Mercedes-Benz makes fancy cars that are known for being safe, comfortable, and reliable. It’s a German company that has been around for over 100 years.
X‑Peng is a Chinese company that builds electric cars with advanced self‑driving features. They’re known for their tech‑heavy approach and competitive pricing.
Think of it as a common language that lets charging stations and the software that controls them understand each other, so they can report status, start or stop charging, and share data.
It’s a group that makes sure charging stations from different companies can work together, so you don’t have to worry about compatibility when plugging in your electric car.
It’s like updating the software on your phone, but for the hardware that runs the charging station or the car’s internal systems.
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We can head quarters. Canadian manufacturing falls amid Trump's trade war. And pressure grows on the CEO of Mercedes as its luxury strategy stalls. Plus, why do charging attempts still fail even as uptime gets better? Charger helps Camille Terry explains.
Simply put, a lot of this, what we call a first charge success rate, and a difference of that between uptime, it really typically has to do with software issues.
Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.
Stellantis is hiring nearly 2,000 white collar employees in North America. That's as it rebuilds under new CEO Antonio Filosa.
The automaker is adding jobs in engineering, manufacturing, and quality at its Auburn Hills Michigan headquarters. It's a sharp reversal from a year ago
when the tech center sat largely empty under former CEO Carlos Tavares with employees calling it a ghost town at times. The hiring comes alongside a $13 billion US manufacturing investment creating 5,000 factory jobs.
Filosa is based at the tech center, unlike his predecessor. He has made North America his top priority, and is working to repair damaged relationships with the UAW, dealers, and suppliers.
Canada's manufacturing sector contracted at a steeper pace in November as trade uncertainty held back output and new orders.
S&P Global Canada manufacturing purchasing managers index or PMI fell to 48.4 last month from 49.6 in October. Any reading below 50 indicates contraction.
S&P Global's economics director says market uncertainty linked to tariffs, especially around international trade, led to the subdued performance.
The timing is critical. Talks have broken down on the US Canada trade deal in key sectors, while the US MCA agreement that shields much of Canada's exports from US tariffs is up for review in 2026.
And Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Colanius is facing what some investors call a last chance to turn the company around.
Colanius unveiled the economics of desire in 2022, de-emphasizing compact models to move upscale. The plan targeted 14% margins, but delivered just 4.8% in the third quarter.
The luxury push worked during post-pandemic supply shortages, but it's faltering as Chinese brands like BYD and X-Pung offer premium EVs in key markets with advanced technology at lower prices.
Now Mercedes is quietly shifting back, extending a-class production. Experts say the company needs volume and entry-level buyers to rebuild customer loyalty and compete long-term.
And those are today's headlines. You can find more details on all those stories at autonews.com. The automotive industry's decades-long push for cleaner, more fuel-efficient engines has created an unintended consequence.
Today's advanced motors are far less tolerant of manufacturing imperfections than older engines could survive.
Our own Richard Truitt wrote about it in the pages of automotive news and on autonews.com. He joins me now to talk about it. Richard, welcome back to Daily Drive.
It's great to be here, Kel. Thanks for having me.
So Richard, what's going on and why are we seeing these failures?
You know, those are the questions that I started to answer when I put the story together. It's a very strange situation when you have general motors, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai all suffering the same kinds of failure with completely different engines.
And so I thought I would try to find out, is there anything connecting these failures together and it turns out there are a few.
Namely, engines today run on much thinner oil. And that's because the tolerances between the parts, the distance between the pistons and the cylinder walls and the rods and the crankshaft are a lot smaller than they used to be, so that they can use thinner oil so that engines get better fuel economy.
So that all sounds great in theory, but in the manufacturing process, if all the junk that's left over from machining is not removed from the crankshaft and the cylinder block and the heads, then you get trouble.
Now I'm going to hold up an engine bearing here from a general motor 6.2 liter V8 engine, one of the ones that have been recalled.
You can see on the edge here where it's been ground away, like there's a protective coating here and there's like a ridge of lines here where what they call swarf and that is the leftovers from machining have just ground the bearing away.
