+++ ASTON MARTIN will reveal the new Vanquish, complete with a thunderous V12, on 2 September. Its next-generation GT flaghship has been confirmed to pack 840 hp and 1.000 Nm, which are substantial increases of 115 hp and 100 Nm over the outgoing DBS. Those figures are significantly higher even than the run-out Ultimate edition of the DBS and will make the Vanquish one of the most powerful production Astons yet, outpunched by only the one-off Victor and the Valkyrie hypercar. The increase in potency comes courtesy of an extensive redevelopment programme for Aston’s twin-turbocharged V12. Aston has strengthened the cylinder block, redesigned the cylinder heads and reprofiled the camshafts. There are new intake and exhaust ports, too, and the spark plugs have been moved, which in conjunction with more powerful fuel injectors allows for “optimised combustion”. The turbochargers, meanwhile, are now more responsive and run at a higher speed, boosting throttle response. Aston said the new engine will “achieve unprecedented performance and efficiency”, hinting it will make the Vanquish tangibly quicker than the DBS. The company indirectly confirmed the name of the new car in its affirmation that “all will be vanquished” by the new GT, which will be the first of a run of “exclusive and limited-availability models” to use the overhauled V12. The engine itself will be hand-built in “strictly limited numbers”, suggesting the Vanquish will be a much lower-volume proposition than its DBS predecessor. Chief technical officer Roberto Fedeli said: “The V12 engine has long been a symbol of power and prestige, but it’s also a statement of engineering passion and technical prowess. With 840 hp and 1.000 Nm, this unparalleled engine represents nothing less than the dawn of a dazzling new V12 era for Aston Martin”. Aston has previously spoken of its intention to transform its flagship GT into a bona fide supercar, more clearly distinguished from its V8-engined Vantage and DB12 siblings. Spy shots of the Vanquish in testing reveal that it’s based on the DB12 but with a wide-reaching visual makeover that points to its extra grunt: there are huge new vents on the bonnet to keep the 12-cylinder engine cool, a much wider front grille and a chunkier lower splitter that hints at improved downforce. The rear end features a larger diffuser to improve aerodynamic performance, and the twin-exit exhaust set-up has been replaced with 4 tailpipes, nodding to the extra cylinders. The power increase will no doubt be matched by a comprehensive chassis overhaul, building on the set-up deployed on the fearsome DBS 770 Ultimate, with uprated dampers and a boost in rigidity at both ends helping to improve cornering performance and giving the supercar a broader scope of ability on track. Although it shares its basic bodywork and no doubt some of its platform with the DB12, the Vanquish will be “completely different” to both that GT and the new Vantage, Aston Martin chief creative officer Marek Reichman told previously. Crucial to Aston Martin’s desire to cement its status as a maker of top-drawer sports cars as well as more luxury cars will be ensuring that each of its front-engined models has its own distinct character and capabilities. “Rather than having products with two levels of power output and performance (and that includes dynamics and braking and all the other aspects of what makes a proper performance car) we now have to bring these power levels that give our cars the edge”, said strategy and product boss Alex Long. Long also emphasised that V12 engines are “synonymous” with Aston Martin. “People still love the twelves,” he said. “As much as the electrification revolution continues, a V12 engine has a different use case, and it’s still very much a huge emotional connection for our customers”. +++
+++ Leading Chinese automaker BYD posted on Wednesday a 24.4 percent rise in net profit for the first half of 2024, boosted by continuing strong demand for electric cars in its home and overseas markets. The company posted a net profit of $1.91 billion in the January-June period, up from $1.54 billion in the same period last year, according to results published at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange where BYD is listed. The firm said sales during the period stood at $42.3 billion, up 15.8 percent year-on-year. The Shenzhen-based company is the most prominent EV manufacturer in China, the world’s largest automotive market. Leaders in Beijing are aiming for car sales to be mainly made up of electric and hybrid models by 2035. In July, such vehicles accounted for more than half of all domestic sales, passing the threshold for the first time, according to the Chinese Association of Automobile Manufacturers. Generous government subsidies initially helped sales take off, but the policies were phased out in late 2022 and the