Welcome to the Daily 5 report for Monday, March 31.
It was once the grand vision of former Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn. A global automotive powerhouse alliance that someday would combine its many strengths under one holding company. Nissan obliterated Ghosn's vision in 2018 when he was systematically ousted and charged with fraud in Japan. He later escaped while awaiting trial and is now hiding from Japanese justice in Lebanon.
Today, the longtime alliance between Renault and Nissan Motor Co. eroded further with the companies agreeing to allow themselves to divest more shares in each other.
But as this report from Bloomberg shows, the latest revisions in this alliance were designed to aid Nissan with concessions in India, relief from investing in the Ampere electric vehicle unit and an ability to raise cash by selling Renault shares.
Read more: Live updates on tariff news and impacts
The tone of the official Renault comments sounded more like a bailout than short-term help for Nissan.
"The decision today gives Nissan additional flexibility, which would be the possibility for Nissan to sell assets and increase their cash position," Renault CFO Duncan Minto said. He said having such ability would help Nissan to restructure.
Renault CEO Luca de Meo said the French automaker "has a strong interest in seeing Nissan turn around its performance as quickly as possible."
Nissan's incoming CEO Ivan Espinosa said, "Nissan is committed to preserving the value and benefits of our strategic partnership within the Alliance while implementing turnaround measures to enhance efficiencies."
Meanwhile, we just released one of our most popular annual Automotive News Research & Data Center projects: the 2025 Top 150 Dealership Groups list. This is quite literally the who's who of the U.S. automotive retail world and is must-have tool for anyone doing business with U.S. auto dealerships.
In other news, several reports emerged over the last few days about the global political backlash against Tesla and Elon Musk.
In Rome, a fire broke out overnight at a Tesla dealership, destroying 17 cars, firefighters said in this story from Reuters. They did not say what started the blaze. Italian news agencies said investigators were looking into various possible causes, including arson. Musk called it "terrorism." On Sunday he lamented all the pressure growing on him for his role heading up the Trump administration's plan to cut U.S. government spending.
But as our Laurence Iliff explains in this story, Tesla's big-picture role as a global leader in automotive innovation could be in decline. The EV company faces hurdles as its product lineup ages. Tesla's brand consideration among luxury vehicle buyers dropped to 9 percent last year from a high of 16 percent in 2021, falling sharply behind Lexus, BMW and Cadillac, Cox said in our story.
"Without a significant change in strategy to develop new products with widespread appeal, Tesla's high-water mark as an automaker may be in the past," one analyst said in the story.
Here's an interesting trial balloon kind of story out of Canada today. General Motors' "woefully underutilized" CAMI Assembly Plant is a potential beneficiary of a commercial vehicle tie-up between the U.S. automaker and Hyundai, industry analyst Sam Fiorani told David Kennedy of Automotive News Canada.
The Ingersoll, Ontario, plant produced an estimated 3,500 electric Chevrolet BrightDrop delivery vans last year — compared with nearly 200,000 Chevrolet Equinox crossovers five years earlier — according to the Automotive News Research & Data Center. The comparatively glacial output has left much of the plant's workforce working part time since CAMI reopened in late 2022 following a retooling period.
Obviously, such a project by GM-Hyundai would need to sort out potential tariff liabilities before any tooling up begins.
That's it for now. Have a great rest of your day.
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— Philip Nussel, online editor
