Europe

WASHINGTON — Texas police will serve search warrants on Tesla on Tuesday to secure data from a fatal vehicle crash, a senior officer told Reuters on Monday, after CEO Elon Musk said company checks showed the car’s Autopilot driver assistance system was not engaged. Mark Herman, Harris County Constable Precinct 4, said evidence including witness

SHANGHAI — Jaguar Land Rover expects premium car sales to continue to grow this year in China, the automaker’s chief finance officer for the country said. Tim Howard was speaking to reporters at the 2021 Shanghai auto show. Jaguar Land Rover has started building its first plug-in hybrid vehicles in China. Overall auto sales in

PARIS — Renault will seek to generate more than 1 billion euros ($1.20 billion) in sales from the so-called “circular economy” by turning its Flins factory outside Paris into a research, recycling and repair center. “Our ambition, by 2030, is to achieve more revenue [from recycling and repair at Flins] than from assembling cars there,”

Volkswagen brand is targeting family buyers in China with the ID6, its biggest battery-powered model to date. The three-row, seven-seat crossover is tailored specifically to the needs and wishes of Chinese customers “in terms of space, functionality, design and, in particular, user experience,” VW said in a statement on Saturday ahead of the model’s public

TOKYO — Nissan will furlough about 800 workers at its Sunderland plant in England, as output slows there because of a semiconductor shortage, the Nikkei newspaper reported. The workers, who represent about a tenth of the workforce at the facility, will be asked to stay away until the chip shortage eases and production can increase,

MILAN — Ferrari is bringing forward the sales launch of its first full-electric car amid an accelerating industry shift to electrification. The automaker will unveil the car in 2025, the automaker’s chairman, John Elkann, told shareholders. Ferrari had previously said the launch would happen “after 2025.” “We are very excited about our first all-electric Ferrari

Ford will use Volkswagen Group’s MEB electric-car platform to underpin an SUV, Autocar magazine reported. The model is likely to have a similar wheelbase to the VW ID4 compact crossover at 2765 mm (9 feet), Autocar said. The magazine said the Ford version is likely to introduced with power output of between 146 hp and

MADRID — Renault has started negotiations with unions to extend the partial idling of three of its four factories in Spain until the end of September as a preemptive measure in case a global semiconductor shortage lingers. Renault had already partly idled its Spanish plants in response to the shortage, on the expectation that chip

BRUSSELS — A majority of residents of European cities support a Europe-wide phaseout of combustion-engine car sales from 2030 to reduce planet-warming emissions, according to a YouGov poll conducted on behalf of environmental campaigners. Of 10,050 survey respondents, 63 percent said they supported the idea that after 2030, only emissions-free cars should be sold in

Daimler’s new flagship electric sedan will generate “reasonable” returns right from the start as the vehicle features top-line technology, CEO Ola Kallenius said. The Mercedes EQS, which debuts this week, will produce attractive profits while still lagging the returns of its combustion engine-powered sibling, the S-Class, due to the higher cost of electric-car components, Kallenius

Renesas Electronics resumed operations at the clean room that was damaged by fire last month, as the key manufacturer of automotive microchips moves closer to restarting production this month. The clean room of Renesas’s N3 building in Ibaraki prefecture went online around 9 p.m. on Friday, the company said in a statement Saturday. Renesas remains

A year after German luxury-car makers’ bleakest period in decades, business has never been better. BMW on Thursday joined rival Mercedes-Benz in reporting record first-quarter vehicle deliveries, driven largely by explosive demand in China. Both automakers are also getting big boosts from newly introduced plug-in hybrid and full-electric vehicles. Sales of BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce

Michelin is intensifying efforts to make fuel cells as the French supplier bets that growing demand for hydrogen vehicles will help reduce its dependence on tires. CEO Florent Menegaux will unveil a new growth strategy later Thursday and provide details on three main avenues for diversification. The tire maker has said fuel-cell production, 3D printing

German new-car sales increased 36 percent in March compared with the same month in 2020. Registrations totaled 292,349, according to data released on Tuesday the KBA motor vehicle authority. The sales result was inflated because dealerships were closed in March 2020 during the country’s first lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus. “In reality,

BERLIN — Germany’s auto industry picked up speed in March, a survey published by the Ifo economic institute showed on Tuesday, although automotive executives also become less optimistic about the outlook for the coming months. The survey’s indicator for the current business situation rose to 7.9 points in March from minus 0.4 in February, as

