Subaru's Next EVs Are Probably Going to Need a Few Years

“Our main electrification strategy centers on strong hybrids and electric vehicles and introducing such models in the U.S. by 2025,” Tomoaki Emori, senior vice president of the corporate planning division, said at the company’s Wednesday quarterly earnings announcement.

“When we look at the U.S. market situation, we will need to offer several models in our EV lineup,” he said. “We have shifted our weight toward that in our development.”

Emori did not offer details about the upcoming EVs, but they would be in addition to the only full-electric vehicle currently in the lineup, the Solterra crossover co-developed with Toyota. Subaru said last May that it wants to derive 40 percent of its global sales from battery electrics and hybrids by 2030 and apply electrification to all models in the early 2030s.

Subaru will start in-house production of EVs on a mixed production line with internal combustion vehicles in the mid-2020s. And from 2027, it will churn out EVs from a dedicated line being planned for its Japanese plant in Gunma prefecture.

Subaru’s upcoming hybrids will use Toyota’s hybrid system and be made at Subaru’s Gunma complex. The site currently manufactures the Forester, Crosstrek, WRX, BRZ, Legacy, Outback and Impreza, giving an idea of what nameplates might be in line for electrification.

Volkswagen preannounced 2022 results on Tuesday evening. Full results are coming on Mar. 14. The company reported full-year operating profit of 22.5 billion euros ($24.2 billion) from sales of 279 billion euros. Wall Street was looking for about 22.8 billion and 278 billion respectively.

Automotive free cash flow came in at 5 billion euros. Volkswagen was targeting about 8.6 billion euros.

“The miss was driven by supply chain and logistics issues in Q4 weighing on working capital,” wrote Bernstein analyst Daniel Roeska in a Tuesday report. “The company expects the effect to largely unwind in 2023.”

Investors appear to believe the company. The stock is stable after the early results release. Volkswagen shares are down about 0.9% in overseas trading.

Uber reported $8.6 billion in revenue in the last three months of 2022, a 49 percent increase from the same period a year ago, when the Omicron variant of the coronavirus dampened travel. The company made $30.7 billion in gross bookings — the amount of money paid by customers — a 19 percent year-over-year jump.

The company said it had tallied two billion trips in a quarter for the first time, up from 1.7 billion a year ago, and it saw an 11 percent increase in the number of customers who use Uber each month, to 131 million.

The results slightly exceeded the expectations of Wall Street analysts. Uber’s stock rose 7 percent in premarket trading.

Hertz Global Holdings Inc’s rental fleet has less than half the number of Tesla cars it planned to order in 2022, its regulatory filing showed on Tuesday.

Hertz’s fleet in the Americas peaked at 428,700 vehicles for the year ended Dec. 31, 2022, of which 11% were Tesla cars, the filing showed. The company had an additional 1,187 Teslas in its international fleet.

That implies the company’s fleet has 48,344 Tesla EVs, or less than half of the 100,000 electric cars the company decided to order from the automaker by the end of 2022.

The manufacturer and ride-hailing company is focused on advanced stages of design and benefiting from the sharing of some technology deployed in its two-wheeler products, [Chief Financial Officer G.R. Arun] Kumar said in an interview in Bengaluru on Wednesday.

“Software, safety systems, electronics, cells, the drive train — a lot of it is common,” Kumar said on the sidelines of the India Energy Week forum. “We think we’re 30%-40% there.”

Last year, Ola’s founder Bhavish Aggarwal said the company aimed to price its first car at less than $50,000, manufacturing components such as lithium-ion cells and batteries in-house to lower costs. Ola aims to compete with the likes of Tesla Inc., Hyundai Motor Co. and local rivals such as Tata Group in India’s electric-vehicle market, which consultancy RBSA Advisors forecasts to be worth more than $150 billion by 2030.

Years later, he would play a therapist counseling Adam Sandler in the black comedy Anger Management (2003), but on February 8, 1994, it was the Oscar-winning actor Jack Nicholson who let his anger get out of control.

In a criminal lawsuit filed against the actor, Robert Blank stated that Nicholson, then 56, approached Blank’s Mercedes-Benz while he was stopped at a red light in North Hollywood. After accusing the other man of cutting him off in traffic, Nicholson used a golf club to bash the roof and windshield of Blank’s car. A witness confirmed Blank’s account of the incident, and misdemeanor charges of assault and vandalism were filed against Nicholson. Charges were dropped after Nicholson apologized to Blank and the two reached an undisclosed settlement, which included a reported $500,000 check from Nicholson.