The Detroit Auto Show is a big event where car companies display their latest cars and technology. It's a chance for people to see what's new in the automotive world.
Stellantis is a big car company that makes many different types of vehicles. It was created when two companies, Fiat Chrysler and PSA Group, joined together.
A plug-in hybrid is a type of car that can use both electricity and gasoline. You can charge it at home, and it can drive a certain distance using just electricity before it needs to use gas.
The Jeep Wrangler 4xE is a special version of the Wrangler that uses both gas and electric power. This helps it be more efficient and better for the environment while still being great for off-roading.
EV charges are the costs that car companies spend to create electric cars and the places where you can charge them.
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9th at AutoNews.com. Welcome to this weekend drive edition of Daily Drive for the third week in
January 2026. I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas. We're breaking down some of the biggest stories
in the auto industry from the past week and looking forward to what's in store the days ahead.
Joining me today are Larry Velikwet, who covers Toyota, Subaru, and Mazda for Automotive News.
Larry Legend, welcome back to Daily Drive, sir.
Cal, can I give you a really nice chill Midwest hello today?
Yeah, I'll take it. And Michael Martinez, who covers Ford in the UIW for Automotive News.
Mike, welcome back to Weekend Drive. Thanks for having me.
Let's start with President Trump's visit to Detroit this week. Mike, you've been tracking the
story. What's the latest on the Ford worker who heckled Trump and got the middle finger in response?
So as far as we know, he is still suspended pending an investigation.
He's also raised over $800,000 through GoFundMe pages that have since been sort of stopped at
his request. Also, the UAW and his local have issued statements backing him up in the case of
any type of disciplinary action. But, you know, Cal, it's interesting. I'm sure Ford did not expect
at all for this visit from the president to turn into this sort of sideshow circus that we've seen.
If you've taken a look at Ford's social channels, any of the past few days, Instagram, Twitter,
Facebook, anything they post, the comments are nothing but support for this worker anti-Trump
sentiment. So it's really sort of snowballed out of Ford's control. At this point, Bill Ford said he
was embarrassed by the situation because he was the host. Ford was the host as a company. And it's
interesting that this is the thing that's probably going to outlast everything else from that trip.
And if it isn't this, it was another sort of unscripted moment. The cameras caught Trump
talking to a worker saying that, you know, him and Bill Ford are buddy buddies and that he calls
him up all the time asking for Trump to get rid of this environmental garbage. Now, if you know
anything about Bill Ford, he sort of built his career around the fact that he is the environment
guy. His advocacy coming up through his career is what set him apart from his peers. So to have
that comment out there isn't great for him either. So it's funny how tightly controlled this visit
was by Ford and obviously by the administration, but yet random remarks from the president,
serendipitous moment with a worker and the president is what will end up remembering. And Larry,
I got to say, I just wish there was some way that Ford could have possibly known that getting
involved with Donald Trump might lead to some drama. I know. I know. It's just a surprise.
Quick question, guys. Couldn't see it coming. Side note. Isn't this when you have your PR team
tell the social media team for your big publicly traded company that, hey,
maybe you should turn the comments off on social media until this dies down a bit.
Isn't that what you would do? Absolutely. I'll be honest. I haven't checked as of Friday, but
I know definitely into Thursday evening, every one of the comments was not about whatever their
post was about. Larry, now I hesitate to even ask you this, but I have to. It's my job and this is
what I get paid to do. What are your thoughts on this story? So I'm going to go in a different
direction than what you probably expect. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What I'm going to say is that there
is a long, like generationally long and proud history in this country of heckling the president.
Lincoln was heckled. Truman was heckled. Nixon was heckled. There's all kinds of video of
Bill Clinton and Obama being heckled. And hell, if you think about it, George W. Bush had two
shoes thrown at him, albeit in Iraq, right? Oh, I forgot about the shoe. Oh my goodness.
I forgot about the shoe. Not the shoe. Shoes. There were two. Plural. Plural. Yeah. And he dodged
them. He dodged them like a champ, but I will just say that this history has always been there,
right? And it's part of the First Amendment. Whether or not that First Amendment applies in
the workplace, boy, that's that's been adjudicated over and over again over the years. So that'll
play out for this worker. But I think the telling thing is how the person being heckled responded
if you watch the videos online of presidents being heckled compared to this. Well, Larry,
Trump made some waves at the Detroit Economic Club when he said, let China come in about foreign
automakers building plants here. He said this before, but this time he did it in Detroit ahead
of the Detroit Auto Show. What do you make of that? You know, here's the thing. This statement
ought to scare the hell out of every automaker and every dealer in the United States. And I'll
tell you why. If he predicates opening the door to Chinese vehicles on them building a plant here,
that is a small, a tiny price to pay for China. If I was China, I'd be all over it. Here's why.
