AD #3749 - Ford Won’t Create Any New UAW Jobs; Tavares Says Stella’s EVs Already Profitable; What If We Don’t Need A Hydrogen Infrastructure
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This is Outoline Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry.
Ford's Jim Farley fired a warning shot past the UAW yesterday, speaking to the investment community at Wolf Research Global Autoconference. He said Ford will now have
to think very carefully about its manufacturing footprint. Here's our own translation of what
that means. Ford builds more vehicles in the US and employees more UAW workers
than General Motors or Stalantis, and from a cost standpoint, that puts Ford at a competitive disadvantage, but from a union relationship standpoint, it's paid off handsomely, with the company avoiding UAW strikes over the last forty years. However,
that all changed last year when the union struck Ford's most profitable plants, which the company says cost it one point seven billion dollars in lost profits.
So we think that going forward, Ford will rebalance its manufacturing footprint with more production going to Mexico and Canada, and we would bet that low cost EV that Farley's been talking about is definitely not going to end up in any UAW plant. He says that any new EV that Ford comes out with has to
be profitable within twelve months. GM's Mary Barra spoke at that same conference that
Farley did, and she talked about a lot of things, but one of the things that stands out to us is that she wished GM had spent more time in planning and risk assessment before it plunged into making electric vehicles. Bara
also said that she wished he had built up GM software team earlier. Right
now, GM is running into a string of embarrassing glitches with the software in some of its evs and even some of its IC trucks. Last May,
GM hired Mike Abbott from Apple, and he brought in a team of software engineers from Google, App and Meta to change the way that GM does its software development. Barras says this will be a year of execution for GM,
both with software and electric vehicles. Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stilantis,
wasn't at that Wolf Research conference yesterday, but he did have a lot to say to investors and the media after the company released its twenty twenty three earnings.
Unlike GM and four, he says Stilantis is not cutting back on its EV investments. He says they're going full speed ahead. In fact, Tavares
claims that the ev Stalanta sells are already profitable, not as profitable as the company's icee E vehicles, he admits, but getting closer. Stillantis is only
just getting ready to sell its first evs in the US, but in Europe last year it's sold over one hundred and forty four thousand electric opals, Pougeots, Fiats and Satroans and sticking with Stillantis, it has an inventory problem in the US, as in too much of it. According to Cox Automotive,
the industry average days supply is seventy days, but Chrysler and Dodge have at least twice that, and Jeep and Ramp are also well above the average.
So to help fix it, Ward's Auto reports that Stillantis is aiming to reduce its inventory by one third through incentives and repricing some of its high volume models, and the automaker says dealers are on board with this goal. Stillantis has
already started lowering prices of models to help boot sales, and it says it plans to do so for the models that make up the majority of Jeep's volume.
Rivian teased its new R II model that's going to be unveiled on March seventh. It will open up reservations, which is a fully refundable one hundred
dollars deposit during the live stream reveal. Prior teaser images show that it will
likely be a small suv, and Rivian has said the model will cost between forty and five fifty dollars, about half of its current models. The R
two is also expected to qualify for the seventy five hundred dollars federal tax credit, which means its starting price could be as low as thirty two thousand, five hundred bucks. That's about all the details we have for now, but
we will learn more about the R two in just a few weeks. We
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Systems driven by your data. Scout Motors broke ground on its brand new plant
in the US, and we're learning more details about the company's plans, but it's probably still going to be three years before we see a production vehicle on the road. The plant in South Carolina is located near Highway's shipping ports,
as well as major cities and will produce this premium all electric off road trucks and SUVs for the VWO brand. At its peak, it will be able
to make up to two hundred thousand vehicles a year. Actual production is targeted
to start at the end of twenty twenty six, and retail sales will kick off soon after. South Korea changed up its policy for EV subsidies and it
helps out Hyundai and Kia. Part of the new requirements go after higher prices,
lowering the cap by two thousand dollars to forty one thousand bucks, but several companies, including Tesla, quickly slash prices to still qualify for some of the incentives. But South Korea also slash subsidies for evs with low performance batteries
like LFP, which are used by Tesla and BYD. The maximum incentive is
roughly four eight hundred dollars, and in some cases Hondai and Kia evs now have a cost advantage of several thousand dollars. However, if this really has
an impact on companies like Tesla and BYD, it would be naive to think that they couldn't just easily make the switch to a different battery type. Despite
the slowdown in EV demand, it's still the fastest growing segment in the US market. According to S and P, global EV registrations were up twenty three
percent in December and accounted for eight point eight percent of the overall car market.
But that growth didn't come from the top three EV brands in the US, Tesla, Ford, and Chevy. It came from other brands. Tesla
registrations were up just eleven percent in December, Ford was up thirteen percent, and Chevy was down twenty six percent because it stopped making the bolt. Meanwhile,
Hyundai's EV registrations shot up sixty two percent, Rivian was up seventy three percent, and BMW increased it's by eighty six percent. Those three brands are
now four fifth and sixth and EV registrations overall. Last year, EV registrations
in the US were up fifty two percent and accounted for seven point seven percent of the market. There's a ton of factors that determine your actual driving range
no matter what powertrain type your vehicle has, and EV makers continue to make improvements to their range calculators so that owners can more accurately gain plan their charging in addition to adding things like headwinds, crosswinds, humidity, ambient temperature, and tire pressure into its calculation, Tesla recently updated the system so it considers the age of the battery as well. The update also added a new feature
that shows how much battery preconditioning time is needed before going to a charging station, which could be a response to all those owners in Chicago who thought their cars were broken when they tried charging in below freezing temperatures without preconditioning. Hydrogen
fuel cell vehicles will never catch on until there's a hydrogen infrastructure to supply the fuel. But what if you didn't need a station on every corner on autoline
After hours Yesterday, Larry Burns, the former head of R and D at General Motors, talked about a radical new way of delivering hydrogen that doesn't need much infrastructure. Scientists have been working on new classes of material. One class
of material is called graphene, which is a very thin material with a huge surface area, and they're creating ways to put hydrogen into matrixes of these materials.
And the hydrogen doesn't chemically bond to the surface, it's held in place by these forces of how atoms interact with each other. They're called Vanderwall forces.
And it looks like we can get the same amount of hydrogen at fifty bar as we have at seven hundred bar. So that means a cartridge like
the cartridge I have under my sink to filter my water, becomes a viable way to give me hydrogen. Now, imagine if my car sitting in my
driveway and through my connectivity, Amazon knows four of my eight cartridges are empty, and they're bringing me this part from my kitchen drawer. They throw four
cartridges a hydrogen in the marginal cost of getting me my hydrogen is zero because they're coming anyhow. They swap out my empties, put in my folds,
and I'm not worrying about this one bit. And Amazon's producing the hydrogen at
their fulfillment center using scaled electrolyizers and renewable energy. Do you think Amazon would
like to sell energy? Yes? Do you think it's a breakthrough to not
have fixed infrastructure at corner gas stations or at recharging and parking structures. It's
a breakthrough, John. And by the way, when Larry talks about the
seven hundred bar of rusher used in today's hydrogen fuel tanks that translates to ten thousand psi. The fifty bar of pressure in these new graphing tanks translates to
seven hundred and twenty psi. You can catch that entire interview right now on
our website and YouTube channel, and we talked about a lot more than just hydrogen. But that brings us to the end of today's show and this week.
Thanks for tuning in, and I hope that you have a great weekend.
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