South Korean Hyundai Workers Headed Home After Trump Asked Them To Stay And Train American Replacements

Happy Thursday! It’s September 11, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift — your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re looking at the Trump administrations offer to South Korean Hyundai workers, as well as Tesla’s plummeting brand loyalty. We’ll also look at an ominous case of bankruptcy in a subprime auto lender, and Nissan’s desire to get new cars to market faster. 

The raid at a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Georgia, in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained 475 workers despite having a warrant for only four, has largely been an international embarrassment for the United States. Most of the 300 South Koreans detained by ICE are now headed home, but one is sticking around — taking the Trump administration up on an offer to train American replacements at the site. From Reuters:

U.S. President Donald Trump offered to allow hundreds of South Korean workers arrested during an immigration raid to stay in the United States, but only one has opted to remain, South Korean officials said on Thursday.

Trump’s overture sought to encourage the workers to stay and train Americans, according to the officials. It resulted in a one-day delay to the departure of a chartered plane to bring the workers home.

Unlike other U.S. deportations, they were not handcuffed – satisfying a key demand from South Korea, which has been horrified by the raid, particularly by the use of armoured vehicles and shackles.

Some 300 South Koreans were arrested last week along with more than 150 others at the Georgia construction site of a $4.3 billion Hyundai Motor and LG Energy Solution project to build batteries for electric cars.

If someone fires you from a company, it generally doesn’t feel great when you’re forced to train your own replacement. How does it feel when you’re kicked out of an entire country? 

Tesla was once a beloved darling of its owners, with drivers proselytizing them like missionaries. Now? Not so much, according to the data. Tesla now sits below Ford for brand loyalty, and it could well fall further. From Automotive News:

Tesla owners are defecting to legacy brands in greater numbers for a mix of gasoline vehicles, hybrids and battery-electric models as the electric vehicle maker’s once sky-high loyalty numbers plummet compared with last year.

They are leaving the EV maker because of an aging lineup, a limited product portfolio with just two volume models and a loss of brand value from CEO Elon Musk’s right-wing political activism, analysts said.

…

Tesla’s loyalty numbers fell 9.4 percentage points from the second quarter last year, the data showed. Only the Dodge brand did worse, falling 12.7 percentage points in the same period.

Now, I’m just a simple girl with a degree in business, but I would think that “prioritizing new models based on what a puerile CEO thinks is cool while he alienates your core audience politically” would be a largely self destructive way to run a company. 

Remember when subprime home loans took down much of the global economy? Good thing we restructured our financial systems after that to prevent such predatory lending from happening ever again. Totally unrelated, a subprime auto lender just filed for bankruptcy. From Automotive News:

Tricolor Holdings, a provider of subprime auto loans and controller of the large Southwestern U.S. used-vehicle dealership group Tricolor Auto, filed for bankruptcy Sept. 10.

Tricolor, of Dallas, filed for Chapter 7 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas, court documents show. It claimed liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion and assets in the same range.

…

Tricolor made more than $1 billion worth of auto loans last year, according to a report from Kroll Bond Rating Agency in March. 

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Fifth Third Bancorp and Barclays are among banks bracing for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in combined losses from loans tied to Tricolor, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

Auto loans aren’t tied into the bedrock of our economy the way mortgages were, with mortgage-backed securities, which is good news in the face of — hang on, my producers are telling me that there are in fact auto loan-backed securities that have gained popularity over the last few years. Yes, these include subprime loans. Wall Street fleece vest types never learn, do they?

Nissan is at the precipice of another enthusiast era, and we do in fact love to see it. New CEO Ivan Espinosa promised to run the company like a car guy, and so far he’s living up to that promise. Now, he’s looking to bring new models to market even faster — good, right? From Automotive News:

Nissan wants to fix its aging lineup as the automaker attempts a makeover designed to save it from its worst financial crisis in a quarter century.

“We are entering now the phase in which we start rolling out a lot of new cars,” CEO Ivan Espinosa said in an interview Sept. 10 at Nissan’s headquarters in Yokohama. That includes reducing the bureaucratic burden of bringing fresh models to market, “shortening the development process significantly,” he said.

“This is going to help us with having the right cadence of product and reacting a bit quicker to allow us to cope with all the shifting trends in the market,” Espinosa said.

The hope, both for Nissan and for enthusiasts, is that this goes well. The alternative would be a Ford situation, where Nissan spends the years after its new models debut recalling seemingly every part on every car. Fingers crossed it doesn’t go that way.

For Chile, the coup that ousted democratically elected Marxist Salvador Allende and replaced him with Augusto Pinochet (whose Wikipedia presence has three sections on human rights violations) was a dark day for the nation. For the CIA, it was Tuesday. 

Every morning is a new chance to sword fight the queen and make love to the duke. Get out there and seize it!