AD #4003 - Tomorrow Is D-Day for Trump’s Tariffs; Tesla FSD Only “OK” Say Chinese Testers; EU to Ease CO2 Regs For Automakers

Speaker 1: This is aut Aligned Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry. Automakers in Europe could be

getting their wish. The EU announced its proposing to EC

two emission regulations for automakers.

Speaker 2: The targets would remain the.

Speaker 1: Same, but companies would have a three year window to hit them, meaning they could miss the targets this year as long as they outperformed them in the next two years.

The EU is also planning on boosting support for battery makers and recommending that member countries revise tax incentives so that companies choose evs for their company cars instead of ices, and that could have a big impact since corporate fleets account for two thirds of.

Speaker 2: Europe's car market.

Speaker 1: Tomorrow is d day for President Trump's twenty five percent tariffs on cars imported from Canada and Mexico.

Speaker 2: Everyone in the industry.

Speaker 1: Is anxiously awaiting to hear if he'll really go through with it and if he'll stick to the twenty five percent rate. If Trump phases the terrace in over time,

that will make it a little less painful. But if

they hit all at once, automakers and suppliers predict it will be a disaster. Our contacts in the industry believe

that what the President really wants to do is renegotiate the US MCA free trade deal early and on terms that are even more favorable to the US. There's a

review of the treaty scheduled for July first to twenty twenty six, but the thinking is that Trump doesn't want to wait that long, and that the tariffs are a way to bring Canada and Mexico to the bargaining table sooner than that.

Speaker 2: But Honda isn't waiting to see what will happen.

Speaker 1: Reuters reports it will move production of the Civic Hybrid out of Mexico and to its assembly plant in the US in Greensburg, Indiana. Production is scheduled to start in

May of twenty twenty eight, and capacity is at for two hundred and ten thousand cars a year. Today, the

Civic Hybrid's price starts around twenty nine thousand dollars, but that's likely going up once they're made in the US.

Stalantis used to make sixty percent of its profits in North America, but in the second half of last year it lost one point eight billion dollars in the region, so chairman John Elkan decided that Stalantis needed more Americans on its board of directors. He nominated Daniel Ramott and

Alice Schroder as new board members. Ramat is the co

founder and CEO of Via, a global transportation technology company, and Schroeder is a former managing director at Morgan Stanley.

The company also proposed the reelection of five board members.

Stalantis has eleven members on its board, including one open seat for the new CEO that it's searching for.

Speaker 3: There's nothing wrong with HEV metal, hey light enough, but with world class composite material Tagent Automotive Technologies makes vehicles lighter, safer, and more eco friendly.

Speaker 1: According to testers who have now had the chance to compare the new version of FSD that Tesla just launched in China to other Chinese systems, Tesla does okay in all tests. FSD or what's called FSD Intelligent assisted driving

software in China required driver intervention, but so did some of the Chinese vehicles. However, it seemed like FSD had

a harder time deciding what lane the vehicle should be in, but that's not too surprising because Tesla still has restrictions on FSD training in China because authorities are worried about any sensitive data that might be transferred back to the US.

The automaker expects to have that resolve soon, so in order to launch the version of FSD that adjusted elon muss as, Tesla quote just used publicly available video on the Internet of roads and signs in China and use that to train the system. When the company gets approval

to train FSD in China, no doubt it will get better operating on the roads. But Tesla also needs to

expand the text availability. Right now, only Chinese customers who

paid for FSD, which now costs about eighty eight hundred bucks, can get it. Those customers go back as far as

twenty twenty two, but the update currently only works on vehicles with hardware four, which started launching last year. Speaking

of hands free driving, Maserati set a new speed record for an autonomous car running on AI software developed by Italy's largest scientific and technological university and MC twenty coup hit nearly two hundred miles an hour or about three hundred and twenty kilometers an hour at the Kennedy Space Center in the They chose that spot because it has one of the longest runways in the world at nearly three miles or roughly four and a half kilometers long,

which was originally built for NASA Space shuttle landings. Rumors

circulating in the Chinese auto industry say that Pollstar will pull out of the Chinese market. The rumors were getting

enough traction that Pollstar had to come out and publicly deny them. Even so, high level executives and staff are

reportedly clearing out of the company's technical headquarters and Nanjing.

It's also moving production of the Pollstar four to South Korea, the Polestar seven to Europe, and the Pollstar three to the US to avoid terrace on Chinese made cars, and we think that management of the company will now be concentrated almost entirely in Sweden.

Speaker 2: The Hondai Group is on a role in the US.

Speaker 1: The Hondai brand sales were up nearly three percent in February to more than sixty two thousand vehicles. Kia's sales

were up over seven percent to sixty three thousand vehicles, and Genesis sold fifty five hundred vehicles last month, which was up twenty percent.

Speaker 2: Compared to a year ago.

Speaker 1: It was the fifth straight month of record sales for Hondai and Kia, and Genesis also set a sales record in February, and speaking of Kia, the automaker's CEO says the brand needs an affordable EV in its lineup below the EV two concept that had just revealed last week.

Kia CEO says it may release a teaser of the vehicle next year, which could be called the EV one.

The EV two is expected to start around thirty thousand Euro, but Kia says it needs a more affordable model in order to reach its goal of selling one point six million evs a year by twenty thirty, and the EV's Kia will be releasing from now until the end of the decade will feature existing battery types. The Hondai Group's

head of Global product plannings as it will focus on improving LFP and NMC batteries in the near term because he doesn't believe the company can commercialize solid state batteries before twenty thirty due to the complexity of the technology.

Solid state batteries have safety, cost, weight and performance advantages compared to lithium batteries. However, producing them in volume is

very difficult. You know, we just had Bob Lee, the

head of LG Energy Solution in North America, on Auto Line after hours, and he said he didn't see any major automaker using solid state batteries in mass production until the early twenty thirties. We've got the results from our

poll that we posted last Friday. We wanted your advice

to the car companies about whether they should keep paddle shifters.

Eleven percent of you said you love them and told the automakers to keep them. Eighteen percent said you don't

use them that much, but like having them when you want them. That means a total of twenty nine percent

are in fits of keeping paddle shifters, but a clear majority fifty five percent advised the automakers to just get rid of them, and sixteen percent of you said who cares because you drive a manual transmission.

Speaker 2: And we sure got a lot of comments.

Speaker 1: Jim Richard's fourteen twenty two kind of captured what a lot of you said. Paddle shifts are like a padded dash.

You touched them on the first road test and never again.

But on the Autuline website, kit Gerhart said he used them on his C six and C seven corvettes. I'd

like to use quite a bit of throttle, but downshift only one or two gears, not four or five gears like it would do if you floor it at fifty to fifty five miles an hour. And Patrick brought up

a great point, maybe add a line for EV regen paddles.

I use them every day in my twenty nineteen Hundai iyaniic EV to adjust the regen.

Speaker 2: They were great.

Speaker 1: Wish my teslas had them. Over fifteen hundred of you

voted in the poll, and for all you product planners in the industry who watch the show, there's some really good feedback for you to take a look at.

Speaker 2: That's a wrap for today's show. Thanks for tuning in.

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AD #4003 - Tomorrow Is D-Day for Trump’s Tariffs; Tesla FSD Only “OK” Say Chinese Testers; EU to Ease CO2 Regs For Automakers

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