market now appears to be reaching maturity. Local EV firms have since been locked in a cut-throat price war as they fight to remain competitive, weighing on their profitability. BYD has “effectively dealt with challenges brought by intensified industrial competition”, it said in the filing. BYD and other Chinese EV giants have accelerated overseas expansion in recent years, despite concerns in Western countries that local markets will become flooded with imports at prices they view as artificially low. The European Union has alleged that Beijing’s automotive subsidies have given Chinese firms an unfair leg up in foreign markets, distorting competition and harming the competitiveness of European automakers. Earlier this month, Brussels released a draft plan to impose tariffs of up to 36.3 percent on Chinese EVs; a measure that will become permanent in October unless a deal is reached with Beijing. The United States said in May that it would significantly raise customs duties on Chinese EVs to 100 percent. Canada also announced a 100 percent tariff on Monday, accusing China of “not playing by the same rules as other countries” in areas such as environmental and labour standards. BYD has nonetheless been ramping up globalisation efforts, with plans to open factories in Hungary and Turkey. Originally specialising in the design and production of batteries, BYD diversified into the automotive industry in 2003. +++
+++ CITROEN is gearing up to launch a new version of the C5 Aircross next year that will effectively become its flagship model and gain electric power for the first time. The French firm has committed to focusing on main-segment models in the future. As a result, it will not replace the slow-selling C5 X, but that saloon’s more popular SUV sibling will survive into a new generation. The C5 Aircross was launched in 2018 and is currently offered with petrol and hybrid powertrains. For its second generation, it will switch to the multi-powertrain STLA Medium platform shared with the Peugeot e-3008 and the Opel Grandland. Citroën boss Thierry Koskas confirmed the new platform will allow the C5 Aircross to be offered with an electric powertrain for the first time and he said this was something “we really want to offer”. The platform is natively front-drive and the single-motor version of the e-3008 makes 210 hp, although a twin-motor 316bhp version is also offered. The platform can accommodate either a 73 kWh or a 98 kWh battery, the latter giving the Peugeot a range of 700 km. While the STLA Medium platform was developed with a focus on electric power, it still allows for hybrid cars. Koskas confirmed the C5 Aircross will be offered with standard and plug-in hybrid powertrains; making it the only model in Citroën’s future line-up that will have a PHEV. “Plug-in hybrid can be an answer to some of the requirements of the market for that car”, said Koskas. “But it’s another cost because the battery is not small, so to put it in smaller cars doesn’t make sense”. The new C5 Aircross is tipped to take styling cues from the recently launched C3, which introduced the brand’s new design language. That suggests a focus on a more boxy and expressive design, along with Citroën’s new logo. The second-generation model will be positioned above the heavily revised C4, which is set to be revealed in the coming months and will also take styling cues from the smaller C3. Speaking about the decision to axe the C5 X, Koskas said: “It’s the flagship today, but it’s pretty marginal. Not because it’s not successful: its market share is pretty good, but the segment is absolutely tiny”. +++
+++ JAGUAR is recalling 2.760 I-Pace cars from the 2019 model year as their battery may overheat and cause a fire. This is a serious safety issue and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the United States is telling owners to park and charge their vehicles outside, away from structures, until the repair is complete and for 30 days afterwards. The latest recall seeks to address concerns that diagnostic software introduced to address previous recalls was inadequate. That’s an understatement as the safety recall report reveals multiple fires involving I-Paces with updated software. The report went on to say these vehicles “experienced thermal overload, which showed as smoke or fire from the underside of the vehicle where the high voltage traction battery is located”. The investigation is ongoing, but it has been determined that the diagnostic software does not provide an “appropriate level of protection”. As a result, owners who thought they were safe could be left with a false sense of security. This is extremely dangerous as an I-Pace could potentially catch fire while parked in a garage, while its owners are sleeping. The report says that after the initial recalls were conducted, Jaguar continued to monitor the situation. A “small