Buick is all about China, where the brand claims more than 5 percent market share.

Buick’s achievements in the United States, once storied, are now not nearly so impressive. Buick’s market share in America today is half what it was in 2002, after volume declined in eight of 14 years, tumbling from more than 430,000 sales 14 years ago to 223,055 last year.

This is part of the Buick story we told you yesterday. In touting record global sales as one of the planet’s fastest-growing volume brands, Buick’s General Motors parent company also made clear that the brand is achieving rapidly increased rates of sales because of the Chinese market, even though U.S. sales are declining, albeit marginally.

Following our managing editor’s press of the publish button, we almost immediately heard from Buick. (Read More…)

General Motors today fêted Buick as the planet’s fastest-growing volume automaker. Ignored in GM’s press release was the Buick brand’s declining volume in Buick’s home market.

As if we needed more evidence that North America is an increasingly unimportant component of Buick’s future plans — Buick is discontinuing the Verano, its most popular car model in the U.S. and the most popular Buick overall in Canada — GM revealed that Buick added more Chinese sales between January and June than the whole U.S. Buick division managed in toto. (Read More…)

General Motors is busy phoning friends and posting on its Facebook wall after it made record net revenue in the second quarter of 2016 and boosted its net profit by 157 percent.

A net revenue of $42.4 billion is a high point for the company, even though the automaker’s global sales were flat compared to this time last year, with 2.4 million vehicles sold. Is it any wonder GM isn’t concerned about its falling market share? (Read More…)

Britain’s recent vote to leave the European Union could cause General Motors to up and leave the country, industry analysts predict.

Production of Vauxhall and Opel vehicles could shift across the Channel if the EU places import tariffs on vehicles bound from Britain, LMC Automotive said in a report, ending GM’s decades-long presence. (Read More…)

General Motors had hoped to put the issue behind it, but a judge’s ruling just opened the automaker up to billions in damages over its faulty ignition switch scandal.

Yesterday, the U.S. Appeals Court of Manhattan ruled that lawsuits filed against the automaker for accidents that happened before the company’s 2009 bankruptcy sale were still valid. The decision overruled an earlier court decision that protected GM from such suits. (Read More…)

General Motors executives are breathing a sigh of relief after the automaker reached a deal with a supplier that threatened to shut down GM’s entire U.S. assembly operation.

The automaker hammered out an agreement with the bankrupt Clark-Cutler-McDermott Company, a supplier of trim and acoustic insulation that GM had been propping up financially since March, the Wall Street Journal reports. (Read More…)

GM is facing off with a key parts supplier in bankruptcy court today, but the drama between it and the Clark-Cutler-McDermott Company started at the same time the automaker handed the company a nice award.

The Massachusetts-based CCM axed its workforce on July 8 and declared chapter 11 bankruptcy, leaving the automaker without the insulation and trim parts needed to build most of its vehicles. A continued disruption in the supply chain would be a massive blow to the automaker, forcing it to shut down assembly plants throughout North America.

Court documents show that at the same time GM was handing CCM a “Supplier of the Year” award at Detroit’s Cobo Center on March 10, CCM had already told GM it had defaulted on a loan and was looking for a handout in order to stay afloat. (Read More…)

A Massachusetts-based parts supplier you’ve probably never heard of could force General Motors’ entire North American operation to grind to a halt.

Clark-Cutler-McDermott Co. stopped making acoustic insulation and trim pieces for GM vehicles on Friday after declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a situation it blames on money-losing contracts signed with the automaker, a source told The Detroit News.  (Read More…)

An anonymous GM employee writes:

I have a field role with General Motors that affords me the luxury of driving (mostly) anything in The General’s portfolio. I can choose from any brand except Cadillac, and can’t drive a Corvette or pickup (because of retail demand and limited supply). I’m 22 with student debt down into the low four digits. GM pays for gas, insurance, and incidentals like oil changes and winter tires because I need a car to do my job. I live in a snow-heavy state where I’m expected to do around 30,000 miles a year for business travel alone. Finally, I switch out cars every four months because that means it remains eligible for new vehicle incentives and programs when it’s sold back to the dealer at a big discount.

