a charge. We're pleased about that. But a number less than that get a charge the first time they charge."

Enter the Charge Angels.

Employees in specially instru…

Magna International and Qualcomm Inc. tussled over the privilege of buying supplier Veoneer last month. Now, through a unique transaction structure, Qualcomm will walk away with the specific part of Veoneer that it wanted, while letting a private investment firm do the heavy lifting of buying Veoneer and figuring out what to do with the part Qualcomm doesn't want.

And it has left open the door to the possibility that Magna could, if it chooses, end up buying a leftover piece of Veoneer.

A spokeswoman for Magna declined to comment.

It's not a typical auto industry acquisition.

Qualcomm, a telecommunications and microchip producer with a burgeoning automotive business, last week won in its bid to acquire Veoneer's advanced-driving software unit, Arriver, as part of a $4.5 billion deal, beating out an offer from supplier giant Magna International Inc.

But Qualcomm won't ever own Veoneer as a whole.

Read more about Qualcomm gets what it wanted of Veoneer; leftovers up for grabs

A growing number of logistics firms are eyeing the sky to improve last-mile delivery efficiencies. But the mass deployment of drones is being slowed by strict U.S. regulations.

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A double-whammy of a global shortage of chips and ships is the only thing standing in the way of Tesla Inc. maintaining sales growth in excess of 50 percent, according to CEO Elon Musk.

“We’ve had a fantastic year, we had record vehicle deliveries,” Musk told Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, on Thursday. “It looks like we have a good chance of maintaining that. Basically, if we can get the chips we can do it. Hopefully this chip shortage will alleviate soon but I feel confident of being able to maintain something like at least above 50 percent for quite a while.”

While the chip shortage has dominated auto-industry headlines this year, Musk said the electric-car pioneer was grappling with “lots” of supply chain challenges.  

“One of the biggest challenges we had in Q3 was can we get enough ships,” he said. “There was a huge ship shortage.”

The chip shortage doesn’t appear to be slowing Tesla down just yet. The company earl…

KAMINOKAWA, Japan – Nissan’s most advanced factory yet takes production of green vehicles to a higher level, delivering efficient, flexible manufacturing firepower to make next-generation EVs, including the highly-anticipated Ariya crossover.

The so-called Nissan Intelligent Factory, shown to reporters for the first time Friday, deploys a host of new production methods, including several world-first techniques, to enable a 10 percent production cost improvement over older methods, despite building more complex vehicles.

A key innovation is a new powertrain assembly technique called SUMO, short for simultaneous underfloor mounting operation. It foreshadows Nissan’s approach to next-gen EV production.

The Intelligent Factory has already begun pre-production of the Ariya at Nissan Motor Co.’s Tochigi assembly plant north of Tokyo, replacing a Line 2 that used to make some of Nissan and Infiniti’s top-tier products.

Tochigi’s Line 1 now hosts co…

SAN FRANCISCO -- Tesla Inc. will move its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas, where a new factory for the Model Y and forthcoming Cybertruck is nearing completion.

CEO Elon Musk announced the move Thursday during the EV maker’s shareholder annual meeting from the Austin plant.

Tesla has been based in Palo Alto, Calif., the leafy Silicon Valley suburb that is home to Stanford University and several venture capital firms, since its founding in 2003. But the company has grown from scrappy startup to the world’s most valuable automaker and Texas -- centrally located between the two coasts -- has become its center of gravity in the U.S.

Musk said Tesla isn’t abandoning California, noting the company will continue to expand manufacturing in the state and aims to boost production at its vehicle factory in Fremont -- and at its Nevada battery plant -- by 50 percent.  

“We will continue to expand our activities in California. This is not a matte…

Honda is heading to the Nürburgring to test the Civic Type R that will join the company's U.S. lineup next year.

The automaker teased two photos of a Type R prototype in red and black camouflage. It’s clear the coming version is far cleaner than the outgoing model with its boy-racer styling elements, particularly at the rear.

While still in development, it's being billed by Honda as the best-performing Civic Type R ever.

The redesigned 11th-generation Civic sedan and hatchback received relatively few mechanical changes, and the Civic Type R is likely to be no exception.

The outgoing model of the top Civic trim is equipped with 306 hp from a turbocharged 2.0-liter motor mated to a six-speed manual transmission. Honda did add a little power to the regular Civics for the 2022 model, so it’s possible the track-ready trim will get a boost.

The hatch-only Type R will also get the Civic family's latest interior marked by a metal honeycomb strip th…

The prices dealers pay for cars and trucks at Manheim auctions climbed to all-time highs in September, another sign of the disruption triggered by the cutbacks in new-vehicle production caused by the global shortage of semiconductors.

Wholesale values rose 27 percent last month from September 2020, according to Cox Automotive's Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index, which tracks prices of cars and trucks sold at auctions. Values in September were up 5.3 percent from August.

With new-vehicle production still hampered by the chip shortage and consumer demand relatively strong, wholesale values are expected to stay elevated well into next year.

In a conference call Thursday, Cox Chief Economist Jonathan Smoke said average wholesale prices have increased for eight straight weeks through last week. And they do not appear to be at a peak for 2021.

"Basically, the odds favor more increases between now and spring because we're still in a very supp…

Stellantis is investing $229 million to retool three Indiana plants to build its new flexible eight-speed transmission that can be used in both electrified vehicles and those with conventional setups.

The Kokomo Transmission, Kokomo Casting and Indiana Transmission plants, all in the city of Kokomo, will be key cogs in the automaker's electrification strategy. Stellantis said in July that it is investing more than $35 billion through 2025 in electrification and software and plans to have four electric vehicle platforms that support driving ranges of 300 to 500 miles.

Stellantis has set a goal of having electrified vehicles account for more than 40 percent of U.S. sales by 2030.

The next-generation transmission will deliver improved fuel economy, the automaker said, and help the company meet "future emission regulations." The company said the transmissions, which can be paired with mild-hybrid and plug-in hybrid propulsion systems along with tr…

Powertrain supplier Vitesco Technologies, which spun off from Continental in September, will phase out much of its internal combustion engine business in the coming years as it bets big on long-term growth in electric vehicles.

The dramatic change speaks about both the evolution of Vitesco, formerly known as Continental Powertrain, and the future of Continental itself, a company that has been morphing from a leading world tire maker into a new titan of advanced electronics.

As a result of its repositioning strategy, Vitesco will shed nearly 40 percent of its current business in the coming years. By itself, Vitesco reported about $9.38 billion in revenue in 2020. Contract manufacturing for Continental, most of which will be phased out by 2025, accounted for $1.28 billion, and sales of noncore internal combustion engine technologies, such as injection products, totaled $2.32 billion, according to the company.

"We saw that those products will not have a fu…