Auto Industry Archive

As General Motors and Chrysler dangle from a fraying rope in a cliffhanger reminiscent of The Perils of Pauline, the Obama Administration is throwing them a life preserver in the form of $5.5 billion in last-ditch aid. The bulk of the money, $5 billion, will go to GM to keep it out of bankruptcy through May. Chrysler’s $500 million is life support for the rest of the month as it struggles to...

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Porsche Cars North America is hardly alone as it faces a challenging luxury car market in 2009. In March, the German carmaker reported sales of 1,749 cars and SUVs, compared to 2,467 in the same month last year—a 29 percent drop. For many decades, Porsche built only two-door sports cars, but the 2002 introduction of its Cayenne SUV (bemoaned as the end of the world by Porsche true believers)...

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Gays and lesbians buy a lot of cars, and the auto industry has begun to recognize that. Subaru, for one, has been a sponsor of the Showtime series The “L” Word, and also an advertiser on Viacom’s Logo channel. A new survey (of 3,685 respondents) by Gaywheels.com and Sorgenfrei reveals that 67 percent of both gay male and lesbian car buyers consider it “very or somewhat important” for...

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If General Motors can’t put together a restructuring plan by June 1, it will end up in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, CEO Fritz Henderson said in a conference call today. That’s the strongest statement yet from GM, tying a deadline together with GM contingency plans for bankruptcy. “It’s pretty simple,” Henderson said in a media conference call. “I think we have...

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Electric cars are great, but don’t they just replace pollution from the tailpipe with pollution from the smokestack? And won’t we be building a huge number of power plants—some of them fueled with dirty coal—if put millions of EVs online in the next few years? Well, no. Utilities point out that their existing grids can easily add millions of EVs if the cars and trucks charge up at...

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General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson seems to interpret his marching orders from the president’s auto task force as a mandate to restructure more or less along the lines GM is already doing, only deeper and faster. In the short run, he may be right, even though GM is taking some heat for not thinking out of the box. “The administration has made it clear that it expects GM to expand...

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Will the new name for Detroit be Battery City? The state of Michigan is shaping up as a global center of lithium-ion battery manufacture, thanks to a $1.7 billion deal announced April 14 involving no less than four world-class battery companies. The four are: · Massachusetts-based A123, which will expand operations in Ann Arbor and Novi, Michigan, as well as build a new 300,000-square-foot...

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Maybe Ford really does have a better idea, after all. Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services upgraded Ford Motor Co. earlier this week, but left alone its lower rating for Chrysler and General Motors. S&P analysts earlier were skeptical that Ford was that much better off than Chrysler and GM, even though Ford avoided asking for a government bailout late last year, while Chrysler and...

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BMW sales in the United States are down worse so far in 2009 than they were in 2008. Jack Pitney, marketing vice president for BMW of North America, said that within reason, BMW is OK with the fact that sales are down, as long as profits are maintained. BMW doesn’t break out profits for individual markets. Naturally, BMW would rather sales kept growing forever. But to protect...

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According to the BBMG Conscious Consumer Report, an impressive 77 percent of U.S. consumers agree that they “can make a positive difference by purchasing products from socially or environmentally responsible companies.” The problem, however, is that only 23 percent of those people say they have any way of knowing if a product really is green—or actually can do what it claims. People...

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