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Feature Coverage
Longer-form reporting on plant operations, manufacturing technology, workforce strategy, and capital decisions.
Honda has asked tier-one suppliers for 30% cost reductions on pressings, electricals and SDV parts, according to internal documents reviewed by Reuters. Top-100 supplier EBIT averaged 6.9% last year, so the number cannot come out of margin. Here is the clean-sheet counter, line by line.
Ford says it converted 3 million square feet at Louisville Assembly Plant from combustion to fully electric in under a year, replacing the single moving conveyor with three parallel sub-assembly branches that marry late. The engineering is genuinely novel. The arithmetic that has to follow it is the harder story.
As roughly $1.765 trillion in reshoring commitments pile up on the U.S. industrial map, the domestic EV powertrain buildout is contracting: Honda scrapped its entire North American EV program at up to $15.7B, Ford booked a $19.5B charge, and GM and Samsung SDI idled a $3.5B Indiana battery plant after the federal EV credit expired.
A $5 billion cell plant in Bartow County has begun production just as America's battery belt idles and repurposes EV lines. Here's why Hyundai and SK On are ramping into a glut — and what captive domestic cells do for tariff exposure and the race to become the No. 2 EV brand.
The July 1 joint review produced neither renewal nor termination — it converted a one-time checkup into an open-ended annual-review regime out to 2036. Now the U.S. wants auto regional content raised to 82% with a 50%-U.S. carve-out, and Section 232 tariffs are the stick. Here's the operator math.
Ultium Cells pushed the return of its idled Ohio battery workers from June to August 2026, citing a hard look at the EV market. The slipping date is a cleaner read on demand than any capacity headline — and it sits inside a year-long layoff wave at the gigafactories that anchored the reshoring story.
The 2026 Stellantis-UAW fight has moved past 2023 contract wages into a war over plant allocation — and the Midwest Tier 1 base has sunk capex on the line.
Stellantis and Accenture announced plans — not a signed deal — to build AI-driven, digital-twin manufacturing with NVIDIA. The disclosed scope is narrow and metric-free. The story operators should track is consolidation: the deliverable closely mirrors Accenture's off-the-shelf Physical AI Orchestrator, hardening a de facto reference architecture even as Stellantis runs deeply negative industrial free cash flow.
Stellantis announced plans for an AI digital-twin partnership with Accenture and NVIDIA — with no OEE, scrap, or cost target attached. Here is what comparable programs have actually delivered, and the integration math that decides whether year one moves the line.