As the vortices of winter give way to the tornadoes of spring, two automotive weather forecasters predict April 2014 sales to rise 9 percent as consumers head for the showroom floor amid the warming air.
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Several hundred Chrysler minivans are stuck indefinitely on a piece of prime Detroit real estate, unable to be transported across America. The reason? The fossil fuel boom in Canada and the United States is hogging much of the available rail capacity needed to transport the vans.
Autoblog reports the first several thousand kits meant for repairing a handful of General Motors vehicles affected by the February 2014 ignition switch recall have been shipped off to dealers. In addition, 1.4 million recall letters have been mailed out to affected consumers of 2003 – 2007 vehicles; 2008 – 2011 affected owners will receive their letters in the coming weeks. The letters inform consumers to schedule the repair with their dealer, which GM claims will take 90 minutes to complete. Until the repair occurs, the automaker instructs all consumers to have nothing more than the key itself prior to insertion, and to be sure their transmissions and switches are set in place before removing the key.
Earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency put in place 2013 requirements for cellulosic ethanol for automotive use in the United States at 810,000 gallons, an amount far short of the 1 billion gallons Congress desired seven years earlier when the Renewable Fuel Standard Act came into force.
The Dodd-Frank Act, created in the wake of the Great Recession as means to curb the practices by financial corporations that led to the Great Recession in the first place, is now being used to go after an automotive lending company in New York for stealing from its customers.
Though Siemens won’t be putting their name upon the body of BAIC C70G for a DTM entry anytime soon, the Chinese automaker and German industrial giant will come together for an green vehicle-related joint venture in Beijing.
3-Series. 3-Series GT. 3-Series Touring. 4-Series. 4-Series Gran Coupe. X3. X4. Not too long ago, it was simple to decipher BMW’s model lineup and nomenclature. One sausage, many lengths. These days, you need the Rosetta Stone for niche variants to figure out what’s what. But I did have a brief moment of clarity on the floor of the New York Auto Show.
Automotive News reports General Motors has split its engineering division in two, with executives Ken Kezler and Kenneth Morris becoming vice presidents of global vehicle components and subsystems and global product integrity, respectively. The split also means vice president of (what was) global vehicle engineering, John Calabrese will retire, though the retirement is alleged to not be linked with the ongoing recall crisis. The immediate changes are the result of the ongoing review of the ignition switch issue affecting the company since early this year, with the aim of flagging potential safety problems within a product sooner than when the division was united. GM product chief Mark Reuss proclaimed the new divisions “would have expedited a whole bunch of things” had they been in place earlier.
Acura fans hoping to ditch their TL or TSX for an all-new 2015 TLX in time for the start of the summertime driving season will have to make do until sometime later this summer, as the automaker has delayed the launch of its newest sedan.
For those who want a Subaru WRX or WRX STi, but prefer the utility of the previous hatchback over the current sedan offerings, they should start breathing again, as Subaru will not be bringing such a beast to the United States after all.
Currently, around 2.13 million cars will come off-lease by the end of 2014, up from 1.7 million last year. By 2016 and beyond, however, over 3 million vehicles annually will turn up on many a CPO and used car lot, replacing a long drought with an El Niño-esque flooding of the U.S. used car market.
With Ally Financial’s IPO now making the rounds on the New York Stock Exchange, the former financing arm of General Motors has its eyes on taking more of the subprime market, a move benefiting dealers once the last ties to the U.S. federal government have been severed and sold to the stock market.
Though Tesla is now just delivering new vehicles to China, CEO Elon Musk predicts his company will build luxury electric vehicles in the burgeoning market within the next three to four years.
The Huffington Post reports the United Auto Workers has withdrawn its petition with the National Labor Resources Board challenging the results of the February 2014 election regarding organization of the workforce at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.
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