The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation concerning door fires on 2006-07 models. The inquiry affects over 309,000 of the Chevy SUVs, with NHTSA stating that the door fires were caused by problems with the power window switches or some related electrical parts.
As of this writing, NHTSA has received 12 complaints from TrailBlazer owners about smoke or fires inside the vehicles, and thankfully, no injuries have been reported. According to The Detroit News, has stated that none of the TrailBlazers in question have been destroyed because of the fires, though some interior parts were melted and some seats were singed.
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because NHTSA recently began investigating and models , with some 830,000 Toyota vehicles possibly affected. Because of this, NHTSA is looking to see if General Motors and sourced the power window switches from the same parts supplier. If that’s the case, other vehicles may be affected.
The Chevrolet TrailBlazer shares its power window switches with three other GM vehicles – the GMC Envoy, Buick Rainier and Saab 9-7X – though NHTSA has not received any complaints from owners of those vehicles, The Detroit News reports. A spokesperson from GM says these other vehicles have different door configurations, and thus, may not have any problems.
GM has said it intends to fully cooperate with NHTSA on the investigation. Of course, it’s important to note that this isn’t an official recall yet, but one may be issued pending the results of NHTSA’s inquiry. In the meantime, owners experiencing any problems should contact their local dealership.
Of the remaining General Motors nameplates, is the one that’s most difficult to wrap your mind around. On the one hand, it’s supposed to be a premium brand, but on the other, it’s selling vehicles with sticker prices that tend to start in the $20,000 price range, seemingly encroaching on territory. To wit: The is a bit over $23,000 and the starts just under $28,000, while Chevy sells its , and in that same range. Even the , whose price shot up nearly $4,000 this year, starts at $31,045. Indeed, GM must be using a mandoline to price the different versions of its sedans clustered around the $25,000-$30,000 price range.
But it’s over that threshold where things get really perplexing. Because whether we understand GM’s strategy or not, a twenty-some-thousand dollar Buick makes sense. You look at all the boxes you have to tick on a mainstream brand product to get the amenities that Buick offers and you dump that and all the data about the premium competition in a spreadsheet, and you can probably justify a Buick as a wise purchase. If you’re an actuary or an accountant, all the better.
A Regal GS with a $35,310 base price (or an as-tested cost of $38,155 like ours), however, has stepped onto an entirely different playing field, like a junior varsity kid getting bumped up to play on Friday night. This isn’t the sort of car you research over the Internet and lease after a five-minute test drive. It’s purportedly a driver’s car, something to seek out and manhandle. We thus find it rather disingenuous to compare it with cars from and – the Regal GS is really scrapping with vetted sports sedans like the and , and even its kissing-GM-cousin, the larger .
The modern union movement was kick-started 75 years ago at a factory in Flint, MI. The workers staged a sit-down protest that eventually led to the formation of the first auto union contract. The United Auto Workers and President Bob King (middle) are looking to celebrate that big anniversary by, of course, hitting the streets in protest.
The Detroit News reports that King told a crowd of about 500 union members that the UAW will join with other unions and members of the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest big corporations that pay no taxes “while middle-class Americans are losing their homes.” King went on to rally the troops with promises to fight corporate greed and right wing politics.
King and company plan to start their collaborative protesting on April 25 with a demonstration in front of the General Electric stakeholders meeting in Detroit. Of course GE isn’t all that thrilled about the negative spotlight. GE spokesman Andrew Williams tells The Detroit News that the conglomerate paid a billion dollars in taxes in 2010.
General Motors took dead aim at the during the Super Bowl by airing a spot for the . The ad featured a post-apocalyptic scene where only Silverado owners survived the end of the world and customers were left to fade into the fossil record. Interestingly enough, however, the spot may not have had the intended effect of pushing more eyes toward products.
According to TheCarConnection.com, the ad may have benefited Ford more than . Kelley Blue Book keeps an eye on which vehicles visitors to the site are interested in, and Ford saw an immediate uptick directly after the GM commercial aired. Ford didn’t have a big Super Bowl ad this year.
That wasn’t all. Ford continued to see a swell in shopping in the days after the Super Bowl. Interest in the Silverado, meanwhile, rose slightly when the ad aired before leveling off during the remainder of the game and falling shortly thereafter. Interest in the F-150, meanwhile, continued to surge. According to TheCarConnection.com, the F-150 saw a greater boost in shoppers week over week while the Silverado fell off by 25 percent. Turns out Ford shouldn’t have been after all. Click to see the ad one more time.
