Welcome to the Daily 5 report for Friday, June 13.
The bureaucratic logjam on self-driving vehicles might be loosening at NHTSA. The agency today said it plans to "further accelerate the safe development of automated vehicles" by streamlining its exemption process.
The process of receiving an exemption for vehicles that do not contain traditional controls such as steering wheels and brake pedals, and thus do not meet federal motor vehicle safety standards, has proved cumbersome. Ford Motor Co. and General Motors automated driving subsidiary Cruise waited years for decisions on their exemption requests that never came from the previous administration. They eventually abandoned their robotaxi efforts.
Sign up here for the Automotive News Daily 5 report.
Only a single exemption request has been granted to date — that went to self-driving tech developer Nuro in February 2020 for a vehicle that did not carry human passengers. Exemptions allow for an operator to deploy as many as 2,500 vehicles that do not meet federal standards. But no manufacturer or operator has come close to bumping up against that threshold.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to pile up on the softening market for full electric vehicles. As Laurence Iliff reports today, EV registrations in the U.S. slipped in April for the first time in 14 months. Tesla's registrations plunged 16 percent.
April EV registrations in the U.S. fell 4.4 percent compared with the same month last year, S&P Global Mobility said. April's 97,833 EV registrations represented a 6.6 percent share of the light-vehicle market, down from the 7.4 percent share EVs held a year earlier.
On the trade front, the Trump administration said this week it reached terms for a new trade deal with China, but the supply of rare earth magnets to automakers remains a major concern on assembly lines.
The supply of the critical components has been trickling out of China, which has instituted a new approval process for exports of rare earths that continues to slow supply lines, Ford CEO Jim Farley said in this story from Bloomberg.
"It's day to day," Farley said in an interview Friday with Bloomberg TV. "We have had to shut down factories. It's hand-to-mouth right now."
That's it for today. Have a great weekend.
If you want to view this story in your browser, click here.
— Philip Nussel, online editor, with contribution from Pete Bigelow
No comments:
Post a Comment