Auto Industry Archive

GM is officially dropping Saab Automobiles, after close to 20 years of failure to grow the quirky little Swedish car company into a bigger, more prestigious, more mainstream brand. GM had Saab under “strategic review” but couldn’t find a buyer. At the same time, GM is also seeking a buyer for Hummer. It is also downsizing the Pontiac brand, and it could drop the Saturn brand as...

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NEW YORK — Despite the guardedly optimistic business plan Chrysler submitted to the U.S. Treasury Department this week, Chrysler as it exists today is likely to be out of business within a year, said Craig Cather, president and CEO of CSM Worldwide. “We don’t see Chrysler operating in its present form a year from now. We expect it to be split up or spun out so that certain...

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Chrysler insists it can survive on its own as a smaller company, even without its planned alliance with Fiat, but at the same time, the company said that to survive, it will need more government loans than originally expected. That’s going to hand a lot of ammunition to Senate Republicans and other opponents of a government bailout of the U.S. auto industry. “We are pursuing...

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ROME–There are still battered examples of the Fiat 500 that the Italian auto giant produced from 1957 to 1975 on the streets of the Eternal City, but they are gradually being replaced by the very sleek and very retro Panda-based 500 introduced in 2007. This is the car Fiat, through its pending alliance with Chrysler, might be producing in Mexico for North American distribution. Fiat...

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Demand for used cars has picked up, but that’s not necessarily good news for new-car demand, according to the used-car auction firm ADESA Inc. New-car demand and used-car demand usually move roughly in tandem. Lots of new-car purchases mean lots of trade-ins. However, at this point in the business cycle it looks as if there is some substitution, where consumers who would normally buy a...

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It’s going to be a real mess, having the U.S. government intimately involved with running Chrysler and GM, based on what’s happening in France, where government loans to France’s two big automakers, Renault and PSA Peugeot Citroen have touched off a chain reaction of controversies in less than a week. The French government on Feb. 9 approved about $8.4 billion worth of loans...

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  There are now 200 high-performance electric Tesla Roadsters in customers’ hands, but still at least 1,000 waiting for their keys. This situation is producing pent-up demand: in September, some eager beaver paid $160,000 for a used example of this $109,000 sports car. I encountered my first East Coast Tesla being polished in a lower Manhattan exotic car dealership this week. It’s a...

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As bad as 2008 was for the global auto industry, the outlook for 2009 is even worse, according a gloomy Fitch Ratings report this week. The Fitch report underscores that the auto industry downturn has spread from mature markets like the United States, Japan and Western Europe to previously fast-growing developing markets like India and China. “Weak GDP growth and the effects of the...

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Obtaining an auto loan just got harder to do for those Americans in the market for used vehicles. AmeriCredit Corp., a leading lender of auto financing to those with sub-prime credit (scores less than 630), said it had breached the net charge-off covenant on its master warehouse facility above the ceiling limit of 8.5 percent for its six-month average default rate. This news comes as no...

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When you add up all the cuts, Chrysler, Ford and GM are well on their way to cutting half their employees in North America in just over five years. That’s staggering, especially since most of those cuts have taken place in just the last two years.   GM announced the latest cut on Feb. 10. GM said it will cut 10,000 white-collar jobs worldwide in 2009, including about 3,400 in the United...

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