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Runtime: 9:58
0:07 New Car Inventory Getting Worse
0:56 Russian Car Sales Collapse
1:49 Solid-State Battery Another Step Closer
3:14 SEMA Members Book All-Time Record Sales
4:05 Magna’s Bolt-In EV Pickup Conversion
4:50 Polestar’s New Electric SUV
6:47 Apple Revamps CarPlay
7:34 Radical New Way to De-Ice Windshields
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NEW CAR INVENTORY GETTING WORSE
You’d think that after two years the chip shortage would start to be easing up. But it’s not. It’s actually getting a bit worse. Wards Intelligence reports that US inventory of new cars, trucks and vans dropped 2.6% from April to May. Automakers and car dealers had 30,000 fewer vehicles in inventory at the end of May, and only a 25-day supply. Compared to a year ago, inventory is down 25%. This is a key reason why most auto analysts are lowering their sales forecast for the year. If automakers can’t build more cars, there’s no way sales can go up.
RUSSIAN CAR SALES COLLAPSE
Meanwhile, in Russia, automakers don’t just face a chip shortage. They’re grappling with a shortage of everything as just about every country in the world stopped exporting parts and components to Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine. Bloomberg reports that new car sales in Russia plummeted 84% last month. Automakers sold fewer than 24,000 cars in May, about 1/10th of what they would sell in a good year. They’re just living off the last remnants of their inventory. Russia nationalized Renault’s operations in Russia and wants to start making the Moskvich this month. That’s a revival of an old Russian car brand. But even if production can resume, the cars will not have any safety or emissions equipment because all that kind of technology had to be imported.
SOLID STATE BATTERY ANOTHER STEP CLOSER
They say that solid state batteries will be the killer app for EVs. And while they’re still years away from mass production, they are making progress. Solid Power, which is developing solid state batteries, says it will ship its first pre-production battery cells to Ford and BMW by the end of the year so they can perform validation tests. Solid Power says it has enough pilot production capacity to make prototype cells for other automakers, but it wants to develop the batteries, not make them. It’s looking for a partner to build the cells as early as 2026 and says SK Innovation is one potential partner. For more info about Solid Power, check out our Autoline Exclusives interview with Doug Campbell the CEO of the company. We’ll provide a link in the transcript or description box below.
SEMA MEMBERS BOOK ALL-TIME RECORD SALES
Performance enthusiasts in the U.S. are spending big bucks to soup up their vehicles. SEMA, the Specialty Equipment Market Association, says sales of specialty-equipment parts hit an all-time high last year. Its members booked $50.9 billion in sales which was $3 billion more than in 2020. More than 80% of specialty-equipment customers said they spent just as much, or more, time working on their vehicles than they did in 2020. Pickup trucks are the most modified type of vehicle with an estimated 13.6 million trucks getting updates in 2021. But SEMA expects the increase in sales to be short lived and soften this year because of parts shortages.
MAGNA’S BOLT-IN EV PICKUP CONVERSION
Magna is making it easy for any pickup truck maker that wants to convert to electric. All an automaker has to do is pull out the conventional IC powertrain, bolt Magna’s e-beam axle onto the rear suspension, and add a battery pack. The e-beam provides 335 horsepower and 7,375-pound feet of torque, as well as 14,500 pounds of towing and 0-60 times of only 4.6 seconds. And it will turn a 13.7 second quarter mile time at 99 miles an hour. It fits right in where the conventional axle goes, so there’s no need for any architectural modifications.
POLESTAR’S NEW ELECTRIC SUV
Polestar made it official. It pulled the wraps off its first SUV, the Polestar 3. Even so, it did not divulge a lot of details. But here’s what it said. The launch edition will have dual motors and a large battery to deliver 600 kilometers or 372 miles of range. That’s on the WLTP test procedure, so we’d expect the EPA rating to be about 10% less. Polestar says it will eventually offer autonomous highway driving, thanks to a lidar unit from Luminar and a centralized computing architecture powered by NVIDIA GPUs. The Polestar 3 will be made in the US and China starting early next year. It will be followed by the Polestar 4, a smaller, performance-oriented SUV, and the Polestar 5 in 2025, which will be the production version of the stunning concept car called the Precept. By the end of 2025 Polestar hopes to be selling 290,000 cars a year globally.
APPLE REVAMPS CARPLAY
Last month, Android revealed the new version of Android Auto and now Apple is showing off its new connected car tech and just unveiled the next-gen version of CarPlay. It integrates with the vehicle’s hardware and provides content on multiple screens, not just the infotainment display. It allows passengers to control the radio or climate functions directly through CarPlay. And using vehicle data it can display the speed, fuel level, temperature and more info on the instrument cluster. And users can personalize the display and choose different gauge cluster designs. Apple will share more details about the new version of CarPlay in the future and it will announce what vehicles will be compatible with it late next year.
RADICAL NEW WAY TO DE-ICE WINDSHIELDS
Anyone who lives in the Snow Belt has had to try and scrape ice off their windshield. It’s a hassle, and time consuming. So a Canadian startup called Betterfrost Technologies came up with a better idea. Here’s Derrick Redding, the CEO of the company, explaining how it works.
“We provide pulsed electricity into the conductive layer inside of the windshield. These new windshields that are coming out in electric vehicles already have a metal layer in it to reduce solar gain, to reduce the HVAC load for the cooling in the summertime. We’re using that same metal to also provide defrost and defog, and it’s right there in the glass where you want to either get the frost off the front side or the fog off the inside of the glass. So in the average commute in the winter we’ll increase the range of an electric vehicle by about 38 kilometers, or 25 miles. And that energy savings is worth about $600 per vehicle.”
Betterfrost is one of the winners of the GAMIC awards. That’s the Global Automotive & Mobility Innovation Challenge. It’s a competition for automotive startups from around the world. And that was the topic on last week’s Autoline After Hours. In fact, we had three other winners on the show: a German company that has a cheaper solution for public EV charging stations; a Polish company that uses nano technology for coating metals; and an American company that developed a zinc battery which delivers the performance of a lithium battery at the cost of a lead acid battery. You can find that show on our website and YouTube channel.
And then this Thursday join me and Gary when our special guest will be Emile Korkor, the assistant vice president for sales at Acura.
And with that we wrap up today’s report. Thanks for watching.
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Seamus and Sean McElroy cover the latest news in the automotive industry for Autoline Daily.