Sony Honda mobility is a company that was working on an electric car project together. They decided to stop the Affila EVs before the cars even reached customers.
A compensation package is the total amount of money and benefits a CEO gets. Here, the show is pointing out that Ford’s CEO Jim Farley received a very large pay package.
The New York Auto Show is a major North American event where automakers reveal new vehicles, concepts, and technology. The segment says they’ll preview next week’s show, which typically means upcoming product announcements and media coverage.
A direct sale model means the automaker sells the vehicle straight to customers rather than through the traditional dealer network. The tradeoff is control over pricing and customer experience, but it can anger dealers who rely on selling those cars.
EVs (electric vehicles) are the focus of the discussion, including how automakers invest in them and how software and technology increasingly define modern EVs. The segment frames EV profitability and execution risk as a key factor behind why some efforts struggle.
The speakers debate the viability of joint ventures (JVs) in the auto industry, especially when one partner changes direction. The argument is that JV outcomes may reflect partner strategy and EV market difficulty rather than the JV structure itself.
A bonus structure is the specific formula or set of rules that determines when and how much executives earn as performance pay. It can include multiple factors, such as quality metrics, financial performance, and stock-related outcomes.
Stock options give an executive the right to buy company shares at a set price later. Their value can change depending on the stock price and when the options vest, which is why compensation can fluctuate year to year.
A recall is when the company says, “We need to fix something on these cars.” It usually happens when there’s a safety issue or a defect that needs repair.
The Ford Expedition is a large SUV with three rows of seats, meant for carrying people and gear. It’s designed for road trips and everyday family use. It may be mentioned in the news because it’s part of Ford’s big-vehicle lineup.
IQS is a J.D. Power score for how many problems show up in new cars early on. The idea in the discussion is that older cars often score better because the bugs have already been fixed.
Stellantis is a big car company that makes brands like Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, and Peugeot. Here, they’re being discussed in the context of workplace parking rules and employee issues.
Aston Martin is a British luxury sports-car brand. The segment uses it as an example of the high-end vehicles Mulally saw in the executive garage, reinforcing the theme of brand pride and internal culture.
A “beater” is a cheap, older, often cosmetically rough vehicle that someone keeps running because it’s affordable. The segment contrasts it with newer cars and implies some workers may only be able to drive older, non-brand-specific vehicles.
“Under embargo” means automakers restrict when journalists can publish details about a vehicle. Media outlets agree to hold the information until a specific date/time, which helps coordinate launch messaging.
They’re saying today’s auto shows are often more like places to shop and buy cars than just look at them. Instead of only showing new designs, they’re set up to help dealers sell vehicles.
A manual transmission is the “stick shift” where you use a clutch and choose gears yourself. They’re basically saying it would be even more appealing if the car had a manual.
Hybrid cars use two kinds of power—gas and electricity. They’re designed to be more efficient than a regular gas car, without requiring you to rely only on charging.
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Welcome to this Weekend Drive edition of Daily Drive
for the fourth week of March, 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 in the days ahead.
We'll talk about Sony Honda mobility
pulling the plug on its Affila EVs,
Ford CEO Jim Farley's $27 million compensation package,
Stellantis employees getting ticketed
for driving the wrong brand to work
and we'll preview next week's New York Auto Show.
Joining me as always to talk about these topics
are Larry Velikwet, who covers Toyota, Mazda,
and Subaru for us at Automotive News.
Larry Legend, welcome back, sir.
Kellan, once again,
always great to spend my weekend with you.
And we're happy to have you here.
And Michael Martinez, who covers Ford in the UAW for us.
Mike, thanks for joining.
You are very welcome.
All right guys, so Larry,
Sony Honda mobility canceled its Affila electric vehicles
this week just months before the first model
was supposed to reach customers in California.
What's your reaction?
So thank you first for not using the term pull the plug
because that's what they did.
I think it's just the reality,
hit them square in the bottom line.
They realized that they had an uphill fight
because the Affila,
the way that they were gonna do a direct sale,
it was going to infuriate their dealers,
much like Volkswagen has actively done with Scout.
And the returns just were not gonna be there
because of the way that EVs are selling right now
or the way they're not selling.
So I think this was a last ditch,
swerve away from the cliff
off of California Highway One,
right at the last hairpin turn.
I think that this was simply caution
and every Japanese automaker is bottom line
when they report here at the beginning of next month,
it's gonna be really, really ugly.
I'm talking monumentally ugly.
So I think this was simple caution, right?
Why throw on even more bad news
because it was not gonna sell.
So this was tied to Honda's broader retreat
from EVs earlier this month.
Mike, what does this say about the viability
of those kinds of joint ventures,
especially when one partner changes course?
You know, I'm not so sure it's an indictment
of these kind of JVs
because we've seen plenty of automakers themselves
fail miserably at EVs and lose a ton of money.
