General Motors will be replacing the 120-volt charging cords that come with the Chevrolet Volt after one utility company had their cord melt during charging. There have been other anecdotal reports of malfunctioning cords being replaced by General Motors at fan sites like GM-Volt.com
Leaked plans of GM doing the math on plant closures at Opel enrage Opel’s labor leaders. They already had been miffed by GM’s unwillingness to come to the negotiating table. Now they feel blindsided by math by math exercises at GM that involve the closure of Opel’s Bochum plant, the plant in Ellesmere Port, or both. Read More >
Opel has taken 7,000 pre-orders for the Ampera (aka the Chevrolet Volt), and looks to be on their way to meeting their 10,000 unit goal for 2012.
Journalism profs would admonish us for “burying the lede”, or hiding the most important information way down in the story, rather than putting it at the front where it’s easily accessible. Amy Chozick of the New York Times put that gem at the very end of her article on how General Motors is hiring consultants from MTV, including Ross Martin, quoted above, to help their brand connect with young people. Mr. Martin, take your own advice.
In a surprise attack, the UAW has taken the first formal steps to unionize Volkswagen’s U.S. factory in Chattanooga. In what Reuters calls “an escalation of its effort to establish a foothold outside the Detroit automakers,” the UAW started passing out authorization cards for workers to sign. According to U.S. labor laws, the union needs signatures from at least 30 percent of the workers of a plant before a representation election can go ahead. The UAW’s timing could not have been worse. Read More >
An article in the New York Times Dealbook blog claims that Tesla is using their customer deposits on upcoming models as a major source of cash to finance operations.
General Motors announced a $1 billion investment in their Australian operations, along with a contribution of $285 million by the Australian government at the state and federal levels.
For the second time this year, Volkswagen is increasing headcount at its Chattanooga plant. After hiring 200 new workers in January, Volkswagen now created an additional 800 new jobs. Read More >
It’s not often that automakers go to the trouble of bringing a car to Canada, but refrain from selling it in the United States. With one tenth the population and different homologation laws than the United States, the costs rarely make it worthwhile for automakers to import unique products to the Canadian market.
Looking for a way to stop the chronic bleeding of money at it notoriously loss-making Opel division, GM has been crunching numbers to see what it would cost to close one of its European plants. Bad news for GM stockholders: Relief won’t come cheap, and it won’t come soon. Read More >
Despite rising gasoline prices, America’s newfound appetite for new cars continues. Both J.D. Power and Kelley Blue Book predict very strong auto sales for the month of March. Read More >
Along with a facelift, the 2013 Mercedes-Benz GLK soft-roader will get a BlueTEC diesel option in the United States, in addition to the standard 3.5L V6 gasoline engine (now making 302 horsepower and 273 lb-ft of torque).
I once had a vehicle that sat on my lot for over 9 months. It wasn’t anything too bad. A 1998 Plymouth Grand Voyager in the tannest shade of brown. But no one wanted the thing.
I couldn’t figure it out. Did it have too many miles on it? Did brown all of a sudden become the new purple, orange or lime green? It did have four doors instead of the three door minivan albatrosses that were common during the pre-Y2k era. But I couldn’t get so much as a nibble on it for months on end.
Denial can be a hard pill to cough up. Lo and behold, this is what I figured out.
While Citroen showed some thinly veiled teasers (above) of their DS9 flagship before the car’s debut at the Beijing auto show, spy photographers in France caught the car being photographed at the bustling Place de la Concorde in Paris (click to see the spy shots). The DS9 looks like it will take the C6’s fastback profile even further, with a shape more like a Porsche Panamera – or the original Citroen DS.
Have a Jeep, need a pickup? No problem! For only $595, Crewbed will sell you – a crewbed. Invented by Goodyear, AZ real estate salesman Calvin Williams, the 88 pound collapsible bolt-in platform transforms a JK, TJ or YJ Jeep into a mini-pickup.
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