General Motors unveiled the company’s refreshed at the 2012 Chicago Auto Show yesterday, and if you were paying attention, you may have noticed something curious about the vehicle. While the new Acadia looks considerably better than its predecessor, a few components of the design looked more than a little familiar. Upon closer observation, it appears that GM has simply repurposed elements of the now defunct Saturn Outlook crossover on the 2013 Acadia. Both vehicles seem to share the same wrap-around rear glass, back hatch, tail light openings and exaggerated, squared-off fender arches.
While the vehicles are differentiated by badging, tail lamps and a rear valance, there’s no denying the similarities toward the vehicle’s rear. Up front, both share similar fenders, though adjustments have been made for the varying headlight designs.
That’s good news if you just can’t imagine life without the Saturn Outlook.
GM isn’t the only automaker to pull something similar. Parts sharing is a smart way to keep costs as low as possible, and recouping the design and manufacturing costs the automaker poured into the Outlook is a smart way to keep GM’s earnings headed in the right direction. For example, famously reused tail lights in the first-generation . We just aren’t accustomed to seeing this sort of recycling on such a grand scale or after so much time has elapsed.
The shows that the rivalry between and still . But is there room for another brand or two to mix it up in the battle for pickup supremacy? Not according to marketing chief Joel Ewanick.
Fox News reports that Ewanick said during a web chat on that “the two big players are Ford and Chevy.” Ewanick added that it’s like a presidential debate, saying “We want to have it with the other strong candidate – and we want to engage them and want them to engage us.”
A quick look at the numbers shows that Ewanick has a point. The was the top dog in 2011, with 584,917 trucks sold. The came in second with 415,130 sales, but if you add the nearly identical , General Motors makes the battle much closer with 564,300 unit sales. That’s more sales than the , and combined (even without the Sierra.)
The Ram, also an excellent pickup, finished a distant third with a reported 244,763 sales. Still, Ram brand spokesperson Dave Elshoff insists that Ram trucks remain part of the equation, adding “across much of the west – where trucks are worked hard – it’s Ram that’s either number one or two in market share.”
We’re not so sure that the truck battle is Chevy versus Ford and then everybody else, but it sure is nice to see GM and Ford getting a little chippy. It’s a good bet that the chatter grows louder as the next generation Silverado and F-150 hit the auto show circuit in about a year.
General Motors has lifted the veil on its refreshed at the 2012 Chicago Auto Show. Designers gave the big crossover a slight redo with a new front valance, headlight details and new interior materials.
Up front, the 2013 Acadia boasts a new grille set into a more vertical nose (reminiscent of the , anyone?), and buyers can now look forward to more attractive diffused LED daytime running lights on both projector and HID headlight-equipped models. At the back, the Acadia now wears wrap-around glass and a redesigned spoiler. GM has also thrown in a few more wheel design options in both 18- and 19-inch sizes.
Inside, the new Acadia offers upgraded materials, including details like French stitching and red ambient lighting. High-zoot models will boast aluminum trim work, as well.
More importantly, the 2013 Acadia will come with what GM calls the industry’s first center air bag. The system is designed to protect drivers and front passengers in accidents where the impact is on the opposite side of the vehicle. The bag inflates from the right side of the driver’s seat and stabilizes occupants during the crash. for the full press release.
When spending big dollars on a Super Bowl ad buy, companies would do themselves well to remember that the successful spots aren’t just the ones being talked about the next day. The ads that more eyeballs actually saw while watching the game were also worth their weight in focus groups.
For the second year in a row, General Motors is claiming that it aired the most watched ad during the most watched event in U.S. TV history. We are speaking of the 30-second spot entitled “” featuring the that aired during the game’s most tense moments, right after the official two-minute warning was reached. The time was 9:37 PM EST and, according to analysis by Kantar Media, more people were watching NBC’s broadcast at that time than any other.
And since this year’s Super Bowl was again viewed by another record audience – 111.3 million viewers in the U.S., not to mention over a billion worldwide – the ATS ad therefore becomes the most watched advertisement on television in U.S. history.