So if Honda was doing this by itself,
it probably would have resulted in the same outcome.
I think at the end of the day,
these JVs conceptually are still pretty smart,
particularly this one,
where you're combining an automaker
with a technology company.
We're hoping to get the best of both worlds
in terms of expertise,
in terms of the software that is increasingly
being added to these new EVs, these new types of vehicles.
And at the same time, the ability to share the costs
that are associated with bringing a new brand to market.
So I'm not sure that it failed
because of the JV specifically
and I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad idea
for automakers to look at in the future.
Obviously, there is some caution.
You have to be sure you are on the same page
as your partner and that you are ready
for whatever bumpy road will lie ahead here.
But yeah, as Larry said,
this was probably an inevitable result
given where we are in the market right now.
All right, let's shift gears to executive compensation.
Let's talk about the money.
So Mike Ford CEO, Jim Farley's total compensation rose
to $27 million last year in part
because the company exceeded quality targets.
But Ford also set a record for recalls in 2025.
Please make this make sense and how does this math work?
Yeah, I'm not sure it does make a whole lot of sense
at the end of the day,
but according to Ford's bonus structure,
now executive compensation involves a number of factors.
There's the base pay, there's stock awards and bonuses.
So Farley's base pay is unchanged.
That's just $1.7 million has been for years.
His stock options sort of fluctuate year to year
based on when things vest
and if he buys more stock, sells it off, et cetera.
But this year, the story is the bonus pay.
His bonus pay jumped like 255%
because Ford exceeded its quality metrics.
Now it set two quality metrics,
one for vehicles with zero months in service
and one for vehicles with three months in service.
And according to its own calculations,
executives hit 200% of that goal.
It's the maximum they could hit.
So both executives and salaried workers
receive the maximum payout.
The way it shakes out is they're getting 130%
of their overall bonus target.
So Farley's numbers jump 11%.
So that's all well and good.
That's how they structure things.
But when you take a step back,
I don't know that it's the best message to be sending
because you almost run the risk
of having like a George Bush mission accomplished moment
because they are clearly not out of the woods
when it comes to quality.
Look at the numbers this year.
They're already leading the league, so to speak,
in recalls again.
And Ford's thing is don't look at the recalls.
Those are a lot of old vehicles.
It wasn't when the current regime was in,
the processes and people are different.
You have to give us time to get our stuff in place.
A lot of these old models, we can't help it.
But if you look at some of the recent headlines,
February 26th, 4.3 million vehicles recalled
because of a software error.
It was 2021 to 2026 model your F-150s.
It was 2022 to 2026 F-250s,
navigators, expeditions, Mavericks, et cetera.
A little earlier this month,
840,000 vehicles recalled for a camera glitch.
2021 to 2026 Broncos, 2021 to 2024 Edges.
So these are not old vehicles.
These are part of the Farley and company regime.
So I don't know that it's the message you wanna be sending
that, hey, my pay is bumping up
to the highest it's ever been.
Our salaried workers are getting higher bonuses.
Keep in mind, while the same time this is happening,
their blue collar workers lost about $4,000 this year
in profit sharing because they had
such an abysmal financial year.
Now, obviously the UAW negotiated profit sharing.
That's what they agreed to, so it is what it is.
But again, it's not a great message coming out of Dearborn
and you have to wonder if they maybe need to reconsider
how those bonuses are structured.
Larry, what's your take on this?
Let us have it.
So since our executive producer won't let me make the joke
I wanna make, what I will tell you, Kel,
is that I get where they're coming from.
I think that the argument that they're making
is a little specious.
However, I wanna point out something.
When we talk about recalls, right?
We use these gross numbers to tally them
and keep track of them.
But recalls by themselves,
A, don't necessarily mean things were wrong.
They mean things that they might wanna improve
relative to the number of recalls.
Very few of them are safety, you know,
oh, okay, this is a real problem.
We gotta shut this down.
You park your car outside, don't drive it.
Very serious recalls, right?
We do have a number of things going on.
Number one, we are in an era
when the vehicles that are right now in market,
many of those were designed during COVID
and the engineers were working remotely.
They weren't working in their offices.
This is especially true with the engine recalls, right?
That made it especially difficult to troubleshoot
and to get all the bugs out of it
because they just weren't in the office, right?
We're living with a lot of that right now as an industry.
That's not just for, that's everybody.
But I really think that we take the wrong view of recalls
and society does, yeah, recalls are a pain in the butt
to have, you know, to take your car in,
but every recall makes your car better
and it does so for free.
And it shows, actually, if they're done right
by the automaker, if they lean into it,
it shows that the automaker still backing their product, right?
And still taking care of their product.
