Automotive suppliers are under increasing pressure as they continue to face challenging market conditions. According to a recently study conducted by Roland Berger and Lazard, stagnant production volumes, geopolitical uncertainty, increasing competition and rising cost pressures have driven average profitability down to just 4.7 percent.

Weak demand and challenging price negotiations with OEMs are placing additional strain on suppliers. While OEM profitability is still higher, it has also declined. That is predicted to put sustained pressure on supplier margins in the coming years.

“What we are currently observing in the European and North American automotive supplier industry can best be described as a phase of ‘stagformation,’” says Felix Mogge, a partner at Roland Berger. “On the one hand, suppliers are facing stagnant volume growth, while on the other, they are undergoing a fundamental transformation that requires them to urgently reshape their business models.

“While suppliers have slowly regained revenue growth since the Covid-19 pandemic, their profitability has structurally declined,” explains Mogge. “A significant portion of revenue growth has been driven by inflation, which has also increased costs.

“Overcapacity is putting pressure on the market, especially in Europe,” warns Mogge. “In contrast, China and South Asia are the primary drivers of modest global automotive growth. Slower-than-expected transition to EV adoption in Europe and North America is lagging behind expectations, preventing the realization of anticipated economies of scale. The EV market is attracting new players, increasing competitive pressure and cost challenges for suppliers.”

“The era of steady market growth is over and a more volatile environment will continue to put pressure on earnings and profits,” adds Florian Daniel, a partner at Roland Berger who worked on the Global Automotive Supplier Study. “However, suppliers can still succeed by implementing consistent efficiency improvement programs, forming partnerships to optimize and scale their portfolios, streamlining their product offering and focusing on strategic technologies.”

Another study conducted by Plante Moran claims that General Motors, Honda and Toyota have the best business relationships with suppliers in North America. Specifically, cost management, strategic alignment and stronger communication are seen as important factors in helping suppliers manage risk and uncertainty.

“Suppliers want balanced financial risk, and they want to know where they fit in OEMs’ future market strategies so they can align accordingly,” says Angela Johnson, Ph.D., principal in Plante Moran’s management consulting supplier relations analytics. “They perceive OEM behaviors—fairness, equity, accountability and then trust—through the impact of OEM decisions to their bottom line.

“What separates the top three from the bottom three OEMs is their ability to help suppliers reduce their costs to serve the OEM and manage uncertainty,” claims Johnson.

The top-three automakers in the study scored better in the basics: communication, responsiveness, accessibility, engagement and buyer knowledge. “These skills help suppliers operate more efficiently and, in turn, create strong relationships,” explains Johnson. “Stronger relationships enable OEMs and suppliers to work together and better navigate industry uncertainty with more equitable risk and cost sharing.”

“It’s all about balancing and aligning the various functional demands of the OEM—purchasing, manufacturing, engineering, design and finance—so there are fewer conflicting demands on the supplier and the OEMs’ team members,” adds Dave Andrea, principal in Plante Moran’s strategy and automotive and mobility consulting practice.

“Overall, OEMs that effectively address consistency, predictability and alignment of strategic goals are generally stronger, more profitable and become customers of choice for suppliers,” says Andrea. “And, because of their mutual dependency, these attributes are good for the suppliers, too.”

Many of our newsletters have covered various compliance topics. How well do you understand compliance at your stores?

This quiz tests your knowledge on the status of some critical compliance issues for your dealership. 

Sales Practices

1. True or False? Arbitration agreements are regularly challenged by plaintiffs’ attorneys. But there are substantial benefits to arbitration— reduced time to a decision, removal of the possibility of a runaway jury, and limited discovery, to name a few. We can still use arbitration agreements for transactions with customers and for employees.

