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VW sees mild growth for China auto market over next three to four years

GUANGZHOU, China/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Volkswagen AG , the top foreign automaker in China, said on Thursday it expects the world's biggest passenger car market to stabilize next year with low growth levels likely for three to four years. Hit by a slowing economy, the U.S.-China trade war and chaotic implementation of new emission rules, China's vehicle sales are expected to slide some 8% this year after a 2.8% fall last year to 28.1 million - the first decline since the 1990s. "Next year we predict a stable total market environment, maybe moderate small growth," VW Group China CEO Stephan Woellenstein told Reuters at the Guangzhou autoshow.

New electric vehicles take center stage at L.A. Auto Show

New electric vehicles, several new small SUVs, a redesigned compact car, a plug-in version of Toyota’s top-selling vehicle and a futuristic electric station wagon concept car from Volkswagen are among the new models on display this week at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

FCC Spectrum Proposal Spotlights Automaker Technological Divide

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed reallocating to mobile devices airwaves long assigned to vehicle safety while preserving some of the spectrum for carmakers planning to deploy new technology.“We want to move on from something we’ve tried for a long time that wasn’t working, and open the door to new and exciting opportunities,” Pai said in a speech at a Washington event. “After 20 years of seeing these prime airwaves go largely unused, the time has come for the FCC to take a fresh look.”Auto industry reaction highlighted a division between companies such as Toyota Motor Corp. that have already invested in the old technology and a growing number of others, including Ford Motor Co., that back the newer system that they say performs better.Pai set a Dec. 12 vote on his proposal, which would commence a months-long comment period on giving Wi-Fi gadgets access to 60% of the airwaves reserved for auto safety in 1999. Automakers would retain use of the remainder.The change wouldn’t be final until another vote by the FCC, which under Pai has worked to free airwaves bands for new uses. Because Pai leads a Republican majority, his proposals usually pass.In 1999, the frequencies were reserved by the FCC to link cars, roadside beacons and traffic lights into a seamless wireless communication web to help avoid collisions and alert drivers to road hazards, among other uses.In a concession to carmakers, Pai’s plan would devote most of their remaining portion of the spectrum to the new cellular-based safety technology that several have recently embraced. A thin remaining slice would be used for either the new system or for an older accident-avoidance technology foreseen two decades ago but is little used today.Ford announced earlier this year that it would outfit all its new U.S. models starting in 2022 with newer cellular vehicle-to-everything technology. Toyota, meanwhile, halted in April plans to deploy the older systems in 2021 citing dwindling support from regulators and other carmakers.However, Toyota said in a statement on Wednesday that it remains committed to the older technology and that the entire spectrum band currently allocated for auto safety should remain available to them.General Motors Co. deferred comment to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which, along with several groups, including the American Automobile Association, urged caution.‘Harmful Interference’The groups issued a joint statement asking the FCC to refrain from sharing the frequencies with non-safety devices “until test results clearly indicate that sharing with unlicensed devices can occur without harmful interference.”The U.S. Transportation Department said it hadn’t changed its position that the entire airwaves swath needs to be retained for auto safety. The government has spent hundreds of millions on the older, competing technology called dedicated short-range communications.“We’re hoping to preserve that 75 megahertz because it is now time, the technology is now there, that we can start deploying this potentially life-saving technology,” James Owens, acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said in a Senate hearing.The 5G Automotive Association, a group that backs the new cellular safety system, applauded Pai’s proposal.Public Safety“Extensive crash avoidance testing continues to demonstrate that C-V2X technology will deliver safety benefits to the American public,” said the group. It represents most major automakers including Ford Motor Co., Volkswagen AG and Honda Motor Co., in addition to wireless companies such as Verizon Communications Inc. and gear makers Samsung Electronics Co. and Qualcomm Inc.“This visionary FCC proposal will enable us to bring the tremendous, unmatched safety benefits from C-V2X to US drivers, passengers, and pedestrians,” Dean Brenner, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of spectrum strategy and technology, said in a statement.The Intelligent Transportation Society of America, an advocacy group with members including GM and several states that have deployed safety equipment that works off the older technology said the “FCC is prepared to trade safer roads for more connectivity.”“In a country that reels from nearly 36,000 roadway deaths every year, it is unfathomable that the United States would literally give away our top safety tool -- and with it, our best chance to save tens of thousands of lives,” ITS America president Shailen Bhatt said in the group’s emailed statement.Cable providers that offer Wi-Fi for customers’ wireless use welcomed Pai’s move. Charter Communications Inc. said it was “thrilled” and Comcast Corp. said the “spectrum is too valuable a national resource to lie fallow any longer.”The airwaves could be used for fast communications including machine-to-machine links, and smart city applications such as smart cameras, traffic monitoring and security sensors, NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, a trade group for companies including Comcast and Charter the FCC in a Sept. 25 filing.\--With assistance from Keith Naughton.To contact the reporters on this story: Todd Shields in Washington at tshields3@bloomberg.net;Ryan Beene in Washington at rbeene@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net, John Harney, Todd ShieldsFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

