The EX90, Volvo’s Great Hope To Take The U.S., Has Hit A Snag

Good morning! It’s Friday, July 21, 2023 and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know.

1st Gear: Volvo’s Volume Champion Delayed

We first laid eyes on Volvo’s seven-seater electric SUV, the EX90, back in November. At the time, the Swedish automaker was aiming for an early 2024 launch, but it seems that timetable has shifted to the middle of next year, per Automotive News. The reason? Trouble developing the vehicle’s lidar-enabled safety and semi-autonomous driving features:

Volvo has delayed production of the new electric EX90 crossover to mid-2024 as engineers work to incorporate a key safety technology into the flagship model’s new platform. On the company’s earnings call Thursday, Volvo Cars CEO Jim Rowan pinned the “five- or six-month” delay on the “complexity of the software code” around the EX90’s lidar system.

The remote-sensing lidar technology uses laser light pulses to render precise images of the environment around the vehicle. Volvo said lidar and other sensors on the EX90 create an “invisible shield of safety” that can help reduce accidents that cause serious injuries or death by up to one-fifth.

The EX90 is the first Volvo to incorporate lidar and will offer the technology as standard equipment.

Well, sort of. Because while every $80,000 EX90 will ship with that hardware, only those who subscribe will be able to use all the features it allows. Lidar-enabled pedestrian detection, for example, may be a standard feature. Lidar-assisted self-driving, on the other hand, maybe not.

In any case, Volvo wants to make sure it gets this right from day one, particularly because the EX90 will be key to its North American fortunes. The SUV will be built in South Carolina, and Volvo projects that it — not the C40, XC40 or even the bargain-by-comparison EX30 — will be its volume EV in the U.S. An $80,000 (at least) SUV that seats seven, to reiterate, which will be right on the cusp of being too expensive to qualify for tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act. What a weird car buying market ours is.

2nd Gear: UAW Wants Washington’s Support

The United Auto Workers union is gearing up for a big fight with Detroit’s Big Three carmakers over the back half of this summer, and UAW President Shawn Fain’s hope is that support from Washington could help his side keep the pressure on General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. Part of that strategy involves holding out an endorsement for Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, which Donald Trump’s camp seems to enjoy. Courtesy Reuters:

Biden also faces pressure from former President Donald Trump, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. On Thursday, Trump said Biden was “waging war on the U.S. auto industry” through “crippling” EV mandates and urged the UAW to endorse him.

Biden’s campaign responded by saying Trump was “the most anti-union president in modern history, stacking his cabinet with anti-union officials.” It added that under Biden, “more than 120,000 auto manufacturing jobs have come back to the United States, and new auto factories are popping up across the country.”

One of the UAW’s sticking points during these negotiations is that battery joint ventures between automakers and suppliers, like GM and LG’s effort together or Ford’s and SK’s, aren’t creating union jobs. As such, employees at these facilities make less than their counterparts at factories wholly owned by automakers, even though their tasks are still highly specialized and just as dangerous.

Fain not only has broken with most major U.S. labor unions in not yet endorsing Biden for re-election, but has also panned some administration policies on electric vehicles.

Last month, Fain harshly criticized the U.S. Energy Department plan to lend $9.2 billion to a joint venture of Ford and South Korea’s SK Innovation to build three U.S. battery plants, citing the lower wages paid to workers that are typically not union-represented.

After a meeting with Fain in April, Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, criticized a GM-LG Energy Solution joint-venture battery plant for paying workers much less than GM assembly plant employees even though GM benefits from hefty U.S. government tax credits. The same program funded Ford.

The Hot Labor Summer rolls on.

3rd Gear: Mahindra’s Baby Jeep Can Live

Back in 2020, the carmaking entity formerly known as Fiat Chrysler and now known as Stellantis took Mahindra to court over its Roxor, a small off-roader that looked suspiciously like a Jeep Wrangler. The thing is that around this time Mahindra just so happened to change the design of the Roxor to look considerably less like a Jeep. As a result, the current-generation Roxor has been deemed fair to sell by the Eastern District Court of Michigan. From Bloomberg:

The legal spat began after Fiat complained Roxor is a “nearly identical copy” of the Jeep, with some design elements such as “boxy body shape with flat-appearing vertical sides and rear body ending at about the same height as the hood.”

In June 2020, the International Trade Commission said that while the Roxor doesn’t violate Fiat’s trademarks, it infringes the trade dress — a product’s look that distinguishes its source to consumers — and recommended prohibiting the import and sale of Roxor parts, according to the filing.

Mahindra contended that Roxor’s 2018 and 2019 models — subject to the legal action — were no longer in production and the 2020 version had a fresh look with further design changes planned. In December that year, the ITC said that the post-2020 Roxor doesn’t infringe on the Jeep trade dress, modifying its previous order to exempt the redesigned Roxor from an import ban.

The old Roxor definitely looked like a CJ-5 and the new one definitely doesn’t, so we should be able to put this whole thing behind us. Right, Jeep?

4th Gear: Daimler Wants To Burn Hydrogen

Hydrogen fuel-cell powertrains have been tapped as a potential path forward for commercial trucking, but Daimler is interested in a different sort of use for the element. It wants to replace gasoline with hydrogen in internal-combustion engines because it’s an easier transition to make, as Bloomberg explained Thursday:

Because hydrogen combustion is similar to the traditional gasoline engine, a shift could happen “much faster than anything else we have to do with electrification,” Michael Brecht, deputy chair of Daimler Truck’s supervisory board and the company’s top employee representative, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. He added that any cost cuts the company is planning to bolster return should not affect investments in new technologies that could safeguard the truckmaker’s future.

The technology has plenty of drawbacks. Hydrogen combustion engines still are using oil-based lubricants, meaning they’re not completely carbon-free when burning liquid or gaseous hydrogen. Because the process happens at very high temperatures, it may also lead to higher nitric oxide emissions and lower efficiency. There’s also limited availability of hydrogen fuel, at least in the short term. BMW tried its hand at the technology for three years in the 2000s but abandoned the push when it failed to prove viable.

Skeptics, however, see this as a bid to prolong the life of Germany’s ICE manufacturing industry, which stands to be very rapidly dismantled as EVs grow in numbers. It’s not like there hasn’t been recent precedent for exactly that tactic:

Critics say the German focus on hydrogen combustion engines is just another attempt by companies in Europe’s biggest economy to retain traditional engines, but label them green. In March, Germany’s push to secure assurances from Brussels on e-fuels — a prohibitively expensive technology that’s virtually unavailable — almost derailed the EU’s bid to effectively ban new combustion-engine cars from 2035.

Also, the “rapid improvement of batteries,” in the words of one analyst, would seem to make fuel cells a better technological investment than direct hydrogen combustion. That investment could also inform the development of fully battery-electric trucks, which may one day become efficient enough to work in the real world. The commercial trucking industry is almost in that place passenger cars were like 15 or 20 years ago: a bunch of companies floating a variety of possible solutions, with no clear winner yet. Exciting times.

Reverse: Volkswagen Gets Its Own Law

On this day in 1960, 63 years ago…