Fresh off reports that it is exploring a venture with PSA Group to build vehicles in Europe, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) chairman John Elkann said that the automaker would remain an active player in helping to shape an automotive industry being transformed by technology.
Elkann, who is also chairman and chief executive officer of Exor NV, wrote in a letter to shareholders of the holding company about his belief that Fiat Chrysler could benefit from the emergence of electrified and autonomously driven vehicles.
Exor, with a 29 percent stake and 42 percent of voting rights, is the Italian-American automaker’s largest holder.
Photo: Reuters
“We are determined that we and FCA will play our part actively and ambitiously in this new and exciting era,” Elkann wrote. “Our commitment to FCA and to participating in its bold and profitable future is also unchanged.”
The scion of Fiat’s founding Agnelli family has repeatedly sought to tamp down speculation that Exor would seek to sell all or part of Fiat Chrysler to another automaker, but the family also has said that it would consider diluting its stake in a larger group the automaker could form with other companies.
Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot owner PSA have been holding preliminary discussions to collaborate on a “super platform” — the basic underpinning of a vehicle model — to reduce their investment costs in the highly competitive European region, Bloomberg News reported last week.
Any eventual partnership would likely include sharing investments for new electric vehicles, people familiar with the talks said.
Automakers are increasingly joining forces to share investments as the auto industry is facing technological disruption from the rise of fully electric and increasingly self-driving vehicles.
Stricter emission rules imposed by European regulators are also forcing the industry to shift away from traditional combustion engines.
Fiat Chrysler has been a laggard compared with global rivals when it comes to investing in electrification, although its five-year strategy plan through 2022 calls for offering hybrid gas-electric engines in more of its top-selling Jeep and Ram models, and for making fully electric versions of some Fiat, Jeep and Maserati vehicles.
The automaker ranked last among 13 auto companies for both fuel economy and carbon emissions in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s evaluation of 2016 model year vehicles.
The company also paid a US$77 million civil penalty after its US-assembled passenger-car fleet fell short of required fuel economy targets.
It has also taken a penny-pinching approach on driverless vehicles, choosing to supply Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans to — and potentially license self-driving technology from — Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc, rather than follow other automakers investing billions to develop the know-how in-house.
It is also partnering with BMW AG and auto supplier Aptiv PLC to bring autonomous features to its Jeep, Ram, Maserati and Alfa Romeo brands.
A partnership with PSA could eventually develop into a wider combination, although the current focus is on limited cooperation, two of the people familiar with the companies’ talks said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day