Subaru talks about electric cars again, Volkswagen’s 2022 was a year of successes and failures, while Uber seems to believe they can never fail again. All that and more in Morning shift for Wednesday, February 8, 2023.
Gear #1: Solterra’s Only the Start
Subaru announced a 9% reduction in its annual production forecast this morning in a quarterly earnings call, citing an ongoing chip shortage. That would leave Subaru around 880,000 units by the end of the current financial year, which ends March 31.
What’s more interesting are the automaker’s mid-term plans. Subaru hopes to cross the one-million-vehicle mark next year, and by 2025 the brand expects to have “several models in its electric vehicle lineup,” joining the existing Solterra, which was developed in conjunction with the company. with partners and minority shareholders Toyota. That will not be the end of the two companies’ cooperation in the field of electrification. polite auto news:
Tomoaki Emori, senior vice president of corporate planning, said: “Our main electrification strategy focuses on powerful hybrid and electric vehicles, and introduces models like so in the US by 2025.
“Considering the US market situation, we will need to offer several models in our electric vehicle lineup,” he said. “We’ve shifted our weight to that in our development.”
Emori did not provide details on the upcoming EVs, but they will complement the only all-electric vehicle currently in the lineup, the Solterra crossover co-developed with Toyota. Subaru said in May last year that it wants to achieve 40% of global sales from electric and hybrid batteries by 2030 and have electrification in place for all models by the early 2030s.
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Ramping up battery-electric offerings is key to future business in the U.S., and the U.S. accounts for a whopping 75 percent of the company’s global sales. That’s a figure I frankly wasn’t aware of, but we indeed love our Subarus here, so it isn’t all that surprising. The automaker intends to reveal its EV roadmap by the summer. If it’s appeared slow-moving in going away from internal combustion, that’s probably because Toyota too.
Subaru will start producing electric vehicles in-house on a hybrid production line with internal combustion vehicles in the mid-2020s. And from 2027, it will produce electric vehicles from a dedicated line that is being planned for its Japanese factory in Gunma Prefecture.
Subaru’s upcoming hybrids will use Toyota’s hybrid system and be manufactured at Subaru’s Gunma complex. The site currently produces Forester, Crosstrek, WRX, BRZ, Legacy, Outback and Impreza, giving an idea of what nameplates might be suitable for electrification.
It’s not an act of horror or anything, but if Subaru really wants to prioritize electric vehicles as much as they say, it needs to deliver something that can. more attractive than Solterraa car whose most notable characteristic to date is lost its wheel. Maybe Toyota is holding Subaru’s EV plans hostage, but of course without Toyota, Subaru wouldn’t have an EV. Throughout no, you might even say.
2nd gear: Good news, bad news for VW
The Volkswagen Group met its sales target for 2022 but fell significantly short of net cash flow expectations. Again, the supply chain is in charge. That’s believable, considering how the automaker said it had 150,000 unfinished vehicles in stock in October. Barron’s:
Volkswagen pre-announced its 2022 results on Tuesday night. Full results will be available on March 14. The company reported full-year operating profit of 22.5 billion euros ($24.2 billion) on revenue of 279 billion euros. Wall Street is looking for about 22.8 billion and 278 billion respectively.
Automotive free cash flow reached 5 billion euros. Volkswagen has targeted around 8.6 billion euros.
“The miss was driven by logistics and supply chain issues in Q4 affecting working capital,” Bernstein analyst Daniel Roeska wrote in a report Tuesday. “The company expects the effect to subside largely by 2023.”
Investors seem to have confidence in the company. Stocks stabilized after the announcement of early results. Volkswagen shares fell about 0.9% in overseas trading.
However, none of this really surprised Volkswagen or investors, that is than some of the company’s competitors can say. The group ended 2022 having delivered 8.3 million vehicles worldwide — lowest in a decade — compared to 8.9 million in 2021.
Device 3: Uber believes the worst is over
Breaking revenue estimates and setting new records in rides en route to “strongest quarter ever” – in the words of the CEO – Uber looks confident that the doldrums of the pandemic was certainly in the rearview mirror. From New York Times:
Uber reported $8.6 billion in revenue for the last three months of 2022, up 49 percent year-on-year, as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus reduced commuter activity. The company made $30.7 billion in total bookings — the amount customers pay — up 19% year over year.