Answer: True. Judicial decisions have strengthened the ability of businesses to use arbitration provisions and reap the benefits. Several Supreme Court decisions have supported predispute arbitration.
Unfortunately, limiting or ending predispute arbitration is at the top of the agenda for every
consumer and employee advocacy group. A consumer or an employee voluntarily enters an
arbitration agreement. Whether an arbitration will survive a challenge depends upon its terms and how
it is implemented. The agreement must be fair and balanced. It must be supported by consideration.
When these requirements are observed, an arbitration agreement is likely to survive a challenge.
Predispute arbitration agreements have not yet been outlawed by federal action. A dealer in a state that
allows predispute arbitration who wishes to enjoy the protections of predispute arbitration in consumer
matters and employment matters is still free to do so.There is one caveat to this answer and it has to do
with sexual harassment cases brought by employees. Congress passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of
Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021, which President Biden signed into law on March 3,
2022. The Act amends the Federal Arbitrations Act so that “at the election of the person alleging conduct
constituting a sexual harassment dispute or sexual assault dispute, or the named representation of a
class or in a collective action alleging such conduct, no predispute arbitration agreement or predispute
joint-action waver shall be valid or enforceable with respect to a case which is filed under Federal, Tribal
or State law and relates to the sexual assault dispute or the sexual harassment dispute.” Thus, should
any sexual harassment or sexual assault claims be brought against your dealership by an employee,
your employment arbitration agreements no longer govern those actions, and the employee has the right
to bring a lawsuit, or even a class action, against the dealership in federal or state court.

2. True or False? We stopped using the NADA Fair Lending program when the Trump administration entered office in January 2025. We still train our sales and F&I employees that finance rates should be provided to customers on a non-discriminatory basis. Our fair lending training should protect us from lawsuits.

Answer: False. Despite the move from the Biden Administration to the Trump Administration, private
litigants, state attorneys general, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission can all
enforce equal credit laws. And it is not only finance reserve that will be at issue. Practices in selling
voluntary protection products are also potential subjects of legal action by these enforcers. If your dealership is not using a fair lending program and a program for sale of voluntary protection
products that requires offering finance rates and VPPs at uniform pricing levels, with deviations for
nondiscriminatory reasons, and with results you can review and for which you can take corrective
action for non-compliance, you are not adequately protecting your dealership. The Fair Lending
Program and the Program for Sale of Voluntary Protection Products published by the National
Automobile Dealers’ Association are comprehensive programs your dealership should implement and
follow.

3. True or False? We spot-delivered a vehicle to a difficult customer for whom we cannot find a finance source to approve assignment of the RISC. The customer is finally agreeing to return the vehicle. Because of the extra work we had to do, we wish to keep the down payment. We may do so if we can justify our expenses.

Answer: False. Carefully observe customer rights in spot deliveries. If you must take back the vehicle you
delivered, you are rescinding the contract. In other words, you are returning the dealership and the
buyer to the beginning as if the transaction had not even occurred, to the extent possible. That means
that not only must the customer give back the car you delivered, you must give back the trade and any
down payment. If you do not do that, or you cannot do that, then you cannot “rescind” the transaction. 

4. True or False? We spot-delivered a car, and we cannot find a finance source to accept the RISC. We also cannot find the customer or the car to repossess it despite diligent efforts to locate them. We can report the vehicle as stolen.

Answer: False. First, dealers must know if they have a statecompliant spot-delivery form or language if their state mandates such, like Virginia and Maryland. Having decided that you can rescind, the recovery
service could not locate the vehicle. Now what do you do? Often, the decision is made out of frustration.
The customer was not candid when he bought the car, or he has not been cooperative in working with
the dealership, or he appears to be hiding the vehicle. The first reaction is likely to be, “Let’s show him! Let’s report the car as stolen.” That is the wrong reaction. The car was not stolen. You gave the customer
possession of the vehicle under the transaction documents. Even a misdemeanor charge of wrongful
use may lead to a malicious prosecution lawsuit since the customer is operating on legally issued documentation, even if overdue. Even if you win the suit, the publicity about the events will likely damage
the dealership. The answer is a civil suit to recover the vehicle. The dealership then can quickly obtain a judgment it can use as the basis for discovery from the customer to find the vehicle and to potentially recover damages if the car can never be found or to recover the dealership’s losses for the period the vehicle was withheld.

