Good morning! It’s Tuesday, October 22, 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: Remember Transportation? Neither Does Either Candidate For President
Transportation is usually a big deal for both parties in the U.S. Trump had his long-promised and never-delivered transportation weeks, while Biden actually delivered with the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Yes, moving around the U.S. is important business, but not one you’ll hear much about on the campaign trail this year.
There’s a lot going on right now, so perhaps the candidates can be forgiven for forgetting about America’s garbage infrastructure for a minute, but who gains power in November will have drastic implications for America’s roads and the way Americans live. From Bloomberg:
This difference in transportation projects selected for funding reflects different priorities and goals. While Trump-era Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao emphasized her support for road projects — typically involving expanding highways to accommodate more cars — current Secretary Pete Buttigieg argued for using federal resources to “make transportation cleaner” and “advance equity.” To that end, the Biden Administration primarily focused its efforts on projects that favored historically underinvested communities that face disproportionate environmental and economic burdens.
We find that the projects selected by the Biden Administration were far more likely to be located in counties with higher shares of people of color than the nation overall, while the Trump Administration typically selected projects in Whiter communities. Biden-supported projects were also much more likely to be located in neighborhoods with higher rates of poverty and lower median incomes, compared with the surrounding areas. These communities have historically suffered from underinvestment in transportation and, as a result, have worse access to health care and employment.
These differences underline that transportation policy in the US is likely to change dramatically based on who wins November’s election. Despite politicians often painting transportation funding as a truly bipartisan issue — President Biden’s “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” for example, received 18 Republican votes in the US Senate — the RAISE data confirm that the parties fundamentally disagree about the value of different transportation types and, in turn, where federal dollars are worth investing.
If Trump wins, we can expect his goals to likely line up with Project 2025’s chapter on transportation, which encourages spending federal dollars only on increasing the intensity of the stroad hellscape we currently live in. Harris will likely lean towards helping build greener urban areas in the U.S. We just don’t know for sure, as transportation is curiously not addressed in either candidate’s platforms, but past is usually prologue, as they say. One thing is for sure, if Trump is elected, we’ll likely have to hear a lot more about more famous golfer’s penises.
2nd Gear: General Motors? More Like Get Money!
At least one American automaker is pumped to stick its third-quarter sales report on the fridge. Is it A+ work? Nope! But Bs get degrees, as they say.
GM started the year expecting to make between $12 and $14 billion pre-tax profit. Halfway through the year, the General bumped that estimate up to $13 to $15 billion in pre-tax profit. Now on the wings of a strong Q3, GM expects to deliver in the higher range of those estimates, around $14 to $15 billion. From Reuters:
The company on Tuesday said it was on track to deliver between $14 billion and $15 billion in pretax profit. Its shares were up about 0.7% in premarket trading.
GM’s adjusted earnings per share of $2.96 for the quarter outpaced market expectation of $2.43, while revenue of $48.8 billion beat estimates of $44.6 billion.
CEO Mary Barra has been focusing on stability, saying earlier this month that GM’s profit next year is expected to look similar to this year, a relief for investors who were worried about a potential decline in the auto industry’s earnings.
GM did have some dark clouds on this sunny report; the General is losing money hand over fist in China, for instance. Not good, considering the gargantuan size of the market overseas, and EV losses are also putting a dent in GM’s profits armor. The General’s slow pivot to hybrids rather than full electrification might put this modest growth at risk, analysis fear.
An uncertain economic future also isn’t helping things, as it seems consumers are starting to tire of paying big bucks for huge gas-powered vehicles—GM’s bread and butter. CEO Mary Barra told Reuters that GM will soften pricing in the coming year to combat price fatigue. Still, the stock price is up, and GM isn’t dealing with the kind of problems Ford and Stellantis face this year.
So go on Mary Barra with your bad self.
3rd Gear: Arkansas Is Swimming In Millions Of Tons Of Lithium
The American South isn’t usually the first place you think of when it comes to EV-friendly attitudes, but it is a spot that loves mining jobs. Luckily for Arkansas, it looks to be sitting on millions of tons of the stuff needed to power a green revolution around the world. From the New York Times:
Researchers at the United States Geological Survey and the Arkansas government announced on Monday that they had found a trove of lithium, a critical raw material for electric vehicle batteries, in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas.
With the help of water testing and machine learning, the researchers determined that there might be five million to 19 million tons of lithium — more than enough to meet all of the world’s demand for the metal — in a geological area known as the Smackover Formation. Several companies, including Exxon Mobil, are developing projects in Arkansas to produce lithium, which is dissolved in underground brine.
Whether lithium harvesting takes hold in the region will depend on the ability of those companies to scale up new methods of extracting the valuable battery ingredient from salty water. The processing technique that Exxon and others are pursuing in Arkansas, known as direct lithium extraction, generally costs more than more conventional methods do, according to the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
Lithium mining is dangerous both to the environment and the people who live in that environment and work in the mines. But this is Arkansas, a state that allowed coal mines to carve up and pollute its landscapes for over a century. I’m sure Mother Nature can take one more for the team, right?
4th Gear: Lucid Builds $1.74 Billion ‘Cash Runway’ With Stock Offerings
Speaking of EVs, Lucid looks to be flush with cash after announcing a major stock offering last week. So much so that CEO Peter Rawlinson told Reuters the EV maker will have plenty of dough well into 2026:
Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson said on Monday that a stock sale announced last week will provide the electric luxury sedan maker with a “cash runway well into 2026.”
Rawlinson said in an interview on the sidelines of a Reuters Next event that the stock sale, which raised about $1.75 billion, “serves to support the future of the company long term” as it prepares to begin building its Gravity SUV before the end of the year.
Last week, Lucid said it expected the offering to raise $1.67 billion but on Monday the company said the offering had raised nearly $1.75 billion, adding that its expenses are “dominated by long-term investments.”
