Autoblog

As reported recently, even though Toyota halted Tundra production for a while, the company pledged not to lay off its workers. At a total cost of potentially $1 billion to the company, Toyota instead placed the employees in retraining and civic works programs during a Kaizen and Development Period.

What kinds of civic programs? One of them, in San Antonio, is called the City-Toyota Green Clean-Up Project, which has put up to 340 workers on the streets to "clean, paint, and plant." Factory staffers have painted curbs, picnic tables and trash cans, trimmed trees and plants, and cleaned up lots. While employees do want to get back to the factories, they're enjoying the time away and being able to give back to the city -- all the while earning their regular wages and benefits.

A second round of city improvement will begin next month. After that, Toyota expects to have all hands on deck again at the factory in November, building 2009-model-year Tundras. Thanks for the tip, Mike!

[Source: My SA News]

Giveth, and taketh away, isn't that always the story? On the taketh away side, GM has recently lost a serious chunk of change. On the giveth side, The General received a $56 milion package of tax credits and grants to keep an SUV factory open in Ohio. It has also just received another package of tax credits from the city of Flint, Michigan to aid its investment in a factory that will build engines for the new Volt and Chevy Cruze. Approved over some constituent disapproval by the Flint City Council, getting GM to build the factory there will keep 300 jobs in the city. GM is now looking to the state of Michigan for more tax incentives.

[Source: Detroit News via Green Car Congress]

VW hasn't yet publicly committed to building one or even two factories in the U.S. (though it's apparently considering the South, specifically South Carolina), but is making statements that sound like it's definitely on the way. VW's head of production, Jochem Heizmann, has said that the requirements for a factory are that: it not be in a hurricane zone, it be near a major airport, and that there be "no other production car in the vicinity" -- or at least, Google Translate said that for him.

The factory that will might be coming in 2011 will also source, according to Heizmann, 80% of its parts locally, or at least, in the dollar zone, which again rules out a factory in Mexico. The first couple of years it will produce up to 150,000 cars, with full production being 250,000. The boon to whatever region is chosen should obviously be significant. The reason for all this, according to Heizmann, is that in addition to developing cars with U.S. tastes in mind, the current Passat is too expensive by at least $4,000.

[Source: Auto Bild via German Car Blog]

Ford's recent Q2 good news shows that it's making progress in cleaning up its own messes. Still, there are plenty of messes that need to be addressed -- a literal one being the land under its Twin Cities production plant in Highland Park, Minnesota. The factory, in use since 1925, will be closed next year. Before Ford can sell the land to developers, the company needs to clean up eight decades of toxic contamination and get the land environmentally certified by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) so that its value can be assessed.

There are more than 70 "hot spots" on the 138-acre plot where pollutants including oil, solvents, paint, batteries, gasoline, diesel, lead, ethylbenzene, toluene, and xylenes have contaminated the ground. The startling variety is partly due to the fact that many of the chemicals were dumped on and in the ground before modern environmental regulations prevented such behavior -- like when an unpaved testing track was sprayed with waste oil to prevent dust, standard practice in 1942. Yet those are just the contaminants that Ford knows about. The company is awaiting results of more soil and groundwater samples recently taken.

[Source: Star Tribune via The Truth About Cars]

Mercedes has been offering factory delivery of its cars since the fifties, and today more than 80,000 folks are handed their new Mercedes fobs right at the plant. One of the top tourist attractions in Germany is VW's Autostadt, which gets more than a million visitors per year. Now BMW has joined the factory delivery crowd with its BMW Welt, built next to the BMW campus at a cost in excess of $275 million.

Looking like a breakaway chunk from the Guggenheim in Bilbao, it contains a gallery showcasing the roundel's complete line, a conference center, a kiddie center, and exhibits. BMW expects 800,000 visitors per year. Of those, 45,000 of them will be coming to collect their new ultimate driving machine. After a tour of the BMW factory, in a separate building, new owners will collect their cars, which will be waiting for them on a revolving turntable... atop a plinth... bathed in the spotlight. Indeed, it will be a dramatic way to collect your 1-Series.