VW’s CEO Says Germany Would Be Better Home for Tesla Car-Making Than California

(Bloomberg) -- Volkswagen AG’s chief executive officer, who’s grown increasingly chummy with Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, said the electric-vehicle maker may find Germany a more accommodating place for manufacturing than its home state of California.“What Tesla probably is looking for is the environment, the infrastructure, to build high-quality cars, which is probably much more the case here in Germany than on the West Coast of the United States,” VW CEO Herbert Diess told analysts and investors on a call Monday. Musk announced last week that Tesla will build a vehicle and battery factory on the outskirts of Berlin, plus an engineering and design center within the city limits. While the plant will be the second to assemble Teslas outside the U.S. -- one near Shanghai is on the verge of making cars for sale -- the company’s massive facility in Fremont, California, isn’t going anywhere. Preparations are underway for Model Y crossover production to start next summer.Tesla hasn’t yet said where it will build a new electric pickup that Musk, 48, plans to unveil in Los Angeles later this week.\--With assistance from Christoph Rauwald.To contact the reporter on this story: Craig Trudell in New York at ctrudell1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Trudell at ctrudell1@bloomberg.net, Chester DawsonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

VW rejects anti-competitive allegation by parts maker Prevent

The lawsuit said that Volkswagen had extracted written agreements from suppliers not to sell to Prevent, which amounted to anti-competitive behaviour. Prevent said it a statement it was seeking damages in excess of $750 million, alleging Volkswagen used its market power to squeeze smaller suppliers who had to comply with "unfair terms and prices" or face bankruptcy. In 2016 https://reut.rs/2OnW5fN, Volkswagen and two of its suppliers, one which was part of Prevent, resolved a contract dispute that had hit output at more than half of the automaker's German plants.

Volkswagen cuts profit, sales forecasts as autos downturn bites

German carmaker Volkswagen cut its forecasts for operating profit and sales growth on Monday due to a downturn in demand for passenger cars, while keeping profit margin targets. "It is fair to say that the very best of the party is over," Chief Financial Officer Frank Witter told analysts in a call to discuss the company's outlook. Volkswagen joins a string of automakers and suppliers including Ford and Continental in warning of tough times for an industry facing higher investments into cleaner and self-driving technologies at a time when a trade war between Washington and Beijing is curbing global growth.

