Super Bowl Commercial declines Canadian Plant Closure despite GM's legal threat
Morgenskiftet All your daily car news in a single place. Isn't your time more important? The Canadian Union warms up the heat of GM after the announcement, 4,000 GM employees are expected to lose their jobs, Brexit contributes to the Nissan cutting X-Trail from UK production plans, MIT professors suing Ford, and more in the morning shift on February 4, 2019.
1 Gear: Canadian Union Super Bowl Outreach GM
The Canadian Union Unifor is horrific that GM shuts down the Oshawa Assembly Plant, which has a long and rich history spanning 100 years. GM says on its website that the facility – which now builds Cadillac XTS, Chevy Impala, Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra – has been open since 1953, but before it built McLaughlin Buicks and Chevrolets before The Bowtie merged with GM in 1918.
Despite all that story, in 2018, GM announced plans to close the historic production site. Shortly afterwards, the workers protested, and the president of Unifor, the union representing the plant worker, expressed his dissatisfaction and said, "They do not close our dam factory without a battle in a fight", by CTV News. [19659009] But last night, during the Super Bowl, the battle between Unifor and GM was heated, with the previous release of this commercial in Canada:
According to Detroit News, GM was not thrilled and even threatened legal action:
On Friday, General Motors lawyers wrote to demand that Unifor "stop and renounce any further disclosure of the ad."
GM told Detroit News that the ad is false and misleading, with the news site writing: [19659012] "While GM respects Uniform's right to protest, we cannot tolerate intentionally misleading the Canadian population, GM said in a statement Sunday." Uniforms know that GM Canada repaid its 2009 loans in its entirety and that the restructured GM fulfilled all the terms of the agreements with the Canadian government many years ago. Since 2009, GM Canada has contributed over $ 100 billion to the Canadian economy, including $ 8 billion invested in occupational pensions. "
Seems like Canadian workers don't go without a fight.
2. Gear: Today is a dark day for GM
The plant's shutdown in Canada is just the start, as there is more PR nightmare – and more importantly , a job loss expected with GM preparing to add over 4,000 employees, and it will start today
This is according to a number of news sites including Automotive News, Detroit Free Press, CNN and Detroit News. The first of these sites provides some correlation behind the fires, writes:
In November, GM plans to cut 15 percent of its 54,000 salaried employees in North America, including slashing global leaders by 25 percent. with 2,250 white employees, who agreed on voluntary buyouts – under the company's goal of about 8,000.
[…]
The car manufacturer, who previously said the redundancies should occur in the first quarter, began to cut some workers in the contract in November. The cuts to contract workers, according to one source, were around 1500 – with the total number of employees who have already left the company at 3,750. It leaves GM with about 4,250 additional positions that still need to be cut.
Sources of Automotive News say GM will start the cuts today, even though GM, in a statement to the news site and to other outlets, said it would not confirm when the layoffs were scheduled. From GM:
"We do not confirm timing. Our employees are our priority. We will communicate with them first."
Days like these are the employees – whether they are laid off or their friends are – will never forget. Some call it black Monday. Understandably so;
3. Gear: Nissan Cites Brexit as the Reason to Kill Plans to Build SUVs in the UK
Not long after the UK's Brexit vote in 2016, Nissan announced it was planning to build its X-Trail SUV in Sunderland, England. where Juke, Qashqai, Leaf, Infiniti Q30 and Infiniti QX30 are built. This was a move that, according to Automotive News Europe, was "viewed as a key indicator of whether international firms would continue to invest in the UK following the Brexit poll."
Fast forward 27 months, and Nissan has canceled these plans, Brexit cites as part of the reason why, with Reuters writing:
"While we have taken this decision for business reasons, it helps the continued uncertainty about Britain's future relationship with the EU not companies like ours to plan for the future, Nissan Europe chairman Gianluca de Ficchy said in a statement on Sunday.
Nissan has decided to just build the X-Trail in Kyushu, Japan, and Greg Clark , United Kingdom's Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, was surprisingly unhappy and said moving was a blow to the [British] sector and region. "
History also mentions that production in Sunderland fell over 10 percent last year, and t hat Nissan "cut hundreds of jobs at the plant in response to failing demand for diesel models." This, the Financial Times writes, may actually have been a major factor in the decision than Brexit, with the news site saying:
While Britain's impending departure from the EU has caused uncertainty for the Sunderland plant, which exports about half of its cars. The decline in diesel across the continent was a more important factor, according to people familiar with the company's thinking.
