Good morning! It’s Tuesday, September 17, 2024, 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: Driver Assist Systems Are Letting Us Get Distracted
Drivers are way more likely to be distracted behind the wheel, doing non-driving activities like looking at their phone or eating, when using partially automated driving systems. The problem is being made even worse by some drivers who have figured out loopholes to defeat the rules meant to limit distractions when they’re behind the wheel.
This new information comes from months-long studies conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that looked into two systems: Tesla’s Autopilot and Volvo’s Pilot Assist. The organization aimed to look at driver behavior when the tech was activated and how it evolved over time. From Reuters:
Partial automation – a level of “advanced driver assistance systems” – uses cameras, sensors and software to regulate the speed of the car based on other vehicles on the road and keep it in the center of the lane. Some enable lane changing automatically or when prompted.
Drivers, however, are required to continuously monitor the road and be ready to take over at any time, with most systems needing them to keep their hands on the wheel.
What the IIHS found out was a bit troubling. People will do the bare minimum to keep their system from yelling at them, but they aren’t exactly active monitors of what is going on around them.
“These results are a good reminder of the way people learn,” said IIHS President David Harkey. “If you train them to think that paying attention means nudging the steering wheel every few seconds, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.”
“In both these studies, drivers adapted their behavior to engage in distracting activities,” Harkey said. “This demonstrates why partial automation systems need more robust safeguards to prevent misuse.”
The study with Tesla’s Autopilot used 14 people who drove over 12,000 miles (19,300 km) with the system, triggering 3,858 attention-related warnings. On average, drivers responded in about three seconds, usually by nudging the steering wheel, mostly preventing an escalation.
The study with Volvo’s Pilot Assist had 29 volunteers who were found to be distracted for 30% of the time while using the system – “exceedingly high” according to the authors.
Listen, I really don’t mind a lot of these partial self-driving systems. My real issue is that, as they’re set up right now, they do just let you text and drive and be generally distracted behind the wheel. Automakers need to figure out a way to get that to stop happening because we’re just creating worse drivers overall.
2nd Gear: UAW Says Dodge Is Shipping Durango Production Overseas
The United Auto Workers union is accusing Dodge owner Stellantis of trying to move Durango production outside the U.S. It’s one of a number of recent actions by the automaker that the UAW argues violates the labor contract they signed in the fall of 2023.
Because of this, the union filed unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board. It points to “Stellantis’ illegal refusal to provide information about the company’s plans regarding product commitments it made in the UAW’s 2023 collective bargaining agreement.” From Automotive News:
The UAW said several locals representing thousands of workers have filed grievances with Stellantis over plans to offshore Durango production. The Dodge SUV is built at the company’s Detroit Assembly Complex alongside the Jeep Grand Cherokee.
The UAW said several locals representing thousands of workers have filed grievances with Stellantis over plans to offshore Durango production. The Dodge SUV is built at the company’s Detroit Assembly Complex alongside the Jeep Grand Cherokee.
The UAW’s summary of its contract with Stellantis said the automaker had agreed to invest $1.5 billion at the Detroit Assembly Complex. The document, published in November 2023, said production of the current Durango would continue through 2025 and that workers there would then build gasoline-powered and electric versions of the the next-generation Durango starting in 2026.
This Durango production issue isn’t the only thing the UAW is fighting back against.
The union also has accused Stellantis of breaking the contract by delaying plans to reopen its idled assembly plant in Illinois. More than a dozen UAW locals recently filed grievances over the company’s “attempt to back out of their commitment to reopen Belvidere Assembly and other violations of the product and investment commitments secured in the UAW’s strike last year,” the union said. UAW leaders criticized Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares at a rally outside a suburban Detroit assembly plant in August.
Stellantis has said it’s pushing back the timing of its plan to build a midsize pickup in Belvidere starting in 2027 but that it would uphold its commitment to reopening the plant.
“Stellantis has not received the filing, and therefore has not had an opportunity to review the charge,” the company said in a statement “The company has not violated the commitments made in the Investment Letter included in the 2023 UAW Collective Bargaining Agreement. Like all of our competitors, Stellantis is attempting to carefully manage how and when we bring new vehicles to market with a focus on enhancing our competitiveness and ensuring our future sustainability and growth. We will communicate our plans to the UAW at the appropriate time.”
Last week, Stellantis announced it was planning to spend $406 million upgrading three plants in Michigan to build electrified versions of Ram pickups and Jeep Wagoneers. The investment is just a sliver of the $18.9 billion Stellantis committed through April of 2028 in the 2023 labor agreement.
“Across the company, a year into this agreement, the company has announced just 2 percent of the total investment commitment they made,” Fain said in a Sept. 12 speech at UAW Local 140, which represents the Warren Truck plant in Michigan. “Two percent, which means 98 percent of the product investment that they made in bargaining a year ago is yet to be fulfilled. So while they’re not yet in violation of the agreement at Warren Truck, they are in violation at plants across this nation, and we intend to fully enforce our contract from the grievance procedure to the right to strike.”