We said this is the second time that GM has claimed this crown. The first was To see the two most watched spots in U.S. television history back-to-back, just .
President George W. Bush recently spoke to a gathering of auto dealers in Las Vegas, saying that while he believes in the free market under normal conditions, he doesn’t regret the $700 billion bailout fund used to rescue General Motors and from the brink of collapse. Bush was quoted as saying he’d do it again, and that he didn’t want there to be a 21 percent unemployment rate. The former leader avoided addressing remarks from the current gaggle of Republican presidential candidates who have criticized his decision to lend a hand to banks, insurers and automakers.
“If you make a bad decision, you ought to pay,” Bush said. “Sometimes circumstances get in the way of philosophy.”
Bush championed a $17.4 billion bailout for the two automakers in December of 2008 as part of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said both Bush and current President Barack Obama were mistaken in bailing out the auto industry. Instead, Romney believes GM and Chrysler should have been allowed to go into a controlled bankruptcy from the start.
launched its mid-size sedan in late 2010 as a 2011 model, with the Turbo, and eAssist models following suit over the past year. Now, ‘ tri-shield arm has announced a couple of powertrain updates that will go into effect for the 2013 model year, namely the discontinuation of the naturally aspirated 2.4-liter inline-four in the base Regal.
For 2013, the Regal’s standard engine is the 2.4-liter powerplant – a mill that, according to the EPA, is good for up to 36 miles per gallon on the highway. Buick pulled a similar stunt with its larger LaCrosse, killing off the base 2.4 in favor of the eAssist powertrain with a V6 available as a no-cost option. That said, Buick has not announced pricing for the updated 2013 Regal line, but we’ll be interested to see if the 220-horsepower 2.0-liter inline-four of the Regal Turbo will be available at no additional cost.
The 270-hp Regal GS carries over largely unchanged, though as initially promised, a six-speed automatic transmission will now be optional. Buick states that the self-shifting unit will not hinder performance (well, except for that whole shift-on-your-own-terms thing), citing that the automatic-equipped Regal GS will sprint to 60 miles per hour in 6.7 seconds, just like manual-equipped cars.
Buick will release full pricing and availability for the 2013 Regal line later this year. In the meantime, read the full details for yourself in the press release .
The sun has long since set on the Ford Crown Victoria and the big sedan’s Police Interceptor variants, but many parts of the country still haven’t seen the next-generation of pursuit vehicles take to the street. In the case of the Chevrolet Caprice Police Patrol Vehicle, that’s because General Motors has hit a delay in providing the Holden-based sedans. According to the DuPont Registry, the delay is two-fold. Shipping from Australia is taking longer than expected, and Chevrolet dealers aren’t outfitting the vehicles quickly enough to satiate demand.
The report quotes Deputy Chief Jeff Undestad of the Largo Police Department in Largo, Florida as saying his office waited more than eight months for GM to deliver their Caprice Patrol Vehicles to the dealer. Undestad should consider himself lucky. A neighboring department waited 10 months for its new patrol cars. , meanwhile, usually takes two to three months to deliver its police-duty models.
GM, meanwhile, says that the company is working to address the shipping issues. The company now has a pool of Caprice Patrol Vehicles at port, which should help trim the wait time.
There are very few things that get the unanimous approval of everyone here at Autoblog. One of them is Icon 4×4, which makes impossibly expensive yet worth-every-penny reimaginings of history’s best off-roaders. For this year’s , Icon debuted something new that had nothing to do with off-roading, yet still had our whole team salivating.
Christened a “Derelict” by Icon founder and designer Jonathon Ward, this looks like an abused artifact from a time not worth remembering. Knowing Icon like we do, however, it’s anything but. The Derelict is fitted with a 6.2-liter V8 from producing 430 horsepower and an interior upholstered in gorgeous vintage briefcase leather, but the exterior is as original and rusty as it was when Icon found it. What we didn’t know at SEMA is that the ‘52 Chevy isn’t the first Derelict that Icon produced.
Our friends at have produced an excellent video about how the two Derelicts came to be, including how Jonathon Ward and his company made them. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t as easy as dropping a new engine into an old car and redoing the leather. The Derelicts were meant to be high-performance yet reliable daily drivers, which requires more thought and engineering than we ever imagined.
to be one of the first to watch this latest video from eGarage.
