Feb. 28, 2026 | Weekend Drive: Stellantis profit-sharing woes, Nissan’s Pathfinder gamble

Welcome to Weekend Drive for the fourth week in February, 2026.

I'm Jake Nier in Detroit, in for Kellan Walker.

Joining me today are automotive news reporter Larry Velikwet, who covers Toyota, Subaru,

and Mazda for us.

Larry, so good to see you, sir.

Jake, it's great to see you in front of the camera today.

It's nice to be on this side.

Michael Martinez, who covers Ford in the UAW for us at Automotive News, Mike, thanks so

much for coming back.

Hey, Jake.

All right, guys, let's dive in.

So, Mike, I wanted to start with you on tariffs.

We've covered this on the show extensively this week from almost every conceivable angle,

but since last week, a lot has happened.

We saw the Supreme Court ruling striking down.

Trump's reciprocal tariffs leaving a lot of questions about refunds, especially companies

are waiting on guidance from the Court of International Trade on how to get their money

back.

Mike, I'm curious, what's your take on how this plays out for auto companies and the

supply chain?

You know, Jake, I'm really not sure.

I'm not sure anybody is, but I think the point is that if you are affected by this, don't

hold your breath on a refund.

Even if you get one, you're probably not going to be able to keep that money long because

President Trump has said quite plainly that he still intends to impose new tariffs just

in a different way.

Obviously, the Supreme Court has closed off one path for him, but as we know, he has tariffs

under what is it, four or five different statutes and laws and things of that nature.

He's just going to do it another way.

Even if you get money back, you're still going to be spending big on tariffs in the coming

years.

Don't spend it on something else.

Yeah, that's a really interesting point that not only are new tariffs in place, but there's

just so much uncertainty about what happens next.

If you were planning on making investments anyway, it seems like it would be tough to

try to allocate any money to anything at this point.

Absolutely.

Larry, any thoughts on this refund situation, where we go from here?

Here's what I would say.

If companies want to know how they're going to get their refund, they need to only watch

the sons of the Commerce Secretary, Howard Blotnick, who spent the better part of the

last year out buying up tariff liabilities at pennies on the dollar so that in case this

policy got ruled unconstitutional, they would have the outstanding refund asset to cash

in dollars on the dollar.

If anybody's going to figure out how to get a refund, it's going to be the kids of the

Commerce Secretary, so watch that space.

This is what I wanted to spend the meat of this first part of the show on with you guys.

It has to do with Stellantis and them confirming big loss.

Mike, they confirmed this week at Stellantis that the UAW workers won't receive any profit-sharing

checks for the first time since 2011.

Of course, Stellantis was not a company named Stellantis back in 2011.

The automaker lost about $2.2 billion in North America last year.

Meanwhile, Ford and GM workers are seeing their checks drop significantly too, but I

guess at least they're getting checks.

Walk us through what's happening here and what it means for labor relations with Big

Three.

Yeah, this isn't a specially wild and cruel swing because these workers were getting

record payments just a few years ago.

In fact, for three straight years, Stellantis workers were making the most, I think 22,

23, and 24, all for the prior year's financial results.

But you take a look at this, and I was trying to come up with how I was going to slice up

the blame pie here, who would get the biggest slice.

I think you can't discount President Trump and tariffs.

Stellantis took a $1.4 billion hit.

They're an international company having to import many of their products to the United

States, costs a lot more, drug down earnings led to negative profit margins, especially

in North America.

So that would be a pretty big slice, but I think an even bigger slice would go to Carlos

Tavares because even as tariffs did happen overnight, or at least last year that didn't

happen before last year, the rest of the house Stellantis got in this situation did not happen

overnight.

It was a lot of cascading product decisions under Tavares' leadership that has led to

steadily declining sales.

He got rid of the Hemi, right?

He tried to make Dodge an all EV brand.

He has not invested, many people did not invest in the Chrysler brand.

