Category: Auto News

Ree’s first product will be the P7-B box truck, which targets the core of the medium-duty electric market.

The selling point is the novel wheel-based drive system called Reecorner, said KC Heidler, CEO of Tom’s Truck Center, a two-store chain based in Santa Ana, Calif.

Each corner has an electric motor as well as steering, braking and suspension components packaged into a module positioned between the chassis and the wheel. The system is controlled by wire, similar to how commercial aircraft operate, but is scaled and modified for the everyday driver rather than a skilled pilot, said Daniel Barel, Ree’s co-founder and CEO.

The modules allow for a flat skateboard platform, creating a low step-in height with more room for cargo or passengers if used as a shuttle. The vehicle has significantly more agility — especially useful for dense urban environments — than other commercial vehicles. It has a 39-foot turning circle.

The truck offers a 150-mile range with up to a 7,000-pound payload, consistent with the drive cycles of box trucks. The vehicle architecture would allow for a bigger battery pack and longer range, but customers neither need nor want to pay for that extra capability, Barel said.

The system also makes for easy service. Technicians can swap a module out in about an hour, limiting the time the truck would be out of service, a key metric for commercial vehicle users, he said.

Ree demonstrated the technology for guests at its headquarters Monday during EcoMotion, a conference and weeklong series of events focusing on Israeli automotive technology.

Ree has a plant in Coventry, England, where it will launch production this year. Barel said Ree could assemble up to 20,000 vehicles annually, working two shifts at the factory.

When it reported its first-quarter financial results Tuesday, Ree said it had 100 truck orders. It set a production target in the low hundreds of vehicles for 2024 and into the low to mid-thousands by the end of 2025.

Ree is recruiting independent truck dealers to build its distribution network. Tom’s Truck Center, with stores in Santa Ana and Santa Fe Springs, Calif., is among the first eight.

Heidler said he sees a market opportunity to help businesses tap federal and state incentives to transition their fleets to ZEVs. He’s working with Nikola Corp. and GreenPower Motor Co., among others, and gets pitched constantly by green vehicle startups.

“Most will be out of business or merged into something else in two or three years. But we have vetted many of these startups and think we are picking the ones that will survive,” Heidler told Automotive News.

One problem is that few offer innovative technology that would provide an advantage to businesses, Heidler said. They typically have similar, conventional designs, he said.

But the Ree technology offers advantages that could make it a survivor.

“In the commercial space, weight and space is everything,” Heidler said. “The corner technology opens up everything else on the truck for us to design for the customer.”

Ree is the only company Tom’s is working with that doesn’t have a product already on the road, he said.

BYD is looking at three Western European countries as possible locations for a vehicle assembly plant, according to various media reports.

The fast-growing Chinese automaker is talking to the French government about building a factory in the country, the French newspaper Les Echos reported. But Germany and Spain are other potential locations, according to Chinese media reports. The U.K. is not a contender because of Brexit, the reports said.

BYD Executive Vice President Stella Li told Bloomberg in February that the automaker wants to build cars in Europe and is carrying out feasibility studies.

BYD is more likely to establish its own plant than take over a factory that is being closed by an established automaker, such as Ford’s Saarlouis factory in Germany.

The company plans to determine the location for the plant before the end of the year and aims to begin production in 2025, reports said.

Ford has started customer deliveries of the new 2023 Super Duty. After a lengthy real-world testing phase and additional quality checks, the truck is now ready to be shipped to retail and commercial clients around the United States.

About 11,000 UAW hourly workers – more than 9,000 at Kentucky Truck Plant and around 1,800 at Ohio Assembly Plant – now assemble the F-Series family of trucks. The production of the new Super Duty was boosted with a $700 million investment adding a further 500 jobs at Louisville. Together with local sales, suppliers, and employees help support, nearly 200,000 direct and indirect jobs are involved in the production at the two plants, generating a combined GDP of approximately $19 billion.

