Trade News

Barbara and Porterfield Wilson were a dynamic dealer duo well known in Detroit's Black community in the 1970s and beyond.

During their lifetimes, they were avid boaters and moved in a social circle that included former Mayor Coleman Young, according to dealers and others who knew them.

The couple owned Porterfield Wilson Pontiac-GMC Truck in Detroit and Honda and Mazda dealerships in nearby Ferndale, Mich. Barbara became the industry's first Black female dealer principal, overseeing the Honda store.

In the early 1960s, before Porterfield started selling cars, he helped build them at a Chrysler-Plymouth factory in Detroit on the night shift and had a part-time side hustle during the day as a pharmacy clerk, recalled Joe Gordon, a longtime family friend who was once the couple's Pontiac sales manager.

It was during his day job that Porterfield made connections that led to him selling cars at a Detroit Chrysler-Plymouth dealership. Gordon called Po…

Red McCombs describes himself as "a wheeler-dealer."

"There has never been a deal he didn't want to buy," said his grandson, Joe Shields, "and then, for the right price, there hasn't been a deal he isn't willing to sell."

Shields, vice president of McCombs' namesake dealership group, Red McCombs Automotive in San Antonio, said his grandfather counts upward of 400 businesses that he has owned during his career. Some succeeded. Others did not. But McCombs, his grandson said, was skilled at recognizing a bad bet and exiting quickly.

His successes, starting in the early 1950s with used-car lots in Corpus Christi, Texas, eventually would become McCombs Enterprises — a venture that, besides automotive, includes real estate, ranching, energy and philanthropy.

His auto retail business ranks No. 69 on Automotive News' list of the top 150 dealership groups in the U.S., with retail sales of 13,905 new vehicles in 2021. Shields, also director of business de…

The first 2023 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 produced by General Motors was delivered this month to dealer Rick Hendrick, who bought it for $3.6 million at a charity auction in January.

Hendrick, a noted Corvette collector and CEO of Hendrick Automotive Group, also bought the first 2023 Z06 convertible for $1 million.

SAN DIEGO — The used-car market perseveres, but industry experts warn the conditions that allowed dealers to sell with ease and vigor in 2021 no longer exist. And dealers are buckling down to be ready for the changes afoot.

2023 is shaping up to be a year of caution and diligence on the used-car side, according to dealers, used-car-related company leaders and analysts who convened at the Used Car Week event in San Diego last week. Some are bracing for what could become severe destruction of used-car demand but say it has not yet reared its head. Still, speculation of recession and signs of a more prolonged slowdown are pushing players in the market to tighten their belts and get ready.

That's already happening at traditional dealerships and at online upstarts such as Carvana Co., which last week said it was cutting 1,500 jobs, or 8 percent of its work force.

"Making sure that you kind of batten down the hatches and get ready for …

Thierry Bollore's two-year stint as CEO of Jaguar Land Rover was memorable for failing to generate a single profitable quarter during a period when rival luxury automakers were posting record margins.

The Financial Times in the United Kingdom reported it was Bollore's inability to mitigate the industry's microchip shortage that prompted JLR owner Tata Motors to push for his resignation. Tata said he will step down effective Dec. 31 for "personal reasons."

In what will presumably be his last public appearance with JLR, Bollore spoke passionately on this month's quarterly results call about the chip crisis.

"We should not forget that the supply of chips is really a crisis in our sector," he said, adding that it would take "years" before the situation returned to normal.

As a smaller player in the industry, JLR found it harder to get much-needed deals with chip makers amid the supply squeeze. In September, one supplier sever…

Police in Michigan said a group of more than 20 people broke into a vehicle holding lot last week, had a shootout with a security guard before making off with 13 vehicles and led officers on a lengthy high-speed chase.

One of the thieves died after crashing a 2022 Ford Mustang he had taken, according to TV station Fox 2 in Detroit, and students at Oakland University were told to shelter in place for five hours after police found another stolen vehicle abandoned on campus and assumed the suspects were still armed.

It wasn't clear whether the lot where the vehicles were stolen was affiliated with a dealership or an auto auction. The vehicles taken were expensive, high-powered models from multiple brands.

Police recovered seven of the 13 vehicles but had located only one suspect, aside from the Mustang driver who died, ABC 12 in Flint reported. They said large-scale vehicle thefts have become increasingly common in the area, but that…

General Motors says it will generate more revenue from electric vehicles in 2025 than crosstown rival Ford Motor Co. brought in from its F-Series pickup line last year.

More importantly, those EVs will be "solidly profitable" by then, GM says, with margins nearly matching those of its internal combustion vehicles. And it plans to build a lot of EVs — 1 million a year at five North American assembly plants, a pace that will require at least three U.S. battery plants to build a total of 1.2 million cells a day.

GM is projecting low- to mid-single-digit margins on EVs by mid-decade, when emissions credits and software and aftersales revenue are included. It expects to generate more than $50 billion in revenue from EVs and $225 billion in total revenue in 2025.

That compares with global revenue of $127 billion for GM in 2021. Ford has said it generated nearly $40 billion from selling about 850,000 F-Series in North America last year.<…

North American factories were forced to eliminate another 79,000 vehicles from their production plans this week because of ongoing shortages of microchips, according to AutoForecast Solutions.

As the industry nears the end of a second full year of the shortages worldwide, automakers still face more schedule changes to deal with the problem.

According to AFS’ latest forecast, microchip shortages will have knocked 4.4 million vehicles out of global production plans by the end of  2022. That is nearly 400,000 more vehicles than already have been eliminated this year — and with barely a month left in the 2022 calendar.

AFS indicates that China’s auto factories have been relatively spared from the chip crisis this year.

Source: AutoForecast Solutions Inc. autoforecastsolutions.com