Slashdot Mirror
GM To Idle Five Factories In North America, Cut More Than 14,000 Jobs As It Focuses On Autonomous, Electric Vehicles (chicagotribune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Chicago Tribune: General Motors will cut up to 14,000 workers in North America and put five plants up for possible closure as it abandons many of its car models and restructures to cut costs and focus more on autonomous and electric vehicles. The reduction includes about 8,000 white-collar employees, or 15 percent of GM's North American white-collar workforce. Some will take buyouts while others will be laid off. Four factories in the U.S. and one in Canada could be shuttered by the end of 2019 if the automaker and its unions don't come up with an agreement to allocate more work to those facilities, GM said in a statement Monday. Another two will close outside North America. The company has marked a sedan plant in Detroit, a compact car plant in Ohio, and another assembly plant outside Toronto for possible closure. Also at risk are two transmission plants, one outside Detroit and another in Baltimore. GM CEO Mary Barra said the company is "still hiring people with expertise in software and electric and autonomous vehicles, and many of those who will lose their jobs are now working on conventional cars with internal combustion engines," reports Dallas News. "Barra said the industry is changing rapidly and moving toward electric propulsion, autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing, and GM must adjust with it."
The restructuring comes as the U.S. and North American auto markets are shifting away from cars toward SUVs and trucks. "In October, almost 65 percent of new vehicles sold in the U.S. were trucks or SUVs," reports Chicago Tribune. "It was about 50 percent cars just five years ago."
The restructuring comes as the U.S. and North American auto markets are shifting away from cars toward SUVs and trucks. "In October, almost 65 percent of new vehicles sold in the U.S. were trucks or SUVs," reports Chicago Tribune. "It was about 50 percent cars just five years ago."
I'm torn between feeling sorry for and laughing at the folks that voted for Trump because of his promises to keep factories open.
Its due to falling sales. If they were successfully focusing on electric they'd still need production capacity. Note part of their 'focus on electric' involves cancelling the Volt, probably their best selling vehicle with electric as the primary power source.
People are buying SUVs and trucks. Most manufacturers are doing the same type of restructuring at this point.
is a big factor. They're building more cars then they can sell in 7-9 months. They could run the factories longer but then they'd have to cut the price on their cars more than it's worth.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The retards at the top of the company failed to keep up with the pace of innovation and failed to continue to produce good product.
Now their turd of a company is circling the toilet bowl.
Survival of the fittest.
Just like politicians abruptly resign to focus on their families.
Steel and aluminum tariffs couldn't possibly affect GM profitability, now could they?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
it's not exactly rocket science to retool a factory in 2018. Or put another way, why don't they have to retool the factories to keep up with demand? They're cutting 15,000 jobs. If they were just shifting product lines there'd be no job losses.
You won't see a lot of talk about jobs being automated away though because, well, the folks running the pro-corporate media aren't allowed to cover those stories too often; if at all. They're all owned by the same folks (everybody sits on everybody else's board of directors at that level) and as a rule you do not piss off your boss.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Oh, wait. Wand. Magic. Lookie over here, not over there. MyGod! DEVASTATING Mueller Report! GOP. IS. DEAD.
What's "fun" is when known liars pull shit out of their ass like Wump just did and present it as fact? Not really...
We build autonomous electric creimers. The future is about to get a whole lot weirder!
25% of raw material is enough to measure you lying moron.
They've come out already and told the Canadian governments and union that the plant in Canada that is mentioned in this story will be closing down next year no matter what.
Though the union thinks it's going to stop the closure.
Whether Trump is to blame or not, this news coupled with Ford's troubles have me wondering if a recession is nigh and how bad it'll be.
If it happens I'm sure Agolf Twitler and his sycophants will try to blame Obama.
And they won't have a clue what to do.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Seriously, like NUMMA, it would be useful to buy one of these plants with equipment that works. They could get MY, Semi, and perhaps Roadster up quickly. Nevada is supposed to gear up to 105 GW worth of Li-ion batteries.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
GM has been making cars & trucks for a long time.
They don't seem particularly good at it (in terms of quality or price).
Not to mention safety. Any car can have safety defects - issue a recall and fix the problem. But not GM. GM cracks down on whistleblowers and makes them suffer.
Current GM employees know the score - don't mention these kinds of problems and you won't be fired (at least for now).
https://www.theverge.com/2014/...
https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/...
Unless they are making Soylent Green, cutting them seems a little drastic, no?
I hope Doug Ford uses the notwithstanding clause to SHUT. THEM. DOWN.
Real Canadians don't support unions.