“The all-new 2023 Ford F-Series Super Duty is the tough-tested icon that our customers trust. It is the smartest and most capable truck we’ve ever built offering must-have towing tech, embedded 5G capability, over-the-air updates plus an entire suite of available Ford Pro Intelligence solutions to help maximize uptime and accelerate productivity. And of course, its best-in-class payload and towing, more than any of our competitors, means this truck can take on any job,” Ted Cannis, Ford Pro CEO, commented at the start of the production.

Ford has been accepting orders for the new Super Duty since October last year and is so far enjoying an unprecedented demand with more than 150,000 pre-orders received in just five weeks. The Super Duty family of trucks is Ford’s most profitable product and the company has applied a new quality check system that takes around three hours per vehicle.

In addition, Ford wants to make sure the Super Duty can withstand hundreds of thousands of miles because that’s what the customers expect from the truck. The new exhaustive road testing program puts an emphasis on high-mileage tests, while every vehicle that rolls off the assembly line is driven 25 miles by a Ford employee as an additional last-minute quality inspection before delivery.

UAW President Shawn Fain on Wednesday called the hundreds of workers currently on strike against suppliers Clarios and Constellium an “inspiration” to the union as a whole and vowed to keep supporting them.

“All these workers are leading the way for all of us right now,” Fain said in a 30-minute Facebook Live appearance. “Their fights are a strong reminder that the way workers build power and make gains in bargaining is by having the collective capacity to shut employers down when our employers refuse to not treat our members fairly. I want striking UAW members to know our million-strong union stands in solidarity with you in the fight for justice.”

Roughly 400 workers at a Clarios vehicle battery plant near Toledo this week voted down a tentative contract agreement by a wide margin, extending a strike that began May 8. The plant supplies batteries for General Motors and Ford Motor Co.

“It’s a shame,” Fain said. “These workers aren’t asking for the moon. They’re asking for a decent wage and the company’s trying to impose a crappy work schedule on them. These workers are holding their ground and we’re behind them 100 percent.”

Additionally, about 160 UAW workers at a Constellium Automotive plant in suburban Detroit have been on strike since May 17. Union officials say the workers are concerned about health and safety issues at the plant, which supplies aluminum structures and crash management systems for a number of Ford products, in addition to management’s disciplinary practices.

Fain said the two strikes show how the UAW can flex its bargaining power.

“Going out on strike is not something that any of us take lightly,” he said. “But when employers leave us no choice, our union is not afraid to act.”

Since taking office in March, Fain has taken a much more aggressive tone toward the Detroit 3 automakers as he prepares for contract negotiations this year, calling multibillion-dollar corporations the union’s “one true enemy.”

Fain on Wednesday said the UAW would not be afraid to strike the Detroit 3 if needed.

“Whether we strike or not, it’s up to the corporations,” he said. “If they give our members their fair share, we’re going to be fine. If they don’t, we’re going to do what we have to do.”

The company’s announcement comes amid skyrocketing demand for EVs. Some automakers have promised all-electric lineups within less than two decades, and the industry is accelerating production of batteries and working on more energy-dense chemistries to meet the needs of eager customers who want a longer range.

Conventional lithium ion batteries use graphite instead of lithium metal anodes, but lithium metal helps cells achieve greater energy density, and it slows decline in energy capacity. Lithium also typically comes from friendlier U.S. trade partners than graphite.

As ambitious EV goals drive growing demand, battery materials efficiencies will be a piece of the supply solution, along with more mining and recycling.

Battery-grade graphite is mostly mined in China, and the Inflation Reduction Act requires that 40 percent of the value of a battery’s critical minerals be sourced in the U.S. or a free-trade partner for the vehicle to be eligible for financial incentives.

That, combined with their increased energy density, means that “lithium metal anodes have been one of those areas of great interest to the battery and OEM community,” said Conrad Layson, a senior analyst at AutoForecast Solutions. “This process could actually accelerate, to some degree, the adoption of the next technical innovation.”

