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Shares of Tesla were down 4 percent Monday after falling more than 6 percent on a report that the electric car maker has turned to some suppliers for a refund of previously made payments in a bid to turn a profit. Tesla has asked some suppliers to refund money it has paid since 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing a memo. The memo, which the paper said was sent by a global supply manager, described the request as essential to Tesla's continued operation and characterized it as an investment in the car company to continue the long-term growth...

In a statement Saturday, he said, "I am profoundly saddened to learn of Sergio’s state of health. It is a situation that was unthinkable until a few hours ago, and one that leaves us all with a real sense of injustice. ..At his side, the reports said, were his two sons and his partner of several years, Manuela Battezzato, who works in FCA communications.

Not even James Bond had an Aston Martin like this. The British sports car maker revealed a concept version of a flying car, the Volante Vision Concept, at the Farnborough Airshow this week. Aston Martin has billed the futuristic vehicle as a luxury car for the skies. The autonomous hybrid-electric vehicle, which has room for three passengers, is designed for urban and inter-city travel, the company said. It’s also capable of vertical take-offs and landings. The vehicle could fly at top speeds of around 200 miles per hour, according to Reuters.

Tesloop, a Tesla-only shuttle service based in Southern California, recently had a Model S reach 400,000 miles on the odometer and gave an account of how it is holding up. Tesloop has incurred a combined maintenance cost of roughly $19,000 or about $0.05/mile. This cost breaks down to $6,700 for general vehicle repairs and $12,200 for regularly scheduled maintenance.

General Motors warned Friday that President Trump’s threatened tariffs on imported vehicles could lead to “a smaller GM,” isolate US businesses from the global marketplace and cause job losses. “Increased import tariffs could lead to a smaller GM, a reduced presence at home and abroad for this iconic American company, and risk less — not more — US jobs,” the Detroit-based automaker said in comments filed with the Commerce Department, The Street reported. “Combined with the other trade actions currently being pursued by the US Government — namely the Section 232 Steel and Aluminum tariffs and the Section 301 tariffs...

General Motors on Friday warned that expansive U.S. tariffs on imported vehicles being considered by the Trump administration could lead to a "a smaller GM" and risks isolating U.S. businesses from the global market. Loading... The Trump administration in May launched an investigation into whether imported vehicles posed a national security threat, and U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to quickly impose a 20 percent import tariff on vehicles. The largest U.S. automaker said in comments filed on Friday with the U.S. Commerce Department that overly broad tariffs could "lead to a smaller GM, a reduced presence at home...

Minutes after GM announced that the Blazer would be making a comeback in the 2019 model year, the labor union issued a statement blasting the plan to build the new Blazer at the Ramos Arizpe factory in Mexico. "This news that the iconic Blazer nameplate will be built in Mexico is disappointing to UAW families and communities across this country," stated Terry Dittes, vice president at the UAW. "GM employs over 15,000 production workers in Mexico, pays the workers less than $3 per hour and exports over 80 percent of the vehicles to the U.S. to sell here. This is...

Frankfurt am Main (AFP) - Audi chief executive Rupert Stadler was arrested Monday in connection with parent company Volkswagen's "dieselgate" emissions cheating scandal, with prosecutors saying they feared he might try to suppress evidence. The dramatic development comes a week after Munich prosecutors raided Stadler's home after charging him with fraud and falsifying documents that allowed diesel vehicles equipped with cheating software to be sold to European customers. Four police officers detained the Audi boss at his home at between 6 and 7 am, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors told AFP, saying that the arrest was justified as he is...

Electric automaker Tesla is cutting 9% of its employees across the company ... Throughout its nearly 15 years of existence, the company has never made a profit, ... Tesla will also not be renewing its residential sales agreement with Home Depot, Musk said, opting instead to focus on selling its solar products in its stores and on its website.

A new emissions study based on testing methods that are supposedly "difficult-to-impossible to cheat" has revealed that even the latest models of European diesel cars are bad polluters. The first such analysis since the 2015 Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, the results show more than 4,000 vehicle models exceeding nitrogen oxides (NOx) levels set by the European Union. The new rating system is known as The Real Urban Emissions Initiative (TRUE). With a data set of 375,000 individual cars from across Europe, TRUE uses a beam of light to study a car's exhaust plume. European cars are broken into numbered groups...