number of post recall fire events were reported” and the capability of the diagnostic software was further reviewed in July of this year. This highlighted limitations of the software and it was eventually determined that vehicles which were not part of the safety recall “require a further recall to better mitigate the thermal overload condition”. Three post recall fires have been reported in the United States and vehicles involved in the latest recall will receive updated software that will limit charging of the battery to 80%. This is just a temporary fix as a “permanent remedy is under development”. Owners will be notified once that is available, but asking them to park outside for 30 days after the repair has been completed doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence. +++
+++ LEXUS believes it has unlocked the secret that will allow its new vehicles to match the dynamics of its German rivals, and it all comes down to body rigidity. Since 2018, engineers from Lexus have been working to improve the handling chops of its models, studying cars from competitors including BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Porsche. They’ve come to the conclusion they need to add support braces to the front and rear of its cars, as well as 2 supports in the center of the chassis. “We didn’t fully understand the 4 body positions”, the project manager for Lexus’ sensitivity performance development department, Toshinori Ito, said. “We learned about it from studying the competition. When we realized it, we wanted to add it to all Lexus models”. Lexus has been slowly rolling out these improvements across its line-up. In 2022, the RZ hit the market with front braces, and more recently, the NX was updated with a front brace in early 2023 and a rear brace this year. Ito added trials have been done on all existing Lexus models, and all of them can be updated and improved with these support braces. Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda has been pushing Lexus to establish a more unified driving signature across its range, combining the safe and sophisticated feeling its products are known for while also making them feel sporty and agile. “We are aiming for the same driving taste, no matter what Lexus model you are riding in”, Ito added. While adding front and rear support braces is quite easy on existing models, it’s a little harder to add those to the middle of the chassis. As such, these more extensive updates will be reserved for full lifecycle changes rather than minor model-year updates. +++
+++ 3 times in the past 4 months, William Stein, a technology analyst at Truist Securities, has taken Elon Musk up on his invitation to try the latest versions of TESLA ’s vaunted “Full Self-Driving” system. A Tesla equipped with the technology, the company says, can travel from point to point with little human intervention. Yet each time Stein drove one of the cars, he said, the vehicle made unsafe or illegal maneuvers. His most recent test-drive earlier this month, Stein said, left his 16-year-old son, who accompanied him, “terrified”. Stein’s experiences, along with a Seattle-area Tesla crash involving Full Self-Driving that killed a motorcyclist in April, have drawn the attention of federal regulators. They have already been investigating Tesla’s automated driving systems for more than two years because of dozens of crashes that raised safety concerns. The problems have led people who monitor autonomous vehicles to become more skeptical that Tesla’s automated system will ever be able to operate safely on a widespread scale. Stein says he doubts Tesla is even close to deploying a fleet of autonomous robot taxis by next year as Musk has predicted it will. The latest incidents come at a pivotal time for Tesla. Musk has told investors it’s possible that Full Self-Driving will be able to operate more safely than human drivers by the end of this year, if not next year. And in less than 2 months, the company is scheduled to unveil a vehicle built expressly to be a robot taxi. For Tesla to put robot taxis on the road, Musk has said the company will show regulators that the system can drive more safely than humans. Under federal rules, the Teslas would have to meet national standards for vehicle safety. Musk has released data showing miles driven per crash, but only for Tesla’s less-sophisticated Autopilot system. Safety experts say the data is invalid because it counts only serious crashes with air bag deployment and doesn’t show how often human drivers had to take over to avoid a collision. Full Self-Driving is being used on public roads by roughly 500.000 Tesla owners; slightly more than 1 in 5 Teslas in use today. Most of them paid $8,000 or more for the optional system. The company has cautioned that cars equipped with the system cannot actually drive themselves and that motorists must be ready at all times to intervene if necessary. Tesla also says it tracks each driver’s behavior and will suspend their ability to use Full Self-Driving if they don’t properly monitor the system. Recently, the company began calling the system “Full Self-Driving” (Supervised). Musk, who has acknowledged that his past predictions for the use of autonomous driving proved too optimistic, in 2019 promised a fleet of autonomous vehicles by the end of 2020. 