Trade News

Early last month at a sprawling factory on the highway connecting Hanoi to the port city of Haiphong, a single worker tested positive for COVID-19. The delta variant was spreading swiftly through the Southeast Asian nation at the time, and on Aug. 4, provincial officials suspended work at the auto-parts manufacturer.

An ocean away, Toyota Motor Corp. Chief Purchasing Group Officer Kazunari Kumakura was watching intently. The plant is operated by a key Toyota supplier and is one of Vietnam’s biggest assemblers of wire harnesses -- a basic but essential yoke for cables that holds the inner workings of an automobile together. As the infection at the facility disrupted operations, Toyota’s inventories grew thin. Since July, the Japanese automaker had been examining its suppliers in the region, which has become a COVID hotspot, on a daily basis to assess how dire things were getting.

Eventually, unable to secure a number of parts, including the wire harnesses …

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday signaled a one-year delay in the shipment of Roadster sports car to 2023, citing global supply chain bottlenecks.

Musk had in January hinted that the Roadster, which was originally set to be launched last year, would be released in late summer of 2022.

"2021 has been the year of super crazy supply chain shortages," Musk tweeted. "Assuming 2022 is not mega drama, new Roadster should ship in 2023."

Global automakers, including Ford Motor Co., Honda Motor Co., General Motors and Volkswagen Group, have been caught off guard by a prolonged global chip shortage, forcing many to idle or curtail production.

A year ago, the Silicon Valley billionaire had said in comedian Joe Rogan's podcast that Roadster was lower priority and compared it to a "dessert."

"We gotta get the meat and potatoes and greens and stuff," he said.

He had said a ramp-up in production of the Model Y crossover and the construction o…

Electric vehicle charging company Wallbox is set to build a $44 million, 130,0000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Arlington, Texas, a step that will aid the company's expansion in North America.

The plant will be Wallbox's first manufacturing site in the U.S. The company expects it to create 250 jobs in the region by 2030. Wallbox has two factories in Europe and one in China.

With its Wednesday announcement, Wallbox, of Barcelona, Spain, signaled a desire to enter a North American vehicle market that is making major forays into electrification.

"This new factory will be an instrumental step in our expansion in the North American market, enabling us not only to meet the growing demand, but also to accelerate the launch of new products and enter the business and public EV charging segments as we bring our production stateside," Wallbox CEO Enric Asuncion said in a statement.

The Arlington plant will host production lines for the company's Pulsar …

At a time when autonomous vehicles and Tesla's Autopilot driver-assist system are drawing greater scrutiny over their public-road performance, there's greater appetite for closer evaluation of their competence.

Israeli startup Foretellix provides such verification and validation. The company has established recent partnerships with Volvo's autonomous-vehicle division and Denso Group, among others.

Now it's gaining traction with investors. The company said Wednesday it has raised $32 million in its Series B funding round. Foretellix, which was founded in 2017, has received approximately $50 million in investments to date.

"The additional funding round is an important milestone in our journey as a company, and will help us address the growing demand for our platform and products," Ziv Binyamini, Foretellix's CEO and co-founder, said in a written statement.

MoreTech Ventures led the funding round, though the amount was undisclosed. Other investors …

Five years into scandals that have already cost Wells Fargo & Co. more than $5 billion in fines and legal settlements, regulators are privately signaling they’re still not satisfied with the bank’s progress in compensating victims and shoring up controls.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have warned the lender they may bring new sanctions over the company’s pace in fulfilling those obligations, according to people with knowledge of the situation. The bank, which signed so-called consent orders with the agencies three years ago, has sought more time to get the work done, the people said. It isn’t clear when the watchdogs might proceed.

Fresh sanctions would be especially notable if they fault progress under Wells Fargo’s new management team, which took over in late 2019 to clean up scandals that triggered lawmakers’ ire and prompted the Federal Reserve to cap the bank’s growth. Chief Executive Office…

Mercedes' AMG performance subbrand is tiptoeing toward an electric future with its first plug-in hybrid.

The Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E Performance combines a 4.0-liter V-8 biturbo engine with an electric motor and high-performance battery. The 843-hp hybrid powertrain delivers a 0-to-60-mph sprint in 2.9 seconds, and it can hit 124 mph in less than 10 seconds.

Mercedes-Benz is taking a dual-pronged strategy to electrify the performance subbrand — with plug-in hybrids and all-electric models — as the luxury automaker targets lower emissions.

Parent company Daimler expects full-electric and hybrid vehicles to make up 50 percent of global sales in 2025 — earlier than its previous forecast of 2030. Daimler said it plans to invest more than €40 billion ($47 billion) between 2022 and 2030 to develop full-electric vehicles and be ready for an all-electric vehicle market by the end of that period.

The Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E Performance is capable of 7 mile…

Greg Wohlford, a shop chairman who helped General Motors workers build ventilators during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, was recently placed on one himself after becoming infected with the virus, according to union officials.

Wohlford, shop chair of UAW Local 292, which represents workers at a GM parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., was admitted to the hospital Wednesday in serious condition after being diagnosed with COVID-19, according to a union Facebook post confirmed in an interview by Local 292 President Matt Collins.

An update Friday said Wohlford had been placed on a ventilator, while a subsequent post Sunday, written by his daughter and shared to the local's Facebook page, noted he was "resting comfortably" and that his "lungs were sounding better." It was unclear whether he remained on a ventilator.

Collins declined to provide additional information out of respect for Wohlford's family. It was unclear whether Wohlford had been vacc…

Auto dealerships in southeastern Louisiana are in recovery mode after Hurricane Ida lashed the region Sunday and early Monday with heavy rain and winds up to 150 mph.

Dealerships are trying to assess the extent of the storm's damage, said Will Green, president of the Louisiana Automobile Dealers Association. He said the process has been difficult because power remains out across the region, cellular service is spotty and many roads are blocked either by debris or floodwaters.

But Green says he thinks most dealerships in the region ultimately escaped a worst-case scenario akin to the one that occurred exactly 16 years ago when Katrina battered the Gulf Coast.

"Based on some initial reports, most avoided large-scale flooding and dealership damage suffered during Katrina, but Ida may have affected a few worse," Green told Automotive News via email. "Most of the affected dealers I have been in touch with thus far are at a minimum without power. … Some have …

LONDON -- Lotus will launch a full-electric SUV next year as it seeks to match the way that Porsche significantly boosted profits by adding SUVs to its sports-car lineup.

The Lotus SUV will be a rival in size to the Tesla Model X. It will be the first of four new electric models from the automaker in the next five years, Lotus said in a statement on Tuesday.

The SUV, codenamed Type 132, will be followed by a large electric sedan in 2023 and a midsize electric SUV in 2025. A previously announced sports car developed with Renault's Alpine brand will arrive in 2026.

The new models, except the sports car, will be built in a new factory in Wuhan, China, which will eventually have a capacity to build 150,000 vehicles a year.

Lotus will continue to build sports cars at its Hethel plant in Norfolk, England.

Lotus is expanding its lineup beyond niche sports cars under its new Chinese owners, Geely Holding Group, which bought a majority stake in the …

Ram topped the industry in the J.D. Power Initial Quality Study for the first time, while Stellantis stablemate Dodge landed in the No. 2 spot after last year becoming the first domestic brand to lead the ranking.

Another Stellantis brand, Jeep, jumped into the eighth spot to give the automaker three brands in the top 10 in the 2021 ranking.

Ram ranked 21st just two years ago. It then vaulted to No. 3 in 2020 and continued that momentum in the 2021 study. Dodge in 2019 rose to the top 10 for the first time before its first-place finish last year.

"What it boils down to is just a lot of hard work on the part of the Stellantis team throughout the organization to improve their quality," Dave Sargent, vice president of automotive quality at J.D. Power, told Automotive News. "Maybe 10 years ago, it wasn't the best. Five years ago, it was getting competitive, and now they're one of the best in the industry, particularly on the Ram side."

Sargent added:…