Tesla has been Wall Street’s fair-haired boy as the electric car startup’s share price soared over the past few years. Production figures have not kept pace with Tesla’s market cap, and now problems getting assembly up to speed on the company’s vitally important Model 3 and concerns about its cash burn have resulted in a downgrade of its credit rating from Moody’s Investor Service. That report from Moody’s was issued late on Tuesday.

When trading began on Wednesday morning, Tesla stock opened at $264.76, down 5 percent from the day before. That is almost 14 percent lower than it was at the beginning of the week, and 31 percent lower than in September of 2017, when Tesla’s stock price apparently peaked at $385 a share. (Read More…)

Detroit’s skyline-defining riverfront Renaissance Center is better known to car enthusiasts as the RenCen, home to General Motors, which has owned the seven tower complex for more than 20 years. Less well known is the fact that the RenCen was the brainchild of Henry Ford II. Shocked by the aftermath of the 1967 riot that devastated many Detroit businesses, the Deuce, as Henry Ford’s grandson was known, saw the RenCen as means of revitalizing the city’s economy. Construction began in 1971 and the facility opened in the summer of 1976. By then, however, the domestic auto industry was hit with the 1973 OPEC oil embargo just as it was struggling to meet new federal emissions and safety standards. Car guys call it the “Malaise Era,” and it was the start of four decades of decline of the Motor City.

That decline, however, genuinely appears to have finally bottomed out. Class A commercial real estate is in high demand downtown and commercial development is spreading to other areas of the city. Unemployment in Wayne County, Detroit’s home, is down to just 4.5 percent, compared to 17.4 percent in 2009.

Now, almost 50 years after Henry Ford II envisioned the RenCen as reviving Detroit, comes word that the car company with his name over the door may well revive and restore one of the most iconic images of Detroit’s decline. (Read More…)

Gad Saad is an evolutionary behavioral scientist who is a professor of marketing at Concordia University in Canada. He’s also an associate editor of the journal Evolutionary Psychology and writes a popular blog for Psychology Today. Some have called him part of the “intellectual dark web”, a diverse group of heterodox academics who are willing to tack against the prevailing winds of thought conformity on today’s college campuses.

Saad applies the principals of evolutionary biology to consumers, but he uses the word consumers in its broadest definition, not just buyers, as humans make many choices about how we use many things. One area of his research has been how hormones affect consumers and also how consuming can affect hormones, in both sexes. For example, when men drive Porsches, their testosterone levels go up. (Read More…)

In 2016, Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg factory fired an employee named Samir B. He had been working for the automaker for 8 years, mounting tires, but after the company said he began threatening co-workers and telling them of his pledge to join Islamist ISIS fighters in Syria, they had to let him go.

VW felt the threats were serious and worried he might stage a terror attack during a stockholders’ meeting at the company’s Wolfsburg headquarters. Now, a German court has ordered Volkswagen to reinstate him. (Read More…)

Tesla keeps insisting it’s going to show the automotive industry how to do things differently. The company’s make-or-break Model 3 was put into production without any pilot assembly or validation prototypes. Tesla is also more vertically integrated than traditional automakers these days. It owns its own stores and it makes many of its own parts. So far, with the EV maker as of yet unable to really get mass production underway on the new sedan, the jury is out on Tesla’s strategies.

CNBC now reports current and former Tesla workers saying almost half of the parts made at or produced for the EV startup’s Fremont, California assembly plant don’t meet production standards, forcing rework and end-of-line repairs, as well as impairing morale in the facility.

This raises the question of whether Tesla will be able to mass-produce vehicles in the quantities associated with automotive mass production: hundreds of thousands of vehicles per year. Tesla needs to be able to build and sell its Model 3 at those numbers to be a viable firm. (Read More…)

The Uber transportation network has had its share of legal woes. When there’s a Wikipedia entry specifically on protests and legal action, including hundreds of lawsuits, against Uber, you know the company is doing its part in keeping attorneys employed.

Uber’s legal matters include claims of employment discrimination, harassment and retaliation, invasion of privacy, labor law violations, an intellectual property dispute with Alphabet/Google’s Waymo division over autonomous vehicles, the use of “grayballing” software to avoid detection by police enforcing local taxi laws, the possible criminal use of an application named Hell that tracked its competitors at Lyft, plus continuing drama involving Uber’s previous CEO Travis Kalanick.

That may seem like a unsavory stew of legal problems, but it’s small potatoes compared to the early days of the taxicab business, when bribery, stock manipulation, trademark infringement, jury tampering, bombings, and even murder was how business was done. (Read More…)

There’s a funeral home not far from my house. On my way to drop off an anniversary present for my daughter-in-law, I drove past their hearse, which appeared to be pulled over by a member of the local constabulary. How often do you see a hearse pulled over by a cop? I drove down the street, made a couple of “Michigan lefts” on the boulevarded highway and stopped to snap a few pics. (Read More…)

People tend to associate (and with good reason, because he was a founder) the Porsche company with Dr. Ferdinand Porsche. However, the first Porsche car did not spring from the Dr. Eng. Porsche’s fertile mind, but rather from that of his namesake and son, Ferdinand Anton Ernst Porsche, known as Ferry. It was he who created the 356 model that established — permanently, it seems — the paradigm for Porsche sports cars that continues through today in the latest iteration of the 911 (itself designed by Ferry’s son, Butzi).

