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Aug. 27, 2025 | U.S. Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Part 1; AN 100th birthday
Aug. 27, 2025 | U.S. Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Part 1; AN 100th birthday
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About this episode
Abdul El-Sayed, a U.S. Senate candidate and former medical executive, discusses his vision for revitalizing the American auto industry, emphasizing targeted tariff policies to combat the negative impacts of NAFTA. He critiques the current administration's chaotic approach to tariffs and advocates for strategic investments in growth industries, particularly in automotive manufacturing. The episode also highlights significant moments from Automotive News' 100-year history, featuring insights from industry veterans about influential figures like Sergio Marchionne and Lee Iacocca.
Topics:
tariff policy
NAFTA impact
automotive industry growth
Sergio Marchionne
Lee Iacocca
financial incentives
EV manufacturing
smart technology features
Automotive News history
Cars:
Ford Mustang
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, talks about his vision for a stronger American auto industry. Stellantis pays $190 million in U.S. fuel economy penalties. Plus, Automotive News journalists celebrate the publication’s 100th birthday with stories of some of the most influential figures they have covered in the industry.
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Welcome to Daily Drive for Wednesday, August 27th, 2025.
I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.
Today on the show, Stellantis pays $190 million in U.S. fuel economy penalties, Mitsubishi slashes
its profit forecast of mid-tariffs, and a new poll finds customers are embracing smart
tech features.
Plus, U.S. Senate candidate Abdullah El-Sayed joins the show to talk about his vision
for a stronger American auto industry and why he, as a medical doctor, likens tariff
policy to treating cancer.
If you think about NAFTA as cancer, then a doctor will tell you that you need chemotherapy.
But every doctor will also tell you that chemotherapy is poison, but you're trying to kill the
tumor instead of killing the human being.
Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.
Stellantis paid more than $190 million in penalties this year for not meeting U.S.
fuel economy requirements.
That's according to a government report, which Reuters confirmed with the automaker.
In an annual report, NHTSA said Stellantis paid more than $112 million in June and over
$78 million in March in payments for shortfalls from the 2019 and 2020 model years.
Last month, NHTSA told automakers they faced no fines for failures to meet fuel efficiency
rules dating back to the 2022 model year under a new law signed by President Donald Trump.
Stellantis declined to comment, other than to confirm the report.
Import Relying Mitsubishi is getting slammed by tariffs in the U.S. market.
Now it's slashing its fiscal year profit outlook.
Mitsubishi lowered its sales outlook in almost every global market today, saying international
brands are shifting their focus to regions outside the U.S. to offset the tariff pain.
Under its revised outlook, Mitsubishi expects operating profit to plunge 50% in the fiscal
year.
It had originally envisioned a 29% decline.
And smart technology features are starting to have a positive impact on the way consumers
view a vehicle.
That's according to a new poll by JD Power.
All of these features ranked in the top 10 of JD Power's 2025 U.S. tech experience index
study for low problems experienced and high satisfaction.
They include smart ignition, climate control, and driver preferences.
And those are today's headlines.
You can find more details on all those stories at AutoNews.com.
Today is automotive news' 100th birthday.
To help celebrate, our own Hannah Lutz and myself hosted a live stream with several reporters
who wrote stories for our Centennial series.
In this clip, we'll hear from Michael Martinez and Larry Veliquette about some of the executives
they've covered that have had an outsized impact on the industry.
Here's a piece of that conversation.
Easily the smartest man I have ever spoken to in my life.
When I interviewed Edward Teller when I was younger, but Sergio Marchione, easily the smartest
guy I ever talked to, interviewing him was like playing four level chess and losing.
You knew that no matter what, he was going to win.
I would try to come up with creative questions.
But he just commanded an audience of reporters.
And it was a spectacle every time that we got to interview him.
But he holds a special place in my heart, I think for a couple of reasons.
I talked about the bankruptcy, I'm getting a little emotional about this.
He saw value in Chrysler when no one else did.
They shopped Chrysler before the bankruptcy.
They shopped Chrysler to every automaker in the world and got turned down.
And the only one guy picked it up and said, yeah, we can use this.
And that was Sergio with fiat of all companies, right?
Small little Italian automaker that said, yeah, we can do this.
And you look at all those tens of thousands of employees across the world who benefited
and are still working today and all those Jeeps that are still running today because
of that one guy in the vision that he had.
He was an interesting character and, you know, he had our challenges with Sergio
as did every regulator that he ever dealt with.
But he was absolutely brilliant.
And, you know, he talked about the Centennial Book.
I wrote a column about Sergio about two covers.
One was Michael tells some fun.
It can tell some funny stories about.