Li-Metal has been working for about a year on an anode piloting facility in Rochester, N.Y., and has produced thousands of meters of lithium metal anode material, said Jastrzebski. Late last year, the company began piloting the lithium metal production process in Markham, Ontario, where Li-Metal is based. For now, production is still in the pilot phase and in relatively small quantities.

The company is in talks with 27 automakers and battery developers, with 13 next-generation battery developers sampling materials.

Jastrzebski declined to say when Li-Metal plans to produce lithium metal using the new process commercially. He said cost savings will come from a simpler supply chain and flexibility with manufacturing facilities and processes because of the lack of noxious chlorine gas. But he acknowledged that the final product will likely not be cheaper because the cost is driven largely by raw materials prices and market dynamics.

Jastrzebski also said the company is executing engineering studies that will provide a better sense of where cost savings will come from and the road to commercial scale.

Richard Laine, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan who researches batteries, said the company must overcome scale and cost hurdles before the technology can be successful.

“If you make lithium at the gram level, everybody will say, ‘How nice’ and move on. You have to make kilograms of lithium,” said Laine. And, “we don’t know if the cost of that process is cheaper than the traditional process that’s used to date.”

General Motors appears to be moving forward with a plan to build an electric vehicle battery plant in northern Indiana.

The automaker has proposed spending $3.5 billion on what would be its fourth U.S. battery plant, according to government officials. The project outside New Carlisle, Ind., would have roughly 1,600 full-time employees by the end of 2027, at an average wage of $24 per hour, according to a development agreement filed with St. Joseph County.

County officials on Tuesday approved a development agreement and tax abatement with GM for the project. It amends an earlier agreement approved last year between the county and Ultium Cells LLC, the name of GM’s joint venture with LG Energy Solution. Talks with LG broke down over a fourth battery plant that would follow three in operation or under construction in the U.S.

GM in April formed a joint venture with South Korean battery manufacturer Samsung SDI and said the two companies planned to invest more than $3 billion to open a plant by 2026.

A GM spokesperson said the automaker has not yet decided on a location.

“Samsung SDI and General Motors are developing a competitive business case for a battery cell manufacturing plant that could be located in New Carlisle, Ind.,” GM said in a statement. “As part of that work, we submitted a tax abatement application with St. Joseph County, which was approved [Tuesday]. We appreciate the local support as the joint venture works to make a location decision.”

GM and Samsung said their plant will produce prismatic and cylindrical battery cells, which will give GM additional form factors for its upcoming EVs. The automaker said it expects to have roughly 160 gigawatt-hours of battery cell capacity in the U.S. when the plant reaches full production.

Construction of the Indiana facility — two buildings totaling 3 million square feet — would begin in the fourth quarter and finish by the end of 2027, according to the development agreement.

St. Joseph County offered to eliminate GM’s real property taxes for 10 years and personal property taxes for 15 years, though the company would pay $4.5 million annually for a decade toward infrastructure costs, according to the county.

GM has invested more than $7 billion in three Ultium Cells battery plants. The first, in Warren, Ohio, has begun production. A second plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., is expected to open this year, while a third near Lansing, Mich., is expected to open in 2024.

BMW will roll out at least four variants of the all-electric i5 midsize sedan as it expands drivetrains as part of a redesign of the eighth-generation 5 Series family.

The i5, which will compete against luxury battery-electric cars including the Mercedes EQE, was unveiled Wednesday along with a combustion engine sibling, the 2024 5 Series sedan.

The retooled sedan is 3.4 inches longer, 1.3 inches wider and 1.4 inches taller than the outgoing model, with a wheelbase increased by 0.8 inches to 117.9 inches, helping to improve seating comfort, notably in the rear, BMW said.   

The battery-electric i5 variants will be:

• The i5 M60 xDrive sedan, which will become the flagship 5 Series model with 590 hp and a 0-to-60 mph acceleration time of 3.7 seconds and 256 miles of range.
• The entry i5 eDrive40 rear-wheel-drive sedan, with 335 hp and 295 miles of range.
• An i5 station wagon to be sold in Europe.
• An all-wheel-drive i5 sedan model that will launch in 2024.

