Europe

VELIZY, France — New Citroen CEO Thierry Koskas has set a target of 1 million annual sales by 2025, with 700,000 of those in Europe, and a 5 percent market share in Europe. The Stellantis brand has lost market share and sales in recent years. Sales were down 16.4 percent in Europe (including the UK,

PARIS — Ford‘s dealer network in Europe is still “oversized” and will have to shrink in coming years, a top company executive said. “Overall our dealer network is oversized, we have to restructure,” Martin Sander, head of Ford’s passengers cars business in Europe, told the Automotive News Europe Congress here on Wednesday. Ford is exiting

Volkswagen Group will face investors hungry for answers at its capital markets day next Wednesday on how it will achieve high cost-cutting targets and whether it will heed their calls for an independent audit of its co-owned Xinjiang plant in China. Pressure is high after a turbulent shareholder meeting in May where activists interrupted proceedings

PARIS — VinFast has had to do a lot more in-house and in its home market than it expected to keep pace with its ambitious timelines to launch the brand in Europe and the United States. The reason for this include the COVID-19 pandemic, the chip shortage and volatile prices for raw materials. Therefore, the

Automakers have been packing their cars with more and more technology, but it might be time to start cutting back on features that aren’t useful to buyers, says Ned Curic, chief technology officer at Stellantis. “There are now safer cars, more reliable cars, but at the same time we’ve overcomplicated so many things,” Curic said

VELIZY, France — The next generation of Citroen’s best-selling C3 small hatchback will be a full-electric model built in Europe that will sell for less than 25,000 euros, said Thierry Koskas, the brand’s new CEO. The model, which will be called the e-C3, will have big shoes to fill, said Koskas, who replaced Vincent Cobee

BRUSSELS — The EU parliament approved on Wednesday new rules to make batteries more durable, more sustainable, and better performing. The new rules, which will come into force once the European Council has formally endorsed the text, affect the design, production and waste management of all types of batteries sold in the EU. Europe’s battery

BERLIN — Volkswagen Group‘s namesake passenger car brand plans to increase earnings by around 10 billion euros ($10.82 billion) by 2026 by improving efficiency and lowering costs. The brand aims to more than double profitability to 6.5 percent as part of the program. VW brand’s returns in the first quarter weakened to 3 percent from

Russian state entity NAMI said on Wednesday it had acquired a 100 percent stake in a factory producing anti-lock brakes and other systems for cars that was formerly owned by German supplier Robert Bosch. NAMI, Russia’s Central Automobile and Engine Research and Development Institute, has been snapping up assets from global automakers that left Russia

TOKYO – When Toyota convenes its annual shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday, the world’s biggest automaker will be bracing for rare investor backlash, with some pension groups even voting against the appointment of longtime leader Akio Toyoda as company chairman. The normally staid and tightly scripted event, traditionally held at Toyota’s global headquarters in Toyota City,

Toyota and Volkswagen Group transferred their Russian assets to Russian entities without a buyback option, Russia’s RIA state news agency reported. “The Toyota asset transfer deal, just like the Volkswagen deal, does not include an option to buy back production sites,” RIA quoted Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov as saying during an interview. Russia

WARSAW — Poland will appeal against European Union rules to end the sale of fossil fuel cars across the bloc from 2035 to the top EU court within days, the country’s climate minister Anna Moskwa said. A package of EU regulations approved earlier this year aims at launching a new carbon market to rein in

BERLIN – Volkswagen Group’s supervisory board will meet on Tuesday to discuss a planned savings program ahead of its capital markets day on June 21, two sources close to the company said. The board will discuss cost-cutting measures amounting to at least 3 billion euros ($3.22 billion) across brands including VW, Seat, Skoda and Cupra,

STOCKHOLM — Autoliv is speeding up cost cuts, mainly in Europe, expecting to cut 6,000 jobs or 11 percent of its workforce, the world’s biggest maker of airbags and seatbelts said. The Swedish group said in a statement on Thursday that the measures across its operations included the closure of several sites in Europe, and

Skoda has said it will not replace its Fabia Combi small wagon as originally planned, citing the coming Euro 7 emissions regulations. In 2020, Thomas Schaefer, who was Skoda’s CEO at the time and is now head of the Volkswagen brand, announced that Skoda would replace the Fabia wagon with a launch date of this

Automakers who faced skyrocketing prices for lithium and other battery metals last year could increasingly adopt sodium-based cells in the future, helping to alleviate strains on raw materials as sales of electric vehicles surge, according to BloombergNEF. In a new analysis of the technology, BloombergNEF said it expects sodium to take market share from the

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has approved Mercedes-Benz’s automated driving system on designated highways under certain conditions without the active control of a driver. California is one of Tesla‘s largest markets, accounting for 16 percent of the automaker’s global deliveries last year, according to Reuters calculations. But Mercedes beat Tesla to become the first

 Bosch is embracing software as the future of its North American mobility business, the company said during a briefing Thursday. New software-based automotive features, including wrong-way driving warnings, distracted driving sensing and rental fleet monitoring, were among the technology Bosch displayed at its Software Day. Bosch is reorganizing its Mobility Solutions unit into Bosch Mobility