So there's many reasons why Stellantis is in a bad position today, and I think you can

point a lot of the blame to him.

I think some of the blame may have to go to Sean Fain too.

And I want to be clear, I'm not saying the auto workers.

They are blameless in this, and it's a terrible situation that they're in this year, especially

because many of them do come to rely on these, which essentially function as bonus tracks,

right?

But I think you go back to those 2023 contracts and all Sean Fain's bluster and getting every

cent he could from the automakers, the conversation inside the auto industry sort of off the record

around that time was that, hey, we're giving up a lot of money here and it's good for the

auto workers.

They'll get this win today, but what happens tomorrow and the next few years?

As companies, we're going to have to look elsewhere to make business sense.

This is before terrorist, before Trump, right?

And the idea was this may be a short-term gain, but long-term pain because it could

lead to fewer jobs and it could lead to significantly higher labor costs for the companies, which

will hurt their bottom line.

So that's how I would slice it up.

I don't know if you guys feel any different, but there's a lot of factors involved in this.

I didn't even touch on the EV situation, which technically didn't impact the profit-sharing

checks because it was a sort of financial trick.

They listed it as a special item, so that doesn't impact North America margins.

But you can say that EVs impacted it because they invested heavily, cost them a lot of money,

that didn't sell as well, led to lower sales.

So a lot of factors there.

I mean, when you talk about the negative margin that they, I think it was what, 3.9% or somewhere

in the threes, you could see maybe EVs contributed to that because EVs just aren't profitable.

So any EVs they're selling are not helping with the negative margin.

Speaking of the blame pie, when I look at social media here and around Metro Detroit,

all the comment sections seem to be divided politically speaking in two ways.

One is people saying this is all Trump's fault because of tariffs.

Other people saying this is all Biden's fault for pushing EVs so much.

And obviously, like you said, the write downs, not part of that, but it seems like that's where

people are divided. So how do we make sense of that, Mike?

Yeah, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

You can't blame the $20-some billion write down, but you can blame the fact that

not everybody wanted EVs, not nearly to the extent that Stalantis and Ford and GM and everybody

else thought they would. So the investment in those vehicles that still have not turned a profit

for anybody hurt and who was pushing investment in electric vehicles, the Biden administration,

can't deny that. Just as you can't deny that the Trump administration's tariffs have significantly

hurt businesses by adding a lot of extra costs. So yeah, it's not one or the other. It's

somewhere in between. Well, and it's also the policy shift too, right? That if Trump had kept

Biden's policies on EVs, they might not have fallen off the cliff, especially the federal

tax credit too. So it's a complicated situation here, but it sounds like plenty of blame to go

around. Now, Larry, you're down near Toledo. This is Stalantis Central down there.

It is. It's the largest market in the United States where Stalantis is the number one,

as the number one market share. And Toyota is number six.

Right. Well, there you go. So that sounds very flipped. But anyway, Larry, talk about

the mood down there. I mean, this has to sting for workers who have already been through a lot

over the past few years with Stalantis. Well, yeah, of course, these are bonuses, right? So

if these workers were counting on this bonus to make their boat payment or to buy an engagement

ring or do anything like a one-time purchase, that's their fault for thinking that it's permanent,

right? I mean, they're bonuses. They're profit sharing by definition. And in order to be there,

there has to be profits. I will say locally, it's going to be a big hit. I mean, the payroll

is still coming in. We have thousands and thousands of Chrysler employees in my metro area

between the two halves of the giant assembly plant. There's a parts plant in the southern suburb

and an engine plant in the northern suburb. It's a very Chrysler-centric community.

And we'll feel that lack of income. But I do want to go back to a point that Mike said,

which is when we talk about the blame here, we have to be careful of two things. Number one,

these profit sharing formulas go back further than the Great Recession. They were simplified.

I think it was Ron Geddelfinger's administration that simplified the formula so that

one billion of automaker profit led to $1,000 of bonus so that everybody could understand what

the hell they were getting. That's one thing. These go back a long way. And when they were

introduced, they were introduced as a way to align the interests of the workers with the

interests of the company, right? Everybody, if the company makes money, everybody wins.

