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As the historic UAW strike enters its third week, dealers hope preparation will be enough to cushion the blow and keep service departments humming as the labor unrest hits closer to home with more than three dozen parts facilities being taken offline by the union's latest tactic.

UAW President Shawn Fain announced on Friday that 38 General Motors and Stellantis parts distribution centers in 20 states that package and ship parts used to repair customers' vehicles will join the strike. This could negatively impact dealership service departments to repair and maintain vehicles, which can account for at least half of a store's annual profits.

"All dealerships across the country have got a shop full of customers' cars that need to be repaired," said Ben Keating, owner of Keating Auto Group, which includes two GM dealerships and four Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram stores throughout Texas.

Despite the impact, Keating said the decision to strike at the parts distribut…

Automakers and their retailers are getting creative in the race for service technicians.

In February, Mercedes-Benz USA partnered with Job Corps to grow its technician ranks. In March, Ford Motor Co. announced a $1 million scholarship fund for future technicians in four U.S. cities.

And Volvo Cars, in an effort to recruit more female technicians, has redesigned its shop uniforms to better suit women.

Female technicians typically have to wear ill-fitting uniforms designed and sized for men. So Volvo aimed to create a uniform that would fit women without making them stand out among their peers.

"While the existing uniforms are meant to be gender neutral, the feedback we received from our female technicians was that the cut and fabric was made with a man's traditional build in mind," said Volvo Car USA and Canada marketing head Leigh Moynihan. Several "female technicians flagged the need for a specific uniform to better …

Aaron Zimmerman vividly recalls the aha moment when he realized service advisers at the dealership group where he worked several years ago knew nothing about the very metrics used to rate their performance — and determine their pay.

"I was in a meeting with a general manager who was getting on his advisers pretty hard about a decline in their key performance indicators, like hours per repair order and effective labor rate," said Zimmerman, a corporate fixed ops director at the time. "And I saw a lot of blank faces."

Nobody knew what an effective labor rate was, said Zimmerman, a 2023 Automotive News 40 Under 40 honoree and now corporate fixed ops director at Len Stoler Automotive Group. The group owns 10 stores in Maryland and New York.

"We wanted to hold advisers accountable to certain KPIs, but it's hard for them to do that if they haven't been taught what they are," he said. "You can't change or improve on what you don't know."…

The Maybach lineup at Mercedes is about to expand beyond current high-end versions of the S-Class sedan and two SUVs — the EQS and the GLS.

Mercedes-Maybach is planning additional vehicles under the brand's Myth and Legend models — which are ultraexpensive, come in limited runs or are more exclusive one-offs commissioned by wealthy collectors, Car and Driver reported. Legend" models are more prestigious, with pricing of $1 million or more.

The magazine said a new Mercedes-Maybach SL roadster, which "will boast more bling per square inch of sheet metal than any other passenger car this side of a Kahn or Mansory conversion," is also in the works.

"We are going to turn Maybach into kind of a coachbuilt super Mercedes which lifts personalization to a whole new level," a senior company official told Car and Driver.

Future Maybach models will feature unique body panels and made-to-measure body-in-white.

BMW is pl…

A former Nissan and Gulf States Toyota executive is joining AutoNation Inc. as its new COO.

Jeff Parent, 58, will start Oct. 16, the company said. He brings an extensive background in areas including sales, supply chain management, business strategy, and operational and strategic initiatives, according to the hiring announcement. Parent will be tasked with overseeing AutoNation's daily operations, working with other members of the leadership team to enact the company's strategic plans and boost efficiency.

He will get paid an annual base salary of $800,000, receive a one-time sign-on cash payment of $1.5 million and participate in the company's annual incentive compensation program. AutoNation also is issuing him various one-time stock payments and making him eligible for annual performance-based stock compensation, according to a regulatory filing Monday.

CEO Mike Manley said in a statement that Parent is "a proven leader with an excellent track record…

By escalating the strike against the Detroit 3 to include 38 General Motors and Stellantis parts distribution centers across 20 states, UAW President Shawn Fain is elevating the plight of thousands of the union's lowest-paid full-time auto workers who would benefit most from the record contracts he's demanding.