"If you want to talk about spiraling debt, you should have seen it explode during the eight years of 0bama!" -Dishonest Republican problems again?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/01/15/obamas-federal-debt-grew-at-a-slower-rate-than-reagan-h-w-bush-or-w-bush/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/us/politics/trump-stock-market-national-debt-fact-check.html
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/09/obamas-final-numbers/
This is an example of how companies die, often a slow and protracted death ...
GM (and Ford) say: people are not buying sedans, so we will be focusing on autonomous cars that are rented, ...etc.
Meanwhile, Tesla is making a killing selling sedans, and there is a long waiting list for its cars!
GM, Ford and Chrysler have the plants that can produce the majority of what goes into a car: chassis, assembly line, ...etc. An electric motor is not a big deal to make. Batteries are the challenge, but there are Japanese companies willing to sell them.
The conventional car companies are like BlackBerry a decade ago: they saw Apple launch the iPhone in 2007 and ignored it. They said no one wants touch screen, everyone wants a 5 day batter, everyone wants a keyboard, ...etc. Then they watched Google do the exact same thing in 2008, and ignored it. They were complacent, they were arrogant, they were incompetent.
Same thing happens in the auto sector now ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
There's no law on who gets to call themselves a liberal or conservative. Any idiot can claim they are liberal, without even knowing what it means. Knowing that you should be more careful about making broad generalizations, unless your post was purely for pejorative pleasure.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Electric car research is how you get investors excited and stock prices up. Perhaps some executives at GM are looking to cash out!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Or as I like to call them, "tall station wagons".
Does anyone know whether SUVs are exempted from the gas mileage requirements? If so, then that means they can "unfairly" be "better" than cars, in the eyes of the consumers.
How many tons of steel do you think are in a modern car? Can you multiply? Twit.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
GM invested millions of dollars into the EV1 program for their electric car in the 90s. They were positioned to be a global leader in EV technology...until those far sighted C-Suite geniuses at GM killed it.
" The steel content of a modern car costs about $50." = you are a lying moron. That's just math.
That is how GM pursues electric cars.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That's your beloved capitalism, baby.
Those fancy EV's didn't trigger any huge bonuses for the geniuses, nor did they fill the pockets of the shareholders within three months, so it had to go. That's how it works, you drain every last bit of immediate profit available in a company, run it into the ground, and then you merrily skip away to the next company where you repeat the process.
Fuck the future, and fuck the people working for the company, it's all about the next quarter.
" The steel content of a modern car costs about $50." = you are a lying moron. That's just math. What other conclusion could anyone come to? Get honest with the world before you die, that's my advice you weird old loser.
How do you know this?
Moving them to S. Korea are they?
The company also said it will stop operating two additional factories outside North America by the end of next year, in addition to a previously announced plant closure in Gunsan, South Korea.
You truly are the most stupendous idiot imaginable...
Basically, anything that has a trunk can't sell. Nobody is selling them. The Honda accord isn't even selling. Even AWD cars aren't selling, so it's not the Crossover/SUV fad driving down car sales.
Simply put, No one wants to deal with the tiny trunk that a coupe or sedan has when a hatchback has a ton more cargo space, Especially when the rear seats are folded down. The writing's been on the wall for years too. Ten years ago everybody wanted either a crossover or a small stationwagon. GM knew this when they designed the Cruize, that's why they had two versions of it. The hatchback sells well, the sedan does not.
It would be smarter for GM to keep Lordstown active building hatchback cruzes instead of sedans since they are so similar, convert the volt and bolt into a hatch and build both of them in Hamtramck, and switch Oshawa over to truck manufacturing, but who knows whats going through their head right now.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
The usual nonsense story about autonomous vehicles, always just over the horizon! Autonomous vehicles that are going to solve all of our urban environmental problems, like a sort of magic! Never mind that one has ever ridden in an autonomous vehicle that was able to do anything more complicated than make a right hand turn. There are no magic cars on the streets of Los Angeles or New York City, able to drive without a driver. Yet somehow GM is banking on this future. Are the MBAs and the tech reporters really this dumb? I suppose they must be.
I think GM's political maneuvering was a wise decision with the EV-1.
The California legislature wanted to require the car companies sell a certain percentage of electric cars by the early 00s. Back then, lithium ion battery tech wasn't mature. The first commercial lithium ion battery was released around ~1990. California would have required billions of dollars of investment in a soon to be obsolete technology.
but he kept jobs for the workers - if he'd let them go bust, things would have been worse for the economy as it would have killed all the jobs around the factories as well that relied on the workers buying from.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
GM should have never been bailed out by the government under Bush and Obama.
