AD #2657 – Ferrari To Expand Lineup of GT Cars, ASEAN Car Market Slowing, Continental Jumps into Smart Farming

This is Autoline Daily reporting on all aspects of the global automotive industry.

FORMER UAW VP ACCUSED IN BRIBERY SCHEME
The federal investigation into corruption at the UAW just snagged Joe Ashton, a former vice president of the union. The Detroit News reports that Ashton is accused of participating in a kickback and bribery scheme involving nearly $2 million. Ashton once sat on the board of directors at General Motors representing the VEBA trust fund which handled health benefits for UAW retirees. At one point, the VEBA fund had over 260 million shares of GM stock. But Ashton resigned from the board two years ago when the federal investigation into the union began. That investigation has caught union leaders at FCA and GM and investigators are also looking into whether union officials at Ford were involved.

FERRARI TO EXPAND LINEUP OF GT CARS
Ferrari set a goal to increase its revenue from $3.4 billion in 2017 to $5 billion by 2022 and one way it will do that is by introducing more new models. Chairman John Elkann says the company will expand its lineup of grand-touring cars, one of which is expected to be shown in November. Currently about 32% of Ferrari’s sales are GT-type cars, but by 2020 Ferrari says they could make up 40% of sales. 

WEEKEND RACING RESULTS
In NASCAR racing news, Denny Hamlin powered his Toyota Camry to the win at the Bristol Motor Speedway. Will Power ended up winning the rain-shortened IndyCar race at Pocono in his Penske Chevrolet. And in NHRA, Leah Pritchett ran 321.04 miles per hour in her MOPAR Dodge to win the Top Fuel category at the Brainerd International Raceway in Minnesota. 

ASEAN CAR MARKET SLOWING
Developing countries in Southeast Asia have been a bright spot for new car sales but now even they are slowing down. LMC Automotive reports that sales in the ASEAN market were up about 1% for the first half of the year, but in June they were down 5%. The ASEAN nations include Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. Most of those countries actually saw sales go up but they were off sharply in Indonesia, the largest market, and that dragged the whole sector down. Sales in Vietnam are actually red hot and are up 32% so far this year. Maybe the Vietnamese economy is growing so fast because of companies moving their supply chains out of China to other low cost countries like Vietnam.   

AI-DRIVEN SCOOTER
Electric ride-sharing scooters are left scattered all over the towns where they’re used. And fleet operators have to pay people to pick them up and bring them back for charging. But China’s Segway-Ninebot is coming out with a new scooter that will drive itself to a charging station. The AI-driven scooters are controlled remotely from the cloud, and reports say the company has already seen interest from Lyft and Uber. Testing will start next month and they should be out in the first quarter of 2020, but the new scooters aren’t cheap. They’ll sell for a little over $1,400, which compares to $100 to $300 for the company’s more traditional scooters.

FORD RANGER RAPTOR BREADCRUMB FEATURE
Going off-roading can be a blast, but when you’re running around in the outback it’s easy to get lost. After all, there aren’t any roads for your nav system to display and often there is no cell phone connection in the middle of nowhere. That’s why several off-road machines use a nav system that follows your off-road driving and leaves what they call breadcrumbs on the screen. So when you’re done driving, all you have to do is follow the breadcrumbs back to where you started. Now the European version of the Ford Ranger Raptor has the breadcrumb feature.

CONTINENTAL EXPANDS INTO SMART FARMING
The giant automotive supplier Continental is taking some of its automotive technology onto the farm as part of a movement called smart farming. That’s the digitalization of farming, using drones and autonomous robots to monitor fields and crops. The robots can even be used for planting, weeding and fertilizing. Coming up with solutions to grow crops more efficiently is becoming a critical necessity. The human population is expected to grow by another 2 billion to 9.8 billion people by 2050. And according to Statista, the global annual market for smart farming is expected to reach more than 200 billion euros, which makes it pretty attractive, even for automotive suppliers. 

But that’s it for today, thanks for watching and we’ll see you again tomorrow.