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Welcome to this Weekend Drive edition of Daily Drive for the first week in May 2025. I'm Jamie Butters, executive editor of Automotive News in Detroit.
And I'm Kellen Walker in Las Vegas. We're breaking down some of the biggest stories in the auto industry from the past week and looking forward to what's in store in the days ahead. Today on the show, we'll bring you the first part of our exclusive interview with Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda, who talks about the future of his family's leadership of the world's largest automaker.
What's important is that this is not a battle between the Toyota founding family members versus the non-Toyota family member. It's all about us contributing with the strengths that we have.
That's coming up in a few minutes. But first, Jamie, how you doing? How was your week?
It was a long week. It was quite a busy week. We got plenty to talk about.
Let's get into it. So the White House this week summoned auto executives for US investment talks. What are the potential benefits for the US economy from these auto investment talks? And how long down the road would it be until we see those benefits?
Yeah, the talks company was more of a parade of executives from companies that have announced big investments or medium-size investments. But that's always good. It's good to celebrate investments in the US that lead to more capital equipment and jobs and GDP. That tends to all be good stuff. To your point though, it's going to be a long time. These are big investments that take time to plan and execute. Hyundai was one of the big ones. They've announced more than $20 billion in investments they plan to make over the next four years. Six billion of that I think is for the steel plant in Louisiana. It's going to take years for that to get bought, built, put together, and operating. They plan to expand the new factory in southern Georgia, but they're not going to add those 200,000 vehicles of capacity until they get up to the 300,000 that's already installed. And that's probably going to take a couple of years, three years maybe. So it's going to take some time, but it's nice to see investments and pretty good April sales numbers from some of the automakers that reported.
How did consumer behavior change in April due to tariff fears?
It was really interesting from what we're hearing from the analysts and the dealers. The push-pull between hurry up and get it or am I worried about the economy kind of got pulled. We saw a big surge in demand at the end of March. March was a huge month, biggest pace in years. April started off about the same, then it's really been dwindling throughout the course of the month. But it was a good month overall. Almost all the brands were up double digits but the outlook for the months coming ahead, it's estimated some 300,000 or more sales were pulled ahead. So those will be sales that don't show up in the later months. And by the time we get to summer, if the tariffs all stay in place, about half of what's on the ground is either going to be a tariff vehicle or something that competes with one.
Finally, rumors were swirling around that Tesla's board of directors were looking for Elon Musk's replacement, but the Tesla board and Elon have appeared to resolve their issues. What would be the potential consequences for Tesla if Musk stepped away from his role as CEO?
He is a big part of the brand. Absolutely. This was a Wall Street Journal story that said while Musk was super deep involved at the White House, spending every day with President Trump, that the board started to reach out to some headhunter firms, actually had narrowed it down to one who would lead a search for a new CEO. Since then they announced their earnings results that weren't very good and Musk said he's going to spend more time back at Tesla, dial back his government time to one or two days a week. So it seems like they've kind of buried the hatchet. The board and Elon Musk denied the story, but as the story said, Musk probably didn't even know that they had hired the firm or had started talking to firms. So we'll see about that. But Elon Musk is the Tesla brand for better or for worse. On the auto side, it probably kind of hurts the brand at the moment. His political activity in the US but also in Germany is really alienating to a lot of EV intenders and a lot of the Trump followers and the followers of the Alternative for Germany party in Germany are not big EV adopters, so it's a little out of step there for the automaking part of the business. But Tesla's real value comes from the promise that Elon's made about robo taxis, about humanoid robots and AI in general. So that's what people are investing in and that's Elon. So that's the complicated soup.
Good stuff, Jamie. Coming up, our own Hans Greimel sits down for an exclusive interview with Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda. That's next on Weekend Drive.
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Welcome back to Weekend Drive. I'm Jamie Butters with Kellen Walker. To hear Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda tell it, the year 1925 was just as special for the Japanese giant as it was for Automotive News. The world's biggest automaker wasn't even in the car business at the time. But that year, the namesake company, founded by Toyoda's forefathers, changed the course of history by starting mass production of its breakthrough Type G automatic loom. It was also the year this Detroit publication was founded. And as Automotive News looks back 100 years, we're honoring Akio Toyoda and his family with a Centennial Award for distinguished achievement and service over the years. Automotive News Asia editor Hans Greimel recently sat down for an exclusive interview with Akio Toyoda. Today we bring you the first part of that conversation from Tokyo.
