Feb. 11, 2026 | CDK CEO Brian MacDonald interview; Ford posts $11B Q4 loss

Welcome to Daily Drive.

For Wednesday, February 11, 2026, I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.

Today on the show, Ford posts an $11 billion net loss, its biggest since the Great Recession.

Honda has a new leader for its critical U.S. operations, and auto industry leaders say

President Trump's threat to delay the Gordy Howe Bridge is adding unwanted uncertainty.

Plus, Brian McDonald, CEO of CDK Global, joins the show to talk about how AI is moving

beyond answering phones to delivering real insights for dealers.

Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.

Ford posted an $11.1 billion net loss in the fourth quarter.

That's its worst financial performance since 2008.

The automaker lost $8.2 billion for the full year, driven by EV write downs and $2 billion

in tariff costs. That tariff bill roughly doubled Ford's previous projection.

After a late year change by the Trump administration,

eliminated offsets Ford had planned to claim. An October fire at aluminum supplier

Novellis also hampered F-Series production, costing Ford an estimated $2 billion,

though the company expects to recover half of that by boosting output this year.

Despite the rough quarter, Ford projects adjusted earnings of $8-10 billion in 2026.

We'll have more on this story in a minute with our own Michael Martinez.

Honda is tapping CFO, IG Fujimora, to lead American Honda starting April 1st.

Fujimora takes over from Kazuhiro Takazawa amid affordability concerns, tariff costs,

and a dramatic EV pivot. Honda slashed its 2030 global EV target from 2 million vehicles

to just $700,000 to $750,000. It also cut prologue production by half.

The company absorbed a $1.8 billion tariff hit last year,

but aims for modest 4% U.S. sales growth in 2026.

And auto industry leaders say President Trump's threat to delay the Gordy Howe

International Bridge is adding unwanted uncertainty to investment decisions.

Glenn Stevens is executive director of Meshado in Detroit.

He says the threat adds another layer of uncertainty for companies moving parts between the U.S. and

Canada. We are all pointing towards this bridge being an enabler in a variety of different ways,

so I think calmer heads will prevail and we'll get there, but it is a new wrinkle and it does

provide more uncertainty to which the businesses in our industry do not need.

Canada and the United States are in the thick of trade negotiations related not only to tariffs

rolled out by Trump early last year, but also a joint review of the USMCA trade deal scheduled

to begin officially in July. Now, let's dig deeper into that Ford story. Joining me is Michael

Martinez, who covers Ford for us at Automotive News. You'll also hear him most weeks on our

Weekend Drive edition of the show. Mike, welcome back to Daily Drive.

Hey, Cal. All right, Mike. So an $11 billion loss is staggering. Walk us through what went wrong

here beyond just the EV write downs. How much of this was Ford's own strategic missteps versus

external factors they couldn't control? Yeah, that's a really good sort of philosophical

question we could get into. How much of this is actually Ford's fault? You can argue a lot of it

isn't, right? They had $2 billion worth of tariff costs that were largely out of their control,

given what President Trump did over the past year. They had a couple billion dollars worth

of costs because of the novellas fire in October that cut their aluminum supply for the F-150.

Nobody could have saw that coming, right? And they've had to react to that. And then even

when it comes to EVs, you could make the argument that some of that was outside of their control,

the rollback in federal policy, sort of changing consumer demand. But at the end of the day,

you do have to give them some of the blame for missing the market, particularly with the F-150

Lightning. Yes, it was the number one best-selling full-size EV pickup, but the customers just didn't

like the range when it came to towing and hauling. It couldn't do truck things. And they didn't quite

understand their truck customers. And they were supposed to, built Ford Tough. Ford trucks,

number one sellers year in and year out, they should know the customers. And maybe they didn't

realize it there. So definitely cost them this year. This is the third worst financial performance

ever in the company's history. Wow. Well, despite this massive loss, Ford is projecting

eight to 10 billion in adjusted earnings for 2026. That's a pretty optimistic outlook.

What gives them confidence they can turn this around so quickly? And is that

realistic given the tariff environment we're in? Well, they said the tariff costs are going to be

about flat year over year. So they're still dealing with about $2 billion worth of tariff costs.

But just the fact that they're not going to be writing down all these EV charges,

they think they've set themselves up well for the future. Because when you look at it,

last year, another factor in all this, they got rid of the escape. We've talked a lot about that

entry level, not profitable vehicle for them. They are replacing it. Even though some dealers

don't like it, they're getting customers into higher priced models, more profitable models,

that's making them more money. You look at the mix of powertrains. Now that all these EV regulations

have been rolled back, different penalties for gas vehicles and diesel vehicles have been lifted.