Eventually it's all going to wear away and it's going to cause a seizure.
And so the swarf that's left in the engine that's grinding away on these bearings is the cause of the problem.
Now are there some possible solutions?
You know, that's another question I asked. I thought the auto industry spending billions on AI. Can AI play a role in this? And Hyundai and GM and others have said, no, not really.
What it comes down to is it's going to take a closer attention to making sure that when an engine is assembled that inside that motor is surgically clean.
At automotive news, we've been reporting for years now how batteries packs have to be put together in that same way where they're cleaner than a hospital operating room.
Well, because engines are the clearances inside engines are so much tighter now, I think that that very same level of cleanliness is going to be necessary to prevent this in the future.
Richard's story is titled Power Failure. What's causing massive engine recalls? You can find it on autonews.com. Richard, thank you so much for joining me.
It's great. Thanks, Kel.
Coming up, Charger Helps Camille Terry talks about the state of EV charging infrastructure and why better uptime hasn't stopped charging attempts from failing.
That's next on Daily Drive.
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Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Kellen Walker. The biggest problem with EV Chargers isn't the hardware. It's the software. That's according to Camille Terry, CEO of Charger Helps.
She spoke with her own hand alerts on the automotive news shift podcast. Here's a piece of that conversation.
Camille, I know that Charger Helps recently published its 2025 annual reliability report.
I thought this part of the report was especially interesting. Uptime is high on paper, almost 100% uptime on average, but a third of charging attempts are actually failing. How do you explain that discrepancy?
Sure. So, you know, the charging stations and electric vehicles, these are what we call IOT assets, Internet of Things. These are connected devices.
I've been using quite often now, but I heard someone state that there is more lines of cold in the vehicle today than was used on the Apollo 13 to get somebody like to the moon.
Right. And so there's a lot of software. And so when we talk about the difference of uptime and first charge successfully, it just ties back to software.
And as we deploy more charging stations and more vehicles and more sophisticated software, you know, at Charger Helps, we try to just get ahead of the curve.
How do we essentially bring, you know, numbers of what we're seeing in order for folks to solve it? And so, yeah, simply put a lot of this what we call first charge success rate.
And the difference with that between uptime, it really typically has to do with software issues. And I believe that by us naming it, it allows for folks to understand what to solve for.
And to also help, you know, drivers kind of understand that, you know, maybe if the station didn't work the first time, but it was up, it's not your fault. You didn't do anything wrong. There might actually be something wrong here.
And so that's really, you know, the purpose of this report we put forth every year is to really be a bit of light years ahead just to help people catch up to know specifically what we need to fix in the industry.
And are you able to track why those those failures are happening most often? Is it a problem with with the charging station? Is it like you said the vehicles are so complex? Is it something in the vehicle? What what is happening usually?
Sure. So from our side for the stations that we work on, we typically first look at it has the software been implemented to cold and speaking specifically about charging software.
So there is an international organization called the Open Charge Alliance that wrote a protocol called Open Charge Point Protocol.
They also have a certification process where after you implement this protocol, you can go to their website and you can work with their team to get your implementation certified.
What we typically see around charge start success failures is that sometimes either that hardware or the software itself was not certified so the software was not implemented to cold.
The other thing that we typically see is, you know, firmware update. So we all have, you know, these nice little cell phones and our pockets and we get to say when firmware is going to get updated on our cell phone with charging today.
That's not really true or with vehicles. I mean, well, some vehicles they let you do it, but more so with charging people push firmware all the time. And if you know anything about software, when one software is trying to communicate to another software and it hasn't been tested and it doesn't understand one another.
It could prevent it from actually working that first time. So I guess in summary, you know, the things that we see are things that have been solved in other areas that has to do with IT.
And so we just need to understand that these assets that we're working with are connected devices. And so the same level of rigor and practices best practices that we see in other industries that use it, we should be applying that to charging.
So it's actually a simple fix, which makes people good.
Yeah, recognizing that these are all connected and treating them that way. That's a good point. And the report also found that the charging experience worsens as stations get older as the chargers get older.
