AD #3872 - Jeep Re-Prices As Sales Drop; Traffic Fatalities Up, Even With All That ADAS; Lack of Hybrid Hurts Nissan Rogue

Speaker 1: This is Autoline Daily, the show dedicated to all of you enthusiasts of the global automotive industry shots out for the rest of the week, and so I'm filling in. Say,

could we be headed into an oil glut? The oil

industry is sure worried about it. The IEA, or International

Energy Agency, says there will be a surplus of oil later this year if OPEC goes ahead with planned production increases, and the main cause is a drop in demand because of the slowdown in the Chinese economy. China is now

the world's largest importer of oil. Crude oil prices are

down twelve percent this year, even though a war involving Iran could break out in the Middle East. One thing's

for sure. While the oil industry is worried about a glut,

motorists at the pump will rejoice if it brings down prices.

Do you remember those reports about front suspension failures on Tesla Model x's and Model s's NITSA. The National Highway

Traffic Safety Administration launched a preliminary investigation into the defect because it could potentially be a safety problem, but yesterday the agency closed that investigation, saying the defect never prevented drivers from being able to control their vehicles, so it was not a safety defect. It also closed down an

investigation into lead acid battery fires in Toyota raft fours.

The battery supposedly shorted out when they came in contact with the whold down frame that keeps the battery in place, but Nitza found that the fires were caused by after market batteries that were too big or from old batteries that exceeded their expected life, so again no defect. We

point to these cases because maybe it's time for the agency to reevaluate its priorities and strategy. Despite all kinds

of safety equipment mandated on cars, the number of fatalities and the fatality rate involving motor vehicles is trending up.

The fatality rate, which measures the number of people killed in vehicle accidents for every one hundred million miles driven, peaked in the early nineteen seventies and then started a long term downwards trend. It bottomed out around twenty eleven,

which is the same year that electronic stability control was made standard, and then it started trending upwards. Since then,

we've seen blind spot detection, lane keeping, automated emergency braking, and other ad as tech added to cars, and yet the number of people killed and the fatality rate are going up. The fatality rate is the most important to

watch because it accounts for any increase in the number of drivers and vehicles. No one seems to be sure

why the rate is going up, but we strongly suspect that driver distraction is a major call print and that's why Nitzhe should reevaluate what it should be doing. And

we think it's time to put a major effort into mandating V to V technology, which can make it almost impossible for cars to crash into each other. You know,

good news here for people looking for a used car because prices continued to decline. According to Edmunds, used car

prices in the second quarter dipped nearly seven percent to about twenty seven four hundred dollars on average compared to last year. But used EV prices are coming down even faster,

with values plunging over twenty percent in the second quarter to about thirty three thousand, eight hundred dollars. Edmund says

used DV prices are falling faster because automakers are cutting prices and boosting incentives to increase sales of new evs, which have cooled off, and because of that it's hurting owners looking to trade in or sell they're used EV and over in Europe, low EV resale values are hurting leasing companies. According to data from Auto Vista, resale values

for BEVs in Germany are twenty four percent below pre pandemic levels and thirty percent lower in the UK. Meanwhile,

used ice vehicles only saw their values drop about fifteen percent as a result. Hertz says it lost one hundred

and fifty million dollars selling close to twenty thousand BEVs, and the rental company six says lower residual shore BEVs cut its twenty twenty three earnings by forty four million dollars, and leasing companies have been forced to raise costs for customers.

According to the Center for Automotive Research, in August of twenty twenty one, a lease for a forty five thousand EUROEV cost about two hundred and eighty four dollars a month.

Now that's more than doubled to six hundred and twenty one euros a month. So leasing companies are calling on

governments to slow the transition to evs until car buyers are more accepting of them. You know, Alex Partners found

that Chinese automakers and suppliers have a thirty five percent cost advantage compared to everyone else. That's a key reason

why Chinese vehicle exports are booming. But it goes beyond exports.

The Chinese auto industry, who's building factories all around the world and could take over one third of the global market by the end of the decade. If you're a

legacy automaker supplier, how do you compete with that. We'll

tune in this afternoon to Autoline after Hours, when we will have Mark Wakefield from Alex Partners on the show.

Keith Noughton from Bloomberg will also join us. But we're

not going to get into a lot of hand ringing.

We're going to be talking about solutions and strategies, and we are going to turn Autoline after Hours into a forum of how to compete.

Speaker 2: Nothing wrong with heavy metal, hey light enough, but with world class composit material taging automotive technologies makes vehicles lighter, safer, and more eco friendly.

Speaker 1: Polestar is producing vehicles in the United States for the first time. It started production of the Polestar three SEV

in South Carolina at its plant that it shares with Volvo, and it will also export them to Europe to avoid the eused new tariff on Chinese made evs. Up to now,

Polestars were all made in China. Next year, Pollstar will

continue to expand its manufacturing footprint outside of China because the Polestar four will actually be made in South Korea.

Besides making cars in the US, Polestar is planning to expand its retail network by adding twenty more stores to its twenty seven dealer network in the United States by the end of twenty twenty five. That's a seventy five

percent increase. Currently it only sells the Polestar two in

the US, which saw a forty one percent slump in sales in the first half of the year. But with

the Polestar three sales beginning this month and the Pollstar four entering the market at the end of the year, Pollstar says it's ready to expand its sales network. Jeep

sales in the US market are going from bad to worse.

They fell nineteen percent in the second quarter, and Jeep knows what One of its biggest problems are its products are just too expensive, so it's starting to reprice its lineup, starting with the twenty twenty five Compass. The base price

of a Compass Sport is now twenty seven thousand, four hundred and ninety five dollars, and that includes destination. That's

about two thousand, five hundred dollars cheaper than it was before.

That includes all wheel drive and an all new interior.

The Latitude model gets a three thousand, seven hundred and twenty five dollars haircut and now starts at just under thirty grand. It also gets heated seats, a heated steering wheel,

and remote start as standard equipment. We fully expect to

see Jeep reprice more of its vehicles. Sales have fallen

sharply all across the line except for the Wagon ear and the Grand Wagoneer, and Nissan is also really struggling in the US market. The Rogue is one of the

most important vehicles in its lineup, accounting for a third of its sales and half of the production at its plant in Tennessee. But despite updating the model earlier this year,

sales of the Rogue fell four and a half percent in the first half. More alarmingly, the decline accelerated in

the second quarter, with sales dropping twenty nine percent to just over fifty thousand units. Meanwhile, its competitors, the Toyota

Raft four and the Honda CRV, saw first half sales increas thirty three percent and twenty percent, respectively. The lack

of a hybrid option is a big reason why the Rogue is losing ground to those models. Get this, just

the hybrid versions of the Red four outsold the Rogue by twenty five percent, and Edmunds estimates that the CRV hybrid nearly matched the Rogue in Q two sales. Hey,

what do you do if you're a battery maker and suddenly realize that EV demand is not as high as you thought it would be. Why you look for new

markets that need your batteries. That's what you do, and

that's exactly what's happening. Bloomberg reports that battery makers are

turning to the stationary storage market, where utilities, commercial businesses, and even homes are using batteries to store electricity for later use. In fact, in China, the market for storage

batteries is now bigger than the one for consumer electronics.

Tesla is even seeing a big jump in its battery storage business even as it's our sales drop. You know,

it's like the old saying goes as one door slam shut, another one pops open, and that brings us to the end of today's report. Thanks for watching, and if you

have not done so already, please subscribe to this channel. Thanks.

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Tesla Model Xs

Tesla Model

Polestar 1 Polestar

Jeep Compass

Nissan Rogue

Jeep Grand Wagoneer

Honda Crv

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