Contents
CHANGE IN MANAGEMENT
Geely reshapes leadership after Li
CLOSING
Stellantis weighs selling Brampton plant
INDUSTRY DIRECTIONS
Solid-state retrofits challenge factory economics
LABOR DISPUTE
Volkswagen Mexico faces strike pressure
MERGERS, VENTURES, ACQUISITIONS
Magna finds new life for tooling
OCTAD acquires Ohio stamping supplier
Volkswagen advances India partnership push
Geely exports engineering to automakers
OPENING
Chery plants R&D roots in Britain
PRODUCTION DECREASE
AESC pulls back Sunderland expansion
Mexico’s EV output plunges
REGULATION
Canada-US trade deal edges closer
Tariff cuts could reshape auto costs
Ottawa abandons EV sales mandate
Canada breaks from US emissions path
Britain rethinks 2030 EV ambitions
SUPPLY CHAIN
AI demand squeezes PCB materials
Change In Management
Geely Auto founder Eric Li stepped down as chairman on August 18, with Andy An taking the seat. Li keeps control as the largest shareholder and remains chairman of Geely Holding. Jerry Gan continues as chief executive, and Gui Shengyue, who has run the company since 2005, moves to vice chairman. The company frames the change as a shift from founder-driven management to a systems-driven board, and it extends a run of consolidation under the Taizhou Declaration that included folding Zeekr into Geely Auto and delisting it from the New York Stock Exchange last December. Li said in June that Geely Auto would shut down, merge, or restructure redundant entities. Suppliers with contracts with those units should expect to work with new purchasing teams and renegotiated terms as the consolidation continues.
Closing
Unifor says Stellantis told it on Wednesday that it is seriously considering closing and selling the Brampton Assembly Plant. Stellantis has not filed the formal written notice required a year in advance under its collective agreement, and the company says it is only preparing for bargaining and has nothing to announce. The plant has sat idle since Jeep Compass retooling was paused in February 2025, and the program was moved to the US that October. Local 1285 represents about 2.2k members there. The City of Brampton has zoned the land for automotive production, so a buyer could not simply convert the site to another use. Timing is the real story. The Stellantis contract covering Brampton, Windsor, and Etobicoke expires September 20, and Unifor moves to Stellantis right after it finishes with General Motors.
Industry Directions
Factorial signed a memorandum of understanding with SK On on July 29 to study whether SK On’s existing lithium-ion lines can be adapted to build solid-state cells. Factorial says that the route could cut capital requirements by up to 80% compared to building new lines. SK On carries more than 200 GWh of annual capacity worldwide, including 100 GWh in the US, and supplies Hyundai, Ford, and Volkswagen. No vehicle is in series production with true solid-state cells, and the performance figures on offer, 375 watt-hours per kilogram and a 15% to 90% charge in 18 minutes, are Factorial’s own claims. Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis have both run the cells in test vehicles. The retrofit question matters more than the chemistry. If existing lines can be converted, the capital math changes for every cell maker, and the 2030 split between low-cost LFP and solid-state performance packs arrives faster than most sourcing plans assume.
Labor
Wage talks between Volkswagen Mexico and its independent union are being mediated at the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare in Mexico City under a live strike notice. The union, led by Hugo Tlalpan and representing more than 7k permanent workers at the automaker’s Puebla complex, wants a 17% increase, split into 13% for wages and 4% for benefits. Volkswagen has not offered a counteroffer the union will accept. Workers settled for 4% in the 2025 review and reached the agreement in the final hours of the strike notice. The same pattern points to another late settlement, but the gap between 4% and 17% is much wider this time.
