Welcome to today's edition of the Daily 5.
In the last 24 hours, Stellantis, Nissan Motor Co. and Volkswagen's Audi unit announced plans to slash a combined 14,600 jobs around the world in the coming months. That's 1,100 at the Stellantis Jeep plant in Ohio, 9,000 jobs across the board at Nissan, and 4,500 cuts at Audi in Germany.
Job losses are never good, but they hurt more during the holidays. Companies in the midst of a bad year want to make the tough decisions to limit the damage to the current calendar year. With elections over in the U.S., some companies may now cut jobs, avoiding potential political backlash.
Nissan's situation appears to be particularly alarming, as our Hans Greimel reports today. CEO Makoto Uchida is wiping out key points of the troubled carmaker's midterm plan, cutting production capacity and selling a chunk of its ownership in Mitsubishi Motors. The share sale should yield about $482 million, Nissan said. The company posted a quarterly net loss of $65 million compared with net income of $1.3 billion during the same quarter last year.
"I plan to take our company toward future growth," Uchida said today in Japan. "The lives of 130,000 Nissan employees and their families around the world rest on my shoulders. I feel great responsibility as a leader of the company."
At Stellantis, slow sales of the Jeep Gladiator pickup prompted the need to cut a shift at its longtime operations in Toledo, Ohio. The company has cut jobs at several operations in recent months.
And at Audi, the company is looking to reduce nonproduction head count by 4,500 in Germany.
Unfortunately, with the U.S. and world economies slowing — and as political leaders hope for so-called "soft landings" — more mass job cuts are likely.
In other news today, we took a deeper dive into Elon Musk's alliance with President-elect Donald Trump and its implications on Tesla's plans for robotaxis.
Meanwhile, our friends at Automotive News Canada reported that China's electric vehicle giant BYD has paused its expansion plans in Canada following Ottawa's imposition of 100 percent tariffs on EVs imported from China. As David Kennedy reports, BYD officials met over the summer with dealers across Canada on establishing a possible distribution network. BYD hired lobbyists to advise the Canadian government on the "expected market entry of BYD into Canada for the sale of passenger electric vehicles." We'll see where this goes.
Looking ahead to Friday, we'll continue to look at the impacts of Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election. And our Richard Truett will analyze how Toyota dealerships are grappling with the recall and replacement of 100,000 Tundra engines in December. It's not pretty, but this story will detail how it'll be done.
That's it for today. Have a great rest of your afternoon.
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— Philip Nussel, online editor