The tech and car companies say that is the future, but I sure as hell don't want a self driving car.
Low-end sedans are all basically the same - it hardly matters which one you buy. The old "GM sucks" thing isn't really true any more.
I can rattle off a bunch of problems with German cars; Audi failed timing chains against a firewall, VW engines clogged with soot, BMW engine failures of many causes - yet people still buy them.
Consumer preferences are changing. Those conscious about fuel economy prefer hybrids and electrics. Those Eco-conscious that can afford it buy pure electric. Those that are less Eco-conscious buy trucks and SUVs.
This trend has little to do with tariffs or build quality.
Many of us voted for Trump simply because we did not want Hillary picking the next 3-4 supreme court justices.
If Hillary runs again in 2020 - Trump is a lock.
you forget that the point is not to ensure the long-term profitability of the company but bolster the short-term stock price.
California would have required billions of dollars of investment in a soon to be obsolete technology.
NiMH batteries were used successfully in the Honda Insight. They were a totally workable solution for small vehicles. It was not necessary to go Li-Ion before its time. (Arguably, we should never have gone to it in such a widespread fashion anyway, and waited for LiFePo due to its increased stability, but eh.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Detroit always seems to be the last one to find out that consumer tastes have changed. Ford/GM/Chrysler were slow to move away from giant trucks and SUVs the last time gas prices shot through the roof and foreign companies (a bit of a misnomer since most are produced domestically these days) ate their lunch. Gas prices have been low for a while now, and Ford and GM are just now reacting to consumers moving back into trucks and SUVs. Both companies produce yawn-inducing vehicles that no one really wants to drive. They need to shake up their lines and looks and catch up to their competition. FCA will likely be the next to announce major changes as they continue to trail as well.
Trump is a proven liar [...]
IMHO he's a bullshitter:
On Bullshit (2005), by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, is an essay that presents a theory of bullshit that defines the concept and analyzes the applications of bullshit in the context of communication. Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
This is also true for vast portions of the GOP in general: in the most recent mid-terms they campaigned on keeping pre-existing condition protection, and yet have put forward numerous bills to actually gut them (though in that case they are lying).
To my countrymen out there pointlessly buying SUVs and trucks to commute to work, you deserve that overpriced vehicle you won't be able to afford or find a buyer for, when gasoline soon costs $5 a gallon again.
Good luck with that! I'm going to assume you've never either owned a car before, or kept an old car?
While I laud your conservatism, it's practicality isn't very realistic.
The short answer to this issue is RUST. It will eventually get you in the end. Eventually if you REALLY want to keep that car past a certain point you are going to need to do a complete restoration, which unless things change a lot, will cost you a lot more than simply just buying a new car. So either it is a classic, and expensive car, or very near and dear to your heart...
I know I have a 2002 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V that I bought new, so it's going on 17 years now (or just about half your 30 year target). Don't get me wrong, I plan on driving it as long as I am able (for a variety of reasons, nostalgia being one) before it is just a small pile of rust on my driveway. However I know that sooner or later rust is going to eat significant portions of body, and eventually the frame. At some point it will be a safety issue not just cosmetic, and to fix/replace just not reasonable.
Never mind you'll also start to run into electrical gremlins as water and condensation gets into things... simply identifying those problems let along re-wiring your car is why most people just live with them until the irritation forces the issue, usually into a new car.
If I make 20 years I'll count myself as really lucky, but odds are I probably only have a couple years left in the old girl before I have to send her out to pasture.. :(
I don't blame Trump (other than GM can use him as a whipping boy), and neither GM cars being "inferior", or at least not in the traditional sense.
The big points are GM hasn't done a great job keeping up with changing trends, and I think they might be reading their "lessons learned" and taking a page out of the Ford playbook sensing the risk of a storm in the not so distant future. Also I think Ford has already cancelled pretty much all of the sedans as well.
#1 Nobody buys sedans anymore. Too hard to get in and out of for older folks. Hence all the milktoast "SUV's". The primary utility being it's easier for baby boomers to get into and out of.
#2 Possible economic hard times on the horizon. Speculative, but also possible another financial loan crisis on car loans. People can only roll the remainder of the the previous 96 month car loan into the new 96 month car loan so many times. Now interest rates are going up.
So basically GM needs to position itself into the electric SUV market, while banking some cash reserves into a leaner company that might better weather financial turmoil. Closing a bunch of plants that make cars that don't sell probably fits the bill.
Go back a little further, it was Bush(a proven repubtard) that started this bail out nonsense.
No mention of that tho. Just Obama Obama Obama.
This is where slashdot has fallen to.