Advertising

5. True or False? When we advertise an attractive APR, we must disclose any qualifiers such as the limit on the duration of the financing, and we must disclose the amount or percentage of the down payment and the terms of repayment.

Answer: True. Advertising enforcement will continue to be a cornerstone of actions against car dealers by
the FTC, even under the Trump Administration. Compliance with the Truth in Lending Act and the
Consumer Leasing Act are critical because both laws are clear. If an APR is only available for loans of limited duration, that must be disclosed to meet the general requirements of the FTC Act that terms
and conditions of offers must be fully disclosed. If the limitation is a trigger term (for example, “up to
36 months”), the duration disclosure then requires the follow-on disclosures.

In advertising credit in connection with a motor vehicle, any of the following is a trigger term:

• The amount of the down payment (expressed as either a percentage or dollar amount);
• The amount of any payment (expressed as either a percentage or dollar amount);
• The number of payments or the period of repayment; or
• The amount of any finance charge.

If you use a trigger term, you then must disclose:

• The amount or percentage of the down payment;
• The terms of repayment; and
• The “annual percentage rate,” using that term or the abbreviation “APR.” If the annual percentage rate may be increased after consummation of the credit transaction, that fact also must be stated.

6. True or False? Under the Truth in Lending Act, if we advertise a low APR, we must also disclose the
amount or percentage of the down payment, and the terms of repayment.

Answer: False. Under the Truth in Lending Act, the annual percentage rate is not a trigger term. You must
make further disclosures under TILA only if an advertisement employs a trigger term.

7. True or False? We have some especially low lease rates. Even though those are like the annual percentage rate, we cannot advertise those as low APR leases.

Answer: True. Often dealers seek to equate lease rates to APR and advertise low rates in connection with leases and nothing more. The Consumer Leasing Act prohibits that. In advertising a lease rate, you may not use the term “Annual Percentage Rate,” “Annual Lease Rate,” or other equivalent term. In addition, if you do advertise a lease rate, the following statement must appear near the rate with no intervening language or symbols: “This percentage may not measure the
overall cost of financing the lease.”

Employment Practices

8. True or False? An employee handbook is dangerous because it lets employees know what their rights are and is viewed as an employment agreement.

Answer: False. An employee handbook is critical to let employees know what is expected of them and to
convey information required by law. A properly designed handbook benefits a dealership and is not
an employment agreement. Your handbook should be reviewed and updated from time to time to remain
current with laws as they change. 

9. True or False? We want to run credit bureau reports on employment candidates to make sure they don’t have credit problems. Our employment application contains an authorization to run a credit report on an employment applicant, but we cannot do so based simply on the signature on an employment application.

Answer: True. Don’t assume that policies for running credit reports on customers apply to employment
situations. The rules are different. A dealership can only run a credit bureau on an applicant for
employment if the authorization is based on a signed document that authorizes a consumer report and
an investigative background report and nothing else. That is why if you are using an employment
application that contains an authorization to run a credit bureau report, the application is hopelessly out
of date. Use an updated employment application and a separate form to authorize a credit report. Credit
reports contain critical personal data, and personal data protection will be an even higher priority under
the Trump administration.

10. Choose the Correct Answer. What should be covered in a salesperson’s pay plan?
A. The length of the salesperson’s employment
B. The specific definition of vehicle cost
C. All pay calculations are final
D. None of the above
E. All of the above

Answer: D. It is more critical than at any other time to use pay plans that protect the dealership. The pay plan simply describes the method for calculating pay due a salesperson. No length of time should be specified, or the plan could be construed as an agreement for employment for a specified time. There should not be a specific definition of vehicle cost. In any pay plan in which calculation of commissions is based upon sale price over cost, the cost should be determined in the sole discretion of
the dealership, and the plan should specifically state that. A pay plan should never indicate that pay
calculations are final. They should always be subject to revision. We provide a pay plan checklist in this
newsletter. 

11. True or False? An employee filed a claim of harassment. We didn’t violate federal law by
harassing the employee in the first place, so we can’t be found liable for taking action against the
employee for filing a complaint. 