So Ford can build more Raptors, they can build more Broncos and F-150s and Mustangs and that will

make them more money. And then on the EV side, they think their losses will continue to go down.

They think they have a plan for profits on EVs by 2029. And they think the small,

affordable segment will do a heck of a lot better than the Lightning and the Mustang Mach-E have

done. Perfect. Mike Martinez, always thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me.

Coming up next, CDK Global CEO Brian McDonald talks about how the company is using 900 million

repair orders and AI to deliver real insights to dealers. That's next on Daily Drive.

Are you a dealer creating a workplace culture your employees are proud to be part of?

Applications are now open for the 2026 Automotive News best dealerships to work for program.

This isn't just an award. It's a chance to get real insight into what's working at your dealership

and where you can improve. And we've expanded the categories this year, recognizing everything

from technician experience and leadership development to AI enablement and employee retention.

The registration deadline is April 17th. Find out more and apply at AutoNews.com.

Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Kellan Walker.

Artificial intelligence has been the talk of the dealer world from answering phones

to scheduling service appointments. With the leader of CDK Global says the industry is entering a

new phase. CEO Brian McDonald caught up with our own Mark Homer at the NADA show in Las Vegas last

week. Here's their conversation.

Well, we're always here to see our customers and showcase our investments, the benefits of our

investments. CDK over the last few years has invested more than a half a billion dollars

in our technology and our products. And we have modern technology, modern products.

And I know we're going to talk a little bit about AI. We've got built-in AI instead of bolt-on

AI. And so there's a lot of things to show at CDK for our dealers this year, a lot of value.

I think it's coming at a crucial time. There's been talk that a lot of impressive AI tools have

come out, but they haven't necessarily maximized yet, you know, just across the industry.

So is this the year where they become more practical and how they're used? And if so, why?

So I've been saying for quite some time, Mark, that artificial intelligence without data is just

artificial. And nobody has more data than CDK. We have a modern data platform and data engine.

And that allows us to bring AI use cases with our data to real life. So if we went back a year ago,

I would say a lot of dealers are coming to the show with AI on their mind. What do I need to know?

What should I be using AI for? And over the last year, what I would say the first level use cases,

you know, answering the phone, scheduling the service appointment, you know, largely taking

holds across the industry. We have those products. And I think now we're moving into the next phase.

I would call it level two AI, which is where you take rich data and you get insights to bring

value to dealers. And I think that's the level two. And that's where I think the AI can be really

useful to the industry and the dealers is how do you take a company like CDK? How does CDK

take the fact that we have 900 million, I'll say it again, 900 million repair orders in our system.

Really? And then we can take those repair orders and use artificial intelligence and machine learning

and bring insights to dealers when a customer schedules a service appointment,

when a technician is looking at a job, and all of these things doing a warranty claim, etc.

And that's the next level of AI. I think we're kind of quickly moving past the schedule and

appointment and answer the phone. We're moving to, okay, who has the data? What can they do with

that data to bring insights to the customer? Is it hard to get enough data and the right data?

Because there's talk that to maximize AI with data, you have to make sure your data source is

current and there are duplications and that it's where it should be in terms of currency.

So how do you make sure that that happens? So CDK has been around a long time and we serve

a lot of great dealers. So we have a lot of data and we have a modern technology platform

that we've invested in over the last few years. So you combine really market-rich data with

modern technology and that's where you can bring the AI to life. So for example, we announced this

week that we're giving dealers a free CDT, that's a customer data platform. And so we took all of

the records of CDK customer interactions over a long period of time, over 1.3 billion records,

and we basically used AI and our new data engine to combine that down to identify

approximately 257 million unique car buyers in America. So if you think about the population

of America, that's 90 plus percent of all car buyers in America have had an interaction with

CDK. They bought a car at a CDK dealership, they had their car service at a CDK dealership,

they shopped for a car in the CDK CRM. So the fact that we could take all of that data, which we

have, leverage the new technology that we have to create a unique view of 257 million car buyers

is really special and then we can bring that to life with our customers through our CDP platform.

