2020 Tesla Model S on 2040-cars

Auto blog

New Jersey will let Tesla continue selling EVs until April 15

Tesla sales in New Jersey were supposed to end today, following the state legislature vote a few weeks ago to pull Tesla's sales license there. At the eleventh hour, though, Gov. Chris Christie's administration has extended the deadline to April 15. The specifics of the situation are that the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC) is going to give new car dealers until the middle of the month to submit their franchise agreement (which, of course, Tesla stores don't have). That means, for now, it's business as usual The two-week extension could keep Tesla alive in the Garden State. While it's only a two-week extension, it could be enough to keep the California automaker alive in the Garden State. This is because state assemblyman Tim Eustace (a Democrat and EV driver) submitted a bill the other day that would allow Tesla to sell cars directly to customers in New Jersey. One interesting component of Eustace's bill is that it only applies to zero-emission vehicles as long as they make up less than four percent of all the new cars sold in the state. Eustace told NJ.com that this bill might be fast-tracked into law because it has leadership support. Jim Appleton, the president of the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailer (the force behind the anti-Tesla movement), said, "to the extent that there is legislation that would allow an all-zero emission vehicle automaker to enter the market for a period of time without franchises, before they eventually convert to a franchise system, it makes sense." You can read the proposed bill here. The MVC gave Tesla a license to sell cars in 2012 and Tesla now operates two stores in New Jersey, one in the Garden State Plaza in Paramus and the other in Short Hills.

Akerson calls for GM tech to stymie Tesla

Electric vehicle maker Tesla has had some good days lately as sales of the Model S have exceeded expectations as much as the company's profits, thanks in no small part to innovative thinking that has resulted in mass sales of ZEV credits to other manufacturers, free charging stations, 90-second battery swaps and manufacturer-owned dealerships. All of this has the attention of General Motors, who views Tesla as a disruptive force to the auto industry and as a threat to the 104-year-old automaker.
Case in point: GM recognizes that Tesla must be doing something right if it can sell more of its $69,900 Model S sedans than the $39,145 Volt. So what is GM doing about it? Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson assigned a small team to study Tesla so the company won't be caught off guard in the future. In an interview with Bloomberg, Steve Girsky, GM vice chairman, said, "History is littered with big companies that ignored innovation that was coming their way because you didn't know where you could be disrupted."
GM was one of those big companies at one point, and it hasn't quite broken that mold. It has struggled to move on from the old, inefficient practices of its past, leading Akerson to chide employees at a recent conference in Houston because so many in-house patents had failed to be commercialized and implemented in GM designs. This, of course, resulted in a huge research-and-development budget that was wasteful. But Akerson knows that GM must rely on innovation and a tight focus on technologies that customers want if it is to be profitable and survive in the long term.

How tariffs in China could cause a meltdown in the American South

While BMW is clearly a German company, the crossovers that are exceedingly important to it are actually made in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And more than that, the Spartanburg plant (physically located in the town of Greer) is where the corporate know-how and capability for those vehicles is concentrated. These are the vehicles – specifically, the BMW X3, X4, X5, X6, X7 – that drove record growth for the company in 2018, according to BMW. But whatÂ’s most notable about BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, given current events, is that according to the U.S. Department of Commerce it was the largest automotive exporter by value for the fifth year running in 2018. ThatÂ’s worth emphasizing: largest automotive exporter by value. Not GM. Not Ford. BMW. And where might one assume that more than a few of those X vehicles are shipped to? China. Some 360 miles southwest of Spartanburg is Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, Inc., in in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. It started building vehicles in 1997. Since then, Daimler AG has invested in excess of $5.5 billion in the facility. It manufactures the crossover now known as the GLE, formerly the ML-Class. It also makes the GLE coupe and GLS. Daimler describes the Tuscaloosa facility as “the traditional home of SUV production” for those vehicles. When it reported its global 2018 sales, Daimler noted that on a global basis SUVs account “for more than a third of all Mercedes-Benz sales.” According to the Chinese finance ministry, on December 15th the Chinese government will impose a 25% tariff on automobiles (and a 5% tariff on auto parts) from the U.S. Certainly this is going to have a direct effect on the sales of vehicles that are manufactured in the U.S. and exported to China. BMW and Mercedes are going to take it on the chin for the vehicles that they make in plants that they invested in so heavily in the U.S. Which could potentially mean that people in places like Greer, South Carolina, and Vance, Alabama, are going to find themselves in the crosshairs of the combatants. Soo too could Lincoln, which produces vehicles in places like Louisville, Kentucky (Navigator), Chicago, Illinois (Aviator) and Flat Rock, Michigan (Continental). Although the Tesla Gigafactory 3 is rapidly nearing completion in Shanghai, it is worth noting that vehicles built in Fremont, California, are being sold in China in numbers that donÂ’t make Musk unhappy.