Amazon Has One World Left To Conquer: Your Car

Happy Tuesday! It’s January 9, 2024, and this is The Morning Shift — your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, all in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know.

1st Gear: Amazon Is Coming For Your Car

Within the next decade, assuming any of us last that long, Amazon will be one of three companies that still exist in our upcoming explicitly corporate-owned cyberpunk oligarchy. In order to ensure that you’re never free from the company’s clutches, Amazon has long been working its way into homes, offices, your restless, dreamless sleep. Oh, and cars. From Automotive News:

BMW said at CES that it will start to use Amazon Alexa technology in its voice assistant in some of its models this year.

BMW and Amazon showcased a voice assistant that is based on Alexa’s artificial intelligence model, which processes human language at a high level and generates sophisticated responses, at CES.

“The next-generation of the BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant will soon become more powerful over the course of the year in vehicles with BMW Operating System 9″ by “leveraging” Alexa technology, but the demo was a peek at a “potential series rollout,” the German automaker said in a statement.

Of course, you won’t just see Alexa in your car. Amazon’s services will also be used in designing your next vehicle. Also from Automotive News:

Stellantis and BlackBerry are collaborating on a “virtual cockpit” that the automaker says will allow much faster delivery of infotainment technology and cut development costs.

The virtual cockpit, which recreates car controls and systems in the cloud, will accelerate development times in some cases to 24 hours from several months, the companies said Tuesday.

The cockpit platform is part of Stellantis’ Virtual Engineering Workbench development tool. BlackBerry’s QNX Hypervisor provides the software, while Amazon Web Services provides cloud services. The collaboration was announced to coincide with CES 2024 in Las Vegas. BlackBerry will show a “nonbranded” demonstration of its QNX Hypervisor platform at the show.

Remember, kids: There are some companies you just can’t escape. Amazon is one of them, and it always will be.

2nd Gear: Volkswagen Ended 2023 On A High Note

Just over a month ago, Volkswagen laid off staff because the company was “no longer competitive” in the marketplace. Now, the company’s year-end numbers are out, and they show that things are actually largely pretty fine. From Reuters:

BERLIN, Jan 9 (Reuters) – The Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) brand’s sales recovered in 2023 to 4.87 million cars, the carmaker said on Tuesday, after the previous year’s sales were dampened by supply chain troubles.

The brand had reported a drop in sales in 2022 to 4.56 million cars, continuing a downward trend underway since the pandemic, after the war in Ukraine and ongoing chip shortages stymied supply chains.

2023 sales improved by 6.7%, the carmaker said, indicating a recovery in supply chains from the previous year and solid demand.

It rocks, living in a world where companies will just lay off huge swaths of workers without any real necessity or justification. Isn’t it great? I’m having a fantastic time here, aren’t you? I am definitely not on the path to making my therapist the richest person alive.

3rd Gear: GM Isn’t Doing So Hot In China…

China is a major market for General Motors, to the point where the country is largely credited for keeping Buick around during the recession restructuring. Yet, over the course of 2023, it seems Chinese buyers largely decided they weren’t interested in GM’s products. From Automotive News:

General Motors’ China sales dropped 8.7 percent to 2.1 million last year, allowing the United States to become the automaker’s biggest market for the first time in more than a decade.

The slide in sales was led by declines at SAIC-GM, GM’s Chinese passenger-vehicle joint venture with SAIC Motor Corp., which builds and markets Cadillac, Chevrolet and Buick cars and light trucks.

Buick volume in 2023 slumped 20 percent to about 517,000 while Chevrolet’s China deliveries shrank 16 percent to around 169,000, GM China said Monday.

Cadillac deliveries decreased 5.7 percent to roughly 183,000 last year.

Sales at SAIC-GM-Wuling, a three-way partnership between SAIC, GM and Liuzhou Wuling Automobile Industry Co., totaled 1.2 million last year, virtually unchanged from 2022.

SAIC-GM-Wuling mainly builds Wuling-brand minibuses and compact pickups as well as Baojun-badged compact and subcompact sedans and crossovers.

Peaks and troughs in your sales numbers are normal, reasonable business waves to ride, but jumps of 16 or 20 percent feel massive. I can’t say I know enough about the Chinese auto-buyer mindset to speculate about the reasons for that drop, but I’m willing to bet it’s something more than “Great Wall had a great lineup this year”.

4th Gear: …But China Is Doing Just Fine Globally

Or, maybe that’s exactly it. Cars from China’s own bands seem to be doing better and better in the global market, so perhaps that’s the cause of GM’s woes: The competition has simply gotten stiffer. From the Wall Street Journal:

HONG KONG—China’s overseas auto sales surged to a record last year, on track to surpass Japan as the world’s biggest car exporter and marking a tectonic shift for the global industry.

While China has become acknowledged as a world leader in electric vehicles, traditional gas-powered autos were the main driver of the increase, with demand surging especially in Russia.

Chinese carmakers seized the void left in the country by the departure of Western carmakers following the war in Ukraine, selling at least five times as many vehicles there last year than the 160,000 it sold in 2022, according to the China Passenger Car Association.

The association on Tuesday estimated 5.26 million made-in-China vehicles were sold overseas last year and said that would likely be almost a million more than exports of made-in-Japan cars. Japan shipped just under four million vehicles abroad during the first 11 months of 2023, according to the country’s most recent official data.

Of course, the replacement of western automakers in Russia with Chinese makes was always going to have an impact on export numbers, but the sheer scale of the impact is staggering. China has outsold Japan in the global auto market. Who had that on their 2023 bingo card?

Reverse: And Then The Series Slowly But Surely Went Off The Rails