Happy Friday! It’s December 27, 2024, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know.
1st Gear: The Used Car Market Isn’t Getting Any Better In 2025
If you’re planning to sell a car next year, you’re in luck — analysts are predicting a slight rise in used-car sales over this year, without a meaningful increase in supply. In fact, late-model used-car supply may drop relative to 2024. From Automotive News:
Cox Automotive expects used-vehicle sales to grow 1 percent year over year to 37.8 million in 2025. An estimated 20.1 million of those will be retail sales, the automotive services company said in a 2025 forecast released on Dec. 17.
Used-vehicle supply constraints present in 2024 will carry over into 2025, said Jeremy Robb, senior director of economic and industry insights for Cox Automotive.
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Much of the used-car supply tightness is because of fewer vehicle lease maturities. Those declined in 2024 — an effect of new-vehicle production lost and fewer leases written during the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing chip shortage. Year over year, lease maturities fell 15 percent in the third quarter and 18 percent in the fourth quarter, Robb said.
Cox Automotive estimated lease maturities will be down 17 percent year over year in 2025. Fewer leases maturing means there will be fewer 3-year-old used vehicles — an important model cohort — available in the wholesale market.
Of course, if you were hoping to buy a lightly used car, the tarot cards say things are bad. More sales on lower supply means higher prices, so expect to shell out for your next used car in 2025. I wonder if that’ll apply to bikes too.
2nd Gear: Osamu Suzuki, CEO Who Made Company Dominant In India, Dead At 94
Did you know Suzuki is an overwhelmingly dominant market force in India? It’s true, and it’s largely thanks to one man: Former Suzuki CEO Osamu Suzuki, who died this week at age 94. From Reuters:
Osamu Suzuki, an ingenious pennypincher who led Japan’s Suzuki Motor or more than four decades and played a key role in turning India into a flourishing auto market, has died aged 94.
He died on Christmas Day of lymphoma, said the company, which he steered ambitiously, during his time as either chief executive or chairman, out of its primary market of minivehicles.
The inexpensive, boxy, 660-cc cars specific to Japan benefited from generous tax breaks, but demanded a stringent reining-in of costs that proved to be a key part of the automaker’s DNA.
Even so, Suzuki’s thriftiness was legendary: he would order factory ceilings lowered to save on air-conditioning and fly economy class on airplanes even at an advanced age.
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Suzuki then took a big and risky decision to invest a year’s worth of the company’s earnings to build a national car maker for India.
His personal interest was motivated by a strong desire “to be number one somewhere in the world”, he would later recall.
Maruti Suzuki, the partnership between Suzuki and Indian-owned Maruti, did indeed become number one. One does have to wonder, though, where Suzuki would be without such stringent cost-cutting. Would it still be a competitor here?
3rd Gear: BYD Contractor Blames Claims Of ‘Slavery-Like Conditions’ On Translation Error
Earlier this week, word came out about “slavery-like conditions” in the construction of a new BYD plant in Brazil. The subcontractor working on the plant for BYD has, unsurprisingly, said that the allegations are false. From Reuters:
Jinjiang Group, a contractor for Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD said on Thursday Brazilian authorities’ portrayal of their employees as “enslaved” was inconsistent with the facts and that there were translation misunderstandings.
Brazilian labor authorities had on Wednesday said they found 163 Chinese nationals working in “slavery-like conditions” at a construction site for a BYD-owned factory in Brazil’s Bahia state. BYD said then that it had cut ties with the firm that hired the workers and was working with authorities.
“Being unjustly labeled as ‘enslaved’ has made our employees feel that their dignity has been insulted and their human rights violated, seriously hurting the dignity of the Chinese people. We have signed a joint letter to express our true feelings,” Jinjiang said on its official Weibo account.
Their statement was reposted by Li Yunfei, general manager of branding and public relations at BYD, on his own Weibo account. He accused “foreign forces” and some Chinese media of “deliberately smearing Chinese brands and the country and undermining the relationship between China and Brazil”.
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Jinjiang said there had been translation and cultural difference issues that had led to the situation, and that the questions from the Brazilian inspectors had been “suggestive”. It also posted a video showing a group of Chinese workers in front of the camera with one of them reading out a letter that Jinjiang said the workers have jointly signed.
Pretty much everyone involved here has a vested interest in smearing the other parties, so it’s unlikely we’ll know exactly what conditions at the plant site are like unless we all go there personally. Does anyone have Ms. Frizzle’s number?
4th Gear: California Dealer Group Threatens Legal Action To Block Direct Scout Sales
Car dealerships are sort of like well-off lacrosse players — they don’t really do anything for anyone, vanishingly few people benefit from their presence, and if their position is threatened they’ll go running to daddy to ensure they’re forever unharmed. Volkswagen is facing this right now, as it tries to set up Scout Motors as an entirely direct-to-consumer operation. From Automotive News:
California’s association of new-car dealers is demanding that Volkswagen Group and Scout Motors stop taking refundable deposits for a planned electric truck and pickup, claiming the companies are in violation of an amended state law that prohibits direct sales to consumers.
In a Dec. 20 letter to Scout Motors General Counsel Neil Sitron and Volkswagen Group of America General Counsel Antony Klapper, the California New Car Dealers Association said the two companies’ plan to sell Scout vehicles direct to consumers “wrongfully cuts new and existing VW dealers out of an opportunity” and directly violates a section of California’s law covering new-vehicle sales.
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California law covering new-car sales and marketing was amended to permit competition “so long as the vehicle is being sold using new or existing franchisees to sell and service those vehicles,” the CNCDA said in the letter. Tesla, which has operated without franchisees since it was founded, is exempt from the amended law.
The amendment, approved by the California’s legislature and signed into law, took affect Jan. 1 2024. It bars Scout, or any new brand from an automaker with an existing dealership network in California, from direct to consumer sales. However, VW could sell Scout vehicles in California if the automaker decided to retail them through an existing VW brand, Audi, Porsche, Bentley or Lamborghini dealership.
Under the amendment, VW Group could also create a new franchise network for Scout if the automaker wanted to keep the new brand distinct from other VW Group brand dealerships.
The law seems pretty strongly pro-dealer, which is what happens when your lobby understands just how useless it is and how much the average person loathes everyone involved — you enshrine your position in law rather than doing literally any single thing to endear you to your customers.
Reverse: Right Next To The Old Jalopffice
The old desks at the G/O offices used to overlook Radio City’s signs, which was a neat view until the first time you tried to emerge from the subway to find the entire block swarmed by approximately one million of the oldest out-of-towners you ever saw all visiting for their kid’s graduation at the Music Hall. The view lost its novelty after that.
On The Radio: Mitski – ‘Pink In The Night’
Have you thought out your New Years kiss yet? Yeah, me neither. I wonder if my go-to dyke bar still has tickets available.