Mergers, Ventures, Acquisitions
Magna is repurposing equipment it bought for North American EV programs that never reached planned volumes. CFO Philip Fracassa said on August 13 that customers have reimbursed part of that spending and that Magna is working with them to move the tooling onto other programs. The sale of its lighting and car top systems businesses, with combined 2025 sales of about $1.1B, is now expected to close largely in the third quarter rather than later in the year. That pulled the full-year sales forecast down while margin, earnings per share, and free cash flow guidance went up. Magna expects capital spending below 4% of sales this year, down from a historical range of 4% to 4.5%, and is pursuing robotics, data center, and warehousing work using capacity it already owns. Stranded EV tooling sits on balance sheets across the supply base. Magna has the scale to recover part of the cost from customers. Most of its Tier 2 suppliers do not.
OCTAD Precision Manufacturing Group, an affiliate of OCTAD Capital Partners, has bought Omni Manufacturing, a stamper in St. Marys, Ohio. The 225k ft² plant runs about 50 presses ranging from 50 to 1,500 tons, plus manual and robotic welding lines and an in-house tool shop. Omni has served automotive customers for more than 58 years.
Volkswagen Group expects to sign a joint venture deal with an Indian partner this year, Skoda brand CEO Klaus Zellmer said on August 19. Zellmer would not name the partner, though VW has been in talks with the conglomerate JSW, which has signaled its intent to acquire a majority stake. VW is open to giving up control and needs funding to launch clean-energy vehicles before stricter Indian emission norms take effect in 2027. Any new investment requires approval from the VW Group board. The group is also fighting a $1.4B Indian tax demand from 2024 over alleged import-duty evasion, and no court has ruled on it. JSW already runs an India joint venture with SAIC through MG Motor and holds a separate deal with Chery, so a VW tie-up would place it alongside two Chinese partners in the same market.
Geely is now selling its engineering to Western automakers instead of buying theirs. Its External Collaboration Research Institute, set up in 2021, runs more than 100 projects for about a dozen clients, including Renault and Waymo, offering modular platforms, AI-driven electrical architectures, in-house semiconductors, and manufacturing systems. Ford agreed in July to a joint venture at its Spanish manufacturing hub to produce a new Bronco family member, a jointly developed multi-energy crossover, and two Geely-branded SUVs. Renault will build hybrids on a Geely architecture at an underused South Korean plant, and will use Geely's GEA architecture in Brazil, while Geely will use Renault's local plants and dealer network. The institute plans to grow from 800 engineers to 2k by 2030. This is how Chinese development cadence and cost targets flow into European and North American programs. Sourcing for those vehicles may go through Geely's existing base rather than the OEM's usual panel, and it will likely need to meet development timelines set by Chinese benchmarks.
Opening
Chery will open a passenger car R&D center in Bedfordshire, England, in late fall, first calibrating vehicles for UK roads and later focusing on autonomous driving and AI. Chery, Omoda, and Jaecoo together took almost 8% of the UK market in July, up from about 3% a year earlier. Manufacturing is the next step. Chery signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with Nissan in June to build its cars on the idle Line One at Sunderland from next year, marking the first large-scale UK production by a Chinese brand. Of the roughly 277k vehicles Chery sold globally in July, 203k were exports, up 70% year-on-year.
Production Decrease
Next door to that same Sunderland plant, AESC has shelved plans to expand its gigafactory after supply talks with Jaguar Land Rover stalled. The Chinese-owned cell maker runs two lines and has held off installing a third that would have served JLR, which has since sourced cells elsewhere while it waits for sister company Agratas to start up in Somerset in 2027. People familiar with the talks point to JLR’s unwillingness to make formal financial commitments and to disputes over cost and timing. Nissan's demand has also come in below plan. AESC now targets 15.8 GWh of annual output, enough for about 300k cars, against the 38 GWh it talked about in 2021, and it secured roughly $1.3B in refinancing last year, including UK government money.
Mexican EV assembly fell 57% in the first half of 2026, to 47k units from 110k a year earlier, with nearly all of that output built for export. Chevrolet Equinox EV assembly dropped 81.6% to 7.2k units, and Blazer EV assembly fell 80% to 2.1k units. Analysts point to weaker US buying as the cause. Domestic Mexican demand ran the other way, with electrified sales up 46.5% to a record 112k units through July, driven mostly by Asian imports and price competition. The two numbers tell one story, not two. Mexico’s EV lines were built to feed the US market, and the domestic boom doesn’t absorb the lost volume because the vehicles being sold in Mexico aren’t the ones being built there.