5 years later, many who follow the technology say they doubt it can work across the U.S. as promised. “It’s not even close, and it’s not going to be next year,” said Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for AutoSafety. The car that Stein drove was a Tesla Model 3, which he picked up at a Tesla showroom in Westchester County, north of New York City. The car, Tesla’s lowest-price vehicle, was equipped with the latest Full Self-Driving software. Musk says the software now uses artificial intelligence to help control steering and pedals. During his ride, Stein said, the Tesla felt smooth and more human-like than past versions did. But in a trip of less than 15 km, he said the car made a left turn from a through lane while running a red light. “That was stunning”, Stein said. He said he didn’t take control of the car because there was little traffic and, at the time, the maneuver didn’t seem dangerous. Later, though, the car drove down the middle of a parkway, straddling two lanes that carry traffic in the same direction. This time, Stein said, he intervened. The latest version of Full Self-Driving, Stein wrote to investors, does not “solve autonomy” as Musk has predicted. Nor does it “appear to approach robot taxi capabilities”. During two earlier test drives he took, in April and July, Stein said Tesla vehicles also surprised him with unsafe moves. Stein said that while he thinks Tesla will eventually make money off its driving technology, he doesn’t foresee a robot taxi with no driver and a passenger in the back seat in the near future. He predicted it will be significantly delayed or limited in where it can travel. There’s often a significant gap, Stein pointed out, between what Musk says and what is likely to happen. To be sure, many Tesla fans have posted videos on social media showing their cars driving themselves without humans taking control. Videos, of course, don’t show how the system performs over time. Others have posted videos showing dangerous behaviour. Alain Kornhauser, who heads autonomous vehicle studies at Princeton University, said he drove a Tesla borrowed from a friend for two weeks and found that it consistently spotted pedestrians and detected other drivers. Yet while it performs well most of the time, Kornhauser said he had to take control when the Tesla has made moves that scared him. He warns that Full Self-Driving isn’t ready to be left without human supervision in all locations. “This thing”, he said, “is not at a point where it can go anywhere”. Kornhauser said he does think the system could work autonomously in smaller areas of a city where detailed maps help guide the vehicles. He wonders why Musk doesn’t start by offering rides on a smaller scale. “People could really use the mobility that this could provide”, he said. For years, experts have warned that Tesla’s system of cameras and computers isn’t always able to spot objects and determine what they are. Cameras can’t always see in bad weather and darkness. Most other autonomous robot taxi companies, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, combine cameras with radar and laser sensors. “If you can’t see the world correctly, you can’t plan and move and actuate to the world correctly”, said Missy Cummings, a professor of engineering and computing at George Mason University. “Cars can’t do it with vision only”, she said. Even those with laser and radar, Cummings said, can’t always drive reliably yet, raising safety questions about Waymo and Cruise. Phil Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies autonomous vehicle safety, said it will be many years before autonomous vehicles that operate solely on artificial intelligence will be able to handle all real-world situations. “Machine learning has no common sense and learns narrowly from a huge number of examples”, Koopman said. “If the computer driver gets into a situation it has not been taught about, it is prone to crashing”. Last April in Snohomish County, Washington, near Seattle, a Tesla using Full Self-Driving hit and killed a motorcyclist, authorities said. The Tesla driver, who has not yet been charged, told authorities that he was using Full Self-Driving while looking at his phone when the car rear-ended the motorcyclist. The motorcyclist was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities reported. The agency said it’s evaluating information on the fatal crash from Tesla and law