AD #3592 - BMW M Declares DCTs Are Dead; Buick EV Starts at $26,500 in China; Rivian Holds Parking Lot Sale

This is Autoline Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry.

The story of former Nissan CEO Carlos Goan still has a few chapters left in it. He's now suing the automaker for more than a billion dollars,

accusing Nissan, to other companies and twelve individuals of defamation, slander, libel, and fabrication of evidence. The lawsuit was filed in Lebanon and a court

data is set for September. Nissan will not say anything about it, but

here's how it all started. Goen was arrested in Japan in twenty eighteen after

he was accused by Nissan of underreporting his earnings and misappropriating company money. Goen

denied any wrongdoing and famously escape from Japan in twenty nineteen by hiding in a box and flying to Lebanon, which has a no extradition treaty with Japan.

Renault is getting ready to spin off Ampier, it's dedicated EV and software subsidiary, in the second half of this year, and it just picked the guy that's going to be in charge of the ten thousand people who will work there, and it didn't have to go far to find him. Renault CEO Luca

de Mayo will leave the new division and he will stay on as CEO of Renault at the same time. That's different than Ford's approach of bringing in Silicon

Valley types to run its Model E division. Renault says it already has eighty

percent of the investments it needs for Ampier and expects to break even on its operating profit and generate free cash flow by twenty twenty five. It's targeting double

digit profit margins by the end of the decade. It's also targeting a forty

percent cost reduction with its next generation of vehicles around twenty twenty seven, and it also wants to be able to kick out a vehicle from one of its factories in under ten hours. But for comparison, Tesla can make a Model

Y in China right now in about two and a half hours. The DCT

is dead, and that's according to BMW. The head of development at BMW's

M division says the new eight speed torque converter units it buys from z Our quote better performing than the double clutch transmissions and no new performance BMW's will have a DCT. They will now only get a manual or traditional automatic, and

unfortunately the days of shifting your own gears in a BMW are dying too.

The same m exec says he's not sure if BMW will keep offering manual transmissions in the future, and that future could only be six or seven years away, and to me, a BMW you without a manual feels like the end of an Era Buix. Second, all tim based EV is going on sale

in China. The Electra E four is basically a fastback version of the Electra

E five suv, and we've shown both on this channel before. The base

E four is front wheel drive and features a one hundred and eighty kilowatt or two hundred and forty one horsepower electric motor and a sixty five kilowatt hour battery pack that provides up to five hundred and thirty kilometers or three hundred and twenty nine miles of range. Interestingly, the base pack in the E five is

sixty eight kilowatt hours, and there's no mention of the E four using an altium battery in the press release, which makes us wonder if it could come from another supplier like c ATL. There will also be an all wheel drive

version that has two hundred and eleven kilowatts or two hundred and eighty two horse power, and will have up to six hundred and twenty kilometers or three hundred and eighty five miles of range. Buick didn't provide a size for the bigger

battery in the E four, but the one in the E five is nearly eighty kilowatt hours. Other highlights include a large digital display and super Cruise hands

free driving technology. Starting prices for the Electric E four range between roughly twenty

six thousand, five hundred and thirty six thousand dollars. We want to know

what drives you're testing. OTA Connected Car Diagnostics, Remote Testing Intrepid Control Systems

is here to help you work from anywhere. Intrepid Control Systems driven by your

data. Demand for Rivians R one t electric pickup is cooling off, so

it took a unique approach to try and get rid of excess inventory. It's

a direct sales model, but in a completely different way. It held a

one day event last weekend in the parking lot of its assembly plan to Normal Illinois to sell trucks directly to customers. It sold four motor versions of the

pickup with the largest battery pack, which start at eighty seven thousand dollars, and if they decided to purchase one, customers drove them home that day.

While sales of the R one T have dropped, demand for its R one SSUV is strong, with customers having to wait a year and a half for delivery. Hyundai is really ramping up its investment in evs. It's going to

spend about eighty five billion dollars over the next decade to develop evs, including almost seven point four billion to develop LFP, NMC and solid state batteries.

It's coming out with an all new, clean sheet EV platform to build thirteen different models for Hyundai, Kia and Genesis, ranging from small and large SUVs to pick up trucks and flagship models for Genesis. That platform, called Integrated

Modular Architecture or IMA, will use common modules to achieve a higher economy of scale, which kind of sounds like GM's all team platform approach. Hunday will

make some of those evs in existing plants alongside ice vehicles, and will also build dedicated EV assembly plants. It plans to sell two million Hunday evs a

year globally by twenty thirty, which would account for thirty four percent of its sales, and it's also targeting a ten percent profit margin on those vehicles.

Meanwhile, while Hunday is ramping up its EV efforts, General Motors is pouring nine hundred and twenty million dollars into adding heavy duty diesel production. GM will

add over a million square feet towards DMAX engine component plan in Brookville, Ohio.

D Max was a joint venture between GM and Asuzu to make diesel parts, but it's now fully owned by GM, and with this expansion, the plant is likely to start making diesels, not just components, though GM did not announce any details on that. While the light duty part of the automotive

market will likely go electric, the heavy duty segment will likely rely on diesels for many years to come. Two years ago, Stillantis and Fox conformed a

joint venture to develop next gen infotainment, telematics, and cloud service platforms, and now they're forming another joint venture, this time to develop and make semiconductors called Silicon Auto. The JV will supply chips to Stillantis and other automakers starting

in twenty twenty six, and it will be headquartered in the Netherlands. Stillantis

will use the chips for its new electronic and software architecture called Stella Brain.

Stellantis is officially headquartered in the Netherlands, and the Dutch dominate the global market for the machines that make the chips. And what do you do about the

EV revolution If you're a legacy supplier with deep roots in internal combustion technology, well, if you're Borg Warner, you get with the program. It's spinning

off its business unit called Finia, which makes things like fuel injectors and fuel pumps, and it's buying the business unit from an Italian company called Eldor that makes components for evs, including onboard chargers, DC to DC converters and integrated high voltage boxes. And last year it bought Rombus, which makes DC fast

chargers, and Borg also makes battery systems. This legacy supplier, which was

founded in nineteen twenty eight and can trace its roots back to nineteen oh one, still makes icy components like turbos and electric superchargers, but it seems to be doing a good job of getting ready for the transition to electric vehicles.

And wow, do we got a great Autoline After Hours Coming up on Thursday, we'll have the CEO of Caresoft on the show. They tear down vehicles

for benchmarking and the insights they have on how Tesla does things compared to legacy automakers might just shock you. And that's the end of today's show. Thanks

for joining us. Autoline Daily is brought to you by Bridgestone Solutions for your

Journey, Intrepid Control Systems over the year, Engineering boost your game, and by Scheffler We Pioneer Motion. At Scheffler We Pioneer Motion electrifying mobility, manufacturing

smarter, reducing CO two emissions, making energy production clean. Scheffler Pioneer's Motion

to advance how the world moves

AD #3592 - BMW M Declares DCTs Are Dead; Buick EV Starts at $26,500 in China; Rivian Holds Parking Lot Sale

Ford Escape

About this episode

Original notes