Answer: False. Retaliation can be a separate violation of the law even if there is no underlying offense.
Managers and employees must be well trained in the company’s policy and process against discrimination and harassment. Every complaint must be taken seriously. When investigating, always warn those with whom you discuss the circumstances leading to the complaint that retaliation is against company policy and can lead to discipline, including termination. Retaliation is the most prevalent
category of complaints to the EEOC, according to the agency. Protect the dealership against retaliation
claims. 

12.  True or False? Salespeople are paid on commission. They don’t have to punch the time clock. 

Answer: False. Salespeople still need to earn at least minimum wage for hours worked. Timecards have always been the best method to know hours worked by employees. For those exempt from premium
overtime, like new car dealer salespeople, this will give your office the ability to track earnings to ensure
those personnel are paid minimum wage for hours worked. For non-exempt personnel, this will give
your office the opportunity to calculate premium overtime properly.

General Compliance

13. True or False? Our dealership is located in Virginia and has Maryland customers. One of our salespeople called a Maryland customer to discuss a vehicle they purchased. We don’t use the “quality assurance” recording on outbound calls and our employee did not tell the customer that the call was being recorded. We have now been sued by that customer and want to use the voice recording from that call as part of our defense in the lawsuit. There is no issue using that call because our employee knew the phone call was being recorded and gave consent. 

Answer: False. Virginia is a one-party consent state, but Maryland is not—meaning that only the employee at the dealership needs to know that the call is recorded in Virginia to be compliant, but in Maryland, this is a privacy violation because the law requires that both the employee and customer give consent to the call being recorded. While federal law requires only that one party give consent, the following states require the consent of all parties involved in a particular conversation: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington. Most dealerships’ phone service vendors have a
“whisper” or recording for inbound calls that states, “This call may be recorded for quality assurance or
training purposes.” Thereby, if the person stays on the call, it would be viewed as valid consent from
both parties (so long as your employee knows that you are recording them). For outbound calls, it’s
not always cut and dry whether the “whisper” or recording is present. For dealerships that do business
with customers in those two-party consent states, you need to either have a recording for outbound calls
that states that the call is being recorded or cease recording those calls. Dealers should put their employees on notice that their telephone calls are being recorded. 

14. True or False? We are compliant with the FTC Privacy Rule so we are compliant with the FTC Safeguards Rule.

Answer: False. The Privacy Rule and the Safeguards Rule are two different rules that cover different things
and have different requirements. The Privacy Rule governs consumer and customer information
collection and sharing practices. The Safeguards Rule governs how you protect the customer
information you collect and maintain. Meeting the compliance for one does equate to compliance for
the other. The Privacy Rule requires that you provide a notification, to those consumers whom you may or
have arranged leasing and financing through the dealership, of how you will use the information and
certain limitations on disclosure of that information. Personal information collected from cash customers
is not subject to the Privacy Rule. The FTC updated the Safeguards Rule in 2021, which went into effect in 2023. The Rule change requires numerous elements as stated below and should be in effect at your dealership now.

• A Written Information Security Program Including Specific Requirements.

• Designate a qualified individual responsible for overseeing and implementing the
  information security program.
  
  
• Perform a written risk assessment with specific evaluation and assessment criteria
  that identifies reasonably foreseeable internal and external risks.
  
  
• Periodically perform additional risk assessments that reexamine the reasonably
  foreseeable internal and external risks.
  
  
• Design and implement safeguards to control the risks identified in the risk assessment,
  including limiting access to data only to those with a need-to-know, encryption, multi-factor
  authentication, a log for users, and a 2-year maintenance requirement with safe disposal
  of customer data unless an exception applies.

• Testing. Regularly test or otherwise monitor the effectiveness of the critical controls, systems, and
  procedures.
• Continuous Monitoring. For information systems, monitoring and testing shall include
  continuous monitoring or periodic penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.
• Awareness and Training. Implement policies and procedures to ensure that personnel can
  properly use the information security program.
• Regular Updates. Continually evaluate and adjust the security program to address changes.
• Service Providers. Oversee service providers to ensure their compliance with Safeguards
  requirements.
• Regular Reports. Require the Qualified Individual to report in writing, regularly and
  at least annually, to the board of directors or equivalent governing body.

