AD #3620 - Toyota Considers Corolla Pickup; UAW Demands 46% Pay Raise; Mercedes Goes With Geely Powertrain

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

The UAW Sean Fain is making contract demands that gm Ford and Stellantis have never seen before. He wants a thirty two hour work week, full pensions,

cost of living allowances, and a forty six percent pay raise over the four years of the next contract, just to name a few of his demands.

But it's a smart negotiating strategy. He's putting everything on the table so

he has as many bargaining chips as possible. But it could also put the

Detroit three at a competitive disadvantage. Each one of the automakers spends over six

billion dollars a year on UAW labor. If the union got everything that it

wanted, it would likely push that to over ten billion dollars a year per company. And if they're not cost competitive with non union automo makers, they

could end up losing sales and market share that would then threaten those UAW jobs.

Yesterday we reported on the progress that Nicola is making. Today we learn

that it's getting a new CEO. Michael Loescheller is stepping down as president and

CEO immediately due to a family health matter and we'll be returning to Europe.

He'll stay on as an advisor until the end of September, replacing him as Steve Gersky, who's been the chairman of Nicola's board since twenty twenty and previously held a number of positions at General Motors. Before he went to GM,

Gursky was one of the top auto analysts on Wall Street and eve startup Rivian is adding a board member with tons of automotive experience. John Kraftchek, who

was most recently the CEO of Weimo, will take a seat in the boardroom.

He was also the CEO at Honda Motor America and served as president of Truecar after that. Before that, he worked in product development at Ford and

he was a key researcher at MIT who worked on the book The Machine That Changed the World, which triggered the move to lean production amongst manufacturers in the United States. We've reported on how China became the biggest exporter of vehicles this

year and now car imports to China are plunging. In twenty seventeen, China

imported nearly one point three million vehicles last year That dropped to eight hundred and eighty thousand units, and in the first half of this year it was only three hundred and thirty eight thousand, a twenty three percent drop. Part of

the reason is more automakers have moved production to China. Another is that the

government is really incentivizing evs, and just about no one exports evs to China.

Over half the imports are SUVs, and ninety percent of them are from luxury brands, which suggest that Mercedes, BMW and Audie are losing the most.

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Intrepid control systems driven by your data. Fisker is walking a fine line.

The EV startup cut its production forecast again for the year, this time by twelve thousand units to twenty to twenty three thousand vehicles. Fisker puts the

blame on a supplier that needs more time to ramp up, but it's still going to be hard to meet its updated forecast. In the second quarter,

it only made a little more than a thousand Ocean SUVs, which brought in eight hundred and twenty five thousand dollars in revenue. It lost almost eighty eight

million dollars in its operations, about the same that it lost a year ago, but that was thirty eight percent lower compared to the first quarter. Its

net loss was eighty five million dollars. And yet despite its production struggles,

Fisker is revealing and taking orders for new product, which is that fine line we were talking about. It finally showed a physical prototype of the Pair,

which will be built on an all new platform by Foxcon at the Lordstown plant in Ohio. Fisker has pushedback production from twenty twenty four until the middle of

twenty twenty five, but says it will still keep its sub thirty thousand dollar price tag. However, that's most likely with incentives. It also showed off

an off road focus version of the Ocean, a small pickup truck based on the same platform as the Ocean, and a sports car called the Ronin.

The truck, called the Alaska, is projected to have two hundred and thirty to three hundred and forty miles or three hundred and seventy to five hundred and forty seven kilometers of range come out in twenty twenty five and have a forty five thousand dollar price tag before incentives. The Ronin is a four door carbon

fiber hardtop convertible that could have six hundred miles or nine hundred and sixty five kilometers of range, over a thousand horsepower, and do zero to sixty miles an hour in roughly two seconds. These are ambitious goals for sure, but

Wall Street in general still has a positive outlook on Fisker, with its shares up more than two percent in pre market trading. Toyota wants to get into

the robotaxi business in China. Back in twenty nineteen, it formed a partnership

with Chinese self driving startup pony Ai to develop avs, and now the two of them are expanding that partnership to mass produce and deploy robotaxis in China along with Toyota's joint venture partner GAC. They'll invest one hundred and forty million dollars

into the new venture, and pony AI's av technology will be integrated into vehicles based on Toyota's EV platform. Pony Ai has already launched robotaxi services in four

cities in China, but no time frame was given on one will see the ones from Toyota and more good news from the supplier community. Yesterday we reported

strong financial earnings from active in Borg Warner, and today it's Magnus turn the giant Canadian supplier reported that its revenue shot up more than seventeen percent to ten point nine billion dollars. That's in US dollars. It made four hundred and

eighty three million dollars in its operating profits versus a loss of eighty eight million dollars a year ago, and it made a net profit of three hundred and twenty one million dollars versus last year's law of three hundred and forty one million.

Those are significant turnarounds, largely thanks to the chip shortage starting to ease up in automakers making more vehicles. Here's an interesting update on the new Mercedes

CLA that we showed you a teaser of the other day. Reports out of

Europe say that Mercedes developed the vehicle's plug in hybrid powertrain and that Geelie will produce it in China, but Gascrew reports that Geelie was involved in the development of the car and that the p have is Geelie's new generation system. Hopefully

we'll learn more when the new CLA debuts in September, but it would be a milestone in a sign of how the industry is changing if the system is Geelies. And one other thing to note about the CLA it will be available

with a number of power trains, including pure battery electric. The Ford Maverick

might be getting some competition, but will it be too late. Automotive News

reports that Toyota is considering making a Corolla based pickup truck which would be built in the US and that way it wouldn't be hit with the twenty five percent import tariff that normally gets slapped on pickups. But a vehicle like this wouldn't

be expected to hit the market until twenty twenty seven. And that brings us

to the end of today show and this week. Thanks for tuning in and

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AD #3620 - Toyota Considers Corolla Pickup; UAW Demands 46% Pay Raise; Mercedes Goes With Geely Powertrain

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