Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | APR 1 2024 | VIEW ONLINE

Watch the Hennessey Venom F5 Revolution break the Circuit of The Americas (COTA) production car lap record. | Hennessey Performance

What We're Reading

Automotive

Back in 2022, during the COVID-fueled new vehicle inventory shortage, automotive dealerships made a collective $55 billion in annual profits. Fast forward to 2024, and dealer profits are projected to be about $26 billion — down over 50% in two years, but still almost 50% higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the same period, dealership profit margins shrank from almost 7% down to 3.2%. | Automotive News ($)

Great financial intelligence on automotive dealership operations in the latest The Presidio Group Quarterly Report (powered by NCM Associates data). | The Presidio Group

Toyota won't be following Hyundai onto Amazon's shopping platform anytime soon. Hyundai began selling vehicles on Amazon in the U.S. in January as part of a pilot partnership, but Toyota prefers its SmartPath digital retailing tool and its Monogram counterpart at Lexus. | Automotive News ($)

Lucid Motors is raising another $1 billion from its biggest financial backer, Saudi Arabia, as it looks to blunt the high costs associated with building and selling its luxury electric sedan. The fresh funding comes just a few weeks after Lucid told investors that it only plans to build around 9,000 of its Air electric vehicles this year, a slight bump over last year’s output. It lost $2.8 billion in 2023 and finished the year with just shy of $1.4 billion in cash and equivalents. | Tech Crunch

The negotiations between Fisker and a large automaker — reported to be Nissan — over a potential investment and collaboration have been terminated, a development that puts a separate near-term rescue funding effort in danger. The startup’s stock plunged 28% after the stock market opened, and trading was halted. | Tech Crunch

The New York Stock Exchange will immediately suspend trading shares of EV startup Fisker and is moving to take the company off its stock exchange. The exchange said Monday that Fisker’s stock is “no longer suitable for listing” because of “abnormally low” price levels. | Tech Crunch

Tesla has decided to no longer accept Fisker vehicles as trade-ins due to market volatility—at least temporarily. | Inside EVs

Connectivity

Mozilla recently gave 25 major car brands failing marks for consumer privacy. Their report was headlined: “It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy.” Most car manufacturers provide options to opt out of unnecessary data sharing, but as with many other consumer technologies where there is money to be made from the sale of data, these settings are often buried within menus. | CNBC

️Electrification

Once a leader in clean cars, Toyota has cemented its role as the voice of caution against electrifying the auto industry too quickly, using its lobbying and public relations muscle to oppose a rapid shift that experts say is critical to fighting climate change. That’s a significant change for an automaker that pioneered hybrid technology in the late 1990s, giving the world the Prius, a high-mileage vehicle embraced by early adopters of cleaner cars. | The New York Times ($)

Stellantis Chief Executive Carlos Tavares in February made an intriguing announcement: The Chrysler-parent company would remain all-in on electric vehicles, even as competitors scale back and sales growth slows. The 65-year-old’s view on battery-powered vehicles is a drastic change from just a year ago, when he sounded the alarm on the high cost of EVs. Now, Tavares is more bullish, driven by the company’s flexible vehicle platforms and the fact that Stellantis’s EVs are already profitable. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Hyundai announced a massive $50 billion (68 trillion won) investment to secure its position as the auto market transitions to EVs. The Korean automaker will hire 80,000 people in Korea to help it become a top-three EV maker by 2030. Hyundai’s new investment is to “secure future growth engines,” including EV tech and software-defined vehicles (SDVs). | Electrek

Electric vehicle (EV) owners are noticing vehicle tires wearing faster than those on gasoline-powered vehicles, according to the J.D. Power 2024 U.S. Original Equipment Tire Customer Satisfaction Study. EV tires naturally wear quicker because of greater vehicle weight and higher torque. | Automotive News ($)

The Biden administration announced a regulation designed to turbocharge sales of electric or other zero-emission heavy vehicles, from school buses to cement mixers, as part of its multifront attack on global warming. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) projects the new rule could mean that 25% of new long-haul trucks, the heaviest on the road, and 40% of medium-size trucks, like box trucks and landscaping vehicles, could be nonpolluting by 2032. Today, fewer than 2% of new heavy trucks sold in the United States fit that bill. The regulation would apply to more than 100 types of vehicles including tractor-trailers, ambulances, R.V.s, garbage trucks and moving vans. | The New York Times ($)

President Biden has long vowed to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations in the United States by 2030. But after two years, that program has only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 spots where drivers can charge their vehicles. | The Washington Post ($)

According to a new report by BloombergNEF, in all analyzed cases, EVs have lower lifecycle emissions than gas cars. Just how much lower depends on how far they are driven, and the cleanliness of the grid where they charge. A driver in the US will only need to travel about 21,000 kilometers, or around a year’s worth of driving, for a BEV to be cleaner than an ICE. | BloombergNEF

Electrical grid regulators and utilities are ramping up warnings of a looming electric grid crisis. Projections for U.S. electricity demand growth over the next five years have doubled from a year ago. The major culprits: New artificial intelligence data centers, federally subsidized manufacturing plants, and the government-driven electric-vehicle transition. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

China

Is a $10,700 electric vehicle (EV) from China exactly the kind of product that could turbocharge our transition away from gas and toward electric vehicles? | Vox

