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Every now and then we put on a time capsule worthy act.
Monday Automotive News is one of them. Page 1 contains three stories. Each will surely fascinate any student of automotive history who meets them 100 years from now.
One of the stories nods to ages gone by from the start. He begins: “General Motors has been the best-selling automaker in the United States for the past 90 years, a period that began during the Great Depression, spanned 15 presidential administrations and has withstood countless crises. , including the humiliating bankruptcy of the company.
This sequence, as we point out, is threatened by a disturbance of seismic proportions: the global microchip crisis. As we enter the fourth quarter, GM is behind Toyota Motor North America by around 90,000 sales.
Dealer buy-sell agreements are the subject of more summary statistics. But you will be hard pressed to find a month like the one we just witnessed.
The latest mega-deal adds the 54 new vehicle stores of Larry H. Miller dealers (No. 8 in the US) to the holdings of No. 6 Asbury Automotive Group. The $ 3.2 billion deal is peaking per month in which Asbury’s biggest rivals – Group 1 and Sonic Automotive – have announced massive deals themselves.
And there may be more to come.
“I expect this to be just the start of the mega-trades being announced over the next 12 months,” said Erin Kerrigan of Kerrigan Advisors.
And then there is Ford. The creator of the powerful Red Complex made another mark of manufacturing last week by announcing the biggest investment in its history. It includes the company’s first factory on land vacant for more than 50 years.
And what a footprint it is. A total of 5,100 acres at sites in Tennessee and Kentucky, with three battery factories and an assembly plant for F-Series electric pickups. The award, shared by Ford and its battery partner SK Innovation : $ 11.4 billion.
This third story ends with words from Bill Ford himself.
“It’s a huge stake in the ground for what we think is the future,†he said. “And we want to make sure we’re at the forefront of that future.”
No one knows how Ford’s bet will end. But these historians leafing through the October 4, 2021 issue of Automotive News in a century will.
– Dave versical
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