So even stations that are just like three years old, which to me doesn't sound that old are often unreliable. What is the solution to that?
Sure. So there's a couple of things that's been that has memory interesting to us.
One is, you know, as technology progresses in the software progresses, how can that physical unit be able to keep up?
So sometimes like even today, there's some assets in the field that cannot be upgraded to the newest protocol because it's missing key components.
And so when we talk about kind of like age, like that's one thing that I don't know how much we have invested in from a physical component to think about the leaps that we're making with software and technology.
Or on the other end, as we build software and technology, how are we taking into consideration the physical components of things that have already been deployed.
So really, to me, it's like an engineering problem. And it's something once again where we need to get these two groups together.
You call it underneath a big tent or something of the sort.
To actually call it just some ground rules. I'm like, okay, we know you're going to build great amazing software.
Let's take into consideration how that can be implemented in existing hardware.
Right? I think that's one overarching theme. And then, you know, the other stuff that we find too is really depending on how people are deploying the hardware.
And are they thinking about this asset really being on highways and by ways, sometimes not protected by a canopy, sometimes in hot sun.
Are we actually taking that into consideration as we are, you know, building and engineering these units? I don't know.
Yeah, it's a lot of this thought of like future proofing the units.
And I mean, does that start at square one when when they're planning for this charging station or is it over time?
Is it a is it a maintenance solution as well? What are you looking at?
Sure. I think that it starts like at square zero.
So I think that there needs to be an understanding between the players in the industry on just like how we want to move forward.
And this is not something that's out of the ordinary.
The airlines industry came together and did this a while ago around safety. It was just that hey, it's not hopeful for anybody, right?
If your plane is less or more safe than my plane, like we should all just kind of share how to make everything really safe because if, you know, if something isn't safe, it's going to impact all of us.
And so we also seen that happen in Wi-Fi, also telecom.
Sometimes this also comes through consolidation, but we really do need need a big tent organization that can help people at least get a baseline to say, hey, this problem is impacting all of us.
So what is our baseline? And I know that the charge ex consortium, which came out of the joint office was doing some of that.
I have here whispers that there's something like that coming back up again.
There's also organizations like the Alliance for Transportation electrification, reserves as a big tent organization to really try to bring learnings and come to some kind of commas consensus.
The last thing I'll say is they saw this worked really, really well in Europe.
The organization called ELAD, and they essentially brought all the manufacturers together.
And for problems that everyone was having, so one thing was like cables, swapping out cables was very different in Europe.
And so they actually created like the literal plug.
So now all of the cables have a plug.
And so when you swap them out, you literally just plug in and it's not all of this additional wiring.
They did a big tent and everybody can get and they just agreed and that is now how cables are deployed in Europe.
So it's just stuff like that that we can do it.
You know, it's going to be a bit difficult, but it can be done.
Charger helps CEO Camille Terry spoke with a Ron Hannah Lutz on the automotive news shift podcast.
You can hear that full conversation now, wherever you get your podcast.
That's Stanley dry for today. I'm Kellen Walker.
Thanks to automotive news executive producer Jake Nier, as well as writer William Boston for his reporting for today's podcast.
We also had reporting from Kurt Nagel of our sibling publication, Crane's Detroit Business.
You can get the latest news on tech and innovation, manufacturing, and everything happening in the auto industry at autonews.com.
Come back tomorrow for a conversation with Eric Knockbar about why cyber security protections that dealerships have relied on for years are losing their effectiveness.
It's a false sense of security of I'm viewing an activity that should protect me, but the activity actually is misunderstood.
Industry wide.
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About this episode
Stellantis is on a hiring spree, adding nearly 2,000 white-collar jobs in North America as it shifts focus under new CEO Antonio Filosa. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz faces challenges with its luxury strategy, struggling to compete against emerging Chinese brands. ChargerHelp CEO Kameale Terry discusses the disconnect between high EV charger uptime and the failure rates of charging attempts, attributing issues primarily to software rather than hardware. The episode highlights the need for improved standards and collaboration in the EV charging infrastructure to enhance reliability.
