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Aug. 28, 2025 | Mercedes wants a Europe tariff deal; AAA’s Greg Brannon

Automotive News Daily Drive Aug 28, 2025 19 min

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About this episode

Mercedes-Benz is pushing for reduced auto tariffs between the US and Europe, citing significant impacts on sales. A Pennsylvania dealership group has settled for $130,000 over deceptive practices. Meanwhile, AAA's Greg Bannon discusses the challenges of driver assistance systems in traffic jams, revealing that hands-off systems perform significantly better than hands-on systems. The episode features insights on the performance of these technologies and their real-world implications for drivers, making it a critical listen for those interested in automotive innovation and industry trends.

Topics: tariffs driver assistance systems unionization deceptive sales practices voice assistants automotive technology traffic jam assistance

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Welcome to Daily Drive for Thursday, August 28th, 2025.

I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.

Today on the show, Mercedes-Benz wants the US and Europe

to lower auto tariffs.

Pennsylvania dealership group settles with the state

for $130,000 after being accused of deceptive sales

and credit practices.

Employees at a Ford plant in Kentucky vote to join the UAW,

but contested ballots could change the result.

Plus, AAA recently tested several driver assistance functions

in traffic jam conditions.

Director of Automotive Research, Greg Bannon,

talks about all the problems they encountered.

The systems that allowed you to take your hands off the wheel

but maintain eye contact with the road performed

about three times better than the systems

that you had to keep your hands on the wheel.

Let's run through all the news you need to know

to keep up in the auto industry.

Mercedes-Benz wants the US and Europe to strike a deal.

Group Chief Technology Officer Marcus Schaefer told Bloomberg

that the 27.5% tariff on European vehicles

is having a serious impact.

The automakers global sales fell 9% in the second quarter.

Deliveries to the US dropped 12% and tariffs were a key factor.

Mercedes is also sorting out other impacts

of the tariff situation.

China has been withholding exports

of rare earth minerals.

Schaefer said Mercedes is sourcing its rare earth materials

from alternative suppliers.

He warned that the company cannot guarantee

that rare earths sourcing forever.

A Pennsylvania dealership group

has paid the state's attorney general $130,000

to settle accusations of deceptive sales

and credit practices.

The attorney general said dealerships owned

by the Rosado Group inflated vehicle prices

to sell more cars.

The state also said dealerships manipulated

credit applications.

The settlement was announced earlier this month.

It is not an emission of wrongdoing.

Bill Rosado is president of the Rosado Group.

He told Automotive News in an email

that the group agreed to settle

to avoid wasted time and money on a court battle.

A chunk of the settlement

will go to impacted customers.

The Rosado Group will hire a compliance officer

within 90 days.

A foreign joint venture battery plant in Kentucky

voted to unionize,

but contested ballots could change the results.

The United Auto Workers said that 41 ballots

were cast by employees not eligible to join the UAW.

Now the National Labor Relations Board

will determine whether to count the contested ballots.

The Battery Factory is jointly owned by Ford

and the South Korean company SKON.

Automakers and other industry companies

have opened manufacturing facilities

in the American South,

making the region a key battleground for the union.

And those are today's headlines.

You can find more details on all those stories

at autonews.com.

Joining me now to talk about how the auto industry

is working to improve voice assistance

is our own Molly Boygon,

who covers tech and innovation for us at Automotive News.

Molly, welcome back to Daily Drive.

Thanks for having me, Kel.

All right, friends.

So you wrote a piece this week

on why in-vehicle voice assistants are so bad.

What complaints are consumers having

with voice assistant software?

And is this more of a generational tech issue?

So the issues that are plaguing

in-vehicle voice assistants are the same ones

that are plaguing voice assistants

even outside of the vehicle.

You have vehicle voice assistants that are not responsive.

You know, you use the wake word

and or you ask a question or you give a command

and the system doesn't respond.

You have systems that respond

when you're not trying to ask them to do anything.

In some older vehicles, you have very rigid commands.

You know, you have to say,

call Kel in a very particular way with information.

And in general, the technology just hasn't really kept up

with the more advanced software offerings,

you know, through the vehicle system.

Interesting.

And what are companies doing to help solve these problems?

So it's a very interesting solution.