Think about Toyota, right? Toyota didn't build a plant in the US until the late 1980s when it
built Kentucky. It was here for, you know, it was sending cars from Japan for 25 years. Take that
scenario and put it on China, which if you have followed this, China has, they sell about 26
million cars a year. They have capacity for 52 million cars of production, right? Their economy
is straining and their entire auto industry is straining because they are overcapacitized. They
have too many plants, too many workers. What's the relief valve? Export. If all I have to do
to say turn BYD into Toyota is build a plant here and suddenly I can make a few cars here
and ship millions from China that I made cheaply and I can ship fairly cheaply and deliver to the
market really cheaply no matter what I pay those American workers. That is a small, small price
to pay, right? That's why it ought to scare everybody because you open the door for basically
the cost of one mayor's ribbon cutting, maybe two billion dollars. You destroy a, how many,
$700 billion industry in the US for a $2 billion plant located in one place.
Mike, what are your thoughts? Well, you know, I'll say this. I think
President Trump has shown over his first term and now in his second that oftentimes when it comes
to his decision making, it's usually the last person he talks to who's in his ear on something
that gets him to take a stance on a particular issue. So I think this goes back to the fact of
why you saw Ford roll out the red carpet, so to speak, for him. Why you see an environmental
advocate in Bill Ford despite Trump rolling back regulatory policies, sort of hitch their wagon
to the president and be proud for his visit and to show off, you know, that partnership is because
I think they're trying to get in his ear and they're trying to know that when they do call him
with an ask that he'll pick up and that ask may be, hey, reconsider your policy on China because
Jim Farley has been one of the leading figures out there sounding the alarm bells, saying how
much of an existential threat that country's industry is to ours. So again, I think, you know,
there's going to be a lot more to be said on this, you know, in the next few years. But
I think this is why you're seeing the auto industry really try to gravitate towards
Trump to try to influence his decision on this. So the polling we discussed earlier this week
showed 88% of Republicans worry about losing manufacturing jobs to China. Is there a disconnect
here between Trump and his own base? Yes.
In the words of Stan Lee, enough said.
Let's let's think about this, though, for a minute, Kel. If you are worried about manufacturing
jobs being lost to China, those are not what you should be worried about, right? Because
A, they're gone. But more jobs have been lost to robots than to China.
I've said this for years, Larry. I've said this for at least 10 years. Every time,
I don't mean to interrupt you, but any time someone is complaining to me about losing their job
to a person in a foreign country, I'm like, no, a robot took your job. And that's like a tough
pill for people to swallow. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's, well, you look at the
innovations this month, right, from CES about humanoid robots. Yeah. Right? These are workers
who work 20 hours a day in dark factories and don't have to worry about health insurance
and have somebody working maintenance on several of them, but without limitation and without yelling
at the president when he walks through, right? That is the existential threat,
not whether or not those jobs are going to China. Good point. All right, coming up,
we'll talk about Stellantis' decision to drop its entire plug-in hybrid lineup in the U.S.
Reaffirms its commitment to introducing its own PHEVs. That's next on Weekend Drive.
Artificial Intelligence dominated CES 2026, but is the industry's pivot away from EVs,
putting the U.S. at risk? This slowdown in the U.S. and this pivot to hybrid and other powertrains,
my concern is, is how far will we fall behind and how difficult will be for us to catch up or
can we catch up? On this week's episode of the Automotive News Shift podcast, EY's George
Lenio joins the show. He talks about why U.S. automakers skipped big displays this year,
the shift from EV hype to AI and robotics, and his concern that the U.S. is falling behind
China in electrification. I'm Molly Boygon. Join me on SHIFT, available this Sunday wherever you get
your podcasts. Welcome back to Weekend Drive. I'm Kellan Walker with Larry Belliquette
and Michael Martinez. Guys, now let's talk powertrains. Stellantis just pulled the plug
on its entire plug-in hybrid lineup for 2026, including the Jeep Wrangler 4xE,
which was the top-selling PHEV in the U.S. Meanwhile, GM says it still plans to introduce
plug-in hybrids. Mike, what's going on here? Why are these two companies taking such different
approaches? Well, I mean, the fact that Stellantis was the top P.F. seller is kind of a low bar to
clear. I'm not sure how much that really matters because those kinds of vehicles don't sell well
here in the United States. And I think it's because there's some confusion with the customer. If you
take a look at it, most P.F. customers don't plug in the vehicles. They sort of treat them more like
gas. And I think as you're reconsidering investments in this new day and age, you really need to focus
on what you know is going to sell. And I don't think that's P.F.'s. Larry, what are your thoughts on
this divergence in strategy? So I want to bring up some research here from JD Power that we ran
back at the end of November. So it's true. Mike points out, P.F.'s account for only 1-2% of the
entire U.S. market. But among the premium brands, P.F.'s are around 7% and growing. They're up from
1.5% in 2019. According to JD Power, the typical premium P.F. buyer, older,
affluent, highly educated, most between 55 and 65, married, own their own homes.