Last week, the FTC posted updated FAQs for dealers on the Privacy and Safeguards Rules. The FAQs are very informative to dealers and should be reviewed. The link to that post is: https://www.ftc.gov/businessguidance/resources/automobile-dealers-ftcssafeguards-rule-frequently-asked-questions

Gone are the days that dealers could implement all compliance requirements on their own. For best
practices, dealers should be using an outside vendor to assist with compliance needs.

Automakers and car buyers are taking a second, harder look at hybrids after leaving them behind for electric vehicles.

There are a lot of things Sarah Martens likes about the 2025 Toyota Highlander hybrid she bought a few months ago. Its pearlescent white paint shimmers in the sunlight. It has lots of safety features. And for a large sport utility vehicle, it sips gasoline, getting nearly 30 miles per gallon at times.

But the thing she likes most: It doesn’t feel like a hybrid.

“It’s so smooth,” said Ms. Martens, a Pilates instructor in Ann Arbor, Mich. “When it starts off from a stoplight or switches from electric to gas, I can’t tell I’m driving a hybrid. It just seems like I’m driving a normal car.”

Not so long ago, it seemed that the heyday of hybrids had come and gone. As Tesla and the potential of electric vehicles grabbed the imaginations of drivers and automakers, hybrids appeared destined to be remembered as an interim step on the way toward a fully electric, emissions-free future.

Just four years ago, for example, General Motors set a goal of ending production of all internal combustion models by 2035, and all but eliminated hybrids from its future product plans. Other manufacturers also bet heavily on electric vehicles and scaled their hybrid plans.

But then a funny thing happened. Car shoppers balked at the high prices of fully electric models and the challenges of charging them. In the last few years, sales of electric vehicles have grown at a much slower rate than automakers once expected. And hybrids have stepped in to fill the gap, accounting for a large and growing share of new car sales.

“People like the attributes that hybrids bring to the table,” said Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds, a market researcher. “They offer better mileage than pure gasoline models, and the prices are pretty close to pure gas vehicles, so they’re much more affordable than E.V.s.”

In the first three months of this year, hybrids — including cars that can and cannot be plugged in — made up about 14 percent of all light vehicles sold in the United States, according to the Department of Energy. That was around twice the market share of fully electric vehicles in that period.

Republican legislation working its way through Congress could further lift sales of hybrids. In May, the House passed a policy bill backed by President Trump that would eliminate a $7,500 tax credit available to people who bought or leased electric vehicles. That legislation would also impose an annual tax of $250 on electric cars and $100 on hybrids to finance road projects. The Senate version of the bill introduced this week would do away with the tax credit, too, but does not include the annual tax.

A few large automakers dominate the sale of hybrids.

Nearly half the cars and trucks that Toyota and its luxury brand, Lexus, sold in the first five months of the year were hybrids — and sales of those vehicles were up about 40 percent from a year earlier. Ford Motor’s hybrid sales rose 31 percent in the same period. Honda is on track this year for its highest hybrid sales ever, and the hybrid versions of its Accord sedan and CR-V sport utility vehicle now outsell the gasoline-only models.

Hybrids are typically powered by a small gasoline engine that is paired with an electric motor driven by a battery that is much smaller and, thus, less expensive than the batteries in fully electric vehicles. These batteries are charged primarily by regenerative brakes and gasoline engines.

Plug-in hybrids, which account for a small share of hybrids, have bigger batteries than regular hybrids and can also be charged from power outlets at home or at charging stations. Some plug-ins can go around 50 miles on battery power alone before the gas engine kicks in.

Hybrid technology burst onto the automotive scene more than two decades ago when Toyota introduced the Prius, which was able to go more than 45 more miles on a gallon of gas — a remarkable feat at the time.