The retooled 5 Series and new i5 sedan, assembled in Dingolfing, Germany, will go on sale globally in October, BMW said.

The 5 series, dating to 1972, is a core model in BMW’s U.S. car lineup. It was the No. 2 seller, after the Lexus ES, among luxury midsize cars in 2022, with sales of 20,859, down 15 percent.

The 2024 i5 has an 84.3-kilowatt-hour battery pack and a driving range of 296 to 361 miles under Europe’s WLTP testing regime.

The charging unit in the i5 enables Level 2 AC charging up to 11 kW. When connected to a DC fast charger, the charging rate of 205 kW allows the i5 battery to be topped off to 80 percent from 10 percent in about 30 minutes. BMW said first-time owners of the i5 will receive two years of complimentary 30-minute charging sessions at Electrify America DC fast-charging locations.

The i5’s range can be also moderated by activating a new drive system function, what BMW is calling Max Range, to help alleviate range anxiety. When the car is in Max Range mode, drive power and top speed are restricted and comfort functions are adjusted to conserve battery power.

The spokesperson also declined to provide pricing for Night Series vehicles, noting that the cost will differ depending on the market and the customer’s choices for personalization. By comparison, Black Badge Rolls-Royces command a premium of roughly $45,000 over standard models, according to the company.

In an emailed statement, Gorden Wagener, the chief design officer of Mercedes-Benz, characterized the options as offering “a playful sense of rebellion” compared to what you might typically see in a brand such as Maybach, which had been seen by some as becoming bland.

Mercedes has introduced various Maybach models off and on since the Maybach 52 and Maybach 62 in 2002, but the automaker worked hardest in recent years to permanently rejuvenate the 114-year-old marque.

In 2022, Mercedes-Maybach introduced the two-tone, 18-foot (5,486mm) long S680 sedan developed by Virgil Abloh, the late head of menswear for Louis Vuitton, to much fanfare and critical acclaim.

A Mercedes-Maybach “Haute Voiture” (a play on “haute couture”) sports bouclé door panels that look like they could have come out of the Chanel atelier. The vehicle has recently started production, and all 150 units are spoken for.

The 600 will be the first Fiat model on a Stellantis platform after the merger of PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler that formed the group in 2021. 

The 600 is expected to go on sale by year-end, with a potential unveiling on July 4, according to reports in the Italian news media.

A Stellantis representative declined to comment.

Fiat has used the 600 name for two series of small cars, dating back to the rear-engine replacement for the Topolino in 1955. That version of the 600 was in production until the late 1960s, with variants that included the Multipla ultra-mini van. A second generation was launched in the late 1990s as the Seicento (Italian for 600) minicar and later renamed the 600.

The Fiat 600 will be assembled in Poland at the former FCA Tychy plant, alongside the Jeep Avenger, which was unveiled last October and for which deliveries started in April in Italy.

The e-CMP platform supports gasoline, diesel and full-electric powertrains. The Jeep Avenger is only sold as a battery electric car in most European markets, with a 1.2-liter three-cylinder gasoline engine offered only in Italy, Poland and Spain. The Fiat 600 is expected to  follow the same pattern.

A small Alfa Romeo crossover on the same platform will also be unveiled by the end of 2023 and be on sale in 2024. It will also be assembled in Tychy.

The 600 is the first entirely new model unveiled by the Italian brand since the New 500 full-electric small car in 2020. Stellantis said at an analyst conference in February that two Fiat EVs will be launched in the second half of 2023, with a second potentially being a Fiat version of the Citroen Ami quadricycle. Opel already sells a derivative of the quadricycle called the Rocks Electric. The Fiat variant could revive the Topolino name, dealer sources told Automotive News Europe last year.

With few new products in the past decade, Fiat’s European market share has been declining sharply. First-quarter sales were up 7.5 percent to 103,312, according to industry group ACEA. However, the market as a whole grew by 18 percent, and Fiat’s share fell to 3.2 percent from 3.5 percent in the same period in 2022.