Nio, originally launched as NextEV in 2014, announced that it had delivered 3,268 electric SUVs in the third quarter of 2018. Not only does this beg the question of when Nio swapped from Formula E and electrified hypercars to utility vehicles, but it also makes us wonder how a burgeoning EV firm managed to surpass production goals. Aren’t all zero-emission automobiles that aren’t developed by established automakers supposed to languish in purgatory?

Answering the first question is easy. Nio started deliveries of the ES8 crossover last June, though it still sells the high-performance EP9 for $1.2 million. We doubt that model provided any significant contributions to overall volume in Q3. The trickier bit of this equation is figuring out how the Nio moved all that metal. While 3,200 cars is a paltry some for a mainstream manufacturer, it’s pretty damn good for a company that just started building a volume electric. Even Tesla would have been envious in 2012.  (Read More…)

Volkswagen’s Passat has long been the choice for Euro-fetishists who believe themselves too good to purchase a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry. That decision was easier to make in 2012, when VW moved 117,023 of them in the United States, diesel cars were still tolerated, and Japan had basically given up on styling its vehicles. But things are different now.

Diesel might as well be a four-letter word when not affixed to trucks and Japan’s automakers have gone mental with their newer designs. Volkswagen only sold 60,700 Passats in the U.S. last year. The automaker needs to work some real magic if it hopes to bring that number up in the years to come. While Europeans get ready to wrap their paws around an MQB-based Passat, Americans remain stuck with an older platform shared with China, South Korea, and the Middle East.

Fortunately, it looks like VW has been hard at work in Asia, delivering a sharp new sedan for the Chinese market that it might share with the U.S. next year.  (Read More…)

Faraday Future’s summer fling with Chinese real estate group Evergrande, which invested $800 million into the company last June, appears to be over. The “automaker” is allegedly trying to back out of its arrangement after its CEO and founder, Jia Yueting, requested an additional $700 million in funding. The official deal calls for another $1.2 billion over the next two years.

Faraday has a real knack for screwing over anyone who lends it any kind of financial help, and it looks like its biggest investor doesn’t want to get burned. As a result, the carmaker wants out and Jia has begun seeking arbitration to abandon the sale.

So far as we know, Evergrande stipulated that the company had to hand over its intellectual property and begin mass production of the FF91 before year’s end — otherwise Jia will be ousted as CEO. Officially, Faraday says it’s on track for December deliveries, but all we’ve actually seen are a few side panels being passed around by robots and one completed shell. Meanwhile, the manufacturer’s only completed pre-production prototype was reported to have caught fire last month, following an event where it was shown to employees and their families. (Read More…)

Now that China has relaxed its joint-ownership mandates, BMW has announced that it will procure a majority stake in its venture with Brilliance Automotive. The German firm will be the first foreign automaker to have majority control of its business in the region.

Being first will not come cheaply, however. It will cost BMW $4.2 billion to assume control with a majority stake of 75 percent of the business — albeit as part of a larger deal. All the manufacturer has to do is come up with the funds and wait until 2022, when rules limiting foreign ownership for all Chinese auto ventures are officially lifted.  (Read More…)

Earlier this year, we addressed speculation that there was a chance Nissan’s new body-on-frame SUV — and spiritual successor to the now-defunct Xterra — could go on sale in the United States. Unfortunately, the development team behind the Nissan Terra has advised us to keep it in our pants. It isn’t coming here, despite previous claims from the manufacturer that it could be possible.

“We can do anything,” Ashwani Gupta, global head of light commercial vehicles for the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, said last March, while maintaining that a strong case would still need to be made for the model’s U.S. arrival, “[The Terra has] authentic capability to go off-road — even if the customer only wants to go off-road once a year.”

Nissan has since changed its tune on the Terra’s prospects. “Currently, that is out of our scope,” Hironori Awano, chief vehicle engineer of the Terra, said during a briefing at Nissan’s global technical center last week. “The U.S. market is one of the toughest, not just because of crash tests but also because of customer expectations.”  (Read More…)

Tariffs and other pressures are weighing on the once blistering hot Chinese new car market, and a suspension issue has now added new storm clouds to General Motors’ formerly sunny skies. The automaker’s Chinese arm, GM Shanghai, has announced the recall of 3.3 million Chevrolet, Buick, and Cadillac models.

Bad news for a foreign company in a suddenly dodgy market. (Read More…)

Ford’s decision to construct the current-generation F-150’s body purely of aluminum paid off in terms of lightweighting, fuel economy, and sales, but rising commodity costs over the past couple of years eroded some of the financial benefit. There’s far greater headaches facing Ford these days, as the industry grapples with tariffs on not just imported aluminum and steel, but vehicles as well.

