Trade News

TOKYO — Toyota Motor Corp. is ready for takeoff in the brand-new world of electric air mobility.

But for now, it is skipping further investment in a Japanese startup founded partly by its own engineers in favor of an American aerospace company focused on fast, quiet flying machines.

The Japanese startup, an initiative now operating under the name SkyDrive, received ¥42.5 million ($387,700) of seed money from Toyota over a three-year period that ended in 2020.

Meanwhile, in January of that year, Toyota announced a $394 million investment into the U.S. rival, Joby Aviation, which develops electrical vertical take-off and landing aircraft, or eVTOL.

The investments highlight Toyota's evolving approach to the wild world of venture capital.

In SkyDrive's case, the funding was pitched as a helping hand for young, enthusiastic engineers. "It has nothing to do with Toyota's business," Toyota spokeswoman Shiori Hashimoto said.

For Joby, the…

Ford Motor Co. and General Motors will attempt to settle a trademark fight over the branding of their hands-free driving technology out of court.

Lawyers for the companies told a San Francisco federal judge that they are continuing to work out terms of the settlement and will report back to court within 60 days if an accord isn’t reached.

The tit-for-tat legal skirmish began in July when GM sued Ford for violating its trademarked driver-assist technology. It said it was taking action to protect its “Super-Cruise” brand and “Cruise,” the name of its self-driving affiliate Cruise LLC, after Ford in April renamed its Co-Pilot360 automated driving system as “BlueCruise.”

Ford fired back, asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to strip GM of the two trademarks. It argued the whole industry should be able to freely use the word ‘cruise’ to describe driver-assist technologies. The agency doesn’t typically register words and phrases that are commonly used.…

Tesla Inc. delivered a 241,300 vehicles worldwide in the third quarter, a record for the EV maker led by CEO Elon Musk.

Quarterly deliveries are one of the most closely watched indicators for Tesla. They are also widely seen as a barometer of consumer demand for EVs amid a transition away from the internal combustion engine.

“We would like to thank our customers for their patience as we work through global supply chain and logistics challenges,” Tesla said in a statement Saturday. Deliveries of the Model 3 and Y accounted for the overwhelming number of cars shipped.

The results beat an average estimate for deliveries of 223,677 from 12 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg and also surpassed the average projection of 221,952 that Tesla sent to investors. The latest results were higher than than the company’s previous record for 201,250 vehicles in the second quarter.   

“With the chip shortage a major overhang on the auto space and logistical …

Asad Hussain, senior mobility analyst at financial data company PitchBook, discusses Ford’s recent electric vehicle investments, how investors have rethought funding mobility startups and the future of transportation beyond cars.

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CASA GRANDE, Ariz. — In many ways, electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors, which began manufacturing luxury EVs here last week, is following in the footsteps of its successful rule-breaking competitor Tesla.

But former Tesla employees who are helping to launch Lucid say the new automaker is cutting its own path, including adopting more traditional industry processes to ensure quality and safety.

"It's not always black and white," said Eric Bach, a former Tesla engineer who now is Lucid's chief engineer. Speaking during the production launch of the Lucid Air sedan last week at its new plant outside Phoenix, Bach said he has different views from his famous former boss, Elon Musk, about the processes of automaking.

"There are good processes, and there are maybe a couple of bad ones. So what did we do? We said, they're not fundamentally bad. We want to use robust processes."

To get up and running, Lucid adopted traditional industry practices in safet…

TOKYO — As an indication of the Japanese legal battle facing former Nissan director Greg Kelly, consider this grim fact: The judge presiding over Kelly's case just sentenced a 90-year-old former senior government bureaucrat to five years in prison for negligence in a deadly car crash.

Veteran chief judge Kenji Shimotsu, who has overseen Kelly's trial involving alleged financial misconduct for more than a year, handed down the punishment in that trial to a former government official who was found guilty of mistaking the accelerator for the brake as he plowed through a crowd in Tokyo, killing two people and injuring nine.

The judge said he was being lenient because the driver was at least not inebriated at the time, local media reported.

Even in law-and-order Japan, the sentence was deemed harsh.

Now, as Tokyo prosecutors made their closing argument against Kelly last week, they are asking Shimotsu to sentence the American to two years.

Kel…

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — J.B. Straubel spent the better part of the past two decades at Tesla Inc. attempting to disrupt the auto industry and push incumbent automakers such as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors to get serious about electric vehicles.

Now he's CEO of Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company, and is partnering with Ford to make its EVs more sustainable. Redwood plans to be involved in the company's Blue Oval City campus outside Memphis, and Straubel was on hand for Ford's announcement here last week, when he shared his thoughts on a range of topics with reporters. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: Ford recently partnered with you on battery recycling, and GM has made similar announcements. Has addressing that part of the manufacturing process become table stakes for automakers electrifying their fleets?

A: It's amazing how quickly it's become well accepted that having a closed-loop supply chain and addressing end-of-life problems right up front i…

Rivian Automotive Inc., the maker of EVs backed by Amazon.com Inc., disclosed a net loss of almost $1 billion in the first half of the year in its initial public offering paperwork.

The Irvine, Calif.-based startup in a filing Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission listed the size of the offering as $100 million, a placeholder that will change when terms of the share sale are set.

Rivian was seeking to be valued at about $80 billion in a listing, Bloomberg News reported in August when the company announced that it had filed confidentially for an IPO.

The company’s IPO plans come as EV makers are scaling up, angling for a bigger slice of the growing market. With $10.5 billion raised from backers including Amazon and Ford Motor Co., an established factory in Illinois and thousands of reservation holders for its R1T truck and R1S SUV, Rivian is among the most serious competitors lining up to take on electric-vehicle leader Tesla Inc. …

With only so many semiconductors to work with, Stellantis is putting electric cars before combustion-engine vehicles as consumers respond to sweeteners including significant subsidies.  

"We will continue to manage all powertrains together but EVs come first," Anne-Lise Richard, Stellantis’s head of e-mobility, said in an interview in Milan. "We see more costumers that are willing to buy EVs now."

Demand for EVs has accelerated particularly in Europe, where generous government incentives have made the models attractive relative to traditional cars.

While programs on offer vary from country to country, buyers in Germany can expect to slice 9,000 euros ($10,438) off the sticker price of a fully electric car. 

Stellantis, formed from the merger of PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler this year, is spending 30 billion euros on EVs and software to compete with a wave of new electric models from competitors like Volkswagen.

All Stellantis b…

John Komar and Greg Long, Faulkner Automotive Group's fixed operations directors, are on the front lines of recruiting technicians in Philadelphia's brutally competitive market. Each of Faulkner's 28 dealerships need at least one tech.

It's not easy, quick or inexpensive for them to find and hire techs. According to consulting firm DealerStrong of Evansville, Ind., franchised new-car dealers spend as much as $10,000 to recruit new technicians — a figure that covers the hiring process from writing the job description through onboarding.

So, the last thing Komar and Long want to see is a new tech fail. To help ensure that doesn't happen, Komar and Long, working with the group's service managers and master technicians, relaunched Faulkner's technician mentor program in 2019. Newly hired technicians — most of whom are just out of school — are paired with master technicians for their first nine months. The new techs are eased into their jobs in a cadence designed t…