enforcement officials. It also says it’s aware of Stein’s experience with Full Self-Driving. NHTSA also noted that it’s investigating whether a Tesla recall earlier this year, which was intended to bolster its automated vehicle driver monitoring system, actually succeeded. It also pushed Tesla to recall Full Self-Driving in 2023 because, in “certain rare circumstances,” the agency said, it can disobey some traffic laws, raising the risk of a crash. As Tesla electric vehicle sales have faltered for the past several months despite price cuts, Musk has told investors that they should view the company more as a robotics and artificial intelligence business than a car company. Yet Tesla has been working on Full Self-Driving since at least 2015. “I recommend anyone who doesn’t believe that Tesla will solve vehicle autonomy should not hold Tesla stock”, he said during an earnings conference call last month. Stein told investors, though, they should determine for themselves whether Full Self-Driving, Tesla’s artificial intelligence project “with the most history, that’s generating current revenue, and is being used in the real world already, actually works”. +++
+++ TOYOTA said Thursday its global production fell 0.6 percent in July from a year earlier to 804.610 vehicles, marking the 6th straight month of drop but with the smallest decline helped by solid domestic output. The July figure improved from a 12.9 percent drop the previous month, as its domestic production inched up 0.1 percent to 309.118 cars compared with an 18.8 percent slide in June. Toyota restarted manufacturing the Prius in mid-June in Japan after its output was suspended in April due to a recall. The hybrid model made up for production halts of three other models following its recent vehicle certification scandal, in which it admitted not fully following government standards in testing vehicles. Toyota’s overseas production fell 1.0 percent to 495.492 vehicles, as firm production in North America and Europe was offset by a 9.6 percent drop in China, it said. The automaker’s worldwide sales fell 0.2 percent to 857.982 units as sales fell in North America, where it had fewer business days for the month, and in China, where locally made, more affordable electric vehicles are gaining popularity. The figure in Italy more than doubled due to government subsidies but was not enough to cover the loss in the two major auto markets. Overall overseas sales fell 0.1 percent to 717.629 units. Japan saw a 0.6 percent decline to 140.353 cars due to the production halt of the 3 models, including the popular Yaris Cross, Toyota said. Japan’s 8 major automakers, including Toyota, built a total of 2.05 million vehicles globally in July, down 0.5 percent from a year earlier, according to the companies. Stiffer competition in China weighed down their output, with Nissan logging a 12.5 percent drop to 237.462 vehicles. Combined global sales rose 0.1 percent to 2.02 million vehicles, their data showed. +++
+++ If you want to buy an innovative EV that doesn’t break the bank, you may have to move to China, as the nation has become the global hotbed for affordable cars powered by electricity. Case in point, the new Mona M03 from XPENG . Announced in June, this new model serves as the new entry-level into the Xpeng family and has now been priced, available from a barely-believable equivalent of €33.500. For this affordable starting price, local buyers will be able to get behind the wheel of an EV with the lowest dragcoefficient of any sedan in production. Power comes courtesy of a 51.8 kWh battery pack driving a single electric motor with 188 hp. While the battery is small, the base model has a claimed range of 400 km. It’s not just the range that makes the Mona M03 compelling. All models come equipped with Level 2 driver-assistance technologies thanks to a pair of millimeter-wavelength radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and seven cameras. Sitting in the middle of the Mona M03 range is a €36.500 version. It receives a larger 62.2 kWh battery with a more powerful 215 hp motor at the front wheels. The larger battery sees its range climb to 470 km. Topping out the family is the 580 Max model, priced from €43.500 euro, with 430 km of range. Like many other EVs on the market, the cabin of the Mona M03 is quite sparse but it is well-equipped. For example, all models have a large panoramic glass roof and an 18-speaker sound system. Taking pride of place in the center of the dashboard is a massive Tesla-style screen and like the Model 3 and Model Y, there’s no traditional instrument cluster. However, for €80, a second screen can be added behind the steering wheel. Xpeng reportedly received more than 10.000 firm orders for the Mona M03 in 52 minutes after its June presentation. With prices now made public, its order book is expected to quickly grow. +++