So this is really a marketing issue at its core
that we take such a dim view of recalls
and we look at them as, oh, these are, you know,
marks on what should be a perfect vehicle.
It's not, their vehicles are complicated
and design them and producing them are complicated
and things go wrong.
And if automakers lean into it and say,
hey, yeah, I think we know things are gonna go wrong,
but we're gonna make it right.
As a consumer, I'm gonna feel a lot better about that
than I am, oh, okay, I gotta notice
I gotta take my car in for X, Y or Z,
especially if it's a software update.
That to me, a lot of automakers have leaned
into the over the air thing and it works,
but they still have to go through the,
it's a recall process.
So I don't think that they're necessarily as bad
as what we make them out to be.
So a couple of quick points,
the first being to Larry's point,
yeah, the recalls I mentioned,
software related, relatively easy fix.
Another point I think it's worth noting
is that Farley and the executive team
probably do need to balance
knowing that they have a lot of work still to do
with keeping morale high right now,
because in their defense, they have made strides
on initial quality.
They did pretty well in the last JD Power IQS study,
although they still came in just under the industry average,
but they're trending up and Ford says,
based off its own internal metrics,
they had the best full year initial quality
that they've had in a decade or so.
So it is probably fair to reward
the salaried employees in some way.
I'm just saying it's maybe not the best look
when you have a headline saying,
executive pay is going up so much
because of better quality
when there's still so much work left to be done.
Yeah, you're right.
That looks like hell.
Or any other adjective you wanna throw in there
that's a little stronger.
The one thing I would say,
and Mike knows this well, Cal,
is the problem with IQS is that
the older your model lineup is,
the better you do on IQS
because you've worked all the kinks out, right?
So the IQS measures the first three months of ownership.
You take the initial quality survey.
If you've got a car that's 10 or 12 years old,
all right, a model that's 10 or 12 years old,
well, you better have that dialed in by then.
Good stuff, guys.
Coming up after the break,
Solantis is ticketing employees
who park competitor vehicles in premium spots
and will preview next week's New York Auto Show.
That's next on Weekend Drive.
Almovio is taking aim
at one of the most fundamental parts of vehicle safety,
braking.
And the company says its next generation systems
can cut stopping distance by meters.
And at the same time,
we also see cost advantages for the fighter customer
because of maintenance topics.
It's significantly less maintenance
or even maintenance free over lifetime of the entire product.
On this week's episode
of the Automotive News Shift podcast,
we'll hear from Dennis Fritsch,
Vice President of Almovio's Safety and Motion Division.
He breaks down how Almovio is improving
braking performance,
including its push toward brake by wire
and dry brake technology
that eliminates traditional hydraulics.
I'm Molly Boygon,
tech and innovation reporter at Automotive News.
Join me on Shift,
available this Sunday,
wherever you get your podcasts.
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Welcome back to Weekend Drive.
I'm Kellan Walker with LaterBella Quet and Michael Martinez.
All right, Mike, so we've heard
about company parking lot rules before,
but Stellantis is apparently getting serious
about enforcing them.
What is going on?
Yeah, so the workers up there in Auburn Hills
are seeing tickets on their vehicles.
Apparently there's no fines involved,
so they're not out any money,
but if they get enough of these warning notices,
they could get a boot on their car,
which could be very inconvenient.
Now, this isn't exactly uncommon in the industry.
I think all the Detroit three at some point
have had pretty strict rules around this.
If you've been to any UAW plants or facility
anytime in your life,
you cannot even park in their parking lot.
If you have a foreign built vehicle,
you have to park it literally on the street,
down the road somewhere.
That's probably happened to many of us reporters
going to union events.
But I think the issue here, Kel,
is that you're seeing a lot of newer workers
who maybe aren't used to the old way of doing things,
particularly newer workers since the pandemic,
when most folks have been working from home,
and now Stellantis is calling them all back into the office,
so they're getting a taste of this for the first time,
and they don't exactly like it.
The reason we know about this story
is because people have been complaining on Reddit,
and it made its way to the news stations.
So I'm not here to call them softer to say suck it up
and walk or buy a Stellantis product.
There's actually-
But I am.
Yeah, I'll leave that to Larry.
But, and in these workers' defense,
there are some instances,
hilariously, where security has ticketed older vehicles
that used to be owned by Stellantis,
and no longer currently are, and they didn't realize that.
So some of these workers do have legitimate gripes.
But yeah, it's a shock to the system for some folks.
Should it be? I don't know.
Larry, GM and Ford aren't enforcing these rules right now.
What do you think the effect will be on employees,
and is it worth the trouble for Stellantis?
I mean, we joke about this, but yeah, it's worth the trouble.
If you're working there,
the chances are you're getting a discount on their vehicles
as an employee.
If you're driving a competitive vehicle,
you should know going in,
unless you've been there less than three or six months,
that you should probably buy one of the vehicles
that your company is producing, right?