Volkswagen cuts medium-term outlook for operating profit, sales

Autonomous Taxis Become a Rough Ride for Europe

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As recently as March, Daimler AG, the German carmaker, promised to put 10,000 autonomous taxis on the streets by 2021. But this week, Daimler chairman Ola Kaellenius announced that the company was taking a “reality check” on the project and focusing on self-driving long-haul trucks instead. It’s fine that self-driving cabs aren’t coming as fast as some expected — and it’s even better that Silicon Valley-style big talk appears to be going out of fashion.Kaellenius’s “reality check” has some solid business reasons: Daimler is cutting costs and can’t commit to a large, capital-intensive project without a clear idea of what kind of first-mover advantage it might confer. But mostly, it comes because of a long-obvious technical problem. Making sure self-driving cars aren’t a menace in city traffic is a job that’ll take more than a couple of years. Investigators are still trying to get to the bottom of the March 2018 accident in which a driverless Uber killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, and it appears Uber Inc.’s cars had been involved in dozens of previous nonfatal incidents in the course of the same testing program. No one wants to be in the same situation as Uber — so General Motors Co. subsidiary Cruise won’t be launching self-driving taxis in San Francisco this year, as previously promised, and maybe not next year, either. There's been lots of news stories about Waymo Llc, an Alphabet Inc. subsidiary, launching a self-driving taxi service in Arizona, and in April, it even put an app for it on the Google Play store. But in September, Morgan Stanley lowered Waymo’s valuation because of delays in the commercial use of its technology, and last month, Waymo chief executive John Krafcik said driverless delivery trucks could come before a taxi service.For European carmakers, which have to deal with older cities not laid out on a grid, launching autonomous taxi services appears even more daunting than for Americans. They know it’s a long way from Tempe to Amsterdam or Rome. That’s one reason Volkswagen AG, a latecomer to self-driving development, isn’t worried about being overtaken. Alexander Hitzinger, chief executive of Volkswagen’s autonomous-vehicle subsidiary, said in a recent interview that even an industry pioneer such as Waymo was “a long way away from commercializing the technology” and that Volkswagen’s autonomous vehicles would be developed by the mid-2020s.That time frame may be no more realistic than the previous hype about big 2019 and 2020 launches. Autonomous car developers can complain all they want about unpredictable human drivers and pedestrians who are causing all the accidents with their flawlessly superhuman creations, but nobody is going to clear the cities of people to give self-driving cars a spotless safety record. And making sure that, after millions of hours of training, artificial intelligence is finally able to drive like a human after a few hundred hours on the road, is not all that’s required for robotaxis to be viable. There's still the whole matter of figuring out how to reduce rather than increase urban congestion by using cars that don't “think” like humans.It’s also dangerous to adopt any kind of specific framework for the launch of automated truck services, even though that’s an easier project than taxis because the routes are fixed. The presence of humans in what is still a predominantly human world has rather unpredictable consequences for robot behavior. And the first movers have an obvious disadvantage: Like Uber with a taxi, they can get burned in ways that could set the whole business back years, and the earnings potential is unclear.None of this means, of course, that self-driving development has failed or even hit a dead end. Given enough time and a few technological breakthroughs, autonomous vehicles will be safe around actual people in actual winding, narrow, crowded streets. Engineering challenges exist to be overcome. The problem isn’t with the tech, which is moving along at a reasonably rapid pace, but with how that progress is communicated.Nobody forced experienced managers at venerable companies such as Daimler or GM to make overly optimistic statements about self-driving taxi launches. Waymo is a cash-burning startup, and it’s difficult to hold it responsible for getting ahead of itself. But the adults in the room look silly for having tried to play catch-up. There’s no reason for the big car companies to make any promises on self-driving at all. Unlike with vehicle electrification, which is part of many countries' climate policies, there’s no regulatory pressure to eliminate human drivers. And autonomous mobility-related business models are purely theoretical at this point.It would be enough for companies involved in autonomous car development to say they’re working on it. Pretty much all the big players are, to some extent. The time for any other kind of announcement will come when someone is really ready to launch a commercial service, whenever that may be. No rush.To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Revive the Middle Class by Bringing Back Unions