You used to have a set of rigid specific commands

on board the vehicle

that this is where this kind of call Kel take me home

sort of slate of commands comes from.

Then you have JNAI enter the picture

and companies are able to have you as the driver

give more advanced, more complicated commands

saying something like it's too cold in here

and having the system adjust the climate in the vehicle.

But that requires AI, which is run in the cloud.

So that requires the vehicle to have connection

to the cloud, to be able to process all of the feedback.

It's just a very data intensive process.

So you get pretty intense lag

and sometimes the driver is left sort of confused.

So the way that companies are addressing this

and this is coming to us in like sort of

the next generation of vehicle infotainment

is by running smaller, large language models

that are called small or tiny, large language models

onboard the vehicle with the industry calls at the edge.

So that you have for the most use function

stuff like navigation or making calls or playing music,

you can access, use more flexible commands

by accessing this onboard model.

And then if you feel like you wanna look something up

how many grains of sand are there on the planet earth

that's something that the vehicle voice assistant

would be tapping the cloud for.

So it's an interesting solution that they've come up with

and I guess we'll just see how well it works.

Interesting stuff, Molly, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Kel.

You can find all of our coverage

of voice assistants at autonews.com.

Coming up, AAA's Greg Bannon talks about

how driver assistance systems do in bumper to bumper

traffic and why the answer is not great.

That's next on Daily Drive.

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Welcome back to Daily Drive.

I'm Kellan Walker.

Ask most customers if they'd like a car

that could drive for them in traffic jams

and most will say that's a no-brainer.

Many automakers advertise their driver assistance systems

as convenience features that can pretty much

do just that with some caveats.

AAA decided to test those systems in LA traffic.

What they found was not ideal.

The Association's Director of Automotive Research,

Greg Bannon, spoke with our own Pete Bigelow on SHIFT,

a podcast about mobility.

Here's a piece of their conversation.

You and your research team released

your latest evaluation in a long lineage of analysis

in the driver assistance front

about one aspect of how these systems

really work in the real world.

So it's pretty eye-opening, I think.

Tell us what you've been up to,

what you set out to learn here.

Absolutely.

So as you said, Pete, we've been testing

advanced driver assistance systems

for well over a decade now at AAA.

And we're not just testing those on the roads.

We're doing engineering-level analysis

of how the systems work.

And we do that for a variety of reasons

so we can inform our 67 million members in North America

so we can talk with media like yourself about the results

and really use that to influence industry and regulators

to ensure that these things are deployed in a safe manner.

So our latest research was focused

on the low-speed active driving assistance system.

So for the industry, that means level two,

according to SAE levels of automation,

and specifically systems that will operate

all the way down to a stop.

And often termed and advertised

as traffic jam assistance features.

So we wanted to understand more about

how those systems work, where they do well,

and sort of where they struggle.

And so we put them to the test.

How many systems did you test

in the course of your research here?

Well, we did a full research

on five different vehicles over the course of a week.

We initially had six,

but there were some software problems with the sixth vehicle.

So we ended up testing five vehicles

over the course of a week in LA traffic.

And that amounted to about a little shy of 1,800 miles

and over 80 hours in traffic,

which I wouldn't recommend.

Unless you're doing something like this,

it's not terribly...

Traffic, I mean, who wouldn't wanna do that?

Sure, right, it sounds great.

In fact, there's all these tools available

to people in Los Angeles to understand traffic.

It's much like New York City,

whenever you ask somebody how to go somewhere,

it becomes like this debate about

what is the best way in the shortest route

and it has nothing to do with mileage.

It has everything to do with hours.

And that's the challenge here.

But it presents a unique opportunity

because we were using those tools to find the traffic

and ensure that we had spent the maximum

around the time gathering data in that traffic.

And we're not alone there.

The automakers also test their systems

in the same environment.

And so yeah, it brought about some unique opportunities

and some long days.

But we're glad it's behind us

and we moved on to the data analysis phase,

which was maybe more fun than the traffic itself.

I bet before we kind of dig into the results,

I kind of wanna like further tee this up

to like joking about LA traffic aside.

That is like this real world ideal use case

for these systems that are designed

or aspire to perhaps is the better way to phrase it.

Aspire to solve a very real pain point.

I hate sitting in traffic.

I hate to stop and go.

The promise here, right, is what?

Yeah, the promise is making that easier.