A second income-sucking tariff hit in July, when the U.S. applied an import duty of 25 percent on a slew of Chinese goods, prompting China to up its own tariffs on American goods, including automobiles. Ford isn’t having it. Having already lost $1 billion in profit, CEO Jim Hackett has a message for President Trump. (Read More…)

While the trade situation is still very much in flux, Toyota sees itself as standing to gain from the turmoil, just not in the United States. The automaker, along with other Japanese brands, finds itself in an advantageous position in China — a massive market facing its own troubles.

China’s anger at the U.S., and vice versa, could mean big bucks in the short term for Toyota. (Read More…)

Last week, we looked at how the world’s largest automotive markets are coping. If you’re interested in an abridged version, they could all be doing better. We also noted that China was getting around to summarizing its summer sales data. Well, that ship has since come in, and it was full of corpses. The country has endured three straight months of falling car sales after years of consistent growth.

As the world’s largest automotive market, China impacts just about every other industrialized nation on the planet. Unfortunately, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) reported that influence helped the market share of U.S. brands fall to 10.7 percent in the first eight months of 2018 versus 12.2 percent just one year earlier. The association’s assistant secretary general, Xu Haidong, said this decline could be attributed to American firms inability to refresh their lineups in a timely manner and definitely had nothing to do with the trade war, anti-American sentiments, or the boycotting of U.S. brands by Chinese consumers.  (Read More…)

For the past two years, we’ve reported that the post-recession upswing in new car buying in North America seems to have plateaued. Environmental factors have led to Millennials buying fewer cars than their parents’ generation, and wealthy folk have proven unable to pick up the slack — as no amount of money allows you to drive several cars at the same time.

Most major carmakers posted declining U.S. deliveries in July, and August’s data proved a mixed bag. However, America isn’t the only big market that’s taking a beating. The First World seems to have collectively surpassed peak growth and now has to ride out an extended period where volume dwindles until some other nation can afford to import container ships full of sparkly new automobiles. (Read More…)

This Chinese New Yorker is a long way from home. Photos snapped by TTAC reader MUSASHI66 show a GAC GS8 SUV sunning itself in an Aurora, Colorado parking lot. Wearing New York dealer plates, the SUV also carries a Motorola Radius two-way radio and front passenger seat-mounted laptop, which isn’t standard content in any SUV.

Of course, this isn’t just any SUV. It’s a utility vehicle made by an automaker that really, really wants to spread its wings in the United States. (Read More…)

Evergrande Health Industry Group Ltd, which owns a 45 percent stake in U.S.-based Faraday Future, said Tuesday that the electric vehicle startup has officially moved its headquarters to China. The group claims Faraday now plans on building five R&D and production facilities across the country over the next decade.

The intended goal is to have the startup reach an annual production capacity of 5 million vehicles within 10 years and launch multiple “premium to entry-level segments for the global auto market, to build an internet-based intelligent mobility ecosystem,” Evergrande said.

It sounds a little premature for a company that managed to evade certain death by the skin of its teeth — and only just snagged a manufacturing facility — a few months ago.
(Read More…)

China has bit of a gambling problem when it comes to electric car manufacturers, though it should probably be referred to as a “gambling solution.”

The country dumps vast sums of money into hundreds of EV startups, effectively hedging its bets by placing chips on absolutely everyone. With $15 billion already invested, the nation intends to put another $47 billion toward the cause — plus whatever funding investment firms decide to contribute. While the strategy has definitely stimulated the economy, created jobs, and supersized the industry, there’s growing concern that creating a battle royale between startups could blow up in China’s face.

Even if it doesn’t, there’ll still be a bunch of automakers eating each other until only a handful remain. Previous estimates had that number riding around 5 percent of the whole. But NIO Capital, the Chinese investment firm that’s already invested a gratuitous amount of funds into advanced automotive tech, claims the actual number will be far lower — probably around 1 percent.  (Read More…)

Mercedes-Benz sport-utility vehicles assembled in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, are being checked for potential problems by Chinese customs authorities in Shanghai, according to the nation’s media. The situation was later confirmed by Daimler AG on Thursday.

Officially, custom agents discovered the imported GLE and GLS models possess “insufficient” rear brakes and pose a safety risk. However, this isn’t China’s first time holding up product from the Tuscaloosa factory. Daimler confirmed that its American-made SUVs, along with vehicles from Ford, were held up for several weeks in late April.  (Read More…)

Ford hopes to nab the attention of Chinese customers by unveiling a new midsize sport utility vehicle specifically designed for the region, placing an emphasis on more space for less money — a concept which would likely be appreciated worldwide. However, the model isn’t entirely new. The automaker is actually reviving the Ford Territory, an Australian-market crossover based on the defunct Falcon.

It’s a departure from the trend of Western manufacturers focusing on China’s appetite for luxury vehicles. Still, Ford may have missed its opportunity there. Chinese consumers swarmed Buick like flies on a carcass; Ford wasn’t so fortunate. It performed abysmally in The People’s Republic this year, posting 400,443 sales for the first half of 2018. That represents a 25 percent slip compared to last year’s volume and the worst first half since 2001.  (Read More…)