In 1998, for the 50th anniversary of Porsche’s beginnings as a car maker (the design firm was founded in 1931 with Adolph Rosenberger and Ernst Piech, the senior Porsche’s son in law, but the first Porsche branded car appeared in 1948), and apparently just prior to Ferry Porsche’s passing, he appeared in a commercial conveying his view of the Porsche company’s mission statement.

There is wisdom in his words that anyone in business should heed. (Read More…)

If you haven’t noticed, Series I Jaguar E-Types have gotten very pricey. There were only about 75,000 Es made and not all have survived for a half century. The E-Type had one of the early monocoque unibodies and it was almost as if it was designed to trap water and rust. Also, quite a few were roadsters and open cars don’t do well when exposed to the elements. That’s made all E-Types rare enough to become valuable (well, that and things like a supple suspension, the outstanding Jaguar XK DOHC inline-six, and a body that even Enzo said was sexier than his Ferraris).

They’re so valuable that at this point it may well be that there is no such thing as an unrestorable example. A number of restoration shops around the world specialize in bringing back E-Types. Every body component is available, and it’s no exaggeration to say that as long as there is a number plate, they can probably rebuild an E around it. There’s even a chance, what with the E’s insane appreciation, that you might not even be underwater after the restoration is done.

I thought about that when I saw this heavily patinated ’64 E-Type coupe for sale on eBay for $47,000. (Read More…)

One of the red-circled events on my calendar every year is the Detroit Autorama, arguably the world’s best custom car and hot rod show. As is fitting for an event in the Motor City, the vehicles competing for the Autorama’s top prize, the Ridler Award, must actually function, they have to be driven onto the show floor under their own power, and the hoods are up during judging so the judges can evaluate the engine compartment.

While that makes for fair competition, it also makes for less-than-ideal photography of the cars’ styling. No kid sitting in seventh-grade study hall ever drew a hot car with the hood up.

It might surprise you, then, that I was excited to find out about the Engines Exposed exhibit running until the end of February at the Henry Ford Museum’s Driving America display. (Read More…)

Tesla’s Model 3, described by many as a make-or-break product for the EV startup, has had a very slow launch, with production falling far short of the numbers Tesla had predicted.

CNBC is now reporting that, according to current and former Tesla employees, one of the factors in the launch delay is the failure of Tesla’s battery “Gigafactory” in aptly named Sparks, Nevada to come up to speed. Ironically, the highly automated factory apparently needs so much human hand work that Tesla has had to “borrow” dozens of employees from its partner in the facility, Panasonic. (Read More…)

Obscure cars fascinate me, which may be why I so much like Corey Lewis’ Rare Rides series on unusual and limited edition vehicles. Unfortunately, when you’ve been to as many car shows as I have, you can become a bit jaded; sometimes, unusual limited-edition vehicles don’t quite satisfy that jones for the weird and strange.

Corey’s Rides are usually some kind of actual production vehicle, something you might actually be able to buy. I’m thinking more like something you’d find tucked away in the corner of some private car museum somewhere outside of BFE.

Sometimes you need a hotshot of pure uncut obscure right to the mainline. That’s what Misfit Machines is all about. I’d like to say it’s going to be completely strange, but they’ll most likely all have wheels, so I’m aiming at 99 percent weird. (Read More…)

Nissan introduced the Xmotion (pronounced Cross Motion) CUV concept at the NAIAS in Detroit the other day. The company says the Xmotion is inspired by the Yokahama-based automaker’s Japanese heritage, particularly the practice of traditional Japanese crafts.  The crossover is said to connect “traditional and modern Japanese craftsmanship and technologies.” Artisanal techniques such as weaving, metalsmithing, and woodworking were used to craft the interior of the Xmotion.

To emphasize that connection, master shokunins from Kyoto’s GO ON consortium of traditional Japanese artisans were brought to Detroit to demonstrate their skills to assembled media and the general public after the big auto show officially opened later in the week. (Read More…)

He called his cars — made in California — Eagles, and his friends and fans nicknamed him Big Eagle. His company and team were the All American Racers (though they raced Toyotas for some time). He was one of less than a handful of American drivers to win in Formula One, but the only one to do so in an American race car, built in his own shop. He, along with A.J. Foyt and Roy Lunn, helped The Deuce kick il Commendatore’s ass at LeMans, in a car designed and built in Dearborn, Michigan. There was even a lighthearted attempt to draft him to run for president.

Dan Gurney was quintessentially American, one of the people who have made the United States a great country. (Read More…)

Every year about 5,000 people are credentialed as media to cover the big NAIAS, better known outside the industry as the Detroit auto show, and every year there are articles written about whether or not auto shows are a relic of the pre-internet past of printed magazines and their lead times.

When new product information can be instantly transmitted directly to potential customers, who needs to cater to jaded journosaurs, soon to be extinct? When new product information can be teased and leaked to build buzz on social media months ahead of any physical reveal, who needs an actual physical car show? Even for the automotive journalists, there is less excitement with each big auto show, a sense of deja vu.

Women in Saudi Arabia haven’t yet had a chance to become jaded about car shows. That’s because as the automotive (and other) journalists were starting to arrive in Detroit, the first car show ever for Saudi women was being held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (Read More…)