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GM Kills 6 Passenger Car, Closes Production at 5 Plants

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Several sources are reporting General Motors will end production of six passenger cars and close 5 factories in the largest restructuring shakeup since the bankruptcy.

Reuters and the Associated Press are both reporting Lordstown, Ohio, Hamtramck, Michigan and Oshawa, Ontario will all end production next year. Two transmission plants, Warren, Mich and Baltimore will also close or production will shift to other models.

GM plans to stop building several car models next year including the Chevrolet Cruze, Cadillac CT6 and Buick LaCrosse. Sources are also saying the Chevrolet Volt, Impala and Cadillac XTS are also being discontinued.

The plan is for GM to shift production to electric and autonomous car research, a plan they announced in October, 2018 with the plan to reduce their executive work force by 18,000 executives.

Closing the factories will result in another 14,700 jobs being affected with 6,000 factory jobs and 8,100 white-collar jobs at those factories.

GM’s CEO Mary Barra has reportedly made calls early Monday morning to disclose the plan and the United Auto Works plans to address these changes next year.

This shakeup joins Ford, which announced a similar plan earlier this year, and Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles who also killed off their cars a few years prior.

Sources say the plants affected are running well below capacity and GM is losing money with the recent and stark downward trend on passenger cars sales.

This shift from cars, down 13.2 percent through the first nine months of the year and well offer the mark of 50 percent of vehicles sold annually (now at 31 percent) to SUVs and pickup trucks, both rising 8.3 percent, has caught the industry by surprise and pushed up transaction prices and car loan rates and length to unheard of levels.

It remains to be seen if these changes will have a political impact with GM joining Ford saying the steel tariffs are causing a major loss in their businesses.

 

 

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Tim Esterdahl

Automotive Journalist Tim Esterdahl has been a lover of trucks and SUVs for years. He has covered the industry since 2011 and has pieces in many national magazines and newspapers. In his spare time, he is often found tinkering on his '62 C10 pickup, playing golf, going hunting and hanging out with his wife and kids in Nebraska.

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1 Comment

  1. T Durden December 7, 2018

    Just like the bankruptcy. Poor management. GM’s leaders let’s people down because of short/narrow vision, over compensated management and ill fated decisions. We don’t see this from Ford. Ford has better management, makes better decisions and offers better products. One reason is that the workers are happier. Knowing that poor management has crashed this company before and ruined countless lives leaves GM employees nervous and guess what, it just happened again. 14,600 workers are being let go because of poor leadership. This doesn’t address even touch on all the stock and bond holders from 2009 when the government bailed GM out and allow the company to rip off billion of investors. The company had twice as much debt as they owned in Assets. What kind of leadership could do that? Bad leadership. Have they learned? Doesn’t appear so. Get all these smart people for a well compensated Board of Directors and their answer is to raise the CEO’s salary to $20+M and close plants.
    Avoid GM! I have since 2009.

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