Stellantis Wants To Destroy Your Range Anxiety At Home, Work And On The Move

Good morning! It’s Tuesday, June 27, 2023 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.

Volkswagen’s CEO Is Stepping Down

1st Gear: Stellantis Vs. Range Anxiety

Stellantis doesn’t sell any battery EVs yet in the United States, but next year it hopes to. And when that day comes, it wants to eliminate barriers that may be holding its customers back from EV ownership, like range anxiety. That’s the rationale behind Free2Move, a three-pronged charging service that the company is rolling out this year to tackle charging at home, work and on the road. Courtesy Automotive News:

Free2Move Charge Home will support consumers with installation, financing and warranty of home charging and other energy hardware and services. The company said options can involve AC charging cables and wall boxes that consumers have today. Future options also could include Vehicle-2-Home, Vehicle-2-Grid and complete energy management systems with features such as touch-free wireless solutions.

“It’s not just about the hardware there, but it’s about the care plan, 24/7 support, it’s about making it easy for our customers to actually be charged,” Ricardo Stamatti, senior vice president of Stellantis’ charging and energy business unit, told reporters Monday.

Free2Move Charge Business will bring solutions for companies and foster employee charging while at work. As EV volumes grow, Stamatti said being able to charge at work will be just as important as home charging. […]

Free2Move Charge GO, Stellantis said, will offer access to the largest possible network of public charging points through partners in North America, Europe and other regions. Stamatti said this portion is “about covering our customers wherever they go. This is network aggregation, this is at our dealerships, this is bringing a charge to a customer when they need it.”

Free2Move Charge GO also will deal with payment for public charging access and 24/7 support. Over time, plans to add reservations, loyalty programs, subscriptions, prepaid packages, single invoice/billing and the ability to deliver a charge to a requested location when needed.

Stellantis hasn’t yet named any of the “partners” it’s working with for Free2Move Charge Go, the public component. If the automaker intends to cooperate with the likes of ChargePoint, EVgo, Electrify America and so on, it’d be nice if its payment platform superseded theirs, so customers wouldn’t need to maintain seven different accounts to easily charge on the road.

On its face nothing about this is revolutionary, but it also doesn’t need to be. The country just needs more accessible chargers. So long as they work, it doesn’t really matter where they come from. Buyers could also benefit from more knowledge about home charging options, and the peace of mind of being able to effortlessly juice back up while in the office. When those three areas are taken care of — home, work and public — range anxiety will begin to melt away. The question is how long that’s going to take.

2nd Gear: Aston Martin Is Making Investors Worried

In yesterday’s Morning Shift, we discussed how the British luxury marque would soon utilize Lucid’s technology to further development of its electric cars. Today’s Aston news is of the less hopeful variety. See, the company left out a sales volume target in its latest guidance to shareholders. As a result, its stock price has now dropped from an 11-percent bump following the Lucid news to 4.3 percent in the wrong direction. From Reuters:

“The dropping of an important figure such as a sales target is unlikely to be an accident by any means and that could play a part in spooking investors’ confidence in a company whose track record of meeting the targets is weak at its best,” said AJ Bell analyst Russ Mould.

Aston Martin, the maker of cars favoured by fictional British spy agent James Bond, had previously forecast annual wholesale volumes of around 10,000 units by 2025.

In March, the company had said it was on track to meet the 2025 targets but with “significantly lower volumes”.

At its capital markets day on Tuesday, Aston Martin maintained its targets to achieve annual revenue of 2 billion pounds ($2.55 billion) by 2025 and an adjusted annual profit of 500 million pounds in 2025, but sales volume targets got no mention.

This is not an encouraging sign, because there’s no good reason for a company not to share the number of units it plans to sell over a given time period unless it no longer expects to be able to meet that goal. The silver lining for Aston is that its shares have generally been up thus far over 2023 — by 125 percent year-over-year until today — so it’ll probably be fine. Also, any wire story you read about the company seems to have an obligation to mention the James Bond connection, and that’s the kind of marketing association every carmaker dreams of.

3rd Gear: Bankruptcy For Lordstown

In another era this would have been our top story for The Morning Shift, but we’ve known this was coming for a good while now. On Tuesday Lordstown Motors filed for Chapter 11 protection and sued its manufacturing partner that owns its namesake plant in Ohio. From Reuters:

Shares of Lordstown tumbled 60% in pre-market trading. […]

The automaker, named after the Ohio town where it is based, filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware and simultaneously took legal action against Foxconn.

In a complaint filed in bankruptcy court, Lordstown accused the electronics company of fraudulent conduct and a series of broken promises in failing to abide by an agreement to invest up to $170 million in the electric-vehicle manufacturer.

Foxconn previously invested about $52.7 million in Lordstown as part of the agreement, and currently holds an almost 8.4% stake in the EV maker. Lordstown contends Foxconn is balking at purchasing additional shares of its stock as promised and misled the EV maker about collaborating on vehicle development plans.

Foxconn, formally called Hon Hai Precision Industry and best known for assembling Apple’s iPhones, has said Lordstown breached the investment agreement when the automaker’s stock fell below $1 per share.

Lordstown is also actively seeking a buyer now, someone to swoop in and perhaps successfully bring the Endurance pickup to market. Not that it looks to offer very much compared to likes of the F-150 Lighting and Rivian’s R1T. This is all looking pretty grim and, to add insult to injury, Foxconn’s got the keys to the house and doesn’t seem likely to give those up to anyone anytime soon.

4th Gear: Audi’s Old CEO Sentenced Over Dieselgate But Will Avoid Jail Time

On Tuesday former Audi chief executive Rupert Stadler became the first Volkswagen employee sentenced for his role in Dieselgate. He’ll be fined $1.2 million, however his one-year, nine-month sentence was suspended by the Munich court. Via CNN:

Stadler is the first Volkswagen board member to be sentenced in the affair, some four years after German prosecutors laid fraud charges against the executive. He entered a plea bargain with the court, confessing to his crimes in order to avoid spending time in jail. His sentence has been suspended for three years.

The court also delivered guilty verdicts against Audi’s former head of engine development Wolfgang Hatz and former lead diesel engineer Giovanni Pamio, handing them suspended jail sentences of two years, and one year and nine months, respectively. Hatz was fined €400,000 ($437,000) and Pamio was fined €50,000 ($55,000).

[Dieselgate] also led German prosecutors to charge former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn with fraud in 2019. Winterkorn has yet to stand trial.

Stadler’s earlier position, courtesy Time, was that he’d been “misled by a group of rogue engineers over the functionalities of emissions-control software” and therefore was not guilty. But this trial has dragged on for three years now, and with the threat of jail time looming overhead, the record suddenly no longer reflects that. Here’s how Volkswagen and Audi responded to the news, again by way of CNN:

In separate statements, Volkswagen and Audi said they were not party to Tuesday’s proceedings, which should be “viewed independently” of proceedings against the companies that concluded in 2018.

“Audi has made good use of the crisis as an opportunity to start over. We have updated our systems, processes and checks to ensure compliance company-wide,” Audi added, noting it had since “cultivated and strengthened a culture of constructive debate.”

Next time you think “constructive debate,” think Audi.

Reverse: That’s It For 66

On this day in 1985, 38 years ago…

Neutral: So Long, Savior

I invite you to go revisit (or read for the first time) Peter Hughes’ excellent piece from the dog days of August 2020, when Lordstown was beginning to show cracks, and long before any mention of Foxconn. Were you rooting for Lordstown back then? Promise, this is a judgment-free zone.