Trade News

WINDSOR -- FCA Canada has taken more physical steps toward restarting production in Windsor, Canada, erecting medical tents in the parking lots of its plants and posting large COVID-19 posters on all its gates.

Four tents, anchored over about 12 parking stalls in the employee lots at the automaker’s minivan plant, went up over the weekend. Company spokeswoman LouAnn Gosselin says similar installations are in place in Brampton, Ont., where FCA builds its sedans.

Employees arriving for work are expected to be screened for a fever before entering the factories to ensure “the daily wellness of our workforce,” the company said.

Each gate now has two COVID-19 placards hung on the fence adjacent to the turnstiles employees funnel through.

The first is a five-question checklist employees must answer before entering the plants. If they answer “no” to any of the five questions, they should not report for work. The se…

UK dealer group Pendragon said on Monday it was no longer exploring merger talks with rival Lookers, after a media report over the weekend said that Lookers rejected its approach.

The coronavirus shutdowns have taken a toll on dealers, which were already struggling with a fall in demand and a squeeze on margins in the past year under the weight of Britain's long-drawn exit from the European Union.

Lookers, which has seen a management shakeup in the past few months, is undergoing a fraud investigation into its operating divisions after an initial probe found misstatements in its balance sheet and fraudulent expense claims.

Sky News had reported that Pendragon approached Lookers about a potential merger last month, but Lookers rejected the approach.

Pendragon declined to comment on whether it was exploring other such combinations.

Lookers is Europe's third-largest dealership group by revenue, according to Automotive News Europe's 2019 Guide t…

Nissan Motor Co. will pull back from Europe and elsewhere to focus on the U.S., China and Japan under a plan that represents a new strategic direction for the embattled carmaker, Automotive News and Reuters reported on Monday.

The "operational performance plan" is due to be announced on May 28 and goes beyond fixing problems from ousted leader Carlos Ghosn's aggressive expansion drive, sourcs told Reuters.

Pursuit of market share, particularly in the U.S., led to steep discounting and a cheapened brand. Under the new, three-year plan, Nissan aims to restore dealer ties and refresh lineups to regain pricing power and profitability, the people told Reuters.

"This is not just a cost-cutting plan. We're rationalizing operations, re-prioritizing and refocusing our business to plant seeds for the future," one of the people said.

The plan also aims to cut competition and expand cooperation with alliance partners, the people said. Nissan will follow Mitsu…

FRANKFURT -- Volkswagen Group is reconsidering which of its brands will develop a new family of small electric vehicles after its Spanish unit, Seat, lost the project.

VW Group CEO Herbert Diess said in March 2019 that Seat would lead development of full-electric city cars that will cost less than 20,000 euros. Diess said they would replace the full-electric versions of the VW Up, Skoda Citigo and Seat Mii and would be "a great step toward an even more affordable electric mobility."

One source close to Seat said the VW brand will now head the project. Executives at VW Group's headquarters in Wolfsburg believe that the decision will be "more efficient in terms of synergies," the source said.

The small EVs will be based on a heavily modified version of VW Group's MEB electric-vehicle architecture shortened to less than 4000 mm (157.5 inches), or roughly the length of the VW Polo.

MEB underpins the VW ID3, a compact hatchback due to launch this summ…

SEOUL -- General Motors' South Korean unit plans to sharply cut output this month at a factory producing its new Trailblazer as the coronavirus outbreak weighs on its U.S. exports and also disrupts parts supplies.

GM Korea is responsible for supplying some of GM's small crossovers to the U.S. market to meet a consumer shift away from sedans. But like its peers industrywide, it is grappling with shrinking exports as demand suffers from governments globally restricting movement to slow the spread of the virus.

GM Korea will run its BP1 plant in Incheon, near Seoul, for seven business days this month and idle it for the remaining 11, showed its internal production plan seen by Reuters.

A spokeswoman said the automaker has suspended the line until May 5 due to the virus impact on parts procurement and U.S. sales, and that its production plan for the rest of May is subject to change.

GM Korea started producing the Trailblazer in January and shipping it…

Vehicle listings company TrueCar on Monday rolled out a new car-buying program for military service members, veterans and their families.

