AD #3841 - Rivian Hits Paydirt With Massive VW Investment; Revealed The Last Pontiac Concept Car; CATL Flies 4-Ton Electric Plane
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This is ut Aligned Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry. In a studding move, Volkswagen agreed to invest billions into a joint
venture with Rivian, which ensures that the ev startup will have the cash that it needs to launch its R two models as well as resume construction of its new US assembly plant in Georgia. VW will immediately invest a billion dollars into
Rivian and expects to make additional investments through twenty twenty six, which could bring the total to five billion dollars. Let's just cut to the chase. VW
is essentially paying Rivian a fortune to get access to its software to find vehicle design, its zonal electronic architecture and all the software that runs on it.
It will also give Rivian enormous economies of scale with all the hardware components that are part of the system. But there are potential pits falls that lie ahead.
It will be a fifty to fifty joint venture with equal control, so no one has the final say in what they will do. That can really
slow down decision making. VW already has a deal with Japung and its caread
software unit to develop software defined vehicles and zonal architectures, but that's only for the Chinese market. The deal with Rivian will serve all of VW's brands,
including Scout, in global markets outside of China. In its announcement, Rivian
also hinted at five future products that it's never shown or mentioned before, including a derivative coming off its new Gen two platform, which you can see at the top of the second column in this graphic. There's also another derivative coming
off its MSP platform for the R two and R three, and then on the far right there are three vehicles under wraps that Rivian calls affordable mass market vehicle. We think those could have starting prices in the high twenty thousand dollars
range, and we've got to wonder how Elon Musk and Tesla will react to the Rivian news. Tesla relies on two models, the Yan three, for
ninety five percent of its sales, and those models are starting to run out of sales steam, at least in the American market. Up till now,
Tesla outsold every other automaker combined in sales of electric vehicles in the US, but this month will likely be the tipping point where Tesla's EV market share drops below fifty percent. It wouldn't matter too much if Tesla's sales were growing and
it was losing market share, But sales are not growing. Cox Automotive estimates
that Tesla's US sales fell thirteen percent in the first quarter. Tesla is still
in EV juggernaut, but these stats and the Rivian move should be sending off alarm bells at the headquarters in Austin. Last week, cyber attack that disrupted
car dealership operations across the US is going to impact dealers longer than expected.
CDK told dealers that it won't be able to restore its dealer management system before June thirtieth. The software, which is used by fifteen thousand dealers, manages
parts, service, accounting, finance and insurance, and vehicle inventory. In
the meantime, dealers have resorted to using pen and paper in some cases to keep track of everything. And yet, despite the cyber attacks, June won't
be all that bad from a sales standpoint. Cox Automotive says June car sales
in the US will be up only one percent compared to a year ago, but they're running at a healthy pace. It says sales should top one point
four million vehicles, with the SAR coming in at a healthy sixteen point two million, though for the year it expects the SAR to hit fifteen point five million. If we look at just EVS, sales in June are about on
pace with the rest of the market. Cox Automotive says EVS will have about
seven and a half percent market share, and it expects the pace to pick up in the second half of the year because so many more ev models will hit the market from companies like General Motors, Honda, Stalantis, and Volkswagen.
This is the very last concept car that Pontiac ever worked on. Revealed
on the GM Design Instagram page, the concept had never been seen publicly since it was completed in two thousand and eight. In the background of one of
the hand drawings, you can see a fuzzy G eight, which was a rear drive V eight sedan launched by the brand around the same time time that this concept was rolling out of the Advanced studio in California, so it likely would have inspired the next gen Pontiac G eight, But as most of us know, two thousand and eight was peak Great Recession, GM had financial problems and there was restructuring efforts at the company. It eventually announced that year it
would discontinue the Pontiac brand, and by twenty ten, Pontiac was gone altogether.
Earlier this month, we reported about a system GM and its Chinese joint venture partner SEIC are developing, and thanks to GASCU, here's a much better look at the robotest platform. Basically, it does the entire vehicle testing and
certification process instead of using a human, which makes the results more accurate.
All of the motors, actuators, radars, cameras, and other devices have been designed to fit into a wide range of vehicles without modifying any original structure, and all of the data is then sent to a control center. Not
only will they use the tech for their vehicles, GM and SEIC hope to sell it to other companies as well. Bentley introduced the new Continental GT Speed,
which it says is the most powerful vehicle in its lineup. Ever,
the model is ditching its W twelve engine and is now powered by a plug and hybrid setup. It consists of a four liter V eight engine and an
eight speed dual clutch transmission that are combined with a one hundred and eighty seven horse power electric motor and a twenty five point nine kilowat hour battery pack, the total output of the system is seven hundred and seventy one horse power.
It can move from zero to sixty miles per hour in three point one seconds.
It has a top speed of two hundred and eight miles per hour or three hundred and thirty five kilometers an hour, and its all electric range is fifty miles or eighty one kilometers. A convertible version is also available, but
with that extra weight it's a little slower than the coup The Continental GT also gets a significant styling update for the exterior, most notably its single front headlamps, which is the first time since the nineteen fifties that a non coach built Bentley features single headlamps. The new Continental GT Speed will be built at the
automaker's plant in England, with production and deliveries starting in the third quarter of the year. Catl the biggest battery maker in the world, is taking to
the skies. Last year, it revealed its high density condensed battery, which
it said could be used in passenger aircraft, and it's already doing tasks.
The company's chairman revealed COATL has successfully tested a four ton electric plane and expects to introduce a pack for an eight ton commercial plane by twenty twenty seven or twenty twenty eight that has twelve hundred to eighteen hundred miles or two thousand to three thousand kilometers of range. Software to find vehicles, allow automakers to provide
updates and new features with over the air updates, or an engineer with a laptop can tap into a vehicle to change almost any parameter. So join us
on auto line after hours tomorrow when ZF, a sponsor of this show, will show us how automakers can do all the chassis steering and breaking development with a laptop instead of needing crates full of different springs, bushings, brake pads, sway bars, and months of testing at the proving grounds just to sort out which works best. But that's a wrap for today's show. Thanks for
making autoline a part of your day. Autoline Daily is brought to you by
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