To sell electric cars, dealers need places where people can plug their cars in to charge. This means installing special chargers and the power lines that feed them.
The perception platform is the car’s “eyes and ears.” It uses cameras, lasers, and radar to see other cars, pedestrians, and road signs so the vehicle can drive safely.
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On the EU to abandon its 2035 ice band. Volvo's CEO predicts a sales rebound in 2026, and Canadian dealers spend millions on EV infrastructure for few sales. Plus, we're part of our exclusive interview with Rivian CEO, RJ Scarage, who says the auto industry is on the verge of a self-driving revolution.
We believe that autonomy is going to redefine how we think about vehicle ownership.
Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.
Six European Union leaders are asking the European Commission to soften vehicle emission rules and halt a de facto ban on combustion engines planned for 2035.
The leaders say in a letter that they want upcoming revisions to allow plug-in hybrids, range extenders, and fuel cell technology beyond 2035.
They wrote quote, we can and we must pursue our climatic goal in an effective way while not killing our competitiveness.
The Commission was set to unveil the proposal on Wednesday, but that has now been delayed until December 16th.
Automakers like Stellantis, Volkswagen, and Renault have billions at stake.
While many EU leaders want to soften emission rules, Volvo CEO, Hocon Samuelson, says the 2035 zero emission target should stay in place.
The automaker invested heavily to meet it, and he says backing off now would hurt companies like Volvo that played by the rules.
We expected that we could go out and sell these cars and that there also would be value with the CO2 credits that we in that way could sell and finance the development.
Okay, now this is changed and that's of course very bad for our company.
Despite those challenges and a difficult year, Samuelson says the automaker is poised to return to growth in 2026.
We'll have more from that conversation on Tuesday here on Daily Drive.
And Canadian auto retailers have poured millions into EV infrastructure upgrades, but many say there's been no return on investment.
The green is dealer principle at high country Chevrolet in Alberta.
He told a federal committee he spent $200,000 on chargers, heavy duty hoist and electric upgrades required by GM.
In three years, he sold just three EVs at a combined loss of $10,000.
You see without subsidization consumer demand is not there.
Right now dealers are not making profit to recruit their investments and I am a for profit business.
Perhaps we forget that we're not a government that can run deficits green told the committee.
He made the investment out of fear of losing his franchise, not because he thought they'd be profitable.
Joining me now to talk more about this is Automotive News Canada, digital and mobile editor, Greg Lason, who's also the host of the Automotive News Canada podcast.
Greg, welcome back to Daily Drive.
Thanks for having me.
What exactly were automakers requiring dealers to install?
It looked like it went way beyond putting in a few charging stations.
It did. The list, it's a laundry list of things that dealers need to do from heavy duty hoist.
As you mentioned, they have to buy forklifts if you can believe it.
And it used to be that if you own a dealer group, you could buy one forklift and use that at multiple dealerships.
Some automakers now requiring dealers to have a forklift in every service bay to move batteries around.
If need be, they need battery tables.
And Doug Green is sort of the poster child for worst case scenario in that his store didn't have enough electrical capacity to power all the chargers that were required
by general motors.
So he actually had to trench his parking lot and run more electricity to his store.
When all was said and done, he spent $200,000.
He invited a thousand customers to come and check out EVs.
30 showed up, no one bought one and he's only sold three over the last three years.
So they're being asked to do a lot for very few sales.
On the Automotive News Canada podcast, you spoke with Laura Zankin, who owns 37 stores in Ontario.
She estimates her group spent three and a half to four and a half million dollars on upgrades with EV sales slumping.
Are dealers going to recoup any of that investment or is it just sunk cost at this point right now in the short term?
It's just a cost.
It's more overhead to selling the vehicles that are currently on the lot.
Now Laura told me she doesn't believe it's a total loss.
She'll never believe that she spent money for nothing.
She does believe that electric vehicles will eventually become popular and up and they will sell enough vehicles to pay off the investments that they've made.
But it does depend dealership to dealership brand to brand.
So for example, a brand like Mazda that might not have very many electrified vehicles in their portfolio now hasn't required much upfront cost in any renovations.
But GM, which has a portfolio of electric vehicles, might ask for more things to be done at their stores.
So at this point, she's spending the money because these are non-negotiable.
She told me you cannot back out of these requirements.
They are being forced upon the auto dealers from the auto makers.
If you want to sell internal combustion engine vehicles, you must equip your stores with electric vehicle charging infrastructure and the other requirements.
And you must take a certain number of electric vehicles for your lot to sell.
Now she thinks 75% of all sales being electric is unrealistic at any point in the future.
But she says she can see her some of these brands getting to 35 or 45% at which time then the investments start to pay off.
