AD #3771 - Is This Ford's Electric Maverick?; UAW Ready to Rumble at VW; Bentley Delays EVs, Pushes PHEVs

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

The need for more affordable vehicles is causing Ford to make some key shifts.

Last month, CEO Jim Farley revealed that the automaker created a top secret skunk works program to develop an EV platform that significantly slashes cost, and Alan Clark, the person who led engineering on the Tesla Model Y, is heading up the program. According to Bloomberg, his team is less than one hundred

people and the first models will debut in late twenty twenty six, priced around twenty five thousand dollars. There's going to be a compact electric truck, in

suv and possibly another vehicle that could be used for ride hailing. The Maverick

has been a surprise hit for Ford, so a compact electric truck makes sense and in small SUVs are one of the fastest growing segments. But a ride

hailing car is a surprise, and we wonder how big Ford's plans could be.

Remember GM CEO Mary Barra thinks that crews could generate fifty billion dollars a year in revenue by twenty thirty. Jim Farley says he wants the new models

to turn a profit within the first year of hitting the market, so it'll do things like use LFP batteries, which are about thirty percent cheaper than traditional lithium batteries. With its focus on more affordable evs, Ford is delaying plans

for a price year three row electric suv. The UAW says it's ready to

rumble at Volkswagen's US assembly plant in Tennessee. The union claims that a super

majority of the plants four thousand workers signed cards saying they want to be represented by the United Auto Workers, and so it filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election there. The union lost to vote there

in twenty nineteen, when fifty two percent of the workers voted against the union.

Only sixteen hundred workers voted in that election. Now comes the tricky part

for the union. Workers will often sign a card saying they're in favor of

a union just to get organizers to stop pestering them. Then when they vote

in secret at the ballot box, they vote against the union. But this

time it could be different, and everyone in the US auto industry will be waiting with anticipation to see the results of the vote. Fisker is in serious

trouble. The company has practically run out of money. It's stopped production of

the Ocean Suv, and it says there's quote substantial doubt that it can continue without raising more capital. The company started shipping vehicles last year and built roughly

ten thousand units, but it still has about five thousand units in inventory, and we've seen reports of quality problems and other software issues. Fisker says it's

trying to raise one hundred and fifty million dollars, but we think it would need more like a billion dollars or someone to take it over to have any chance of surviving. The US Department of Energy is giving automakers a break.

It's expected to announce revised fuel economy rules today that will give car companies more time to adjust to the stricter standards. It originally proposed to lower the fuel

economy equivalency of electric vehicles by seventy two percent and twenty twenty seven, which the Detroit Automakers warned would result in fines of ten and a half billion dollars for not complying with the standards. Instead, the DOE will reduce the fuel

economy ratings through twenty thirty by sixty five percent in total. To give companies

more time to adjust, and in another win for automakers, the EPA is expected to issue revised emission rules that will soften the requirements of its original proposal.

However, the easing of the standards is front loaded, and by twenty thirty two they're expected to be as strict as the original proposals. When the

elements are working against you, being confident in your grip on the road is what really matters. Breach through the lens of tires, Improved acceleration in wet

conditions. Chinese battery maker Goshen is suing a US township in Michigan, where

it wants to build a plant. Township board members voted to prevent extending the

city's water supply to the plant's location, even though the township already entered into a contract to provide that water. A year and a half ago, the

company and state officials announced plans to build the two point four billion dollar plant, but there was local opposition to the construction due to tax incentives used for the project and concerns over Goshen's alleged ties to the Chinese government, which the company has denied. Last year, five members of the township's board who approved

the project were were called by voters and another two resigned. And it's the

new board members who are trying to prevent the plant's construction. So Goshen is

filing a lawsuit to get the township to honor the contract that was originally signed.

And Video, which makes some of the most powerful computer chips in the world and has a market cap of two point two trillion dollars, came out with a new centralized computer for cars called drive Thor, and it signed up a slew of automakers and autonomous mobility providers who want to use it. All

the automakers are Chinese buyd x, pong Le, Auto Zeker, and Hyper will begin using the Generative AI compute system when it comes out next year.

And Vidia says drive Thor is perfect for quote feature rich cockpit capabilities and highly automated and autonomous driving. It can perform one thousand terra flops of processing per

second and keep in mind that a high end gaming console has about thirteen terra flops. And if you wanted to know why Chinese automakers are on the leading

edge of technology. This is a good example, and Vidia is based in

Silicon Valley while its chips are made by TSMC and Taiwan. Bentley is tapping

the brakes on its transition to electric cars. First off, it's delaying the

sales of its first beev by two years until twenty twenty seven, which the company blames on technical difficulties with software development. Since Bentley is part of the

Volkswagen Group, that sounds like another Cariad victim to us. But Bentley is

also backtracking on its commitment to go all electric by twenty thirty and will put more emphasis on pluggin hybrids instead. But its main competitor, Rolls Royce already

has its all electric coup the Specter on sale, and Role says it's still committed to going all electric by twenty thirty. One factor in Bentley's delay is

that its sales, revenue, and profit fell last year. Sales fell eleven

percent, revenue dropped thirteen percent, and profits came in seventeen percent lower.

CEO Adrian Hallmark blamed rising interest rates. He said customers who were leasing their

cars saw the cost of their monthly payments triple Chinese evmaker Neo opened its first solar powered battery swapping station in China. The station's power modules achieve a peak

efficiency of ninety eight point two percent and a discharging power of sixty two point five kilowatts. The modules are also bidirectional, meaning that electricity can be shared

with the power grid. GM plans to significantly ramp up production of its altium

batteries and the evs that they go into. It sold fewer than thirteen thousand

altium based evs last year, but this year its planning to make two hundred to three hundred thousand examples, or twenty times more. That would be a

massive jump, but still behind previous forecasts. However, GM says that it

thinks the challenges it had in scaling up aultium is behind it, and that brings us to the end of today's show. Thanks for tuning in. Auto

Line Daily is brought to you by Bridgestone Solutions for your journey and by Intrepid Control Systems over the air engineering boost your game. We want to know what

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AD #3771 - Is This Ford's Electric Maverick?; UAW Ready to Rumble at VW; Bentley Delays EVs, Pushes PHEVs

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