We interviewed Jason, former publisher Jason Stein and former managing editor
Rick Johnson and I interviewed Sergio for about two and a half hours on August
15th, 2015.
And it was absolutely the best interview any of us had ever done.
And it it blew up.
Mike was at the Detroit News then with our former colleague, Mike Whalen.
And Mike Whalen talked about being on the plane on a plane just about to take off
when the news of all this Sergio news broke.
It was it was fantastic for me.
Mike, Mike Whalen, not so much.
For me with him on the plane, I had to sort of pick up some slack there.
So thanks a lot, buddy.
Yeah, no problem.
That's great. It's nice to hear kind of two sides of a person with Sergio.
So brilliant, even though, you know, we we face challenges in covering the company.
Sometimes it was a real big impact on the industry.
Challenges in covering the company was that's that's a good way to put it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I have one more.
And this this is this is cheating a little bit because Larry or I didn't cover him.
But I don't think you can have a segment like this talking about
impact on the industry without mentioning Leia Coca impact for two of the Detroit three,
really, one of the fathers of the Ford Mustang.
And Larry mentioned the bankruptcies in the late 2000s.
He helped Chrysler avoid a bankruptcy in 1980 in the early 80s
with his cost cutting initiatives and the union accepting concessions at the time.
Also, the father of the minivan while at Chrysler, right.
So he was also sort of big in pop culture
and extending beyond the automotive industry.
There was a Gallup poll, I think, in the mid 80s that said,
who's somebody that you admire the most?
And the top three responses were Pope John Paul II,
Ronald Reagan and Leia Coca number three.
The next year, he was number two behind only the Pope.
So it shows you how some of these people that we've interacted with again,
extend well beyond the auto industry.
He was a tremendous salesman, a tremendous business mind.
And, you know, while Larry or I didn't cover him, Hannah,
somebody at Automotive News certainly did.
And I think we have something fun about that.
Yeah, that is cool.
Something to be proud of.
And, you know, speaking of Leia Coca, Keith Crane recently shared a story
about Ford's firing of Iacocca in 1978.
Mr. Crane is chairman of Crane Communications and became publisher
and editor-in-chief of Automotive News when Crane purchased Automotive News in 1971.
So in 1978, Iacocca, Ford's president at the time, was fired.
And in a clip that will play, Mr. Crane shares how automotive news broke that story.
This was before the Internet.
He called the Iacocca household just as Leia Coca was coming home from work.
Automotive News knew about his bad day before even his wife did.
So Keith Crane got Iacocca on the phone and he confirmed that he got fired.
It was a Thursday night, so not ideal for our print deadlines even back then.
So the Automotive News editors put the story on the news wire.
And as Mr. Crane says, it went around the world and it put Automotive News on the map.
So Jake, let's hear that clip.
We ran the story and first the people in Detroit got the story.
And then the people in New York got the story.
And then the people in Europe got the story.
And then the people in Japan.
And it kept going all the way around until everybody had covered the story.
We then ran a second story that the world confirms the Automotive News story.
So we got it twice.
And it was indeed a big deal.
Now, there were a lot of other big deals, I think, but none came close to that.
And that's such a big moment for Automotive News and one of so many pivotal
industry moments that we've covered.
Yeah, definitely.
Thanks to Mike and to Larry for bringing up Iacocca and talking
automakers with us.
We'll see you guys next time.
Thank you.
Thanks, Hannah.
Thanks, Kel.
If you missed today's live stream, you can still catch the full
recording on the Automotive News LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube page.
Coming up, US Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed joins the show to talk
about his ideas for bolstering the US auto industry.
That's next on Daily Drive.
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Welcome back to Daily Drive.
I'm Kellan Walker.
Earlier this month, we started a series of interviews on the show
with candidates hoping to win Michigan's open U.S.
Senate seat with the retirement of Democrat Gary Peters.
The race is a critical one for control of the Senate,
as well as how the federal government will address issues
that are particularly important for the U.S. auto industry.
On our August 11th episode, we spoke with current U.S.
Representative Haley Stevens, a Democrat from Michigan.
If you missed that episode, make sure to listen.
Today, we'll hear from one of Stevens's primary opponents.
Dr. Abdul El Sayed is a physician and a progressive Democrat from Ann Arbor.
He served in top medical executive roles for the city of Detroit and Wayne County.
He recently spoke with our own Molly Boygon.
Here's the first part of their conversation.
Dr. Abdul El Sayed, thank you so much for joining us on Daily Drive.
It's an honor to be here, first-time caller, but long-time listener.
Great to have you on.
So you grew up in the Detroit area and were raised by two automotive engineers.