Early hybrids, including the Prius, sometimes felt a little clunky as they switched from gas engine to electric motor and back, and many were small vehicles that lacked the power and room some drivers were accustomed to. Some auto engineers at rival car companies brushed the Prius off as a toy, and objected to the idea of a car’s having two propulsion systems under the hood because they found it too complicated or unconventional.

But when gasoline prices rose in the early 2000s, the Prius drew raves from environmentally minded consumers and cost-conscious drivers. As Prius sales took off, other automakers hopped on the hybrid bandwagon.

Hybrids gained proponents especially in periods when gas prices spiked. But once Tesla’s sales took off in the middle of the last decade, the industry’s focus shifted to electric vehicles.

Consumers are now gravitating toward hybrids because the technology has improved significantly. Batteries are smaller in size but hold more power. The switching between the gas engine and the electric motor — as Ms. Martens has noticed — is now pretty seamless.

“When the Prius came out in 1997, it was mostly tuned to be fuel-efficient,” said David Christ, group vice president and general manager for the Toyota brand in North America. “But we’ve had 25 years to refine the technology in a way that makes our hybrids not only fuel-efficient but also fun to drive.”

The hybrid version of Toyota’s RAV4, Mr. Christ noted, now has more power and torque than the pure gasoline version.

At the same time, automakers have created hybrid versions of all types of vehicles, and have found ways of using the hybrid’s battery to offer consumers additional features. Ford offers a hybrid version of its F-150 pickup truck that can run power tools and lighting on job sites. The truck can also provide electricity during power outages.

Collectors trek to all corners of the globe for rare finds, from diplomatic tags to the devilish 666; the Vatican City holy grail

Some people dream of scaling a peak or writing a novel. Ethan Craft wants to collect at least one license plate from 500 global jurisdictions.

The quest has taken the 27-year-old across the world in search of junkyards, antique stores and other collectors willing to trade plates.

It also nearly killed him.

The Phoenix native and freelance journalist was recently driving through South Africa’s rural Eastern Cape in a rickety Renault Kwid hatchback when he swerved to avoid debris, slammed into a rock wall and flipped over. Craft avoided major injury. As important, he was able to recover the dozens of plates that spilled onto the road—along with the tag on his rental car.

“I’m going to save that one for my will,” said Craft.

Stamp collectors are called philatelists. People who save coins are numismatists. License plate collecting is so arcane that there isn’t a word for it. But there are thousands of people who so covet tags that they are willing to travel to remote corners of the globe—sometimes at great expense and personal risk—to score a rare find. 

Some collectors focus on geographic regions. Others target tags based on design or color. Numbers are big draws, too, namely low ones, birth dates, the devilish 666 and the code for marijuana, 420. Some seek out diplomatic tags or presidential inaugural ones. Others pursue early porcelain plates or those from countries at war. 

Tags from Vatican City are a holy grail for plate collectors. For enthusiasts of early American plates, it doesn’t get much better than a 1921 Alaska tag, one of which is rumored to have changed hands for $60,000. 

There is a market for humorous plates that call to mind the “Assman” tag meant for a proctologist that instead went to Kramer in an episode of “Seinfeld.” In Maine, where vulgar plates were outlawed in 2021, bidding wars erupt when a good one comes up for sale.

The Super Bowl of plate collecting takes place in July at the annual convention of the 3,000-member Automobile License Plate Collectors Association. This year’s event, in Tulsa, Okla., marks the gathering’s 70th anniversary.  

Craft’s obsession began at age four on road trips with his dad, peering out the back seat window to see how many different state tags he could identify. He later used a disposable camera to shoot out-of-state plates at the airport and malls, collecting them in a scrap book. Craft’s parents took note. “One year, the tooth fairy left me a license plate instead of a couple of bucks,” he said.

Craft memorialized his South Africa mishap on his TikTok account, where he treats his 526,000 followers to lessons on why European plates have no mounting holes, the historical differences between tags from Zimbabwe and Zambia and what features reveal a Sri Lankan plate’s age. 

