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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.
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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.
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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/...
"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 ...
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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.
That is how GM pursues electric cars.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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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)
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.
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.