German magazine Wirtschaftswoche said U.S. President Donald Trump aimed to push German carmakers out of the United States, and that he told French President Emmanuel Macron he wanted to stop Mercedes-Benz from cruising through New York. German carmakers control 90 percent of the U.S. premium auto market, with BMW owning the Rolls-Royce and BMW brands while Daimler has Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen controls Bentley, Bugatti, Porsche and Audi. The Trump administration has opened a trade investigation into whether vehicle imports have damaged the U.S. auto industry. Citing several unnamed European and U.S. diplomats, the magazine said on Thursday that he told...

Toyota Motor Corp. said Wednesday that its exports to the U.S. rose 22% in April, highlighting the problem it faces if the Trump administration makes good on threats to impose higher tariffs on imports. The problem is crystallized in one model: the RAV4 sport-utility vehicle. It is the most popular Toyota among American consumers—and none are made in the U.S. More than half are imported from Japan, while the rest are made in Canada and imported tariff-free under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a rare thing in the car business: a celebrity and a leader. His celebrity has definitely helped fuel Tesla's rise. But of late it has begun to reveal some disadvantages. Maybe you haven't been paying attention to all things Tesla for the past two weeks. Here's an update: Tesla reported first-quarter earnings and lost over $700 million in three months. CEO Elon Musk, who is supposed to be sleeping on the floor of his factory in California, flipped out on an earnings call, silencing two analysts and taking 20 minutes of questions from a YouTuber...

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Munro & Associates, Inc. of Auburn Hills, Michigan, is in the business of competitive teardown and analysis. They just completed a 6,000-man-hour study of the Model 3. Scattered around the Munro warehouse is a methodically exploded Tesla, quite literally in pieces... Clearly Tesla employs a lot of savvy electrical engineers. Its electronic computing circuitry ranks somewhere between that of a cellphone and a Mars mission in terms of sophistication... Panel gaps are inconsistent around the same car as well as between cars. Many gaps exceed accepted norms for any price class,...

Ford's plan to reduce its passenger car lineup to just two models, and GM's difficulty selling passenger cars in the U.S. show how much tastes are drifting toward trucks, SUVs and crossovers. Ford will only update the Focus Active crossover and Mustang for the U.S. market, while GM called out a challenging passenger car environment. ====================================================================================================== So is it really the end of the American car on its home turf? From the way Detroit's major executives are talking, it would seem so. Ford said Wednesday it will only offer two new cars in North America over the coming years —...

Ford today announced it will phase out most cars it sells in North America. According to its latest financial release, the auto giant will "will transition to two vehicles" being the Mustang and an unannounced vehicle, the Focus Active, as the only traditional cars it sells in the region. Ford sees 90 percent of its North America portfolio in trucks, utilities and commercial vehicles. Citing a reduction in consumer demand and product profitability, Ford is in turn not investing into the next generation sedans. The Taurus is no more.

RENAULT unveiled the EZ-GO, a concept for a robotaxi, at the Geneva motor show, which opened on March 5th. Nissan, in conjunction with DeNA, a Japanese software firm, recently began trials of driverless taxis in Japan. The two companies are pursuing their own paths towards the future of mobility. Yet both are bound together in a close alliance, which celebrates its 20th anniversary next year. In 2016 they were joined by Mitsubishi. Last year the trio sold 10.6m cars between them, one in every nine worldwide. It is a unique carmaking liaison, neither a full merger nor as loose as...

Even long cons can only run for so long. Elon Musk’s electric car con may be on the verge – finally – of coming unglued. This week, he’ll be forced to reveal actual production numbers for the first quarter of the year which are expected to fall well short of what he promised investors – and buyers, who ponied up deposits based on those promises. Last year, Musk breezily assured both groups that an improbable 5,000 Model 3s – Tesla’s first “mass-produced” electric car – would be rolling off the production line in Fremont, CA each week. He’s come as...

It resembles a car park at an enormous open-air venue - but it is actually a knock-on effect of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Dramatic aerial pictures show row after row of diesel VWs and Audis sitting in the baking California sun, awaiting either repair or destruction in their desert graveyard. This is just one of 37 storage areas the firm has around the US, housing almost 300,000 vehicles. In addition to the pictured site in Victorville, other facilities include a disused suburban football stadium in Detroit and a former Minnesota paper mill. The German company needs plenty of space because...