Craft has traveled to about 70 countries, collecting plates from 181 of the 193 U.N. member nations and about 400 global jurisdictions. He has about 2,000 plates in his core collection and another few thousand for trading.

He isn’t the only extreme plate collector.

During his four-decade collecting career, Dave Stratton has gone to extraordinary lengths to acquire rare tags.

Stratton, 74, a retired international flight crew scheduler at FedEx who lives in Mississippi, at one time was enthralled by plates from tiny, hard-to-reach islands in the Bahamas. A pilot friend with a homemade single-engine aircraft made him an offer.

“He said, ‘I’ve got this plane,’” Stratton said. “If you buy the gas, I’ll fly it. I thought he was joking at first but over the course of two years planning it got more serious.”

The duo eventually flew 1,300 miles in a Bushby Mustang II two-seater aircraft from Olive Branch, Miss., to Mayaguana, Bahamas, population 208. They braved thunderstorms, narrow dirt runways and rocky Caribbean bureaucracy over the four-day journey there and back. “Thank goodness for fax machines,” Stratton blogged after the 2001 trip.

Larry Luxner, a Florida-born freelance journalist based in Israel, has been acquiring plates since the age of 5. In 1994, he was driving in Nicaragua on a highway between Managua and Matagalpa when he came upon the aftermath of a head-on collision. The car’s front was totaled, but the back was preserved.

“So I asked the policeman there if I could take the plate because I’m a collector,” Luxner said. “He produced a screwdriver and handed it to me.”

Luxner still esteems the plate in his nearly 700-piece collection—“Nicaragua Libre MV 1899.”

Bernt Larsson, an 89-year-old Swedish economist who lives in Barcelona, said his 1,000-plate collection began in 1952 with a letter to the AAA from Stockholm.

“I received a very kind letter from the secretary with a license plate from D.C. with a very low number, 1087,” said Larsson, who was first inspired to collect by his father, a member of the Royal Automobile Club of Sweden. “I thought, ‘how nice.’”

Larsson followed that up with letters to other countries. He got a surprising response from police authorities in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1960 when the country was under a military dictatorship.

“They sent me 10 or 12 plates from cars, trucks, from a bus, and then sent me a telegram telling me they had mailed the plates. I was so happy,” said Larsson.

Craft is trying to persuade two friends to travel with him to locations with rare plates such as Nunavut in Canada’s northern Arctic region. His pitch: They can sell tags they acquire to fund the trip’s cost.

“They said, ‘How about we go to Miami? Or England?’ I said, ‘How about Nunavut? Or Turks & Caicos? Or Anguilla?’” he said. “We’re in that stage now of making the math work.”

Write to Robert P. Walzer at robert.walzer@wsj.com

Major manufacturers, fearful they will have to shut down assembly lines, consider moving some parts production to China

Four major automakers are racing to find workarounds to China’s stranglehold on rare-earth magnets, which they fear could force them to shut down some car production within weeks.

Editorial Board

The Senate voted 51-44 on Thursday to free Americans from California’s onerous electric-vehicle mandate. This is a real Liberation Day, and the voters who re-elected President Trump won’t fail to notice when he signs the resolution. Feel free to rev your engines in approval. If Gov. Gavin Newsom hears it loud enough, maybe he won’t sue.

The Senate’s move follows similar action in the House, which this month voted 246-164 for a resolution to rescind a federal waiver that gave a green light to California’s EV mandate. The 1996 Congressional Review Act (CRA) lets lawmakers overturn recent regulations. The President also must sign off, so it typically happens only after a change in power.

More than a century before Tesla rolled out its first cars, the Baker Electric Coupe and the Riker Electric Roadster rumbled down American streets. Battery-powered cars were so popular that, for a time, about a third of New York’s taxis were electric.

But those early electric vehicles began to lose ground to a new class of cars, like the Ford Model T, that were cheaper and could more easily be refueled by new oil-based fuels that were becoming available around the country. Bolstered by federal tax incentives in the 1920s, the oil industry boomed — and so did gasoline-powered cars.