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If the U.S. is going to make a big dent in income inequality and raise living standards for the middle class, it’s going to need a multipronged approach. Higher taxes and more spending on health care will help. Minimum-wage laws can raise pay for workers at the bottom without reducing employment much, but they only benefit a relatively small slice of the workforce. But something else is needed.One big idea is to bring back unions and collective bargaining. Several teams of economists have examined the historical record and concluded that unions were important in reducing inequality. But although unions are still important in the public sector, in the private sector they’ve been almost wiped out.People argue about the cause of the decline. Some blame weak enforcement of labor laws or the rise of state right-to-work laws. Others blame global competition and technology. But Martin Manley, an entrepreneur who previously served as assistant secretary of the Labor Department under President Bill Clinton, thinks he has the answer. In a new book titled “A Better Bargain: Organizing Employers and Workers to Grow America’s Middle Class,” Manley argues that the U.S. union system was doomed from the start.Before 1935, Manley notes, there were several types of collective bargaining in the U.S. But the one that ended up being enshrined in law, in the National Labor Relations Act, was called enterprise bargaining. Under that law, workers at each workplace have to vote to unionize; if they do, all workers at that workplace are covered by the union contract. If they reject the union down, however, there’s no collective bargaining.This system has a huge downside: competition. Suppose the workers at a McDonald’s want to form a union. The managers know that if the workers unionize, wages will go up and prices for hamburgers at that McDonald’s will rise. That will put the restaurant at a competitive disadvantage versus the non-unionized Burger King down the street, eventually resulting in layoffs. The managers will make this argument to the workers, who probably will find it convincing.If both the McDonald’s and the Burger King could coordinate and unionize together, competition would be no problem; wages would rise and the profits of the two giant corporations might fall while consumers paid higher prices for burgers. But because U.S. labor law forces each workplace to act independently on unionization, they can’t effectively coordinate. The situation is even worse for companies such as General Motors that face international competition because there’s no way for GM workers to coordinate with Volkswagen workers in Europe or Toyota workers in Asia.Manley has a two-pronged solution to this problem. Both pieces would require a major rewrite of U.S. labor law. And both would involve a shift from enterprise-level bargaining to sectoral bargaining, with negotiations taking place in an entire industry, not individual workplaces or companies.The first piece is industry associations — groups of companies in the same industry and region that bargain collectively with their workers all at once. Though it might seem counterintuitive to let employers collaborate like this, it would remove the competitive threat that unions represent, because the resulting agreements would constrain all businesses equally. Manley suggests that industry associations could also collaborate to create more efficient and flexible labor markets by providing worker training, sharing knowledge about workers across company lines and so on.Second, Manley would make unions nonexclusive. Under his preferred system, an industry association would bargain simultaneously with all the organizations that workers in that industry belonged to, be they unions, worker co-ops, professional associations or advocacy groups. The various worker groups would be awarded representation at the negotiating table proportional to their membership (which could overlap). Manley envisions various worker groups competing with each other for members by offering services other than wage bargaining.These are good ideas. To really be effective, they’ll require one crucial element: that workers who don’t belong to any organization are all covered by the contracts that result from sector-level labor negotiations. A law like this is the reason that the French and German workforces are still mostly covered by collective bargaining, despite falling unionization:If combined with Manley’s idea for competing labor organizations and proportional representation in negotiations, sectoral bargaining would undo the decades-long decline in private-sector collective bargaining almost overnight. It wouldn’t require unions to rebuild their membership; all it would need is a few worker organizations to pop up and start bargaining on behalf of everyone. At first, these early movers would get almost all the seats at the negotiating table, which would induce other workers to form other organizations to get a piece of the action.Presidential candidates such as Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren have backed sectoral bargaining, showing that the idea is catching on. Innovative ideas like Manley’s could allow sectoral bargaining to take root even faster and to be carried out in a way that many employers would embrace. Ultimately, a more cooperative relationship between workers and management would result in a more sustainable system for supporting the middle class.To contact the author of this story: Noah Smith at nsmith150@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

BMW executive Markus Duesmann tasked with reviving Audi

Volkswagen on Friday installed former BMW executive Markus Duesmann to reinvent Audi after the German premium brand lost key engineering know-how and influence in the wake of the 2015 diesel-cheating scandal. Duesmann will become chief executive of Audi as well as take on board level responsibility for research and development at Volkswagen Group on April 1 next year, the Wolfsburg-based multi-brand group said on Friday.

UPDATE 1-Volkswagen to invest 60 bln eur in e-mobility, digital tech by 2024

Volkswagen will invest 60 billion euros ($66.12 billion) by 2024 to develop electric and hybrid cars as well as digital technologies, the multi-brand car and truckmaking group said on Friday. Volkswagen plans to build 75 variants of electric car and around 60 hybrid vehicle models, it said.

Volkswagen to invest 60 billion euro in e-mobility, digital tech by 2024

Volkswagen will invest 60 billion euros ($66.12 billion) by 2024 to develop electric and hybrid cars as well as digital technologies, the multi-brand car and truckmaking group said on Friday. Volkswagen plans to build 75 variants of electric car and around 60 hybrid vehicle models, it said. Volkswagen plans to retool its plant in Emden, Germany to build an electric sports utility vehicle (SUV) from 2022 onwards, and a decision on where to locate a new factory will be taken by year-end, the carmaker said.