And you've said that you saw firsthand how NAFTA destroyed towns in Michigan
and you've also called for a more targeted tariff policy than the Trump administrations.
You've compared that more targeted approach to chemotherapy.
I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about when you talk
about targeted tariffs, are you talking about targeting them by country, by good?
Yeah, just explain a little bit more about what your ideal tariff policy might look like.
Yeah, Molly. Well, first, I have to say that my family would not have come to America,
certainly when I have come to Detroit, but for the automotive industry.
My father worked many long years at GM helping to design some of their flagship automobiles.
And my mom was a manufacturing engineer.
She currently is the president of SAE.
So automotive engineering is something that runs in my blood.
I was a bit of an outcast.
I went into medicine and so forgive me the medical analogy.
But if you think about NAFTA as cancer, then a doctor will tell you that you need chemotherapy.
But every doctor will also tell you that chemotherapy is poison,
but you're trying to kill the tumor instead of killing the human being.
Because if you don't, then the human being dies of the cancer.
So you've got to be very, very targeted, very, very specific and very good at communicating
with your patient when and how you are going to transmit this chemotherapy.
And the thing about it is that, you know, when it comes to the Trump administration,
as is always the case, anything that he does, even if it's a decent idea,
ends up being chaotic, ham-handed and self-interested.
And that's exactly what we've seen.
I think we've had what, like the third liberation day already.
I don't know when we're all going to be liberated enough.
But the way that you would do tariffs if you were serious about addressing the cancer of NAFTA
is that you would target them around growth industries,
and in our case, of course, around heavy manufacturing like automotive.
And that means that you would make some really smart investments in companies,
whether they're legacy companies or companies of the future.
You could imagine, for example, the future of batteries being built right here in Michigan.
And you would take a bet on the fact that we have both the best brains
and the best manufacturing talent in the world.
Now, when you did this, though, you would be very, very clear with your trading partners
about why and how you're tariffing, and you would build tariffs specifically
around protecting those industries that are growth industries of the future.
You would also be very specific about what the benchmarks are
for when those tariffs would lift as you want your products
to be able to compete on the global scale.
Because, of course, because, of course, as we're all learning right now,
any tariff policy is going to come with reciprocal tariffs.
And so you've got to be really smart about the communication you have with trading partners.
That would be a much smarter strategy that would allow you to grow a particular industry,
grow the jobs that come with it, and do so in a way where you're not disrupting
all kinds of other trade.
And that's what I think would work, but that's not what we're getting.
We're getting tariffs by country that seem randomly set as somebody turned a globe
and pointed a country and then picked a particular number and said,
okay, there it is.
And I don't know how this is actually going to make us any more prosperous or certainly
improve the quality of the opportunities that our industries and certainly our workers have.
When you talk about protecting a growth industry,
so much of this tariff conversation has relied on fear about increasing competition from China.
And obviously, the auto industry is talking about that acutely as well.
What sort of policy decisions do you think would help
protect domestic automakers in the global market as Chinese automakers are projected
to increasingly gain market share?
Yeah, I want to be clear.
China has not been a fair trading partner in the least.
They wantonly violate any sort of intellectual property protections.
They don't play fair on the global rate.
They will pump huge amounts of money into their industries and then drop the global price
of a good to try and get market dominance.
We're seeing them do exactly this with the automotive industry.
But to me, I think we bet on our strengths.
I think we bet on the fact that we have the best workers in the world
and we bet on the fact that we have the best minds in the world.
But that's not what the Trump administration is doing.
What the Trump administration is doing is they are retreating from the effort
to be able to compete globally.
I think instead of retreating from that effort,
I think we need to be investing in our ability to compete with anyone,
anywhere in particular when it comes to our strength,
which is manufacturing and particularly when it comes to auto.
But I'll say this too often.
It's been the financial incentives that face the automotive industry
that have led them to make decisions that are more interested
in their short-term quarterly stock price
and whether or not they can return to stockholders
in the forms of stock buybacks than they have been in thinking long term
about our ability to compete on the global market.
And the Trump administration, so cozy with those executives,
is more interested in what's going to curry favor with them
than they are in the future of the industry.
So look, I think when it comes to this,
I do think that we need to play hard and I think we need to play smart.
I think instead of disinvesting in things like the NSF,
disinvesting in research and development,
building a immigration system that is turning more people away
who have great ideas and the opportunity to build them,
people like my own parents.
I think we should be really investing in saying,
this is the best single place to build the future of automotive.
We are going to pivot and invest in our industry
in some really, really smart and targeted ways.