Most days, California must seem like Kazakhstan for the Big Three. Domestic products aren’t so popular out West, where and have long stood atop the sales charts. But not in 2011.
According to a report in Automotive News, both General Motors and managed to bump Honda from its silver medal position in 2011, though Toyota still holds a commanding market share lead. In a storyline we’ve heard before, the twin natural disasters in Asia curbed Japanese production, causing a 4.5 point loss of market share. Toyota’s market share dropped from 22.8 to 19.2 percent, while GM and Ford tied at 12.6 percent – ahead of Honda at 12.1.
Booming sales in the Golden State helped the domestics to their 1.8 point gain. New vehicle registrations in California were up 9.9 percent, according to the report. The biggest sales gains last year were made by and , which were up 53 and 49 percent, respectively.
Just when you thought you’d seen all the Super Bowl ads there were to see, is jumping in with a whole new spot for the . The General Motorsplug-in hybrid has been struggling to make sales headway for a number of reasons, including a into the vehicle’s safety. With negative press at its peak in January, Volt sales took a nosedive last month – GM managed to move a . With some , the automaker is understandably keen to put the spurs to Volt sales. This Super Bowl ad features a host of very curious aliens attempting to comprehend the science behind the propulsion system in the Chevrolet Volt.
It would seem GM believes buyers are being scared off from the Volt because they simply don’t understand the mechanicals in the plug-in hybrid. If that’s the case, this new commercial should help clear up any mysteries surrounding the vehicle. to see E.T. in action for yourself.
If you, like us, were wondering how MG managed to away from in the British Touring Car Championship, well you had good reason to wonder. The racecar driver and Fifth Gear co-host had, after all, driven the factory-backed team to both titles in 2010 and landed himself third and his team second just this past season. But you can wonder no more, as the latest news from the BTCC paddock is that Chevrolet has withdrawn from the popular saloon racing series.
The news arrives as a bit of a surprise coming from the front-running team, particularly at a time when the grid has expanded enormously in the past couple of seasons. The reason? According to Autosport, Chevrolet wants to focus its energies on the World Touring Car Championship, where the same outfit RML that ran the BTCC team fields similar touring cars – driven by Yvan Muller, Rob Huff and Alain Menu – with considerable success: The RML Chevrolet team has claimed both the drivers’ and constructors’ titles for the past two seasons running, making it something like the Red Bull Racing of touring cars.
A longtime competitor in the BTCC, RML reportedly hopes it won’t be long before it is back on the grid in the British series, and given that most of the cars in the championship are fielded by privateer teams, we wouldn’t be surprised to see them return as early as next year. In the meantime, General Motors will be well represented in the series by Vauxhall.
Good news has been in abundant supply for the domestic automakers the last twelve months, and nowhere is that more evident than in the headline to this press release: “ Group Reports Full Year 2011 Net Income of $183 Million.” Now, $183 million isn’t exactly a king’s ransom in the auto industry (or elsewhere – Apple made $25.92 billion last year). But if Chrysler is making money again for the first time since emerging from bankruptcy, well, perhaps the U.S. auto industry has finally recovered from 2009.
The smallest of the Big Three automakers reported sales of 1,369,114 vehicles in 2011, up 26 percent from 2010. Chrysler , and finished fourth in U.S. sales, behind General Motors, and . To read the full press release, click .
When 2011 ticked over to become 2012, something changed with the dynamic that had been in place nearly all of last year. We had become so used to the domestics seeing increased sales month after month while and struggled to keep their heads above water while fixing disaster-related production issues. No more.
January saw both Toyota and Honda report strong positive sales figures (up 9.00 and 9.25 percent, respectively). That’s good enough to out-trend (up 8.29 percent) and General Motors (down 6.11 percent), the latter of which saw its new year kick off with a decline after finishing 2011 with 11 out of 12 monthly sales gains. Conversely, Honda kicked off its new year right after posting eight straight months of sales declines to end 2011.
The Chrysler Group was King of the Hill in January, posting a 44.26-percent increase in sales.
Both Toyota and Honda should especially be pleased with how their traditional top sellers performed. The redesigned entered the market without skipping a beat and posted a 55.9-percent increase on 28,295 units sold. Likewise, the , which received a harshly criticized redesign in 2011, bounced back in January with a 49.5-percent increase on sales of 21,883 units. It replaces the aging at the top of Honda’s sales heap, which remained flat in January with just 13,659 units sold.
