First Look at Afeela, Ford Round Up, and Business Ready AI

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Welcome to Tuesday, where we hope your day is less filled with Super Bowl Commercial conversations. We take a first look at Afeela, run around the block with Ford plans, and introduce an AI model tuned for your business.

• The Sony Honda Mobility project has launched under the brand name ‘Afeela’ with projected 10 year lease options.
  • Executives say they’re in it for the long haul, not as an experiment to test the waters.
  • Sony sees the automotive space as the next natural frontier for their media business.
  • “The important thing is software,” COO Izumi Kawanishi said. “We have to strengthen our software technology. That means we can provide mobility services for the future. We have to change the business from hardware to software.”

• Let’s take a round up jog with Ford as they shrink staff in Europe and expand manufacturing in Michigan.
  • The company plans to slash 2,300 jobs in Germany, 1,300 in the UK and 200 elsewhere, all related to production development and administration.
  • The restructure comes after Q4 results that were down $11B YOY.
  • Farley: “I don’t want to just make the output the cuts without redesigning the work. This has to be sustainable and that’s how we’re thinking about it nowadays,”
    • Speaking of being sustainable
  • BlueOval Battery Park Michigan was announced on Monday, and will open in 2026 in Marshall, about 100 miles west of Detroit.
  • The plant will employ 2,500 workers and have the capacity to build 35 gigawatt-hours of lithium iron phosphate cells a year, enough to power 400K EVs.
  • Ford currently uses nickel cobalt manganese battery packs, which are less durable and charge slower than lithium based batteries.

• With ChatGPT and Bard owning news headlines, AI company Writer has been training language model options for enterprise business.
  • Palymra comes in three sizes: 128 million, 5 billion or 20 billion parameters, respectively, for Small, Base and Large.
  • The model is trained on business and marketing writing, not Reddit posts and Project Gutenberg.
  • You can upload your company's files, including posts, annual reports, and financials to train the model.
  • Has business ready integrations like Google Docs, Chrome, Word and Outlook

Join Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier every morning for the Automotive State of the Union podcast as they connect the dots across car dealerships, retail trends, emerging tech like AI, and cultural shifts—bringing clarity, speed, and people-first insight to automotive leaders navigating a rapidly changing industry.

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