Here’s the catch: the vehicle is considered a taxable benefit.

(Read More…)

Cadillac detailed the sources of its so-called global sales surge in June 2016 in a press release yesterday. In so doing, Cadillac called attention to its first-half global sales decline and the global rarity of the wreathless crest.

#Global

Cadillac has reason to pursue (and then tout the results of its) increased global strength (or diminished global weakness). In the United States, Cadillac isn’t doing enough. The three top-selling Cadillac rivals — BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Lexus — generate more U.S. sales than Cadillac does around the world. Globally. Everywhere.

Roughly 13,000 monthly sales in Cadillac’s historic North American market is a figure simply insufficient to secure a bright future for General Motors’ premium brand. Thus, Cadillac now intends to be a global luxury brand, and is in fact making inroads leading toward that goal.  (Read More…)

After TTAC delved into the details of the sixth-generation Chevrolet Camaro’s gradual decline last month, General Motors reported the worst sales month for the Camaro since November 2014.

June 2016 sales of the Chevrolet Camaro fell to a 19-month low. With only 4,969 sales — a huge number by the standards of most sporting cars but a 40-percent drop compared with the Camaro’s five-year June average — U.S. Camaro volume fell below 5,000 units for just the second time in the last 18 months.

Newly launched this past winter, the latest Camaro’s sales have fallen well below the totals achieved by the six-year-old fifth-gen Camaro in its final — and worst — year on the market. In the first-half of 2015, GM reported 42,593 U.S. sales of the Camaro, a 9-percent year-over-year drop. Yet one year later, the new Camaro is down 14 percent to 36,834 units, a drop of 5,759 sales. (Read More…)

“Has GM lost market share? Yes.”
Alan Batey, President, GM North America,
Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2016

From 17.7 percent in the first-half of 2015, General Motors’ U.S. market share tumbled by more than a point to 16.6 percent in the first-half of 2016.

But, GM’s North American president points out in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, profitability is on the rise.

TrueCar estimates that, as a percentage of the average transaction price, GM’s incentive spend in June 2016 fell by half-a-percentage point to 10.9 percent, year-over-year. As for the average transaction price, TrueCar says GM’s rose 6.5 percent in June 2016 to $36,489. That is 9.4-percent higher than Fiat Chrysler Automobile’s June 2016 ATP, which also required greater incentives to achieve according to TrueCar. Meanwhile, Batey wrote in The Journal that GM has “reduced low-margin sales to daily rental companies in the U.S. by 88,500 units.”

This explains the marriage of two conflicting subjects: GM’s decreased volume in a growing market and GM’s corresponding increase in profitability. (Read More…)

Not too long ago, engineers from General Motors and NASA stood around a glove, thinking, we can rebuilt this — better, stronger, more dexterous than before.

Well, they did, and now RoboGlove — a term that conjures up images of a vaguely 1980s dystopian future — will soon get its manufacturing debut at the end of select GM workers’ arms. (Read More…)

General Motors wants better performance from its boosted engines, so it headed to the patent office with a design for a new two-stage turbocharger — one that eliminates the drawbacks of the existing setup.

According to a document published by GM Inside News, the General filed the patent on May 19. The design (mated to a four-cylinder engine) isolates the low-pressure and high-pressure turbines, calling on one or the other (but not both) at different engine speeds and loads. (Read More…)

The United Kingdom, through referendum, has decided to break off from Europe and go it alone. But what of all the auto manufacturers that produce vehicles in the island nation? And of their employees? And trade?

We won’t know the answers to those questions until the UK and European governments sort out how the two entities will work together in the future. For now, it’s business as usual. Though, thanks to Autocar, we at least have reactions from the big players in the UK’s automotive industry.

(Read More…)