What about ? Shockingly, the Chrysler Group was King of the Hill in January, posting a 44.26-percent increase in sales compared to 2011, led by an indomitable Chrysler brand that reported an 81.39-percent increase in sales on the back of strong performances by its and sedans. (41.86 percent), (37.40 percent) and (29.37 percent) all reported strong sales, as well.
Additional mentions should be made for (up 68.19 percent) and (up 47.87 percent). Mazda enjoyed a 532.6-percent in sales to 3,032 units, as well as a 118-percent increase in sales to 4,929 units. Meanwhile, the went from selling just 108 units last year to moving 6,318 last month.
Check out the rest of last month’s sales numbers in the table below.
*Brands and companies are displayed in descending order according to their percentage change in volume sales. There were 24 selling days in January 2012 versus 24 selling days in January 2011, so the change in monthly sales volume will be the same as the change in average daily sales rate (DSR) for each brand/company. Also, brands are combined and reported as companies only if their sales figures are released jointly.
The “Government Motors” crowd isn’t going to be happy about this: The Detroit News is reporting that the U.S. Treasury now says it has lost an extra $170 million in the auto industry bailout. The culprit? The declining price of General Motors stock.
According to the report, GM’s stock crested at $37.23, but is down 35 percent from that level today. The Treasury Department based its calculations on a $21.29 value from November 30, 2011. The government’s share of GM was initially 61 percent, but has been reduced to 26.5 percent. The News says that the lower stock price has kept the government from selling its remaining 500 million shares.
While political opponents of the Obama administration will no doubt jump all over this report, the final cost of the bailout is still looking like it will be far less than originally thought. According to the report, the $44 billion estimate was reduced to $30 billion in December 2009, and this most recent estimate puts the total sum at $23.77 billion.
Matthew Anderson, a Treasury spokesman, was quoted as saying: “The auto industry rescue and is still projected to cost dramatically less than many had expected during the crisis.”
Indiana Democrats fought it for weeks by not showing up for sessions, but eventually the Repblican-led House of Representatives was able to pass a measure to make Indiana a Right-to-Work state. That bill will go to the State Senate where the Republicans have an even larger majority, and observers expect it to be signed into law by governor Mitch Daniels before the Super Bowl takes place in Indianapolis on February 5.
Assuming nothing stops that from happening, Indiana becomes state number 23 among the nation’s Right-to-Work faction, but the first in the upper Midwest, known so well for its wide and heavily unionized manufacturing base that it’s called The Rust Belt. According to a report in Automotive News, Governor Daniels points to VW’s decision to build its plant in Tennessee as the reason for the legislation. In fact, he said wouldn’t even return phone calls. “Why would that one company not even talk to us? I think I know.”
Indiana’s strong union presence didn’t stop other manufacturers from setting up plants or maintaining plants there, such as , and . But it appears Daniels took the VW snub especially hard and wants to sure that, if the threat of unionization really was the problem in that case, that it is never a problem again.
Domestic automakers have much to be happy about, with , and General Motors all gaining market share last year for the first time since 1988. Yet according to Bloomberg, 2012 won’t be as good to Detroit. Total sales are projected to grow from 12.8 million vehicles last year to 13.6 million, according to the report, but increasing competition from Korea and a Japanese recovery from the natural disasters of 2011 mean those extra sales aren’t likely headed to the Big Three.
The news agency spoke to five analysts, and predictions have the U.S. automakers losing 1.3 percentage points this year. The analysts estimate that GM will drop 0.6 of a percent, Ford will lose 0.5 percent, and Chrysler will be down 0.2 percent. is seen gaining 0.9 percent, with grabbing an extra 0.5 percent, while and are only projected to see their combined market share improve by 0.01.
If all this comes true, GM would have the top market share in the U.S. at 19 percent, with Ford in second at 16.3 percent, followed by Toyota at 13.8 percent, Chrysler at 10.5 percent, and Honda at 9.5 percent.
When 2011 ticked over to become 2012, something changed with the dynamic that had been in place nearly all of last year. We had become so used to the domestics seeing increased sales month after month while and struggled to keep their heads above water while fixing disaster-related production issues. No more.