He's also threatening the service business at Chevrolet, GMC, Jeep and Ram dealerships around the U.S. that need shipments from those 38 facilities to repair customers' vehicles. The largest of them fulfills 15,000 orders for GM Genuine and ACDelco parts a day.

Most parts depot employees start at around $16 an hour and top out at $24, vs. top pay of $32 at assembly and powertrain plants. If put on the same pay scale as most other workers — and given raises totaling 20 percent, as the automakers have proposed — some workers' wages would nearly double by 2027 to about $40 per hour.

"It means everything to me," said Eric Ray, a worker on the newly f…

Imports from China to the U.S. saw a surge in August, in part thanks to a rush for back-to-school shopping. With a predicted uptick in demand this peak holiday season comes renewed optimism for an industry rebound.

In fact, the National Retail Federation has reported that this year's back-to-school shopping season was going to be a big one. Spending was expected to reach around $41 billion, nearly doubling pre-pandemic spending of $26 billion in 2019. Each household is also likely to have spent more, increasing from $697 to $890 per person for this year, without considering price increases.

Further, the Global Port Tracker report from the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates predicts that the import cargo volume at significant U.S. container ports will hit 2 million TEUs during September and October.

“If you look at the U.S., the market looks relatively upbeat.” — Christian Roeloffs, CEO, Container xChange

The Container Market Forecaster’s …

<!--*/ */ /*-->*/ Toyota Research Institute sees room for human touch

LOS ALTOS, Calif. — A mock grocery store inside a Toyota Research Institute laboratory here presents challenges for a humanoid robot plying the aisles.

The robot must know where items on its shopping list are located and how to navigate within reach. It must understand how much each product weighs and how it's packaged.

Should the robot use pincers affixed to its right arm to grab an object — such as a milk jug — or the vacuum-based suction tube on its left hand to pluck a product from the shelf and place it in the cart?

There's a fervor around the burgeoning robotics industry, which Boston Consulting Group projects will rise to $160 billion to $260 billion in annual market sales by 2030 from about $40 billion now. But such bullish outlooks remind Max Bajracharya, senior vice president of robotics at the institute, of another much-ballyhooed technology.

"It is ro…

The UAW's strategy of having targeted strikes against the Detroit 3 aims to damage the companies' reputations and "keep them wounded for months," according to private messages written by a top aide to the union's president.

The messages, obtained Thursday by Automotive News, indicate that the union's goal is to extract gains from the automakers by pitting them against each other instead of using the pattern bargaining approach of past negotiations. They were viewed by top executives at the companies and have added to concerns among them that the union hasn't been bargaining in good faith, according to two sources with knowledge of the negotiations.

Stellantis called the comments by UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman, posted in a group chat on the X social media platform, "incredibly disturbing." They were first published Thursday evening by The Detroit News.

Furman did not respond to requests for comment from Automotive News. Reached by The Detroi…

Automotive News reporter Michael Martinez takes a closer look at one of the most complicated issues of UAW-Detroit 3 negotiations: worker tiers. The UAW strike idles a GM plant and prompts Stellantis layoffs. Plus, a Detroit-based seating supplier lays off workers.

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A Detroit area Ford dealership owned by auto retail giant Lithia Motors Inc. "let go" an employee who posted an inflammatory comment about the UAW on social media — around the time thousands of Ford workers went on strike last week.

Suburban Ford of Ferndale on Sunday posted an apology on its Facebook page for "hateful" comments it said were made by "a former parts department employee." The dealership's post has since been taken down.

The employee had made several comments on a Facebook page geared for UAW members to talk about contract negotiations with the Detroit 3.

It was not immediately clear when the worker made the comments or what post they were responding to. But in screenshots shared over the weekend, the employee said in one comment: "Umm how about they want to work 32 hours but get paid for 40 hours.....?" In another, they wrote, "I work for a Ford dealership so depending on how bad this gets it could affect me." In a third comment, they wro…

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