Wow. Well, you can hear that interview with Laura Zankin on the Automotive News Canada podcast available now wherever you get your podcast.
Greg, thank you so much for joining me on Daily Drive anytime.
When those are today's headlines, you can find more details on all those stories at autonews.com.
Coming up, we'll hear part of our exclusive interview with Rivian CEO, RJ Scarinch.
That's next on Daily Drive.
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Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Kellen Walker.
Rivian has a big year planned for 2026. It's launching its first ever mass market vehicle in the R2.
It's also pouring R&D dollars into autonomy.
CEO RJ Scarinch says that's because he believes self-driving capabilities will separate the winners and losers in the auto industry in the next decade.
Scarinch spoke with our own Lauren Seiliff in an exclusive interview on the automotive news shift podcast.
Here's a piece of that conversation.
Hey RJ, welcome to shift.
Hey, thanks for having me.
It's great to be here and it's also a really good time, I think, to be having this conversation.
It's always a good time, but this is a particularly good time.
We can take a look back at, you know, 2025 and all of the interesting things that happen.
May you live in interesting times for sure.
And we can take a look at, look forward.
You have autonomy day coming up and then you have the launch of the R2 in the first half of next year.
And you have all kinds of interesting things going on with your Volkswagen joint venture, where I visited recently.
And so let's get into it.
I do want to start off with autonomy day, right?
I know you can't tell us all the cool stuff that you're going to do because then it wouldn't be a surprise.
But can you give us a preview?
And can you maybe just talk about autonomy in general like why it's important?
It doesn't seem like super important like in this moment, like people aren't rushing out to get, you know, self-driving cars.
Yeah, but it will be, right?
Yeah, why don't we talk broad first?
I mean, for us, you know, we're building a, we're building a business that's designed at its core to be significantly bigger than we are today.
And in saying that, that means we need to have a long-term view on technology.
And we've taken the approach around identifying the technical areas that we think are going to be really important
and then vertically integrating and building extreme competency in those areas.
And so some of that has already played out and is sort of seem manifesting in both our products
and in the relationships we've created.
So we built our electronics, our software and house, and built this really incredible capabilities to develop these systems.
And that, of course, we see in our first set of products, our one products, which are flagship set of products.
We're about to see it the next version of our integrated software hardware solutions in our R2.
And then, of course, we see it embedded in a large partnership we put together with Volkswagen.
It's a $5.8 billion software licensing arrangement.
We have a Volkswagen group.
And so we're going to see it across a whole range of different products that exist under the Volkswagen portfolio brands.
So with that said, that was built on the conviction of really believing that software defined architectures were going to be critical in the long term in terms of customer experience, in terms of that that's inclusive of the user experience like the UI and the interface of the vehicle, but also just the overall operations of the vehicle.
And I would say to an even larger degree, we believe that autonomy is going to redefine how we think about vehicle ownership.
And so today, as you said, it's not the driving criteria for a lot of purchasers.
But once we get past the phase run today where most of the systems are more system systems, but into the world where the vehicles lie to take your hands off the wheel and importantly your eyes off the road.
That ability to have your time back to be able to be in the car and the commute and be on your phone, be on, you know, be reading a book, be resting.
And then as we move even beyond that eyes off hands off environment, but into an environment where the vehicle can operate empty, it dramatically changes your life.
It allows you to pick up your kids, but I have to go drive there yourself to get them allows, you know, elderly access, building ways that they haven't before.
And of course, it unlocks new business models, the one that gets a lot of attention of course is road taxis.
But yeah, I've said this many times, I think personally owned autonomy is going to be really powerful as well.
And, you know, close to 99% of the miles driven on our roads in the United States are in personally owned vehicles.
And I think it's likely that a majority of the miles stay in personally owned vehicles just given the wealth that exists in our country.
And so we see personally owned autonomy being really important anyways with all that said, we've taken the approach of also building out the capability to do this.
And so our Gen 1 vehicles, what we launched in the end of 2021, about four years ago, had a very different architecture about that same time.
So about four years ago, we kicked off an effort internally to vertically integrate a very different technology approach to self driving, which is a shift away from a rules-based environment and towards an end-to-end AI-centric environment.
And to do that well, you have to control all your perceptions, you have to control your cameras or radar.
You have to be able to feed that into a really robust data flywheel, that data flywheel is being trained by the vehicles that are being driven, so being trained by the car park by the vehicles on the roads.
And so that launched in the middle of 2024, about a year ago now.
And we're about to show with an autonomy day what's to come.
And I'd put it like this, the next few years are going to look entirely different than the last few years.
Not just for Riveon, but I'd say for the automotive industry in general, just the rate of progress, if you look five years forward versus five years back, the slope of the curve is wildly different.