The company loses money while we all share the pain, right? And it's a good negotiating strategy

on paper, but it has consequences when we go into downturns. And this is still a cyclical industry.

We haven't had a really serious cycle since 2009, but it's still a cyclical industry.

And so these are the pitfalls of this. The workers, they're victims in this because

they don't have any say in strategy, right? If I'm in a profit-searing situation where part of

my compensation depends on how the company does, and the company makes asinine decisions

that I don't take part of, I end up paying for them indirectly, but I catch that heat.

So they don't have any say in how the companies run. They do have a say in quality and maybe

to borrow a term from my companies, finding kaisins to make them more efficient,

but those have very little effect on that bottom line number.

You know, Jake, I would say in a previous life when I was at the Detroit News every year on this

time, they would have me go talk to boat stores and camper stores to see what sort of impact

profit sharing had on the region. And it was significant. A lot of people did spend on those

big ticket purchases that Larry mentioned, but even beyond that, not everybody went out to buy a boat.

Some people would bank that money because you have to remember every four years,

you have a contract negotiation and there's the risk of a strike where you may not be getting

paid. I know plenty of workers that would try to bank some profit sharing and bank bonus money,

so they would have something to fall back on if their company went on strike and they were without

a paycheck for a while. So this definitely stings. I don't want to make light of it at all, but it

does, it almost is reminiscent of Clark Griswold trying to put in a pool for his family, needs

a bonus check. All I get was membership to the Jelly of the Month Club. And you can argue that

this is an even worse situation because these guys don't even get a Jelly of the Month Club

membership. Where's the Tylenol, right? That's certainly maybe a question being asked around

the country, especially here in the Midwest a lot this week. Well, we'll keep on top of this,

guys. Coming up, we're going to talk about Asian automakers making some big bets on pickups and

SUVs, Hyundai with a mid-sized pickup, and Nissan with dual versions of the Pathfinder.

That's next on Weekend Drive.

Chinese vehicles reaching American driveways, including the Commerce Department ban.

He also explains why the threat from Chinese automakers might be overblown.

Coming in and getting a foothold is only the beginning, but from there until you establish

yourself as a kind of an Americanized brand, I think that will take decades.

I'm Molly Boygon. Join me on Shift, available this Sunday wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to Weekend Drive. I'm Jake Nier with Larry Velikwet and Michael Martinez.

All right, guys. Let's shift gears a little bit here to product strategy. Now, Larry, Nissan

announced plans this week. Well, actually, they didn't really announce that our own Irvox Carcaria

broke this story, as he does often. And Nissan doesn't get to announce anything with Irvox

That's right. Shout out to Irvox. They are planning to sell two distinct Pathfinders,

starting mid-2029, an updated unibody version, and a new body-on-frame model.

They're essentially mirroring Toyota's approach here with the Highlander and the Forerunner.

Nissan says they want to capture 33% to 40% of Toyota's combined volume in that space.

Larry, I got to ask, how realistic is that goal?

I wish them well.

Enough said, enough said.

You know, there's certainly a competition in that space, but careers have been

staked on trying to beat Toyota at its own game. I don't know that anybody's ever done it,

that I can recall, with the possible exception of Tesla, who killed the Prius when they first

came out with the Model S years ago. But I'll say that Nissan's approach here is

they're capitalizing on a very popular nameplate. I don't know how you differentiate to a consumer

the difference between a body-on-frame and a unibody, when there are a lot of auto reporters

that don't know the difference between a body-on-frame and a unibody, and how they're put together,

right, and why they are, how they are. So it's going to be an interesting strategy.

Let's put it this way. Will it work? We wish them luck.