Regulation
Canada and the US are close to a tariff agreement, Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Thursday in Washington after roughly three hours with senior Trump administration officials. Neither government has released terms. The forcing mechanism is a threatened 50% US tariff on about $20B of Canadian imports, paused for three days after Trump announced the deal Tuesday night, hours before it was due to take effect. Washington tied that threat to provincial bans on US wine and spirits and to complaints over Canadian treatment of US autos and dairy. Premiers say Carney has asked provinces to prepare to lift the alcohol ban.
What is under consideration, according to people familiar with the talks, is cutting tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum from 50% to 25% and top-line vehicle tariffs from 25% to 15%. Steel may face a quota with higher rates above it, while aluminum likely would not. A White House official called reporting on the details “speculation” until an announcement comes. It is still unclear how the new rates would sit with USMCA, which already lets automakers deduct US content and pulls the effective vehicle rate well below 25%. That gap is the part purchasing teams need answered. Until the interaction is spelled out, a USMCA-compliant producer cannot tell whether a 15% headline rate is relief or a step backward from what it pays today.
Ottawa published proposed regulations on August 14 to repeal its EV sales mandate, which would have required EVs to be 20% of Canadian sales this year and 100% by 2035. The replacement is not ready. The government said on August 17 that consultations on tougher tailpipe standards begin in the fall, with draft rules targeted for early 2027, later than environmental groups had been led to expect. Carney has said the new standard will reach 74 grams of CO2 per mile by 2035, down from the 172 grams per mile still in force, but officials have not set the path to get there.
The same Gazette notice shows how far Canada is now drifting from US rules. Canada has long copied EPA standards and test procedures to keep certification aligned, but the EPA rescinded the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding in February 2026, removing the basis for its vehicle emissions rules. By the EPA’s own account, manufacturers no longer have obligations to measure, control, or report greenhouse gas emissions for highway vehicles, including model years built before the rule. Ottawa’s amendments ignore the current US code and instead build on EPA rules published in June 2024, setting Canada’s combined fleet target for 2026 at 161 grams per mile. A coalition of 25 state attorneys general is challenging the US rollback in court, and that case is unresolved. Two certification regimes where there used to be one. Anyone selling into both markets now plans compliance separately, and the June 2024 baseline is only a placeholder, since Canada intends to finalize its rules by early 2027.
Britain is consulting on softening a similar target. The zero-emission vehicle mandate, in force since 2024, requires EVs to account for 33% of new car sales this year, 80% in 2030, and 100% by 2035, with fines for noncompliance. Three of the four options released on Friday keep the 2035 endpoint but cut the 2030 target to as low as 50%, while the fourth holds the path and adds flexibility. The Department for Transport cited supply chain disruption and tariff uncertainty as reasons for the review. Battery EVs accounted for 27.4% of July registrations, which New AutoMotive says already exceeds compliance requirements once existing flexibilities are counted.
Supply Chain
The PCB material shortage has spread from advanced laminates to standard FR-4 and thicker copper-clad laminates, and Norwegian supplier Confidee expects no relief through 2026 or into 2027. All three inputs to copper-clad laminate are tight at once. Glass cloth, resin, and copper foil producers are converting capacity toward the high-end grades that AI accelerator boards need, and those boards can run past 40 to 50 layers. EVs, renewable energy hardware, and networking gear compete for the same materials. Some laminate suppliers now confirm the price only at delivery, and quotation validity windows are shortening. Confidee tells buyers to specify performance attributes rather than exact materials, qualify alternative laminate systems and second manufacturing sites, and release orders earlier. Automotive electronics buyers now compete with data center demand for a commodity most programs treat as always available. That is a new competitor for a material nobody had on a risk register a year ago.