Dubbed "TrueCar Military," the program will offer participants purchase incentives and maintenance benefits, as well as a dedicated customer hotline. TrueCar developed the platform as it prepares to wind down a 13-year partnership with USAA Federal Savings Bank this year.

An expanded military purchase program had been under consideration for some time, CEO Mike Darrow said, but the development timeline was "accelerated" when USAA notified TrueCar in February that it planned to exit its car-buying membership service.

"We knew all along we had military veterans shopping on our site," Darrow told Automotive News. "This was the opportunity for us to kind of expand that."

TrueCar Military will offer up to $2,000 in automaker incentives on brands from BMW, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Nissan, the company said. Additi…

The playbooks Ford Motor Co. will use to restart assembly lines and reopen offices in Europe and the U.S. have been written largely by its team in China, which was first to be hit by — and recover from — the coronavirus outbreak.

As early as February, Ford's salaried employees in China were sending videos to their U.S. counterparts showing how they were working from home and emotionally managing the abrupt changes, providing inspiration for colleagues who would soon be forced to do the same.

By early March, Ford China CEO Anning Chen and other executives shared what they learned about disinfecting vehicles at dealerships, creating safer factory shift patterns and even mining connected-vehicle data to predict recovery patterns.

The tutorials flowing back to Ford headquarters have provided some clarity in an unprecedented crisis that idled factories and choked off revenue.

"They've really helped us tremendously," Ford …

No-interest, seven-year loans did the job.

Maybe even a little too well.

Now, some dealers who worried in March about business evaporating instead fear they'll run out of the pickups their customers are clamoring for.

"The pipeline is very dry," said Mike Maroone, CEO of Maroone USA, which operates five stores in Colorado and one in Florida. Maroone's stores have only a 30-day supply of their top-selling Chevrolet Silverado.

"That is a problem for us," he said.

Pickup inventory at General Motors dealerships was already slimmer than usual in the aftermath of the 40-day UAW strike last fall, but Ram dealers also are feeling inventory pressure. GM and Ram have been particularly aggressive with incentives since the coronavirus crisis began.

With North American auto plants closed since mid-March to protect workers from contracting COVID-19, the most sought-after vehicles have become tough to fin…

Electrification and shared mobility are taking it on the chin during the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

But don't count either industry trend out, says former Ford Motor Co. CEO Mark Fields.

"Electrification has a bright future in the industry, but clearly it is going to be a bit of a collateral damage of COVID," said Fields, now senior adviser with private capital firm TPG Capital. He made the prediction last week as part of the video series "Congress Conversations," the 2020 online version of the Automotive News World Congress.

Electric vehicle and plug-in hybrid adoption rates have probably slowed as the purchasing power of American consumers has been diminished significantly, Fields said, noting that "electrified products are more expensive than [internal combustion engine] products right now."

Fields noted that depressed gasoline prices are also working against EVs, as is the pandemic's pressure on…

Tesla Inc. told furloughed employees on Friday that they will remain out of work for at least another week, postponing a plan to resume normal operations on May 4 at its California  assembly plant, according to an internal email.

"For furloughed employees, unless you are contacted by your manager about a start date, you will remain on furlough until further notice, at least for another week," the company's in-house counsel Valerie Capers Workman said in the email, which was sent to employees and seen by Reuters.

Tesla suspended production at its Fremont, Calif., plant on March 24.

The extension comes days after health officials from San Francisco County, along with five other Bay Area counties, said they would revise shelter-in-place orders that are set to expire on Sunday.

The new orders will keep the restrictions in place and extend them through May, with limited easing for a small number of low-risk activities.

The company was not i…

April 23 was supposed to be a day when about 1,000 children descended upon Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' suburban Detroit headquarters to get a taste of what their parents do every day.

But when the coronavirus outbreak scuttled the plan for "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day," the automaker came up with a Plan B: Bring the workplace to the kids.

FCA found a way to observe the day by creating a virtual experience to give children of its U.S. employees a glimpse into the company.

Its online portal, which came together in about three weeks, gives kids something educational to do while schools are closed and exposes them to the auto industry, said Kelly Tolbert, FCA's vice president of global talent, leadership and learning, who led the effort.

She said the company designed the portal so every department was represented. Youngsters can browse sections on product development, quality, human resources, marketing, design, manufacturing and other spe…