Lyft Inc said on Friday it would distribute some 60,000 vehicle partition shields to its most-active drivers as a protection against the coronavirus and begin selling the custom-made protective barriers to other drivers later this summer. The ride-hailing company began in May to require both passengers and drivers to wear a mask during trips and said it had provided North American drivers with more than 150,000 sanitizing products and masks since the outbreak of the pandemic. Lyft began designing the semi-rigid partition shields, made out of a polycarbonate material, several months ago and has since piloted it with a group of ride-hail drivers to solicit feedback, a spokeswoman said.
Volkswagen AG said on Friday it expects its China sales to fall a single-digit percent this year as new sport-utility vehicles and premium models help it recover from a sales slide in the world's biggest auto market. The German automaker sold 1.59 million vehicles in China in the first six months of 2020, down 17% from 1.92 million units in the same period last year. For all of 2019, Volkswagen sold around 4.23 million vehicles in the country.
Indian state refiners' petrol and diesel sales declined in the first half of July from the same period last month, according to preliminary data, as a renewed lockdown in parts of the country and rising retail prices hit demand. India on Friday became the third country in the world to record more than one million cases of the new coronavirus, behind only the United States and Brazil, as infections spread further into the countryside and smaller towns. Fuel demand growth in India, the world's third-biggest oil importer and consumer, plunged to historic lows in April when the federal government imposed a country-wide lockdown.
Tesla Inc cut the price of its sport utility vehicle Model Y by $3,000, just four months after its launch, as the U.S. electric carmaker seeks to maintain sales momentum in the COVID-19 pandemic. The reduction follows price cuts in May on Tesla's Model 3, Model X and Model S. The company headed by Elon Musk this month posted a smaller-than-expected fall in car deliveries in the second quarter, resilient results despite the pandemic that hit the global auto industry.
Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker Li Auto Inc, backed by food delivery giant Meituan Dianping, has filed for a U.S. initial public offering. The move, announced on Friday, comes as share prices of EV makers including Tesla Inc and Nio Inc have surged in recent months. Five-year-old Li Auto, formerly known as CHJ Automotive, is building Li ONE extended-range electric sport-utility vehicles in China's eastern city of Changzhou.
Electric vehicle startup Rivian, which is backed by Amazon and Ford Motor and aims to put an electric pickup and SUV in production in 2021, boosted its war chest further with a $2.5-billion investment round led by T. Rowe Price, Rivian said Friday.The deal comes on the heels of electric car maker Tesla's meteoric rise in valuation and the recent public offering of Nikola Corp. Both Tesla and Nikola are planning electric pickups to rival Rivian.
Tesla Inc's blistering stock rally is putting Chief Executive Elon Musk in reach of a payday potentially worth $1.8 billion, his second jackpot from the electric car maker in about two months. Fueled by stronger-than-expected car deliveries, shares of Tesla have surged over 40 per cent in the past seven sessions, elevating the company's market capitalization to $259 billion. More important for Musk's personal finances, Tesla's six-month average market capitalization has reached a record $138 billion.
China sales for the second quarter climbed to 158,589 units, Ford said in a statement, attributing the rise to a stronger vehicle lineup including new sport-utility vehicles and locally-made luxury Lincoln cars.
Workers at Bajaj Auto, India's biggest exporter of motorbikes, are demanding the temporary closure of one of its plants after 250 employees there tested positive for coronavirus, its unions said on Saturday, as companies struggle to ramp up operations. India went into complete lockdown in late March to curb the spread of the virus but it has recently eased restrictions despite the number of cases surging, putting some companies in a difficult position as they try to revive production. The Bajaj Auto factory affected is located in western Maharashtra, the state with the highest number of cases of COVID-19, the disease the virus causes.
Tesla Inc is building mobile molecule printers to help make the potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed by CureVac in Germany, the electric-car maker's Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk, tweeted on Wednesday. CureVac, an unlisted German company, has said it is developing portable, automated mRNA production units that it calls printers and which Musk described as "RNA microfactories".
