Fritz Henderson could not save Saab.
Victor Muller could not save Saab.
Vladimir Antonov could not save Saab
Pang Qinghua could not save Saab.
Rachel Pang could not save Saab.
Now, Barack Obama is supposed to save Saab.
At least that’s how the Swedish metalworker union IF Metall sees it. (Read More…)
What was highly probable yesterday is definite: GM will shift production of the Astra compact from Germany to Ellesmere Port, England. Workers at the UK plant agreed nearly to a man and a woman (approval rate 94 percent) to a deal with GM that keeps Ellesmere Port open and that spells the near certain doom of Opel’s plant in Bochum.
Workers agreed to a four-year deal that freezes wages for two years, and that allows only moderate rises of around 3 percent for the following two years, Reuters heard from a source. The source also said: (Read More…)
Yesterday, we brought you the bad news about European auto sales in April. You are a gearhead, you don’t care about market share and percentiles, you care about cars! Here is how cars fared in Europe in April. Are you safely buckled-up? (Read More…)
Listening to the news from Europe, one thinks that there is chaos in the streets of Europe. Not yet. But Europeans are clearing room for chaos by buying fewer cars. 1,017,912 new passenger cars were registered in the EU, or 6.9 percent less than in the same month of 2011. Four months into the year, new registrations in the EU were 7.5 percent lower than a year earlier, the European manufacturers association ACEA reports. (Read More…)
Tomorrow, Thursday morning, GM will most likely announce that the new Opel Astra will be built at the Ellesmere Port plant near Liverpool, and no longer in Germany. This ends weeks of hard-nosed gamesmanship, where one plant was played against the other. (Read More…)
It was 1972, 40 years ago, when BMW did something that many would later imitate: Much to the chagrin of its own engineers, who were convinced they already had the hottest cars imaginable, and that to touch them meant to desecrate their creations, BMW decided to put the tuners out of business, and created the M series.
Allegedly, the M stood for “Motorsport.”
Today, I happened to be at Toyota’s Tokyo headquarters in order to personally get to the bottom of numbers nobody seems to care about. There was a minor riot in the usually zen-like lobby of 1-4-18 Koraku, Bunkyo-ku. TTAC was there to investigate … (Read More…)
While GM is withdrawing from Facebook advertising, over in Europe, Opel does the opposite: Opel spent untold budget amounts to hire Orlando Higginbottom, better known as Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. The hot UK producer, remixer and DJ was hired to flog … clicks to Facebook. (Read More…)
You would have to travel far to shoot (bad boy as you are) a Bali tiger. Germany’s Auto, Motor und Sport Magazin did not have to travel further than the Golfanlage Schloss Nippenburg to shoot themselves a Macan. Macan is Indonesian for tiger, better known as the name for Porsche’s upcoming SUVlet. (Read More…)
In case you have surplus cash sitting around, doing absolutely nothing, hang on to it until the end of 2013. This is when Porsche finally wants to crank up production of its Über-Porsche, the 918 Spyder. Porsche has finished the initial prototypes, which are cleverly camouflaged: If you see something whizzing by, and you think to yourself: “This looked just like a Porsche 917 race car,” then you actually saw a 918 in drag. (Read More…)
Need an excuse for getting fat for lack of exercise? Buy Honda’s latest invention, and you won’t even have to walk to the bathroom anymore, assuming a barrier-free environment. Honda presents the UNI-CUB, the first vehicle you steer with your ass. (Read More…)
Car sales in China have become headline material the world over. However, numbers are often reported without checking, and even more often reported erroneously. Yesterday, we were tracking two reports of Chinese car sales, January-April. One set of data was from China’s official manufacturer association CAAM, the other from Reuters. They did not quite match. A day later, the confusion is even bigger. (Read More…)
Minutes after Ally Financial, the bs-artist formerly known as GMAC, took its Residential Capital bankrupt, David Shepardson tweeted to his followers that all is fine:
“GM owns 9.9% of Ally Financial Inc, while
@USTreasuryDept owns 74 percent” (Read More…)
Dayna Hart, GM China’s Director of Communications, and resident of Shanghai, has been shanghaied as a spokesperson for an amazing new weight loss product on Twitter. (Read More…)
A lot of the Opel news seen below emanated from an all hands meeting at Opel’s ancestral home in Rüsselsheim. Opel CEO Karl-Friedrich Stracke explained the restructuring plan for Opel. According to German media reports, Stracke delivered more questions than answers. According to Reuters Germany, “the management of the lossmaking GM subsidiary did not contribute to a heightened confidence of employees.” The impression is that the management has no plan. (Read More…)
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