And in fact, in the case of systems

that allow you to take your hands off the wheel entirely,

it could feel like the car is driving

the traffic jam for you.

And I think we would all sign up for that.

I have never met the person that has said

that my most enjoyable driving experience

is when I'm in bumper to bumper traffic

with people cutting in and cars going everywhere.

It's not an enjoyable experience of driving.

And for some time I have felt,

and we at AAA have felt that the traffic jam

assistance type features are something

that consumers would be the most willing to pay for

to try to alleviate some of that pain point.

And so I think the automakers understand that as well

and are doing what they can

to sort of catch up to that demand.

All right, so all that as a prelude to

what did you find when you and your team

looked at these assistance systems, Greg?

Yeah, so it was interesting.

And really when we set out to do this research,

we thought we could do it in closed course.

And instead we found that we really needed to do it

in the live environment on the freeway.

And so that set us down this path

and trying to figure out exactly then what we would do

and how we would capture data

is sort of a challenge around it.

And so where we landed after a lot of experimentation

and research is that we instrumented the vehicles

that we tested with high precision GPS,

with cameras, with microphones,

and with a system that allowed us to capture

the events that happen sort of as they happen real time.

And so for the duration of that testing

we had video rolling and all of the systems active.

And then whenever something happened

that we thought of note, we would mark that in the system.

And so we created some categories that we,

heading into it that our friends at Consumer Reports

sort of helped us identify some of the more common things

that they'd seen in just driving these vehicles

and testing them over time.

And so we created these categories

and then we left some categories sort of TBD

until we sort of experienced

what we were gonna experience in traffic.

So as we drove all those hours and experiences

we saw all sorts of interesting things.

And I'll tell you that I've driven all over the world

and certainly in all the major cities in the US

and LA drivers are interesting.

I think every area has sort of a behavior

among drivers that's different and interesting.

And cutting in in front of a stopped vehicle

or a slow moving vehicle is a very common occurrence

in LA traffic.

I think it's just the sheer number of hours

that people spend in that traffic

and sort of the rat race of trying to get to your next exit

and everybody trying to find the quickest area.

So one of the things that we found

is an extremely common behavior

and unfortunately a common issue

that the system struggled with were those cut-ins.

And so it was sort of the challenge of identifying

that something's changed

and you've got a new vehicle in front of you.

And in fact, we saw that cut-in behavior happen

once every 8.6 miles or about every 27 minutes.

We also saw things with lane centering

that were challenging.

But overall, if you back up from it

without getting into all the details,

we saw 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,

take full control and try to avoid a crash.

And so these systems hold some promise

to relieve that stress of driving,

but quite honestly right now,

if you're using the system properly,

it might be causing more stress

because you're waiting all the time to have to intervene.

Was there a difference in how the hands-on systems performed

versus how the hands-off systems performed?

Yeah, there was and a significant difference.

And we expected some difference,

but not maybe as significant as we saw.

So the hands-on system, just to clarify

for the listeners, the hands-on systems

are the ones that require the drivers

to keep their hands on the steering wheel.

And they may use a combination of driver monitoring cameras

and steering wheel torque

to ensure that the driver is engaged.

For the hands-off system,

these are your Ford BlueCruise

and your SuperCruise type systems

that allow you to take your hands off the wheel entirely,

they're relying on cameras in the cockpit

to make sure that your eyes are on the road.

And so what we saw is the difference

between those two systems is pretty significant

in terms of the performance.

The systems that allowed you to take your hands off the wheel

but maintain eye contact with the road

performed about three times better

than the systems that you had to keep your hands

on the wheel.

Triple A director of automotive research, Greg Bannon,

spoke with our own Pete Bigelow.

You can hear their full conversation on Shift,

a podcast about mobility that's available now

wherever you get your podcast.

That's Daily Drive for today.

I'm Kellan Walker.

Thanks to Molly Boygon and Riley Hodder

for their reporting for today's podcast.

You can get the latest news on tariffs, the UAW

and everything happening in the auto industry

at AutoNews.com.

Come back tomorrow for a conversation

with retail FNI reporters, John Hutter and Paige Hodder.

Where the bottleneck as far as I tell anyway

to my reporting seems to be with the state DMVs.

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

or leave us a voicemail at 313-444-2774.

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