Good morning! It is Thursday, May 9, 2024, and this is The morning shift, your daily roundup of the biggest automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know.
1st Gear: Tesla deletes over 3,400 job offers
Tesla just cut over 3,400 Job postings in North Americaa, so there are currently only three positions open. The roles are mainly based on California, Texas and Nevadawere listed on Tesla’s official careers page first on Tuesday.
The hiring freeze comes immediately after Tesla addressed one of these issues It’s the shittiest neighborhood ever And rolling layoffs that spanned more than four weeks at this point as part of CEO Elon Musk’s decree to address the “hard core” of job cuts. At the same time, At least six executives have fled the company. Out of Business Insider:
Even the three remaining positions in the US do not appear to be full-time jobs, even though they are labeled as such. They are for Tesla’s Manufacturing Development Program, a seven- to 16-week training program at community colleges in Texas and California that offers applicants “the opportunity to transition into a full-time manufacturing workforce.” The Nevada version of the program is labeled as an internship and lasts only four to six weeks, according to Tesla’s website.
Tesla withdrew summer internship offers last week, just weeks before launch dates.
Tesla’s website lists 28 jobs in Europe, most of them at Tesla’s Brandenburg Gigafactory in Germany. No entries are available for other regions.
But Tesla’s career site and LinkedIn seem to be out of sync.
On LinkedIn on Thursday, the company advertised 35 open positions, including three in the U.S. and 28 in Europe, but also some roles in the Dominican Republic – these roles were performed in Mandarin.
It’s hard to say when the job cuts is really going to end, and I’m not entirely sure about the strategy of “hiring and firing people until we figure out how many people should be working here.”
2nd Gear: The CEO of Rimac believes that the rich are giving up on electric vehicles
Rimac has sold 150 more copies of it its electric hypercar Neveraand that’s perhaps why any replacement that comes later probably won’t be one electric vehicle. Actually, Rimac has only been able to sell about 50 units so far. Mate Rimac, CEO of the Croatian car manufacturer attributes this to a decline in demand for ultra-high-end electric vehicles. Out of Autocar:
“We have started to develop [the] Nevera in 2016/2017, when electric was still cool,” he said at the Financial Times Future of the Car conference in London.
Since then, he said, the market environment has evolved and tastes have changed as lawmakers and mainstream automakers look to make a move electric cars the main direction.
“The regulators and some OEMs [manufacturers] I’m pushing it so much that the narrative has changed. They force things on us that we don’t want, so people are a little repulsed by the whole forced application.
“I am always against it. I think everything has to be based on performance. So the product has to be better.”
The Nevera was designed in part as a demonstration of what could be achieved with motors and batteries, at a time when the technology was still in its infancy and not yet fully adopted and adopted by mainstream manufacturers.
“Back then,” Rimac said, “we thought electric cars would be cool in a few years – the best cars or the highest performance and so on.”
“We notice 1715263863 As electrification becomes mainstream, industry leaders want to differentiate themselves.”
Rimac told Autocar that buyers are feeling the desire for more analogue vehicles again, at least as far as super sports cars are concerned.
During the interview, he focused on the company’s partnership with Bugatti.
He added: “If we had made an electric Bugatti, I’m sure we would have sold a lot of it because of the brand,” but that amount would have been “nowhere near” the amount estimated that the V16-engined Bugatti will sell Chiron successor.
Rimac said he does not expect demand for electric hypercars to return because while there will be little prevailing loyalty to individual brands and drive technologies in the mainstream car segments, the high-end car segments demand a high level of differentiation and “more analogue” Attractiveness. […]“Rimac is not exclusively electric; It does what is most exciting right now,” he said, naming LPG, hydrogen and even diesel as potential fuels that could be used in this setup. Meanwhile, he said he saw “no reason” for Bugatti to take over Rimac. “We have developed a new V16 engine and we want to use that engine for a while, and maybe some other engines too, but I can’t think of one.” Reason why it would be impossible.”
Normally you can’t hear other people’s heads Brands that are (at least for now) only dedicated to electric vehicles talk like that. Nobody knows what Rimac plans to do next, but one thing is for sure: it’s going to happen pretty damn quickly.
3rd Gear: Toyota prepares for annual profit decline
Toyota predicts a decline in its fiscal year profit and blames it higher cost. For this reason, the Japanese automaker announced a share buyback after posting a stronger net profit in the fourth quarter. From that Wall Street Journal:
The Japanese carmaker said on Wednesday that net profit rose 80% year-on-year to 997.6 billion yen ($6.45 billion) in the three months to March. That beat the estimate of 752.85 billion yen in an analyst survey by data provider FactSet.
Sales rose 14% to 11.073 trillion yen in the fourth quarter, helped by a weaker yen and strong sales growth in North America and Europe despite a decline in sales in Japan due to certification issues at subsidiary Daihatsu Motor and subsidiary Toyota Industries.
A weaker yen boosts profits for Japanese automakers by making exports more competitive abroad and increasing the value in yen of profits earned abroad.
Toyota is also benefiting from the consumer shift in the U.S. and some other markets from all-electric vehicles to gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles. More and more car buyers are choosing hybrid vehicles as a fuel-efficient option due to fears of charging problems and higher prices.
Chief Executive Officer Koji Sato said the arguments for battery electric vehicles had been overstated and that more attention was now being paid to customer convenience.
“Something would be lost in a transition that occurs at an excessive pace,” Sato said.
For the fiscal year that began in April, Toyota forecast a net profit decline of about 28 percent to 3.570 trillion yen. This is attributed to the higher material, labor and research and development costs. The good news is that sales are expected to increase slightly.
The group’s vehicle sales are also forecast to fall to 10.95 million units from 11.09 million units sold in the previous financial year.
Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus expect to sell about 4.7 million hybrid vehicles this fiscal year, up from 3.7 million units sold last year, and about 171,000 battery electric vehicles, compared to about 117,000 units last year.
Sato said the automaker should take measures to avoid falling into fierce price competition in China, adding that demand for plug-in hybrid cars is growing there.
Toyota announced that it would buy back Y1 trillion of its shares by the end of April next year. This appears to be done in part to respond to any divestment plans by its stakeholders. It can buy back up to three percent of it outstanding shares.
4th Gear: Hyundai and Kia settle illegal service member auto repos
Hyundai And Kias The American financing entity will pay $334,941 to settle the charges it illegally seized U.S. military service members Vehicles. Out of Reuters:
According to documents filed in federal court in Los Angeles, between 2015 and 2023, Hyundai Capital America violated the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act by seizing 26 vehicles whose owners had begun repaying their loans before they began active duty.
The Justice Department said the law requires the financing department to obtain court approval before repossessing vehicles.
One example cited was the 2017 repossession and sale of Naval Aviator Jessica Johnson’s three-year-old Hyundai Elantra after the financing department determined she was on active duty but “not deployed.”
Johnson still owed $13,796 on the car, and Hyundai Capital America realized in 2020 that it should not have repossessed it, court records show.
“Members of our armed forces should not have to worry about having their cars confiscated while serving in the military,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement.
Without admitting any wrongdoing, Hyundai Capital America will pay each of the 26 service members $10,000 plus lost vehicle equity and restore their credit. It will also pay $74,941 to the U.S. Treasury “to justify the public interest.”
In a statement, Hyundai Capital America said it is proud to support military families and has “already taken steps” to promote compliance with all SCRA requirements.
In recent years, the Justice Department has settled several DOJ claims Soldiers’ Law against financing companies, among others General Motors, Nissan and Wells Fargo’s financing unit.