Nissan moved away from body-on-frame back in 2012 for the Pathfinder. Now they're going back

to it more than a decade later. Mike, what's your read on this? Does this tell us something about

how the mid-size SUV market has evolved? Sure, and we've seen other vehicles thinking of the

Ford Explorer, right, or even the Escape, how that's sort of evolved over the years,

obviously, different segment. But I think it's a smart strategy, and again, not apples to apples,

but you look at what Ford did with Bronco, or you look at what they've done with some of the other

name plates. Their whole idea now is to build families of vehicles. A Bronco family, where you

have a rugged body-on-frame Bronco, you have a smaller unibody Bronco Sport, something different

for different needs. You have the Mustang family of vehicles. We've reported that's going to expand

further in the coming years. So conceptually, I think it's a good idea. You can divide and

conquer in the segment, but you have to make them distinct. You have to give consumers a reason to

choose one or the other and not cannibalize yourself. So will they beat up on Toyota? Probably

not, but can they still have success? Sure, I think it's a good strategy. Back in the day, they had

the X-Terra, right? That was their off-roader, and the only reason you build a body-on-frame

vehicle and name it the same thing is you want an off-road version and you want a version that

is all-wheel drive and that will go through snow. The off-road version was the X-Terra.

They killed that in 2015. Now, there's some thought that they're going to bring it back,

but you had a product there that was a legitimate tender back in the day,

and I don't understand this naming strategy to double up on Pathfinder and confuse the hell

out of consumers. Well, I was going to say, I think that to your point, Larry, and to Mike's point,

both, they have to find a way to distinguish and market these things without using the words

unibody and body-on-frame, clearly. I also want to talk a little bit about Hyundai,

speaking of body-on-frame pickups, that sort of thing. Hyundai confirmed that it's bringing

a mid-size pickup to the US by 2026. This puts them head-to-head with the Ranger, Colorado, Tacoma,

and now Canyon. Mike, I'm curious, what's driving Hyundai's confidence, do you think,

that there's room for another player in this really crowded segment right now?

I wish I knew because I'm not so sure that they should have confidence

for many of the same reasons we talked about Nissan. Look, what Hyundai's tried to do in the pickup

space has simply not worked on the smaller side. Clearly, the Santa Cruz was way too overpriced,

particularly compared to the Maverick, and Maverick ran laps around it. So they need to learn from

that mistake moving up to the mid-size. Again, everything they've tried to do so far in the

truck space has been unibody. I don't think that'll work on mid-size. You see, the ridgeline isn't

exactly light in the world on fire, but our colleague Richard Truitt had a story on this

week, and he put it into visual numbers with a graph, and it showed that this mid-size segment

has not evolved since prior to COVID. Sales are up slightly compared to 2019, but that's not what

you want to hear with the addition of a Ranger and a Jeep Gladiator. And if those pretty well

established brands can't find success in the truck space, I don't think Hyundai's gonna be able to,

unless they do something that Richard said. I thought it was a great idea. I did not know about

this because I don't pay too much attention to the African market, but Kia sells a body-on-frame

truck there called the Tasman. It looks awesome. Again, this is my ignorance. This is the first

time I'm seeing it. It's boxy body-on-frame. Looks cool. I think they could have success

if they would bring that over here with a Hyundai badge. You'd have to build it here because of

tariffs, so it would be a win for the Trump administration and be a win for US auto workers,

and you could probably expand the lineup by whatever you put in that plant to rugged SUVs.

So I think that would be a great opportunity if Hyundai would take that route and stay far away

from whatever they tried to do with the Santa Cruz.

Larry, I know you've got thoughts on the pickup battle, especially thinking back to the Maverick

and Santa Cruz, but what are your thoughts about Hyundai entering the mid-sized truck market?