Tesla and China built a symbiotic relationship, with credits, workers and parts that made Elon Musk ultrarich. Now, his reliance on the country may give Beijing leverage. | The New York Times ($)

Tesla has a plan to fend off cheaper competition from China with a $25,000 electric car. The company is moving to what it calls an “unboxed” production line approach. If the new assembly process is successful, Tesla says it can slash production costs in half. | Automotive News ($)

Chinese-made electric vehicles will capture a quarter of Europe’s EV market this year, up from 19.5% in 2023, despite tariffs the European Union is likely to levy on such EVs. | Automotive News ($)

BMW Group CEO Oliver Zipse has spoken out against raising tariffs on Chinese electric cars imported into Europe, calling the threat to the European automotive industry "overblown." Zipse is the latest automaker executive to warn against erecting bigger trade barriers and follows similar statements from his rivals at Mercedes-Benz AG and Volkswagen Group. | Automotive News ($)

Stellantis will start building vehicles for Chinese auto brand Leapmotor at its historic Fiat plant in Poland as part of its accelerating foray into the European battery-electric-vehicle market. Last year the group bought a 21% stake in Leapmotor in a $1.6 billion deal to help its own sales strategy in China. | Wards Auto

China produces 80% of the world’s solar panels — compared with the United States’ 2% — and makes about two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries. China’s overwhelming dominance has alarmed officials in the United States and in Europe, who say they are worried that a flood of cheap Chinese products will undercut their efforts to grow their own renewable energy industries — especially if the Chinese companies have what they consider an unfair advantage. | The Washington Post ($)

Insurance

Insurers are reporting bigger hail losses. In 2023, State Farm paid 27,300 claims for hail damage to homes and businesses, up from 23,200 in 2022. Payouts totaled $6.1 billion last year, more than the previous two years combined. In addition, inflation is driving up the cost of materials and labor to repair the damage, increasing insurers’ liability. | The New York Times ($)

Cities

Cities with plans to transition away from cars are finding that going car-free is a lot harder than it seems. Not only has it led to politicians and urban planners facing death threats and being doxxed, it has forced them to rethink the entire basis of city life. But, many of the cities that pioneered reducing car use—like Copenhagen in the 1970s—are rated today as some of the best places to live in the world. | Wired

New York City completed a crucial final step in a decades-long effort to become the first American city to roll out a comprehensive congestion pricing program, one that aims to push motorists out of their cars and onto mass transit by charging new tolls to drive into Midtown and Lower Manhattan. The plan still faces challenges from six lawsuits before it can begin in June. | The New York Times ($)

Police departments have begun tagging fleeing vehicles with GPS trackers, eliminating the need for high-speed pursuit. Old Westbury Police Department in New York is using vehicle-mounted launchers that fire foam projectiles with a heat-activated sticky glue at fleeing vehicles in a car chase. The projectiles have wireless GPS tracking systems built into them, which allow police to track the car's whereabouts. | The Drive

Autonomy

By the end of this year, autonomous trucks will for the first time start traveling alone, without human backup drivers, as two major companies — Aurora and Kodiak — launch fully autonomous trucks in Texas. The advent of robot trucks could have a massive impact on America’s supply chain, dramatically reducing the time it takes to transport goods from place to place and unbinding the trucking industry from the costs and physical limitations of human labor. | The Washington Post ($)

️Marine

The International Maritime Organization, which regulates the shipping industry, committed to creating the world’s first global carbon price. The proposal would require shipping companies to pay a fee for every ton of carbon they emit by burning fuel. In other words, it’s a tax. That could raise a significant amount of money and lead to sweeping changes in the shipping industry. It would also be a first step toward the lofty goal of a carbon tax not limited to a particular country, but a global one. | International Maritime Organization

Between swirling geopolitical winds, the variables of climate change and continued disruptions resulting from the pandemic, the risks of depending on ships to carry goods around the planet are conspicuous. | The New York Times ($)

The container ship that hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday while leaving Baltimore Harbor is enormous. When fully loaded, the vessel, the Dali, can weigh more than 116,000 tons and carry thousands of containers of cargo. But in comparison with some of the other ships out there, the Dali is a featherweight. The size of the largest container ships has grown, in fits and starts, since the early 1980s. The current largest class of container ships in the world can hold more than twice the amount of cargo that the Dali can. | The New York Times ($)

Aviation

The war in Ukraine has been characterized by drone deployment of unprecedented scale, with thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used to track enemy forces, guide artillery and bomb targets. | Reuters ($)

Many airlines and aviation companies are experimenting with new technologies not only to manage relentless economic pressure to be an affordable choice for transportation but also to be more environmentally friendly. Besides the move to electric engines, airlines are investigating options for fuel such as hydrogen and repurposed fuels and the reemergence of supersonic flight. Investors have spent an estimated $22.2 billion pursuing these concepts. | The Washington Post ($)

Have a great week,

Steve Greenfield

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Notable & New

Jim Roche from Automotive Ventures portfolio company WarrCloud was featured in Used Car News. | Used Car News

On this week's Future of Automotive segment on CBT News, we explore the challenges that early-stage EV automakers like Rivian, Lucid Motors and Fisker are facing. | CBT News ($)

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