And of course, the big giant technical innovation that's happened in the last couple of years is the use of transformers for doing and coding and just the whole nature of AI has dramatically changed.
We see that most, most fully and large language models, but we're about to see it in the physical world in many applications, one of which is vehicles.
Now, obviously, it's a road to autonomy, right? It's not like you're going to turn it on tomorrow.
When do you think you'll be like what we call, now we call it level two plus, right?
Where you can have your hands off the wheel, but you're monitoring the driving, mostly on highways, right?
And then at some point you'll allow some eyes off the wheel, right? Where you could, you could do like a text message or something, but you have to be partially engaged in case the car wants you to take over.
And then at some point in the future, I imagine by the end of the decade, maybe they'll completely drive themselves and you can maybe potentially sit in the back seat. What does that time line look for Riveon?
Well, so as it is today, we have hands off. So if you're on the highway today, you can take your hands off the wheel and provided you're still like looking at the road often, the system operates.
Of course, you can glance away for, you know, some time, but not unlimited time. That's going to expand.
If you think about Riveon, that will expand to hands off everywhere and then following hands off everywhere will overlay that with point to point navigation.
So you get in the car, you plug in your dress, it can drive to that address with no involvement from you other than being in the driver's seat.
And then importantly is the all of that plus eyes off in specific situations, the most viable, which of which are highways, starting with highways and then going from highways to everywhere.
And so once you get to hands off eyes off everywhere with of course point to point navigation, the next step is allowing you to not be in the vehicle.
And so our view is that that's going to happen well before the end of the decade. And I think this is where my point on just the changing mindset of customers is once you get used to not having to drive your car and having the time back, it's going to be very hard, I think for customers to accept anything less than that.
And when you have these big technical changes, there's often like the things that happen before the technical shift.
So if you take like the iPhone, all the things that are embodied in an iPhone that make it so powerful today existed in like smaller scale, less fully developed forms.
You had MP3 players that emerged, you had phones, you could check your emails on.
You even had Apple producing one of those things and I put out some songs in your pocket, but it was the convergence of all those things together that suddenly made all phones that weren't a full smartphone really irrelevant.
And I think in the same way today we have driver assistance systems, the best of which can allow you to take your hands off the wheel, you know, highway situation, but when we start to see the ability for the vehicle to fully and completely operate itself.
And now I guess what we see in a Waymo vehicle in a robot taxi, but those worlds could work where that level of autonomy is available on a personally on vehicle and not costing, you know, $50,000 in perception and compute, but, but rather you're being similar to what you'd be buying today, that's going to be a pretty big shift.
It's going to shift how we make decisions. I think it's going to lead to big swings and market share, saying all that I couldn't be more bullish on the importance of autonomy.
We spend more R&T dollars in this area than anything else across the whole business. It's that important.
I think to do it really well, you need a few ingredients that are hard to get. You need to have complete control of the perception platform. You need to be building an AI centric approach.
Meaning it's trained and end you need to be off of the call autonomous vehicle 1.0 architectures of purely rules based environments.
You need to have a really robust data flywheel that data flywheel needs have really, you know, a strong set of perception information coming in.
We believe multiple modalities will help train the brain so to speak faster so cameras plus radar at a minimum.
But I don't think there's a lot of companies that have all those ingredients and certainly even fewer that are working on a full solution.
And so we're bullish on this. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about it in a few weeks.
So I don't want to steal all the thunder of the things we're going to all demonstrated as well. We'll show everything I've just said.
So folks can get a chance to get a glimpse into what we're working on.
You can hear the full first half of that exclusive interview with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe on the automotive news shift podcast.
That's available now wherever you get your podcast. That's daily drive for today. I'm Kevin Walker.
Thanks to automotive news executive producer Jake Near for his help on today's podcast.
We also have reporting from Greg Lassen and Doug Bullduck of our sibling publications, automotive news Canada and automotive news Europe.
You can get the latest news on tech and innovation, emissions regulations, and everything happening in the auto industry at autonews.com.
Come back tomorrow for an exclusive interview with Volvo CEO, Ocon Samuelson.
We will be ready 2030 with a really good lineup over electric cars and then we will have these backups.
We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think of the show on the topics we cover today.
Send us an email at dailydriveatautonews.com or leave a voicemail at 313-444-2774.
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About this episode
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe discusses the future of autonomy in the automotive industry, emphasizing its potential to redefine vehicle ownership. He highlights Rivian's commitment to developing self-driving technology and the importance of software-defined architectures. The episode also covers the EU's push to soften its 2035 ICE ban, Volvo's CEO's stance on emissions targets, and the challenges faced by Canadian dealers investing in EV infrastructure amid low sales. Notable insights include the financial burdens on dealers and the evolving landscape of vehicle technology.