That's A, that's how you keep track
of the products that you're working on.
Mike said he wasn't there to call out soft,
you know, the softness.
Really, this isn't a ticketing issue.
It's a walking issue, right?
It means that the folks that have these competitive cars
have to walk a little further to go to the office,
and it's a pain in the butt,
just like, you know, especially in the winter,
in Auburn Hills, it really stinks.
And all they gotta do is maybe trade in that Tesla
or trade in the Ford or the Toyota that they had,
and go buy a Dodge or a Ram or a Jeep or whatever,
you know, really buy one of those
because you're gonna wanna buy something
that they're gonna hold onto,
one of the brands that they're gonna hold onto,
and not ditch.
Yeah, right?
So, you know, it's a walking issue,
and it's funny and it's fun to laugh at,
but I get it, I understand it.
So I would say there's a famous story
when Alan Mulally became CEO of Ford.
One of his first days on the job,
he pulled into the executive garage,
and he saw a lot of non-Ford luxury vehicles
in the parking garage.
And he really liked Ford,
really Volvo's and Aston Martin's.
Yeah, some formerly owned by Ford
that they sold during the Great Recession,
but he, you know, chastised the leadership team,
and he sort of took that top-down approach,
and said, if we want more people to buy our cars,
we need to drive them ourselves
and be proud of what we're doing.
So I don't know what the requirements
are for slantist executives.
Right now, I would hope they're doing the same thing.
But you know what, Larry, in defense of the workers,
we're talking week in and week out
about the affordability crisis.
You don't know what some of these guys can afford.
Maybe they have an old beater
that's not a Chrysler or Stalantis product,
and it's not in the cards right now
for them to trade it in.
So, I mean, maybe that's a rare case,
but yeah, I guess we'll have to get some good shoes.
All right, guys, let's look ahead to next week.
The New York International Auto Show press days
kick off Wednesday.
Larry, you and I will be there at the Javits Center.
What are you expecting to see?
Ironically, compared to most shows
over the past couple of years,
this actually has a couple of reveals coming,
one of which, at least a couple of which,
we don't know what it is, which is really surprising.
The Hyundai Group is showing some vehicles
and we don't know what they are.
They've not shared them under embargo
as most automakers have done.
So those are gonna be surprises,
which is, it's an interesting turn,
at least from a media standpoint,
there's a new Subaru EV coming, a three-row EV
that is the sister vehicle of the Toyota Highlander,
and we've got a refreshed Volkswagen Atlas.
So, from a new standpoint,
it's the newest show that we've had in the US in a while.
Otherwise, I think what we're gonna see is the same thing.
We're gonna see a lot of focus on consumers
for really what auto shows have become,
which is shopping events,
which is what they were beforehand.
There's a little bit of a grist there for us to deal with,
but for the most part, it's gonna be about dealers
trying to meet up with shoppers to show their vehicles.
Mike, what stands out to you about the lineup this year?
Well, it seems like there's a little bit for everybody.
I'm curious to see the Atlas.
It's gonna be the big volume vehicle,
but I'll tell you what,
that Genesis G90 wingback concept,
I know design is subjective.
I think that looks gorgeous.
A sporty wagon is basically catnip for auto journalists.
We all love a sporty wagon.
Is it brown with a manual transmission?
If they were smart, that would be the trend.
Man, I love a good wagon, man.
I love a good wagon.
As does every auto journalist in Paris,
but I think it looks great.
I'd love to see that in person.
Seems like if you are going to the show,
either as a buyer or just an enthusiast,
there's gonna be something to spend your time on
and to take a good look at walking around.
All right, guys, Mike, Larry, good stuff.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Kel, it is always a wonderful way
to spend our weekend every week.
Thanks, Kel.
That's all for this weekend drive edition of Daily Drive.
I'm Kellen Walker.
Thanks to Automotive News executive producer Jake Nier
for his help on today's podcast.
You can get the latest news on electric vehicles,
executive compensation, and everything happening
in the auto industry at AutoNews.com.
Come back on Monday for a conversation with Dennis Frinch,
vice president of Amovio's Safety and Motion Division.
Basically, all OEMs are very interested
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About this episode
Sony Honda Mobility is canceling its Afeela EV program just months before the first cars were due in California, sparking debate about whether EV joint ventures are doomed or simply responding to today’s weak EV demand. Ford CEO Jim Farley’s $27M pay package is also scrutinized: bonuses tied to “quality” rise even as Ford sets record recalls, raising questions about messaging and metrics. Stellantis employees at Auburn Hills are getting ticketed/boot threats for parking non-Stellantis vehicles in premium spots. The crew also previews next week’s New York Auto Show, including Hyundai surprises, a new Subaru EV, and a refreshed VW Atlas.