The creation of such a building was inspired by marketing. With relative tadpoles in the auto business muscling their way into the top tier, one of the last battlegrounds for distinction is age. With the BMW Welt, the company that was winning races before Toyota had made its first car wants to show that old girls still have a lot of fight left in them. Porsche is expected to join the party next year with its own specially designed factory delivery monument.

[Source: New York Times]

How's this for a wake-up call on the state of the dollar: "If the dollar keeps slumping against the euro, the United States could become the next Mexico -- a low-cost manufacturing haven for European automakers and suppliers." With the dollar at $1.38 to the euro as of now, and expecting to drop further, European makes either need to raise prices, move production to "cheaper" countries like the US, become more efficient, or be happy with less profits. Fewer euros in the till isn't really an option, and price wars are already difficult enough to navigate. That leaves relocation or finding cost efficiencies in other markets.

The article in Automotive News goes on to detail how European manufacturers like BMW and Mercedes are actively moving production to their Spartanburg, South Carolina and Tuscaloosa, Alabama factories, respectively. VW is considering its options for an American plant, but will stick with Mexican operations for now. Audi's approach, since it only sells 10-percent of it's European product in the US, has been to find cost efficiencies in markets like China. Other companies looking for such natural hedges include Magna, which recently lost a huge amount of production at its Austrian plant. The Canadian supplier and manufacturer is looking at building a factory in America to ease the pain.

The market is being watched closely, and there are too many factors in play to know who will do what yet, but some analysts think the dollar might drop to $1.50 against the euro. If so, said John Lawson, chief auto analyst for Citigroup in London, "Either the dollar has to change, or the business model has to change."

[Source: Automotive News, sub req'd]

So Acura won't be making it to Japan just yet, and the new NSX has been delayed until at least 2010, but parent company Honda is not slowing down for anything. Company President Takeo Fukui is determined not to let Honda get left behind in the battle for global automotive supremacy. In the name of meeting demand, he announced that Honda will be building five factories, two engine plants, and two R&D facilities. Much of the new construction will be taking place in Asia to fulfill demand in the Asia-Oceana region: Thailand, and Tochigi, Yorii, and Ogawa Japan. With everything in place, Honda plans to turbocharge production of its increasingly ubiquitous small cars by an extra 300,000 per year by 2010.

Thanks for the tip, Dylan!

[Source: Car Advice]

There have been periodic rumors of a United States assembly plant for Volvo cars since at least the early 1980s. There was a North American construction arm of the Swedish carmaker, situated in Nova Scotia, but that plant has been shuttered for several years now. Volvo CEO Fredrik Arp has told Automotive News that an American plant would take an unacceptably long time to pay for itself, according to the automaker's studies. A weak dollar doesn't help the economic argument for a plant in the States, either. Volvo can currently handle its goal of 600,000 units worldwide, which they have yet to meet. Current plant capacity is good for 590,000 vehicles, so it goes building any new plants, Volvo would be wise to fully utilize its current capacity. The automaker is looking to markets other than North America to drive growth in the coming years -- China, India and Russia all look to be emerging soon as major Volvo buyers.

Arp would not be pressed regarding rumors of Volvo being put up for sale by parent Ford, but he did comment that the historically green-minded automaker has its finger on the pulse of viable alternative powertrains for the US market. Diesels and alternative fuels are big in Europe, but Volvo's not going to just forge ahead in the US with those technologies. Rather, what they intend to do is watch and see what green platform takes off here, and follow on quickly with their own version of whatever that turns out to be. Volvo is too much of a niche player in the US market to risk developing something that may be met with a yawn by the US consumer. Up for sale or not, it looks like Gothenburg's Rollers have their eyes on the brass ring.

[Source: Automotive News - sub req]


http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070626/ANE01/70626009/1116/rss03&rssfeed=rss03

The protests are said to potentially impact the launch of the Opel Corsa, a subcompact product that is key to GM's European model line-up. GM workers in Western Europe are said to be deeply concerned about the potential for their assembly jobs moving to lower-cost sites towards the east, and GM has also stated that it will be bringing over additional product from South Korea.  

[Source: Reuters]