So to Mike's point, I think the thing holding them back is also they don't have a body-on-frame

plant. They only have unibody plants, like most automakers. So like Volkswagen with the Amarok,

they basically outsource that to Ford because they didn't have any place to build it anymore,

and you'd run into the same thing here unless you got a very flexible line and were able to

pull it off, that you could put a body-on-frame line in a unibody plant somewhere. So I don't know

that that's a possibility, but I will say this. We talked about this before when we talked about

Maverick. There is a white space in the market right now for a compact body-on-frame pickup,

not a mid-sized pickup like Ranger and Tacoma, but a true compact body-on-frame pickup with

3,500 pounds of towing, et cetera, that they would be able to do with a body-on-frame lineup

instead of a car-based one like the Santa Cruz and the Maverick. That right now is white space

in the entire US market. If you're going to build, put a new vehicle and go where your

competition isn't, that's where they are. You're not going to dethrone, even after the war that

was the mid-sized pickup over the last 15 years. The Detroit 3 all pulled out of that

segment, then they all came back in. When they came back in, Tacoma had a 54% market share

when they decided to come back. They've regained some of it, but Tacoma is still in the 40s.

They gave up that segment like they did with sedans and they did it voluntarily and it was

boneheaded. There's another point here that truck customers are more loyal than customers of other

vehicle types. The Calvin test, right? Exactly what you're talking about immediately.

It's the Calvin test that's on the back of every truck window. Yeah, go ahead.

Exactly. You're going to have to give them a really good reason to switch. To Larry's point,

the Detroit 3 got out, now they're back in. By the time we get this mid-size from

Ande, you're going to have a new Dodge Dakota too. Give them a good reason. We obviously

haven't seen the plans yet, but they're going to have to come up with one.

I'm getting this image. You guys know the movie Gangs of New York.

The five points and all the gangs are meeting there in the middle and they're in the middle of

this royal rumble in the middle of the streets. Then Hyundai's over here, 10 years later, walking

in like, oh, let me get involved in this. Is it Gangs of New York or is it Anchorman?

Yes, that works exactly well. They're like the public TV station coming in at the end.

I can say that as a former public media person myself.

All right, guys, before we end off here, we have to talk about this one.

Mike, you brought this to my attention. Ford announced this week it's now charging $495 to

unlock the front trunk or the frunk, as us EV enthusiasts like to call it, on the Mustang

Mach-E. The hardware is there. There's a frunk that's there, but if you want to actually use it,

you have to pay an extra $500. Mike, what's going on here?

Well, it's easy to laugh at this and I think we probably can and should a little bit,

especially because this is sort of inside baseball, but Ford, when they announced this,

had a press release that showed them filling the frunk up with cocktail shrimp and boneless wings

because the idea was, hey, use this at a tailgate party. They were trying to market

a new technology on a new vehicle. At the end of the day, yeah, right?

Have fun getting the smell out of that. Exactly. Washington would not be fun,

but once we get all the laughs out of the way, I don't mind this so much because all you got to

do, it's an insert or whatever and they have a heat pump in the Mach-E now, so it made the

frunk smaller a couple of years ago anyway, so just take the frunk insert out anyway.

I think we're going to see more of this because you have to remember two things with the Mach-E.

One is built in Mexico, so it's subject to tariffs. Ford needs to get costs down.

And two, they're still losing money on everyone they sell because it's an EV

that they have not found a way to be profitable on. So I think in this era of rising prices,

you're going to see automakers do stuff like this and you got to commend them because they

done the research and they found out people don't actually use this thing. Certainly not

for cocktail shrimp and really not for anything else. My mom has a Mach-E. I don't think she's

ever used the front. I think it would take her a couple of minutes to figure out how to open it.

So I think most customers are like that and Ford is waving the white flag here saying,

hey, we'll take it out. People don't use it, so standard, you don't got to deal with it. If you

really want it, pay 500 bucks. That's a little unfair, but I don't think that many people really

want it. Larry, what are your thoughts? From a purely logical standpoint, Mike is right,

but this is my caution here. I hate subscription models and I especially hate, I mean, I'm

Midwest cheap. I was born Midwest cheap. I'll die Midwest cheap. I'm the kind of guy that'll look at

candy machine and choose something I don't like if there's a chance that two of them will fall,

right? So with that said, what I will say is that if your goal is a repeat customer

who you want to come back and if you don't treat them well and you abuse them on your purchase

by saying, oh, here we put this equipment in your car that you just purchased,

but we're not going to let you use it unless you give us another 20, 30 bucks a month.

