GM Exec Thinks It’ll Take ‘Four To Five Years’ To Earn Back Trust For Tarnished Cruise Robotaxis

Happy Monday! General Motors has a nice little tailwind going into 2024 thanks to a nice chunk of profits, but it also facing the reality that its Cruise robotaxi division isn’t going to be a profit center for a while, with GM President Mark Reuss admitting it’ll take many years to earn back trust after a pretty disastrous response to a tragedy.

It’s been fun watching the merger rumors between Renault and Stellantis, but it ain’t happening according to Stellantis Chairman John Elkann. Your local neighborhood The Morning Dump will be looking into this because the more someone denies something the more we’re tempted to believe it.

News out of China is both interesting, with BMW and Mercedes getting approval for a joint venture in the country, and depressing, with a new report out about forced labor being used in automotive production there.

GM’s Reuss Hopes Cruise Will Regain Trust In ‘Four To Five’ Years

The best way to measure the magnitude of your screwup is to record the duration between public awareness of the screwup and public ignorance of it. Remember how mad everyone was about the GM Ignition Switch Recall? Nope, me either.

GM’s Cruise done messed up and they done messed up something fierce. One of the company’s robotaxis was involved in a pedestrian-dragging incident and the company, essentially, tried to hide that fact. This led to its self-driving license being revoked, which then led to the company shutting down its taxi service, which then led to much of its executive team either leaving or getting fired.

A report commissioned by GM has since been released and it showed that the company was terrified of the media and didn’t initially consider the issue important enough to fix, possibly out of a concern that it would bring more attention to said issue. This is not-how-to-do-things 101.

GM’s President Mark Reuss was at last week’s big J.D. Power Auto Summit and The Detroit Free Press has seen the video of his speech, wherein he says some important things. From that report:

“We had some problems with transparency and the way we dealt with a very serious situation,” Reuss said Thursday at the J.D. Power Auto Summit.

Hard agree. [Ed Note: That is your name, after all. -DT].

“In the next four to five years, you’ll see, hopefully, we regain that trust. We continue on the technical progress for that,” Reuss said. “I’d say in the next one to two years, we return back to the roads with great products and great delivery for both the taxi piece of it, but also delivering goods to people that can’t, don’t have mobility perhaps or for companies that need an autonomous delivery system. So we’ll do that. And I think we’re capable of doing it.”

So that’s 1-2 years to get the cabs rolling again and another 2-3 years after that to get people to trust the service? That’s a rough timeline and probably a little pessimistic given the American people get mad like cannons, with one big burst and then a long silence.

I personally like Reuss. He’s a car person and a gearhead and likes to drive fast. I think as a board member at both GM and Cruise he, along with other board members, may not have been involved in the bad decision-making of individuals at Cruise in this particular incident but he does bear some responsibility for appointing and overseeing those executives.

The use of the 1st person plural here is encouraging. It’s not they need to regain trust, it’s we need to regain trust.

Elkann: We Are Not Merging With Anyone

There’s been a bit of speculation as of late that someone might try to buy Renault given the company’s current issues, specifically that the French automaker had to simultaneously abandon its profitable Russian operations and start earnestly unwinding its Nissan marriage.

There’s been a sense that maybe the most obvious partner for Renault is to link it to its longtime rival Peugeot, which is now part of Stellantis. Stellantis Chairman John Elkann, who also represents the Agnelli family holding company that owns the biggest chunk of Stellantis, says that ain’t happening.

Specifically, according to Reuters, he said “There is no plan under consideration regarding merger operations with other manufacturers.”

Elkann (the serious one) is one of three grandchildren of the legendary Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli, along with Lapo (the fun one) and Ginerva (the artsy one).

So where is this coming from? Also from that Reuters report:

Italian daily Il Messaggero had said on Sunday that the French government, which is Renault’s largest shareholder and also has a stake in Stellantis, was studying plans for a merger between the two groups.

A spokeswoman for Renault said on Monday the group did not comment on rumours. France’s Finance Ministry had declined to comment on Sunday.

Hmm… if it’s cheap enough I think Stellantis would do it.

BMW Brilliance-MercedesTie Up Approved In China

Here’s a fun question: have Mercedes and BMW ever worked together?

Mercedes once worked with Porsche, which was aligned with Volkswagen, but that was before Porsche was fully ingested into Volkswagen. But BMW? I can’t think of a single time this happened, though I’m excited to be wrong.

Well, I can’t think of a single time this happened until now.

BMW Brilliance is the Bavarian automaker’s tie-up with Shenyang-based Brilliance. Unlike a lot of European-Chinese JVs, BMW owns most of the company (75%) and builds primarily the same cars it builds in other markets.

Last year, BMW announced it was planning to team up with Mercedes-Benz China to create a joint venture built around creating a high-power charging network:

The joint venture aims to establish a network of at least 1,000 high-power charging stations with around 7,000 high-power charging piles by the end of 2026, adopting state-of-the-art charging technologies. The first stations are expected to open for business in 2024 in top NEV regions, with further stations to be installed nationwide.

According to Reuters, this deal has now been approved. What’s next? A Mercedes-badged 3-series?

Forced Labor Is Possibly Being Used In Creating Aluminum For Cars

It’s no secret that forced or coerced labor has been involved in the manufacturing of Chinese products, and a new report from global nonprofit Human Rights Watch indicates that this includes the aluminum used in automobiles, although China is a hard place to study if you care about human rights and tracing the source of materials like aluminum is difficult. From the report:

The link between Xinjiang, the aluminum industry, and forced labor is Chinese government-backed labor transfer programs, which coerce Uyghurs and members of other Turkic Muslim communities into jobs in Xinjiang and other regions.

If you aren’t aware of what’s happening in these regions of China, the BBC has a good explainer on the religious persecution that’s been sanctioned or encouraged by the Chinese government.

The report specifically looked at VW through its SAIC venture, BYD, Toyota, and GM. Most of those companies didn’t provide much in terms of details, mostly stating that it was difficult to track but that the companies are variously committed to not using coerced labor.

Curiously, Tesla was the most forthright here, according to the report:

Tesla, which does not operate in China through a joint venture but builds cars for China’s domestic market and for export at its Shanghai Gigafactory, provided the most detailed information to Human Rights Watch about its aluminum sourcing. The company stated that it had intensified supply chain mapping for aluminum, “driven in part by global trade regulations to combat forced labor.” Tesla said that it had, “in several cases”, mapped its supply chain back to the mining level and had not found evidence of forced labor. The company did not, however, specify how much of the aluminum in its cars remains of unknown origin and so could be linked to Xinjiang.

You can read the report and draw your own conclusions, but it’s clear to me that the opaqueness around material sourcing benefits everyone except those being pressed into labor.

What I’m Listening To While I Write TMD

Here’s some kickass rock music courtesy of Bully and her most recent album.

The Big Question

What’s your favorite weird automotive tie-up between two theoretically competitive companies?