Gas prices are higher than ever before and continuing to rise. A perfect crap storm of bad domestic energy policy and an egotistical sociopath invading a sovereign country, caused pricing to hit these extreme highs we are seeing with no end in sight. It is hard to believe that we were energy independent just a few years ago. Now we are doing business with horrible dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to purchase our oil, directly funding those regimes with billions of US dollars. These gas prices will be a leading force in driving inflation up even further, as energy costs are directly tied to everything. Let’s hope our leader can pull together for the good of the country for once and figure out how to deal with these pressing issues. I’ll be holding my breath.
Stellantis is the latest in a long list of companies moving business out of Russia. They announced on Wednesday that they will be halting all imports and exports of vehicles with Russia and they will be moving their van production out of Russia and into Western Europe. They have also frozen any new investments into Russia as a stand against the aggression. Stellantis has produced over 100,000 vans in Russian plants each year since 2017 and this move is likely to hurt the Russian economy badly.
Toyota is cutting Japanese production by 20% for April, May, and June to ease the strain on the supply chain issues that everyone is still facing. The President, Akio Toyoda, seemed to hint to its union members that there is no sound production plan for automotive suppliers and this plan to cut production will help get in front of the issue. This will hopefully give their suppliers a little breathing room to focus on ramping up future production to get Toyota out of its current slump.
The National Automotive Dealers Association or NADA show is currently going on right now in Las Vegas Nevada. This year the NADA is bringing in some monsters of the automotive industry as keynote speakers like Dana Perino, a news anchor from Fox News, and Michael Strahan, Pro Football Hall of Famer. Yeah, I found the lineup to be a little weird this year as most years they usually have an automotive CEO or two and some more relevant speakers to the industry. With the auto manufacturers trying to basically cut out the dealerships and sell directly to the customers I can see why these CEOs are not at this show to answer the dealers’ questions. It seems as though the US automakers are making plans to set the pricing of the vehicles upfront, especially with the rollout of new EVs, and just use the dealerships to facilitate the transactions. The manufacturers would then pay the dealers a set amount per sale. This seems to me to be a non-starter for the dealerships and with the big players in manufacturing this year noticeably absent from the NADA show, I think they know that there will be a ton of blowback.
The NHTSA has removed human control requirements from vehicles that are being designed to be driven by a computer system. The old rules assumed that there would be a need for a forward-facing driver’s seat and steering wheel. The agency’s new claim is “For vehicles designed to be solely operated by an ADS, manually operated driving controls are logically unnecessary”. This should lead to some interesting interior designs for vehicles as controls that take up a large area of the cabin will no longer be necessary and the main seat doesn’t even have to face forward.