That is the quickest way to get them to go somewhere else, right? It drives me crazy and

all these automakers have built their future on believing that the subscription model

in some form or another is going to save their bottom lines down the road. And I look at that

and I think, this is nuts. This is not going to work. If you're asking people to buy a giant

capital vehicle, right, a really expensive product, then you say, oh, the only way this

feature is going to work is if you give us more per month or we're going to let you try this feature

for a year, right? And then a year down the road that now that you're addicted to it,

then we're going to turn it off unless you give us more a month. It just pisses people off.

If you don't wait, you know, if Ford doesn't want the frunk in there, I totally get that

Mike's right, but yank it out. Save the weight. Well, I mean, again, to be fair, though, this

really isn't a subscription thing. This is a decontenting thing, right? Because they

did yank it out, right? And it's not standard anymore. So you talk about-

But is it there or is it physically there and not unlocked or is it out?

No, no, no. They're not just going to lock it and not let you lift the hood, what it is.

Okay. All right.

It's a plastic piece that I don't know. I have not seen a Maki without a frunk,

so I don't know if they are moving the heat pump and moving the battery and other things around,

or if it'll just be sort of a weird opening that something could go into.

Yeah. Reminds me of that old National Ampun. By this album, we'll kill this dog.

This is just the National Ampun's version of weekend drive here. Of course,

one is it not, right? No, but yeah, I mean, this totally violates the one thing I've been saying

for a long time now about these extra charges that automakers want to put on products,

is that if you want to charge me for something new, fine. If it's something that you're offering me

that I haven't had before and you want me to, okay, I don't have to pay for it,

but when you're taking things away to charge, maybe it's what you said, Larry,

it's that they're counting on people liking these things and then not wanting them to go away,

but also, as you said, that really ticks people off, I think. I don't know. It's an

interesting game they're playing here. But anyway, I really appreciate all of your insights today.

Really good stuff, guys. Larry Veliquette, Mike Martinez, thanks again for joining me here on

weekend drive. Yep, shout out to Kel. Happy off day. Oh yeah, the world traveler,

Kel, getting some much-deserved vacation time here. All right, well, that's weekend drive.

I'm Jake Nier in for Kellen Walker. You can find all the stories we discussed today at AutoNews.com.

Have a great rest of your weekend, and we'll see you back here on Monday for daily drive.

For a discussion about the barriers to Chinese EV entry to the U.S., featuring Lei Xing,

an independent analyst and consultant on the Chinese auto industry,

who says he thinks the threat to legacy automakers is exaggerated.

The Chinese, are they going to compete in the pickup? What sells in the U.S. market? I think

it's only going to be slowly, slowly establishing a foothold. Then we can talk about Chinese being

where the Koreans are today in the U.S. market. 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. And if you enjoy the podcast, remember to like,

leave a review, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Feb. 28, 2026 | Weekend Drive: Stellantis profit-sharing woes, Nissan’s Pathfinder gamble

About this episode

UAW

Stellantis

Big Three

tariffs

negative profit margins

Hemi

electric vehicles

federal tax credit

profit sharing

cyclical industry

Asian automakers

Nissan Pathfinder

Toyota Highlander

Toyota Prius

Tesla Model S

unibody

body-on-frame

Ford Explorer

Ford Escape

Ford Bronco

families of vehicles

Ford Bronco Sport

Ford Mustang

Nissan XTerra

Chevrolet Colorado

Toyota Tacoma

Ford Ranger

Hyundai Santa Cruz

Ford Maverick

Honda Ridgeline

Jeep Gladiator

Volkswagen Amarok

Ram 3500

Dodge Dakota

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