German carmaker Audi and utility EnBW are setting up an electric car battery operation at EnBW's Heilbronn plant to build scaleable storage facilities by the end of this year, drawing on retired batteries to help power grids. Electric vehicle battery recycling and reuse has become a priority for car and battery makers while renewable energy companies face the problem of how to absorb surpluses of wind and solar power to avoid waste and disruption to the stability of grids, slowing the transition to purely carbon-free energy systems.
Daimler will seek to sell its factory in Hambach, France, as part of an overhaul of its production system, the German carmaker said on Friday, prompting France's finance minister to urge the company to reconsider. The move comes as the auto industry faces overcapacity and plunging demand for new cars in Europe. It will also lead Daimler to take a restructuring charge of hundreds of millions of euros in its second quarter, the company said.
German prosecutors have extended their diesel emissions probe to include auto supplier Continental for its role in supplying engine components, searching the company's offices and those of automaker Volkswagen, the companies said on Wednesday. Prosecutors in Hanover, Germany conducted the searches as part of an investigation into how a 1.6-litre diesel engine came to violate emissions rules by masking excessive pollution levels.
A merger between Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot maker PSA to create the world's fourth largest carmaker is the best way for the two companies to weather the coronavirus crisis, the Italian-American group's chairman said on Friday. Echoing similar comments from PSA Chief Executive Carlos Tavares on Thursday, FCA Chairman John Elkann told shareholders the COVID-19 crisis had not delayed plans to finalise the tie-up by the first quarter of next year.
General Motors Co on Friday asked a U.S. appeals court to allow it to continue pursuing its civil racketeering suit against rival Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV rejecting a lower court judge's belittling of the complaint. The automaker's filing with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals comes less than a week after U.S. District Court Judge Paul Borman called GM's suit against Fiat Chrysler a "waste of time and resources" at a time when both automakers should be focused on surviving the coronavirus pandemic.
Having pulled ahead in the race to develop a software-based vehicle operating system, U.S. electric car pioneer Tesla faces a new challenge from an alliance of German luxury carmaker Daimler and U.S. computer graphics specialist Nvidia. Daimler and Nvidia unveiled a deal on Tuesday to develop and equip the German company's Mercedes-Benz cars with a next-generation chip and software platform that could eventually be used to help vehicles drive by themselves. The move is a response to Tesla's ability to integrate custom-designed chips with thousands of lines of code, which has allowed the Silicon Valley-based company to develop new features faster than its competitors.
India will gradually end central controls on gas pricing as it seeks to attract foreign investment and technology to lift local output, oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Friday. India, which is a large emitter of greenhouse gases and has multiple gas pricing regimes, aims to raise the share of gas in its energy mix to 15% by 2030, from 6.2%. To boost gas usage, India is expanding infrastructure including building new liquefied natural gas (LNG) import plants and connecting households with an expanding gas pipe network.
BMW should shift course and establish a technology platform just for electric cars, moving away from developing cars that can be fitted with either electric or combustion engines, the head of the influential works council said. Schoch said a dedicated electric platform is needed if the German luxury carmaker is not to be overtaken by competitors from California - like electric car company Tesla - or from China.
Ford Motor Co on Thursday unveiled the next generation of its F-150 pickup in an online event, showing a truck with a familiar look but that incorporates the automaker's new strategy for profiting from software and connectivity. The new F-150 and the soon-to-launch Mach-E electric SUV will be the first Ford vehicles equipped with electronic systems that allow for extensive over-the-air software upgrades. Rival Tesla Inc pioneered the use of smartphone-style updates to improve vehicles and generate revenue long after the sale. General Motors Co has launched comparable technology on several vehicles.
Fuel consumption, a proxy for oil demand in the world's third biggest oil consuming nation, totalled 14.65 million tonnes in May, 47.4 per cent higher than in April.
