Automotive Industry. ● For cars and trucks, under the Net Cost method, 4 gradual increases are set out, which will be adjusted until a Regional Value Content (RVC) of 75% is reached. In the case of heavy vehicles, such increase will be gradually performed until reaching a RVC of 70%. ● Regarding the Labor Value Content (LVC), 4 increases are provided until reaching a 40% in the case of cars and 45% for trucks and heavy vehicles. It is important that for the LVC percentage, the wage of workers that participate in certain parts of the vehicles assembly shall be an average of 16 USD per hour. ● At least 70% of the steel and aluminum purchases performed by assembly companies of light and heavy vehicles shall be originating from the North American region. ● In the case of the light vehicles, 7 auto parts were determined to be originating from the region and in the case of heavy vehicles, 3 categories of auto parts were defined, to which a specific percentage of RVC was designated. Other Products ● Chemical procedures were also added to the agreement, such as chemical reaction, purification, mixtures, particle size changes and biotechnology processes. ● Obsolete rules of origin for televisions and electronic manufactured goods were eliminated, and criteria on change of tariff classification and RVC with different percentages are maintained. ● For certain steel intensive products, titanium products and optical fiber, the raw material (steel, titanium or glass) is required to be originating from the region; moreover, the RVC provision was included. Textiles Regarding textile goods, they shall be produced, cut and/or assembled in the region, from yarns originating from one of the Parties. Furthermore, the origin certification was extended for folkloric textile goods produced by indigenous communities from the region. Origin verification procedures will be stricter; surprise site visits by the Authorities were included. Dairy Products The United States and Canada reached an agreement in which Canada will allow the duty free importation of certain US dairy products under a specific yearly basis quota depending on the type of product. Dispute settlement The dispute settlement mechanism State-to-State is maintained, which allows the Parties to settle disputes on the interpretation, application and the scope of the Agreement. Other topics related to the financial services, government procurement, anticorruption, and the recognition of the Mexican direct, inalienable and imprescr...
Automotive Industry. The automotive industry has changed over the course of last century. Vehicles has been emerged over the years, with better engine performance, updated handling features, lower power consumption and finally sophisticated safety systems. During the course of the recent years the focus area for the vehicle OEMs has been the safety. Typical safety system like seat belt has been introduced since last century. The modern three point seat belt took a bit some years until was been introduced [19]. Some year earlier airbags has been added as well, as an additional safety measure [20]. The past 10 years automotive industry has been evolved with exponential steps towards a totally new direction. The complete paradigm of the vehicle industry has been changed by introducing more electronic parts. Modern cars have more than 60 ECUs and most of their crucial subsystems (engine, brake system, passive safety systems) are running software, which controls the behaviour of any given feature. The growth in vehicles embedded electronics, brought a noticeable increase in the software side as well. According to McKinsey’s Academy study the Software Lines of Code (SLOC) has been increased from 10 million to 150 million SLOCs in less than 10 years [21]. There is one main architectural decision, which needs to be considered as the first step during the developement phase of an E&E architecture, the distributed vs centralized architecture [22]. The second decision on the pipeline concerns the target safety level of the subcomponents of the vehicle. Finally on the third place comes the cyber security [23]. Another major change, which the automotive indus- try needs to prepare to face, it is the larger connectivity needs and bandwidths, which will come with the 5G [24]. This additional connectivity it is generating a larger threat towards the vehicle. According to an Upstream report, the past 4 years cyber attacks in the connected side of the vehicle, they increased 6 times [25]. Another intersted trend, which can reveal the report it is the increase in the delta between the remote vs physical attacks. The ratio during 2013-2014 was almost 1:1. During 2018 the ratio it was almost 1:5 in favor of the remote attacks [25]. The ECUs are interconnected in different type of architectures which differs in every OEM. Independently of the architecture in a modern vehicle, it is possible to find four different protocols for in-vehicle communication networks, Ethernet, Flexray, CAN and Lin. The...
Automotive Industry. The South African new vehicle manufacturing industry plans, collectively, to invest in excess of R15 billion, over the course of the next five years, in automotive product, local content and export development and the expansion of the industry's productive infrastructure.
