Grassley: Trump's New Trade Deal Still Stuck Over Tariffs
President Donald Trump’s meeting with Republican senators on trade last week did nothing to unstick his stalled trade deal with Mexico and Canada, reports Politico. Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Monday that the president once again refused to lift steel and aluminum tariffs on U.S. allies when pressed, a requirement that Grassley has laid out to consider the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement to replace NAFTA. Trump also refused to rule out imposing tariffs on foreign automakers, Grassley said. The meeting left the president’s long-sought trade deal with a grim prognosis in the immediate future. Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), and John Thune (R-S.D.) also attended the meeting and lobbied “against auto tariffs” that Trump has threatened to impose, Grassley said. “The president knew the meeting was stacked with senators who thought that the tariff issue needed to be resolved or we wouldn’t be able” to pass the trade deal, Cornyn said on Monday. “He made clear he liked tariffs as an instrument to bring people to the negotiating table. So it wasn’t necessarily a welcome message." Grassley said that the president didn’t rule out enacting those auto tariffs, either. Read more here.
China Forges Forward While Detroit 'Retreats,' Expert Says
Five years into its plan to reinvent itself as the dominant global technology leader, China has raced far ahead of others on electric-vehicle sales, forged into automated-vehicle development and led the way on deployment of next-generation cellular infrastructure, reports Automotive News. "The Chinese are clearly on the offensive," said Michael Dunne, CEO of ZoZo Go, a consulting firm that advises American companies looking to do business in China. On the other hand, "If you look at the Detroit automakers, over the past five years, it's more or less been a theme of retreat," he said. As President Donald Trump threw another curveball into the ongoing U.S.-China trade negotiations Sunday with a new wave of tariff threats, U.S. automakers are grappling with another vexing challenge: Their sales are tumbling in China. As Chinese companies have developed their competence, paying for mass-market vehicles made by foreign companies has become less appealing, Dunne said Monday, speaking at an Automotive Press Association event in Detroit. As the Detroit 3 have struggled to find an answer for declining sales, China has launched what Dunne calls Autos 2.0, a freshening of its automotive strategy that has focused extensively on autonomous, electric, shared, and connected-vehicle developments. Read more here.
U.S. Probes Inadvertent Side Air Bag Deployment on Mazda SUVs
U.S. safety regulators are investigating reports that side curtain air bags can inflate for no reason on some Mazda CX-9 large SUVs, reports The Detroit News. Documents posted Monday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say two owners have complained about the problem. Four people were hurt in one of the cases. In both complaints owners told the agency that the left and right air bags went off for no reason while the SUVs were moving. The probe covers CX-9s from the 2010 through 2013 model years. Mazda sold just over 112,000 of the SUVs from 2010 through 2013. The safety agency says investigators will figure out how often the problem happens and determine the safety consequences. The agency could seek a recall. Mazda said in a statement that it is cooperating with NHTSA. Read more here.
VWoA Wins Delay in UAW Vote in Chattanooga
The National Labor Relations Board, in a vote along party lines, agreed to Volkswagen’s request to postpone an union election vote at the German automakers factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, reports The Detroit Bureau. The United Auto Workers surprised VW last month by asking for a quick vote, among the 1,400 production workers in Chattanooga with the hope of minimizing the impact of anti-union campaigns, particularly by local political figures and outside anti-union groups. The UAW won the right to represent Chattanooga’s 300 or so maintenance workers in 2016. Volkswagen’s ability to engage in a broad anti-union campaign, similar to the one mounted by Nissan in Canton, Mississippi, is somewhat limited by the company’s governance structure, which leaves German union’s allied with the UAW considerable influence in company affairs. However, Volkswagen’s American lawyers, recruited from the ranks of anti-union law firms, did persuade the NLRB to postpone a vote indefinitely, frustrating the UAW. Read more here.
Tesla Plans to Sell Owners Cheaper Car Insurance
Tesla Inc. is creating its own branded insurance program, a move the electric-car maker believes will enable it to offer a lower-cost product to drivers, reports The Wall Street Journal. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has been working with a unit of Virginia-based Markel Corp. and another company, which hasn’t been named, to offer the branded insurance, according to Markel and regulatory insurance filings in California, where Tesla is based. Revealing the program’s existence in an earnings call last month, Mr. Musk said the goal was to more accurately take into account the safety benefits of the cars’ Autopilot driver-assistance system. Tesla says it has far better data on the performance of its vehicles and their drivers than other insurers do, and believes it can use this information to offer customers lower-cost insurance, according to the California filings. In the call, Mr. Musk said buyers would have “to agree to not drive the car in a crazy way.” If they do, their insurance rates would be higher, he said. He said he hoped to launch the insurance offering within a month. Read more here.
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