The X-Trail is a large sports car, the largest passenger vehicle made by the Japanese group, and had planned to make diesel models in the UK.
However, the company fought to make the new diesel cars in accordance with the latest emission rules when using diesel engines as it buys from Renault, according to one person, and fear of an accelerated decline in the fuel source among the public colored its decision.
In addition to alleged emission compliance issues, history continues to say that Nissan has already promised to get rid of diesels from its lineup, and that to get gas X-Trails in Sunderland would "require cargo engines from Japan, which business is considered to be. commercially useless ", news site attributes of a named source.
Diesel Gate. Brexit. They are both stupid names, but their impact on the automotive industry is anything but.
4. Gear: MIT professors sue Ford for claiming they are in violation of Dual Port and Direct Injection Tech
If you're a mechanical engineer, there's a good chance you've heard of John B. Heywood, The MIT professor who wrote the basic text of the ubiquitous combustion engine.
Now his name, as well as the name of two other well-known professors, Dr. Bromberg and Dr. Cohn, are on the cover of another document, but it's not a textbook: It's a legal document accusing Ford of patent infringement.
The process includes The Blue Oval and Ethanol Boosting Systems, LLC, a company created by the three aforementioned researchers, which assigns the inventions to MIT, but licenses them through the company.
Failure claims that Ford violated four patents, including this one, this one, and this one that everyone has to do with dual port and direct injection, a technology that Ford has repeatedly mentioned in advertising, and which we have written several times . The patent credit complaint describes the patents in more detail, and states:
… each of the patents imposed recites ways in which an engine or fuel system utilizes both port and direct injection so that at certain torque values, the motors are driven by both at the same time. Further, in some embodiments, the fraction of fuel provided by direct injection with decreasing torque is reduced.
Furthermore, in other embodiments, port fuel is used only when torque is below a certain value.
The court document continues to describe the advantages of the technology which states:
Such inventions improve in the prior art by, for example, allowing an increase in engine efficiency and reduction of emissions as described in their common specification advantages of fuel injection. which enables better fuel / air mixing and combustion stability than direct injection, while providing engine power in direct injection.
Check out Bloomberg's lawsuit case, which includes a description of an alleged interchange between the professors and a Ford representative where the latter inquired about the Prophets if they were "greedy inventors."
5. Gear: Weather, Government Decommissioning Factors in Slow January Car Sales
January is, in general, not a good month for car sales as it is, but this month's figures are, and they were worse than last year's January figures, Automotive News reports. The news site cites high interest rates, cold weather, higher stickers and the government's closure as reasons why sales fell by one per cent compared with January last year.
From the story:
Average interest rates on new cars rose last year to 6.19 percent – second highest in 10 years – from 4.99 percent a year ago, according to Edmunds. And the Kelley Blue Book said the industry's average transaction price increased by 4.2 percent to $ 37.149. Combined, these factors mean a huge jump in the monthly payment for many consumers interested in buying up.
This potential for sticker shock, along with extremely cold weather and uncertainty created by 35-day partial federal government arrests, helped push down sales down 1 percent in January.
Bite about the government's suspension that affects sales is interesting, and there is something – along with a negative effect of the cold weather Automotive News attributes on "more car manufacturers."
It's not All is bad, as history points out that fuel prices are low, unemployment is down, and the federal reserve gas "signaled that it would be patient with several [interest rate] hikes."
We see how it goes. We've heard about sales slowing down for a long time; who knows when the steep cliff comes.
Conversely: Ford buys Lincoln in 1922 For a cool $ 8 million
From the story:
On February 4, 1922, Ford Motor Company buys the failing luxury car maker Lincoln Motor Company for $ 8 million.
The acquisition came at a time when Ford, founded in 1903, lost the market share of its competitor General Motors, which offered a number of cars while Ford continued to focus on its user-friendly Model T. [19659059] Neutral: Which of the above-mentioned gears worry you most?
No one likes bad news, but all five of the gears above are quite negative. There will be people being sued, people losing their jobs, plant connections, it is bleak. Of the gears, which worries you the most, and why?
