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Welcome to Daily Drive for Monday, May 19th, 2025. I'm Jamie Butters, executive editor of Automotive News in Detroit.
And I'm Kellen Walker in Las Vegas. Today on the show: tariffs are driving up prices and another wave of sticker shock is on the way. A new report says Toyota offered to help Nissan after talks with Honda fell apart. And GM gets its highest-ever supplier relations score amid tariff uncertainty. Plus, Grayson Brulte, CEO of The Road to Autonomy, talks about some big ups and downs for self-driving truck startup Aurora.
Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry. Despite robust sales in April and sweeping discounts from some automakers, the average new vehicle price rose 2.5% last month. That's according to Cox Automotive and Moody's Analytics Vehicle Affordability Index. And the trend is just beginning. Ford said it expects to raise prices by late June on its three Mexico vehicles by up to $2,000. That will deliver another blow to vehicle affordability that data show has already worsened since the Trump administration's import taxes were implemented about six weeks ago. The study from Cox and Moody's found the average monthly payment rose 3% to $753. That's the highest yet this year, and the median number of weeks of income needed to buy the average new vehicle rose by a full week.
Toyota has surfaced as a backup partner of sorts for Nissan. That's according to a news report that says the world's largest automaker offered to help Nissan after its merger talks with Honda collapsed. According to Japan's Mainichi Daily, a Toyota executive contacted Nissan in February to offer support when negotiations with Honda abruptly ended. The newspaper did not detail the results of Toyota's overture and didn't say where it obtained the information. Neither Nissan nor Toyota has publicly disclosed discussions on partnering or cooperating. A spokesman for Nissan declined to comment on the Mainichi report. A Toyota spokesman said the company was looking into the report.
Toyota has long been the most popular automaker among suppliers, and it widened its lead in Plant Moran's latest survey. Toyota, Honda, and General Motors each improved their working relationships with parts makers as the industry grapples with heightened uncertainty from tariffs and canceled electric vehicle programs. GM improved its score by 3%, giving the automaker its best performance in the history of the survey. Suppliers have rated GM increasingly well in recent years in areas such as communication and transparency. Nissan, Ford, and Stellantis all received lower scores, landing them at poor or very poor ratings in Plant Moran's annual survey of automaker supplier relationships. You can find all the details at autonews.com.
And Toyota Industries is set to accept a buyout offer from Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda. That's according to Japanese news agency Kyodo, which did not give attribution. The report says the takeover bid will be announced in May or June. Bloomberg reported last month that Akio Toyoda is planning to buy out Toyota Industries for more than $41 billion through a special-purpose vehicle with backing from Japan's biggest banks. It cited people familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Toyota Motor declined to comment on the Kyodo report, reiterating that the company is always considering ways to efficiently manage its holdings and that nothing has been decided.
And those are today's headlines. So Jamie, tariffs are driving up prices, that's according to Cox Automotive. In your opinion, are there regions or demographics more vulnerable to sticker shock from tariff hikes?
Yeah, it really looks like the group that's going to face it the hardest is the people buying entry-level models. You know, they're probably struggling to make a $500, $550, $600 payment. And if their prices go up by $2,000, $3,000 or more, it's just really going to make it a stretch for them, especially with insurance costs as high as they are. There's been a little more elasticity in the higher ends of the market. You know, luxury buyers who can afford $800, $900 payments, if their monthly payment goes up by $100, nobody likes that, but they can probably bear it and carry on with buying the vehicles that they want to buy, much more so than on the mainstream side.
Gotcha. Coming up, The Road to Autonomy CEO Grayson Brulte talks about the latest twists and turns for AV trucking startup Aurora, which just lost one of its leaders to General Motors. That's next on Daily Drive.
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Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Jamie Butters with Kellen Walker. You might expect Aurora Innovation to be popping champagne right now. The self-driving truck startup just hit a huge milestone when it deployed its semis for commercial service with no human backup drivers. But now it's putting humans back in. That's after truck maker Paccar made public objections to Aurora's use of its vehicles in commercial service.
It marks the second rocky moment for Aurora since its milestone launch. Earlier this month, co-founder Sterling Anderson said he will leave the company to take a job with General Motors as its first ever chief product officer. Grayson Brulte is the CEO of The Road to Autonomy. He recently spoke with our own Pete Bigelow on Shift, a podcast about mobility. Here's a piece of their conversation.
Sterling Anderson leaves Aurora, goes to General Motors. I kind of feel like this is one small step for Sterling Anderson, one giant leap for GM. What do you make of his move?
I didn't see it coming. I like that. If you look at the numbers that are out there and the GM retirement age, Mary Barra in two years will have to retire. Is this part of succession planning is the question that's going through my head. Because if you look at the press release from GM, Mr. Anderson will oversee product both for the electric vehicles, the internal combustion vehicles, and then most importantly, software.
You and I know this, Automotive News has done a really great job covering this. Detroit's struggling to figure out the software-defined vehicle. Mr. Anderson was the product leader on the Model X, worked on the Tesla Autopilot, so he has automotive experience, software experience. Is this part of succession planning potentially for Mary Barra to see that her legacy, this transformation she's trying to usher in at GM, can continue?
That is taking things a step further, Grayson. I was just trying to think of what's Sterling going to do here in the opening few months. But you're right. I think that whenever there is a change in leadership at GM — and there's no reason necessarily to think it's soon or imminent — there's a whole deep bench that GM has now built with Sterling sitting on top of that in terms of software and battery expertise. It will be fascinating to see how that develops over the years and then perhaps transpires when there is a change.
But there's a big but here. Do they actually let him build and be innovative, or does he get put into the GM machine and become GM?
Right. Obviously, Kyle Vogt would probably not approve of this move, based on his tweets from last December when GM scuttled the robo-taxi portion of Cruise. So there definitely is that push-pull between old and traditional GM and perhaps new GM.
And you have to look at the union contracts: how much are they going to weigh down in terms of where he wants to innovate? And if he's going to innovate, is he going to have to talk to Mr. Jacobsen and cut back on the buybacks and put more money into R&D and research? There's a lot of questions that have to be answered, because if you're a GM shareholder, you count on the dividends, you count on the buybacks to increase the stock price. But if Mr. Anderson wants to take it in an innovative, build-the-future direction, which he has a long track record of doing, you're going to run into headwinds. You're not going to have a tailwind, you're going to have a headwind.
When I talked to Sterling when he made his announcement earlier this week, he said he liked going to a place where he did not think the tail was going to wag the dog. I.e., he did not think that quarterly requirements would kind of override a need to make changes for a long-term future.