Stellantis argues that investment commitments will span the life of the 2023 agreement, so it shouldn’t come as a shock that they haven’t been pully laid out in the first year.
While I suppose that is fair, some sort of road map would be nice, wouldn’t it?
3rd Gear: Chinese Cars Struggle Mightily In Japan
Sure, Japan’s top automakers are having a really tough time in China right now, but things aren’t really any easier for China’s top automakers in Japan. Because of the dominance of home-grown automakers like Toyota, Honda and Nissan, the island nation has always been a tough one for other foreign automakers to crack.
Japan is also a country that is all-in on hybrids, and because of that pure battery-powered cars are struggling there. Combined, these factors make the global ambitions of China’s BYD just that little bit harder. From Bloomberg:
Indeed, it’s making headway in selling EVs in Japan, but slowly. Very slowly.
Last week, BYD released a statement touting that its flagship Seal sedan was Japan’s best-selling imported EV in August. While the milestone was worth celebrating, it overshadowed a sobering reality. Total sales were 196 vehicles — around what Toyota sells each hour, every hour in its home market. (To be sure, while Toyota sold more than 140,000 cars in Japan in July, just 166 of those were battery EVs.)
BYD has rolled out three models since it entered Japan’s passenger vehicle market just over two years ago. It plans to introduce new models in 2025 and 2026, and open 100 locations across its domestic dealership network by 2025.
“BYD has no track record in Japan,” said Bloomberg Intelligence senior auto analyst Tatsuo Yoshida. That means customers don’t know the brand, its quality, reliability or value in the secondhand market, or whether the company will stick around long enough to provide long-term maintenance and repair services.
“The hurdles are too high for BYD to achieve its goals in Japan,” Yoshida said. “But if it did successfully expand its business here, in a country known for having sel
BYD may be dominating in other parts of the world, but Toyota still dwarfs it. Globally, BYD sold 3 million cars in 2023. At the same time, Toyota sold 11.2 million vehicles, and about 104,000 of them were electric.
Still, despite Japan’s reluctance to embrace EVs, some still sell there.
The title of Japan’s most popular EV still belongs to Nissan’s Sakura, a fully electric mini-truck that shipped 34,000 units in the 2023 fiscal year. The uptake of EVs is much slower in Japan than in China, Europe or North America — held back by a lack of charging infrastructure, and a belated embrace of EVs by its major carmakers, particularly Toyota.
Because of the slow embrace of EVs at Japanese automakers, they’re now struggling in China. That makes sense when you consider electric cars account for about one-third of new vehicle sales.
In the latest retreat, Honda last week announced it is slashing jobs and has suspended production at three plants in China. Nippon Steel is exiting its joint venture in China as its top customers there — Japanese carmakers — struggle to maintain market share.
Whether BYD can do the reverse, and gain a significant foothold in Japan — the world’s fifth-biggest auto market — has taken on more importance after the US, Europe and Canada imposed punitive tariffs on Chinese EVs to protect their domestic car industries.
To do so, it would need to add some zeroes to the end of those monthly sales figures.
Some really big things would have to change in Japan for an automaker like BYD to really get going there. But, considering the fact it’s dominating just about everywhere else (other than the U.S., Canada and Europe), I wouldn’t be too surprised if it figured out how to win folks over in Japan.
4th Gear: Stellantis Working To Avoid VW-Style Plant Closures
Stellantis is taking measures to avoid the risk of plant closures that Volkswagen is currently facing, according to CEO Carlos Tavares. This is one of those rare instances where being like Volkswagen is actually a super bad thing. From Reuters:
“We have done many unpopular things over the last few years to avoid as much as possible” a situation similar to Volkswagen, Tavares said.
“We have been criticised for that, for taking decisions which were … not always well understood,” Tavares said, adding the key was to sell electric vehicles at the same prices as traditional petrol models.
Earlier this month Europe’s largest automaker Volkswagen announced it was considering for the first time in its history to close factories in home country Germany.
Volkswagen’s announcement has triggered speculation that more European automakers could assess similar moves to respond to low factory utilisation rates in the region, increasing price pressures from Asian rivals and a tougher economic environment.
“We are working very very hard to avoid that situation and the future will say if we are going to be able to avoid any trouble or not, too soon to say today,” Tavares told reporters after inaugurating a global hub for the group’s commercial vehicle unit Pro One, in Turin, Italy.
Following the merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA back in 2021, Stellantis reduced its workforce by around 20,000 employees in Europe by 2023. Most of those were done through voluntary redundancy.
There was one a time when being like Volkswagen was an aspirational goal for other automakers. Today, well, not so much.