That history has largely been forgotten, and almost all of the early electric cars have disappeared so completely that most people alive today have never seen one — and many have no idea that they even existed. A few specimens are in museums and private collections, including a fully restored Baker Electric that Jay Leno keeps in his sprawling California garage.

Mr. Leno’s ancient electric car has a wooden frame and 36-inch rubber wheels. It looks like a stagecoach, but it is propelled by electric motors and batteries just like a current-day Tesla Model Y or Cadillac Lyriq. It elicited smiles and amazement from people on the streets of Burbank, Calif., when Mr. Leno drove it around town recently.

The car may be a novelty, but it is newly relevant because the United States may be poised to repeat history.

The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are working to undercut the growth of electric vehicles, impose a new tax on them and swing federal policy sharply in favor of oil and gasoline.

Scholars who have studied the earlier age of electric vehicles see parallels in their demise in the early decades of the 1900s and the attacks they are facing now. In both eras, electric cars struggled to gain acceptance in the marketplace and were undermined by politics. A big knock against them was they had to be charged and ultimately were considered less convenient than vehicles with internal combustion engines.

“Electric cars are good if you have a towing company,” President Trump said at a campaign rally in Iowa in October 2023. At another appearance the next month, he said, “You can’t get out of New Hampshire in an electric car.”

Charging and access to fuel were also concerns a century earlier.

Americans in the 1920s wanted to explore the country. But many rural and suburban areas didn’t have electricity. President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a big push to electrify the entire country in 1936 — the last farms were connected to the grid in the early 1970s. That made it difficult to use electric cars in many places.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

The times they are a changin’, especially on progressive climate dogma. On Thursday the House voted in strong bipartisan fashion to overturn the EV mandate the Biden Administration let California impose on the rest of America.

The vote was 246-164 for a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to repeal the waiver that the Environmental Protection Agency granted California for its EV mandate. The waiver provision was written to let California address smog. But Sacramento Democrats lobbied the Biden EPA to let it apply to carbon emissions.

The mandate is ludicrously impossible to meet. It says zero-emissions vehicles would have to account for 43 percent of an auto maker’s sales by 2027 in California and the dozen other states that have signed up for its rules. It rises to 68 percent by 2030.

Major car makers other than Tesla are nowhere near those sales targets. It also amounts to another case of California’s regulatory imperialism on the rest of the U.S. since car makers would have to adjust their assembly lines to meet the Golden State’s standards.

The House vote is especially striking because of the 35 Democratic ayes. That included three of six Democrats from Michigan, three of five from Ohio, four of 12 from Texas, and even two from the High Climate Church of California (Luis Correa and George Whitesides). Let’s hope they’re not excommunicated by Pope Gavin (Newsom) I.

The vote underscores that one salutary effect of the 2024 election is the introduction of at least some economic realism into the climate policy debate. Pressed by big environmental donors, Democrats have been willing to genuflect at whatever demands the climate lobby makes—never mind if they will have no effect on global temperatures. President Trump’s willingness to challenge this orthodoxy has shown Democrats that the political risks aren’t all on one side.

Next up is what we hope will be a Senate vote to repeal the waiver. The CRA says the resolution needs only a simple majority to pass, and Republicans who are skittish can take comfort in the bipartisan House majority. The Democratic roll call will be instructive—especially those are up for re-election in 2026 such as Georgia’s Jon Ossoff and Virginia’s Mark Warner.

The New York Times tried to spin the Senate vote over the weekend by calling the CRA an “obscure law” that threatens the filibuster. Yet Bill Clinton signed the CRA knowing about its provision requiring only 51 Senate votes. It’s especially amusing to see the Times, which claims Mr. Trump is a dictator, criticizing an attempt by Congress to rein in the executive. Reporter Maya Miller never mentions the 35 Democratic votes to repeal the California waiver.

If the resolution passes the Senate, Mr. Trump is expected to sign it after he campaigned explicitly against such mandates last year, notably in car-making states like Michigan. Repealing the waiver would be a good deed for the car companies, auto workers, car buyers and the U.S. economy.