All of that is great and exciting and forward, but dealers and dealerships have been more

conservative about adapting technology forever and they haven't always embraced AI. They've been

wary about some of it, you know, like generative AI had the hallucinations where it worked and

then sometimes it would do something funky and they caused problems. So with all of the advances

that you've made, how do you convince dealers and also do you see dealers being convinced

successfully? Certainly dealers are super interested in how to better use AI. AI is really not,

you know, a means to replace people. I heard this term this morning, which I thought was good,

that artificial intelligence is really assistant intelligence or aided intelligence,

because in our business you still need the people. It's still the people business,

still the relationship business. You know, we sell cars to human beings. We don't sell,

you know, we don't sell cars to AI agents, right? So we need human beings to sell to human

beings and human beings to service human beings. And so I think dealers certainly have the interest

and the way to show them the value is the way to show them the use cases and how to use AI

is to show them the value, show them the pick up in appointments, show them the efficiency for calls.

For example, with our 900 million repair orders. I can't believe that number. Yeah, I know it's,

I didn't believe it the first time I heard it either. But with our 900 million repair orders,

we're able to take a complaint from a customer that the customer, you know, puts into the AI

scheduler. And then we run that against all of our repair orders. So when you walk in

with your car and you've made this complaint, the technician can see generated by AI, here's

some things that could be because we can see the issue across all these repair orders. And then we

can see, give the technician suggested repairs, we can tell the technician that maybe it's a warranty

claim, maybe it's not. And so this is places where dealers go, I just had a meeting, you know,

five minutes ago, where the dealer goes, Well, that's really interesting. Like,

my technician is still going to make the decision of what to do. But this is assistant

intelligence to help the technicians be more efficient, more accurate. These things are

impressive. I mean, you can't argue with the advances that are being made that they're impressive.

But you've invested thousands of money to make that. And it's so it's not cheap to get there.

Is this expensive for dealerships? I mean, look, our our CDP that we talked about with the 257

million unique users, that's free to our dealers. Sure. If you if you have our our dealership

experience platform, that's free to you. And so that's the value that we bring to dealers,

the value of our technology investments. And so look, there are there are costs for some things.

I do think a lot of the level one AI features that we talked about, I think over time, like,

very quickly, they're becoming foundational. Sure. It's like the old days, when we first had a

IVR on the telephone call, you know, the interactive press one for your bank balance press two,

I quickly became these things quickly become foundational expectations that this have to

be in the base products. And I think all of the products that and services that we bring to

dealers, you know, over the next few years, we'll have to have AI components to them

to be successful. That's just going to be the expectation of the market. And at CDK, our

philosophy is we have our AI is built in, it's not bolt on. And we really believe that AI should

be embedded in the products and services. Sure. And not a bolt on solution.

So when is AI truly part of that whole process? Does it mean that it has to be part of the

background if you don't think about it very much? I would say that if you think about the adoption

of smartphones, okay, and people initially thought like smartphones would be like a young person's

game, but very quickly, demographics didn't matter, age didn't matter, people are widely adopted,

smartphones much, much faster in our personal lives and in our business lives. And I think

if you look at the growth of the large language models, whether it's Gemini, ChatGPT, anybody that

uses the internet today, which is virtually everybody is using some form of AI for their

searches and whatnot, translate that to our jobs. Everybody is going to want to use some form of AI

to assist their jobs. The companies want to do it, the employees want to do it. I mean, I use AI

for my job probably 10 times a day. I use some tools myself. To your question, AI is just going

to be an expectation. It's going to have to be in everything. If you have the data, it's going to

provide a lot of value. And if it's built in, it's going to provide value. Anything else you

want to add about what's to come in 2026? Well, one of the things I'm super excited about in

CDK, we just launched a new warranty recovery assistance product. We call it WRAP. We launched

it 30 days ago. We've saved dealers over $30 million in 30 days for about 130 rooftops.

We have a couple hundred dealers coming in to see us today into more culture where we've got

another well over another $100 million or well over another $30 million of opportunity

for dealers for warranty recovery. And so that is another example of CDK using its investment,

using its data, and bringing tangible value to dealers. And so we're super excited about that

and a number of the other innovations we have to show our customers.

That's Daily Drive for today. I'm Kellan Walker. Thanks to Automotive News executive producer

Jake Nier, as well as our own Michael Martinez and Irvash Kakaria for their reporting for today's

podcast. We also have reporting from Kurt Nagel of our sibling publication, Prane's Detroit Business.

You can get the latest news on retail technology, earnings results, and everything happening in

the auto industry at AutoNews.com. Come back tomorrow for a conversation with Windsor Ontario

Mayor Drew Dilkins about President Trump's threat to stop the opening of the Gordy Howe

International Bridge. We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think of the show and the

topics we cover today. Send us an email at dailydrive at autonews.com or leave us a voicemail

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Feb. 11, 2026 | CDK CEO Brian MacDonald interview; Ford posts $11B Q4 loss

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