And about 60% have household incomes over $250,000 a year and nearly a quarter have graduate degrees.
That is not a Wrangler buyer. Now, beyond the occasional fun mobile, the third car,
and if it's a third car, you're not going to get to P.F. It's a fun vehicle. What I will say,
I think the difference for GM and why GM is going forward, why Stellantis is pulling back
is really a matter of pockets. GM has deep pockets. Stellantis does not. It's a luxury that you can
afford, if you're GM, you can afford, you have premium brands that you can put investment in.
And you can keep those P.F.'s. And for the customers that want them, they make sense.
But they're a nice transition technology. But I don't think that Stellantis is especially
with the problems that they were having with Jeep. I don't think they could afford that luxury
anymore. Mike, we've now seen Ford take $20 billion in EV charges. GM takes $7 billion
and Stellantis killing P.F.'s. Is this just reality checking after over investing?
Or are we watching automakers surrender the EV market to Tesla and the Chinese?
Well, I mean, if they pull out like that, they risk that possibility. But again, it goes back to the
fact that these investment dollars are precious and you've seen them burn through billions and
billions on EVs for nothing much to show for it. So I think moving forward here, we're going to see
much more carefully calculated plans, whether it's for a vehicle lineup or anything else
related to what these companies are doing. It does, though, kind of strike me as pretty
short-sighted going back to the Trump administration, right? I mean, this is scoring them points,
and this is what the administration is enabling through its policies. But he's still a lame duck
president. He's going to be out in three years. You could have a new administration takeover,
switch parties again, in which case they would likely push greener vehicles because, again,
that's where the rest of the world is going. So I think the industry is really taking a big risk
here while it will benefit them in the short term. And we all know gas-powered SUVs and trucks
continue to sell well in the US. That's a good thing for them. But you really risk the prospect
of alienating yourself on the global stage and the potential to really kind of hurt your prospects
moving forward post-2029. Larry, any final thoughts? Yeah, you know what? I'm actually going to take
the folks on the left to task for this because they pushed EVs as a direct substitute for gas-powered
vehicles, right? You can make that switch without any compromise, and that just wasn't true at the
time that they tried to push this. Now, they did it, you know, presumably for altruistic reasons,
but the business world still had to adapt. And I think what you're seeing, the backlash that we
saw, is a response to that. Instead of a slow rollout, instead of saying, hey, make this change
when you can, as you can, as the infrastructure matures and you're able to do it and you can,
one day, be able to drive cross-country, stop to fill up just like you would without the Tesla
Supercharger network, because this was still growing up. I think they pushed it too fast,
and we're now in the backlash stage. Eventually, this technology will mature. You'll see the switch
come, and that's why I'm really reluctant to watch companies move only in one way or the other,
because I think it's a mistake both ways. Got you. Good stuff. Larry, Mike, thank you so much for
joining me. Kell, also, to be here, bud. That's all for this weekend drive edition of Daily Drive.
I'm Kellan Walker. Thanks to Automotive News executive producer Jake Nier for his help on
today's podcast. You can get the latest news on Trump's Detroit visit,
Stalantis and GM's powertrain strategies, and everything happening in the auto industry
at AutoNews.com. We're off on Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday here in the US.
Come back on Tuesday for a conversation with George Lenio, EY's America's automotive leader,
about how artificial intelligence is turbocharging the simulations used to train autonomous vehicles.
As you start to look at the AI and the compute power that exists today that didn't exist last
year, it's allowing for that technology to be brought to light. 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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About this episode
Discussions revolve around President Trump's recent visit to Detroit, where he made controversial remarks about welcoming Chinese automakers, igniting debates about the implications for U.S. manufacturing jobs. The episode also covers Stellantis' decision to eliminate its plug-in hybrid lineup in the U.S., contrasting with GM's commitment to PHEVs. Experts analyze the shifting strategies of major automakers in response to market demands and the evolving landscape of electric vehicles, highlighting the tension between immediate profits and long-term sustainability.