The Climate Crisis Is Coming for Your Land Rover

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If you’ve dropped the kids off at school in London or the New York suburbs recently, the idea that Jaguar Land Rover Automotive Plc is struggling must seem far-fetched. The British carmaker’s Range Rover SUVs have become a common feature of the upper-middle class lifestyle. How else would one get to brunch and the gym?Yet a decade after India’s Tata Group acquired and dramatically reinvigorated these famous old brands, JLR is back on the ropes. The unit lost an eye-peeling 3.3 billion pounds ($4.2 billion) in the fiscal year to March and burned through 1.3 billion pounds of cash. No wonder Tata is casting around for help.JLR’s cost-base has become bloated, its sales in China have collapsed and its big bet on Jaguar saloon (sedan) models has  failed to pay off. Selling SUVs to Brits and Americans has prevented its fall from being even more dramatic. However, new gasoline and diesel cars are going to be banned in the U.K. and elsewhere by 2040 and the climate crisis could trigger a backlash against gas-guzzlers well before then. Either way, refashioning the company for a zero-emissions future will be very expensive.Tata insists JLR is not for sale but that doesn’t mean it wants to continue this journey alone. The unit had about 2.2 billion pounds of net debt at the end of September.The Indian parent has approached fellow automakers including China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. and Germany’s BMW AG, about forging partnerships to help JLR save money, Bloomberg reported this week. These would supplement existing collaborations with BMW on electric drive systems and with Waymo on autonomous vehicles.This hunt for allies makes sense because JLR’s business model is looking shaky. More than 80% of the vehicles that it sold in Europe last year run on diesel, a technology that’s been undermined by Volkswagen AG’s emissions cheating and the threat of bans in many cities.SUVs make up an even higher percentage of sales. The boom in these vehicles has contributed to a rise in average carbon emissions from carmakers over the past year or two. No wonder they’re in the cross-hairs of climate campaigners. Last month JLR listed “increasing environmental activism” among its biggest challenges.The Extinction Rebellion crowd has a point here. A top-specification Range Rover can weigh more than 5,700 lbs (2,585kg), which is why the company’s vehicles tend to spew out more CO2 than peers.Because it sells less than 300,000 cars annually in Europe, JLR has special dispensation from Brussels to pollute more.(1) However, these lenient fleet emission targets expire in 2028, so the company needs to change its ways sharpish.It says it’s on track to cut emissions by 45% in 2020 compared to 2007 levels, as required by regulators. From next year there will be a hybrid or electric variant of all of its models; and Jaguar’s all-electric I-Pace compact SUV deservedly won car of the year. Creating zero emissions versions of the group’s biggest SUVS will be more difficult, though, because of their hefty weight and poor aerodynamics.Footing the bill will be a stretch too. The company has to manage a 4 billion pound yearly investment budget while selling far fewer cars than its bigger rivals: JLR sold less than 600,000 vehicles last year, about 5% of Volkswagen’s haul. Lackluster sales have left it with unused production capacity.Its attention to detail in manufacturing has also been found wanting. The Jaguar and Land Rover brands came bottom in J.D. Power’s U.S. new vehicle quality rankings, and high warranty costs are an unwelcome feature of its earnings. All of this means JLR’s profit margins are thinner than you might expect given the $210,000 price tag of a high-spec Range Rover.Even as far out as 2023, JLR anticipates an operating return on sales of 6% at most. This is similar to Daimler AG’s 2022 target for Mercedes-Benz, but is way below the margins of French mass-market carmaker Peugeot SA.Thanks to progress on cost-cutting and signs that plunging China sales have bottomed out, investors have become more confident in Tata’s ability to turn JLR around. It returned to profit in the second quarter, prompting a rally in Tata Motors’ shares and JLR’s beaten up bonds. President Donald Trump’s threat of a 25% U.S. tariff on imported vehicles appears to have receded somewhat, as has the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit that would have been ruinous for carmakers.Might this moment of calm tempt a buyer of the company out of the shadows? Tata’s reluctance to sell isn’t the only barrier. Peugeot was rumored to be keen but its chief executive officer Carlos Tavares has found another merger partner in Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV. Bernstein analyst Max Warburton says BMW would fit but the Bavarians lost a lot of money when they owned Rover in the 1990s.There are also politics to consider. The backlash against SUVs, many built by BMW, is acute in Germany. Doubling down on gas-guzzling urban tractors might harm BMW’s emissions footprint.(2) It might also be viewed poorly by the Berlin government, which boosted electric vehicle subsidies recently.While SUVs can carry lots of baggage, increasingly it’s the wrong kind.(1) JLR's new cars must have average emissions of about 130 g/km of CO2 by 2021, compared to an industry average of 95g.(2) Depending on what happened to JLR's emissions derogationTo contact the author of this story: Chris Bryant at cbryant32@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Chris Bryant is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies. He previously worked for the Financial Times.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.