The company said it hit two billion rides in a single quarter for the first time, up from 1.7 billion a year ago, and the number of customers using Uber each month jumped 11% to 131 million.
The results slightly exceeded Wall Street analysts’ expectations. Shares of Uber jumped 7% in premarket trading.
To say that Uber’s story is a rare one in the current economy would be an understatement, as the rest of Silicon Valley has announced sweeping layoffs. At $36.82 a share, Uber is currently trading higher than it has been in nearly a year, but is still far from its February 2021 peak, when company has crossed $60.
Gear 4: Hertz should have had more Teslas now
Hertz is quite optimistic these days. The company posted slightly improved revenue for the fourth quarter and forecasts travel demand will continue to grow through 2023. However, it appears Teslas make up a smaller percentage of Hertz’s total fleet. than expected, after the rental car company announced plans to order 100,000 Model 3s before the end of last year. From Reuters:
Hertz Global Holdings Inc’s rental car fleet has less than half of the Tesla vehicles it plans to order by 2022, the company’s regulatory filings showed on Tuesday.
Records show that Hertz’s fleet of vehicles in the Americas peaked at 428,700 vehicles for the year ending December 31, 2022, of which 11% were Tesla vehicles. The company added 1,187 Teslas to its international fleet.
That means the company’s fleet has 48,344 Tesla EVs, or less than half of the 100,000 electric cars the company has decided to order from the automaker by the end of 2022.
If you call back, that deal is too big for Hertz and Tesla back when it was announced in October 2021 that it had rapidly raised Tesla to a $1 trillion valuation. About 14 months later, Hertz claims less than half of the electric cars they’re talking about – and that’s only if we pick the Model 3 they’re planning to buy, say nothing about it. Model Y added to tabs.
5th Gear: India’s electric scooter startup invades cars
Ola Electric, a scooter company founded in 2017 that spun off a rideshare company founded in 2010, wants to add four-wheeled vehicles to its portfolio. This may seem like a giant leap for an entity that only started production six years ago, but its chief financial officer says the process of building an electric car isn’t much different from building an electric car. create an electric motorcycle. From Bloomberg:
The manufacturer and ride-hailing company focuses on advanced design stages and benefits from sharing some of the technologies implemented in its two-wheeler products. [Chief Financial Officer G.R. Arun] Kumar said in an interview in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
“Software, safety systems, electronics, cells, powertrains – a lot of them are commonplace,” Kumar said on the sidelines of the Indian Energy Week forum. “We think we hit 30%-40% there.”
Last year, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal said the company aims to price its first car at under $50,000, producing parts like lithium-ion batteries and batteries in-house to reduce costs. fee. Ola aims to compete with Tesla Inc., Hyundai Motor Co. and local rivals like Tata Group in India’s electric vehicle market, which consulting firm RBSA Advisors forecasts to be worth more than $150 billion by 2030.
See companies that have never built a car before comparing it to making anything else — more often, more complex gadgets — that has proven to be a source of renewable entertainment in this era of mainstream EV adoption. Maybe Ola will knock it out of the park, maybe notBut, one of two ways, It will be fun to see what happens next.
Reversed: Jack Nicholson Invents Road Rage
On this day in 1994, 29 years ago, something happened that I personally did not expect to read on this page. History.com:
Years later, he played counseling therapist Adam Sandler in the black comedy anger management (2003), but on February 8, 1994, it was Oscar-winning actor Jack Nicholson who let his anger spiral out of control.
In a criminal lawsuit against the actor, Robert Blank claimed that Nicholson, then 56, approached Blank’s Mercedes-Benz while he was stopping at a red light in North Hollywood. After accusing the other man of cutting him in traffic, Nicholson hit the roof and windshield of Blank’s car with a golf club. A witness confirmed Blank’s account of the incident, and mild charges of assault and vandalism were filed against Nicholson. The charges were dropped after Nicholson apologized to Blank, and the two reached a non-disclosure agreement, including a check for $500,000 reportedly from Nicholson.
Neutral: The Secret History of Prius
News that Toyota engineers want to update GR Later Cool new Prius It may come as a surprise to those of us who spent our younger years crashing into cars for no good reason, but this has precedent. Meet the GT300 Prius, the Japanese Super GT racing series.