Argo AI, the self-driving startup backed by Ford Motor and Volkswagen Group, is considering going public as soon as this year, according to people familiar with its plans. Bryan Salesky, Argo’s co-founder, told employees in an all-hands meeting April 1 the company is looking to boost its funding as it comes closer to commercializing its

With Europe expected to lead the world in electric-car sales for a second straight year, a rush to build a battery-supply chain from scratch is playing out across the region. After years of ceding the EV battery business to foreign companies, Europe wants in. Prospective manufacturers are popping up in the Nordic region, Germany, France,

Tesla posted record deliveries for the January to March quarter, beating Wall Street estimates, as solid demand offset the impact of a global shortage of parts. “We are encouraged by the strong reception of the Model Y in China and are quickly progressing to full production capacity,” Tesla said in a statement on Friday. “The

Spanish new-car registrations grew by 128 percent in March compared with the same month last year, when dealers were partly closed under coronavirus lockdowns, but sales were still down sharply from 2019. There were 85,819 sales in March, according to the ANFAC industry group, compared with 37,643 in March 2020. However, that total is 30

PARIS — Stellantis will launch hybrid hydrogen and battery-electric medium commercial vans from Peugeot, Citroen and Opel by the end of the year, with the promise of 400 km (250 miles) of range and a fill-up time of about three minutes. The “mid-power” hydrogen fuel cell drivetrain on the Citroen Jumpy, Opel Vivaro and Peugeot

Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler said it will accelerate its shift to electric cars as it builds on a strong start to 2021 despite a global semiconductor chip shortage, but gave no details of how fast its car line-up will go electric. Daimler said it expected 2021 to be a significantly better year for revenue, and pretax

SEOUL — Hyundai Motor Group said on Tuesday it plans to temporarily suspend production at its Ulsan No. 1 plant in South Korea due to chip and component supply issues from April 7 to April 14. “We are closely monitoring the situation to take prompt and necessary measures and optimize production in line with the

SEOUL — Hyundai Motor Group plans to temporarily suspend production at its Ulsan No. 1 plant in South Korea due to a chip shortage between April 5 and April 13, Korea Economic Daily reported on Monday, citing auto industry sources. The affected Ulsan factory produces 311,000 vehicles annually including the Kona and Ioniq 5 electric

BERLIN — Volkswagen Group has issued a recall for premium subsidiary Audi that affects more than 150,000 A3s in the United States on concerns that their passenger airbags might not activate, according to a filing to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The recall is expected to affect 153,152 units of the compact car

Honda has agreed to sell its UK car plant to logistics giant Panattoni, a company spokesman said. The Japanese automaker builds about a tenth of the 1.5 million car output in Britain. It announced its intention to cease production at its plant in Swindon in southern England two years ago. The plant closure is expected

Robert Bosch has shuffled its management board, with CEO Volkmar Denner adding the position of chief technical officer and oversight of the chief digital office after the departure of two executives, Uwe Raschke and Michael Bolle.  Raschke, who is retiring, has been a board member since 2008, and currently head of the Bosch Consumer Goods

Skoda is working on an affordable full-electric car based on parent Volkswagen Group’s MEB platform, CEO Thomas Schaefer said. The EV would be positioned below the brand’s Enyaq IV battery-powered compact SUV, he said. “We are working on the next model and it will be smaller than Enyaq,” Schaefer said during the brand’s annual press

Vitesco Technologies, the powertrain spinoff from Continental, has won a contract to provide 800-volt inverters for Hyundai Motor’s new E-GMP modular electric platform. Vitesco said in a news release Wednesday that the contract was in the “triple-digit million euro amount.” Hyundai says the E-GMP platform will eventually underpin 23 models by 2025, including 11 battery-electric

New-car sales in Russia rose 0.8 percent last month, regaining a run of growth that stalled in December and January, the Association of European Businesses (AEB) said in a statement. A total of 120,081 vehicles were sold in February. “This seems to be a sign of continuous stabilization followed by a further recovery month,” Thomas

TOKYO — Americans Michael Taylor and his son Peter could face jail terms of up to three years after Tokyo prosecutors charged them on Monday with illegally helping former Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn flee Japan more than a year ago. Extradited by U.S. authorities this month, the U.S. Army Special Forces veteran and his son