AD #3645 – UAW Negotiations & Two More Offers To Go; Tesla Headed For $1.4 Trillion Market Cap; Chinese OEMs Target Brazil For BEVs

  

This is Autoline Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry.

UAW NEGOTIATIONS & TWO MORE OFFERS TO GO
Three more days. That’s what we’ve got until the UAW contract expires at midnight on the 14th. And we’re starting to see the negotiations intensify. GM, Ford and Stellantis have each made an offer and a counteroffer to the union. UAW President Shawn Fain called Stellantis’s counteroffer “deeply inadequate.” He called the counter offers from GM and Ford “shameful and insulting.” But guess what? That’s actually progress. When he got their first offers, he dramatically threw two of them in a waste basket and punctuated it with profanity. So that’s why we say we’re seeing progress. Here’s our Autoline Insight. In contract negotiations, it usually takes three offers and counteroffers before both sides get to a final agreement. So, we’ve probably got two more offers to go. And the final offers likely won’t hit the bargaining tables until Thursday, which means we won’t know if there’s going to be a strike or not until midnight on September 14.  

MORGAN STANLEY: TESLA HEADED FOR $1.4 TRILLION MARKET CAP
Tesla’s current market cap is $778 billion. But it could jump by another $600 billion. That’s how much value Tesla’s supercomputer called Dojo could add to the company’s market capitalization, according to Morgan Stanley. Tesla’s stock is currently trading at $248 a share, but Morgan Stanley says it could hit $400 a share over the next 12 to 18 months, giving it a market cap of almost $1.4 trillion. It also made Tesla its top stock pick over Ferrari. Dojo is going to play a key role in getting to true self-driving autonomy. Tesla switched from using machine learning to develop autonomous cars and is now using neural nets instead. That means that instead of using millions of lines of code to teach a car how to drive itself, Tesla is now using millions of images and artificial intelligence so a car kind of learns to drive on its own. Morgan Stanley says Tesla could be earning $335 billion a year by 2040 by selling services to customers and licensing its autonomous technology to other automakers.      

CHINESE OEMS TARGET BRAZIL FOR BEVs
Toyota says developing countries are not ready for electric vehicles because they don’t have the proper infrastructure. It points to Brazil as a market that is committed to biofuels, not EVs. But someone forgot to tell that to BYD and Great Wall. The Chinese automakers are both selling EVs in Brazil. The base version of Great Wall’s Ora Good Cat is priced at $30,000 and has a driving range of 310 kilometers, or about 192 miles. BYD already offers 6 BEV models in Brazil and is outselling all the other BEVs combined. It already has 4,000 orders for its model called the Dolphin in just two months, which is probably going to come as something of a surprise to Toyota. 

GOTION TO BUILD ANOTHER U.S. BATTERY PLANT
Chinese battery maker Gotion is going to build yet another battery plant in the US. Gotion is building a battery plant in Michigan that’s expected to start production in 2025, and now it announced it will build a $2 billion factory in Illinois. That plant is expected to begin production next year and will have the capacity to produce 10 GWh of lithium-ion battery packs and 40 GWh of lithium-ion battery cells. Gotion has faced criticism from some politicians over its ties to the Chinese government.

BMW BACKS OFF CHARGING FOR HEATED SEATS
Good news for BMW owners. The company is no longer going to charge you for features that are already installed in your car. As you may remember, last year BMW started charging $18 a month or $180 a year to activate heated seats, which upset customers. Obviously, the backlash was enough that BMW decided to reverse course. But while the company will no longer charge for features already installed in the car, BMW says it will continue to offer subscriptions for software based services like driving or parking assistance.

MINI EVs TO BE BUILT IN UK
In other BMW news, all of MINI’s new models that launch in the next couple of years, the all-electric Cooper as well as the Countryman and Aceman, are going to be built at either BMW’s plant in Germany or China. That left some concern about what might happen in MINI’s home country, but the Group announced it will invest 600 million pounds or over $750 million into its Oxford plant in the UK. And by 2030 it will have invested over 3 billion pounds or nearly $4 billion in its 3 UK facilities. The investment in the Oxford plant will allow it to make up 200,000 BEV and ICE vehicles a year. In 2026, it will get the all-electric versions of the Cooper 3-door and Aceman, which could be made on BMW’s Neue Klasse platform. And then by the end of the decade, MINI will only make electrics in the UK. The move also ensures that its vehicles won’t get hit with a tariff in its home market because of Brexit.  

VW RUSHES OUT PERFORMANCE ID.7
Volkswagen is putting a little excitement back into its EV concepts and I think it’s also giving us a little peek at upgrades coming to its ID family of vehicles. The ID.X Performance is a souped up version of the ID.7 sedan with bigger wheels, tires and brakes as well as a sport suspension, fender flares and a rear wing. But the things I want to focus on are the AWD system and the charging. The ID.X Performance pairs the new in-house developed 210 kW or roughly 280 horsepower electric motor that drives the rear wheels of the ID.7 with an asynchronous motor on the front axle. Combined they produce 411 kW or about 550 horsepower, but no acceleration figure was given. VW has said it will come out with EVs that have 500 kW or 670 horsepower, so I could easily see a toned-down version of this setup making it to production. It has also said it wants to boost the charging rate that its MEB-based EVs are capable of, which currently sits at 135 kW, up to 200 kW. And that’s exactly what this concept is rated. That signals to me it’s testing the higher charging rates right now in hopes of implementing the upgrades in future models. 

TESLA & MCDONALD’S OFFER CYBER SPOON 
Tesla is known for coming out with odd accessories, like flamethrowers, surfboards, belt buckles and branding irons. And now the latest is the Cyber Spoon. The company partnered with McDonald’s to create a spoon inspired by the Cybertruck to use for McFlurries. They plan on selling 50,000 of them and will charge $4 for it but it will only be available in China.

TESLA MIGHT INCREASE MODEL Y PRICE IN CHINA
Speaking of Tesla, CarNewsChina reports it’s making some changes to the Model Y in China. It says a buyer’s incentive of nearly $500 will end this week and that Tesla might increase prices of the Model Y after that by $1,100 – $1,400. It also adds that the rear-drive version could be dropped from the Chinese market. A reason for the price increase could be that the Model Y is said to have gotten all the same upgrades as the new Model 3, but there’s no mention of any styling upgrades or this being the refreshed version of the Model Y, which is nicknamed Juniper. 

But that brings us to the end of today’s show. Thanks for making Autoline a part of your day.