And I think we are going to do exactly what it is that China has done,
which is we are going to pump financial support into the industry
and we are going to push the best automobiles in the world
out onto the global market.
That's not what's happening right now.
And I worry that this retrenchment,
the consequences of it are going to last for a decade and decades more.
And I worry what the consequences of the long term are going to be.
At the same time though,
I think we've got to get the financial incentives right.
I think too often the fact that you've got stockbrokers on Wall Street
who are making decisions that are shaping the future of the automotive industry.
I think that's been a real problem.
It's been a real problem since the 90s
when my dad watched as GM pulled down a lot of their engineering workforce
and invested in their financial workforce.
And when a car company does that, it spells bad news.
And we saw the consequences of that in the late 2000s.
And so I think we also need some real investment
in the kind of regulation that recognizes
that auto is a huge important industry for the future.
And no, you cannot make decisions focused on a quarterly bottom line
and what's going to do your stock price.
You are a mission critical industry for our future
and you have to invest with the long-term in mind.
And I think that means some real financial regulation at the very top
in the ways that I think we should be seeing for corporations across our country.
When you talk about the auto industry being focused on
short-term gains rather than a long-term strategy,
what are you talking about in more recent history?
I know you mentioned in the past, but what do you mean by that in the current day?
So 2017-2018, Ford decides to cut 10% or announce a cut of 10% of their global workforce.
Why? Not because Ford wasn't financially sustainable,
not because Ford wasn't making 15% on the top of every car that they sold,
but because they were worried about an overall trend toward automation
and because the stock system, some stock broker on Wall Street who researches the stock said,
well, if you're seeing reductions in global workforces among other automotive manufacturers,
then clearly Ford isn't keeping up with the Joneses.
And the system of financialization that we live under
basically means that you're competing on stock price with the projection of how
much money your stock price will make if somebody buys it today
and then sells it in the future.
And so Ford ended up making some really terrible decisions about firing its workforce
rather than investing in its workforce, not because of their overall profitability,
but because of what Wall Street said about their potential for their stock price in the future.
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
And you see those kinds of incentives play out in our economy overall,
and you see them play out disastrously because folks are more focused on what
some stock broker thinks about the future profitability of their stock price
next quarter than the future profitability of their industry overall next decade.
Do you think that the industry pullback on EV technology and EV manufacturing
is that type of short-sighted decision?
I think we should be doing a lot more of everything,
like the idea that you're going to pull back on anything is a problem.
And when we talk about China dumping artificially low-cost automotive
vehicles out onto the market, we're talking about EVs.
And so if demand is for EVs globally, for our big three to be able to compete globally,
we're going to have to make the automotive vehicles that people are demanding.
So the kind of cars that people are trying to buy on the market.
And so I think what we need to do is make sure that we're continuing
to make the best combustion engines in the world for folks who want that.
But pulling back on EVs, that doesn't make sense to me.
I want us making more cars and selling more cars rather than pulling back
on certain kinds of cars because we are trying to signal some sort of retreat.
At the end of the day, I think it's just really important to see
where the industry is headed and where the demand is headed
and to beat our competitors there rather than to try and protect what we've got left
and then wonder why we have not kept up when it comes to the tech two decades from now.
And so what I'm thinking about is the auto worker today
who's making the best vehicles in the world.
And I'm also thinking about two generations from now
and the auto workers that ought to be there building the best cars of the future
in the future, too.
And that means rather than retrenching on where the demand is,
it means following the demand and doubling down on that.
So we can walk in chew gum for the United States of America, right?
And I've never once seen us take a bet on our workers that hasn't panned out.
I think we've got to take a bet on our workers,
take a bet on our engineers and let them build that future
while we're also building the incredible legacy vehicles
that we've built for a long time.
U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed spoke with her own Molly Boygon.
You can hear the rest of their conversation on this week's bonus episode of Daily Drive.
That will be available Sunday morning.
We'll also hear from another primary candidate,
Mallory McMorrow, on the show next week.
That's Daily Drive for today.
I'm Kellyn Walker.
Thanks to automotive news executive producer Jake Nier
as well as our own Hans Grimel and Riley Hotter
for their reporting for today's podcast.
You can get the latest news on government regulation,
trade and tariffs, and everything happening in the auto industry at autonews.com.
Come back tomorrow for a conversation with AAA's Greg Brannon
about why traffic jam tech struggles in real-world congestion.
Every 3.2 miles or about every nine minutes,
there was some type of event that the driver had to intervene
and take full control of the system.
And 85% of the time they had to do that and try to avoid a crash.
We'd love to hear from you.
Let us know what you think of the show and the topics we covered today.
Send us an email at dailydrive at autonews.com
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