Filed under: Trucks/Pickups, Etc., Commercial Trucks, Chevrolet, GM, GMC

It’s an epic poem that could have been written by Byron: you suffered a nasty breakup and met a new girl, you dated for a while, things were looking outstanding, you proposed… and then the bottom dropped out of the medium-duty truck business. We’ve seen it all before. And now that it’s happened, Navistar has backed away from it’s non-binding commitment to purchase GM’s medium-duty truck operations.

GM and Navistar only had a memorandum of understanding, so there appears to be no harm, no foul in Navistar getting icy feet. The brief announcement of the dissolution presents it as a mutual affair: “Due to significant marketplace and economic changes, GM and Navistar have decided not to renew the memorandum of understanding to purchase GM’s medium duty truck business,” but we imagine GM standing at the altar, watching its Navistar groom bolt from the church and hop in a taxi.>

GM is still talking to Navistar and looking at other ways to dump find a good home for its medium duty truck business. A shame, because they make some fine vehicles.

[Source: GM]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Car Buying, Economy, Sedans/Saloons, Trucks/Pickups, Plants/Manufacturing, Commercial Trucks, Hatchbacks, Ford, Lincoln

Click on the pic above for our high-res 2009 Ford F-150 gallery

As staggering as it may seem, the 2008 Ford F-150 pickup can be ordered in billions of different combinations. That’s all going to change for 2009. In an effort to reduce complexity and cut spiraling costs in the process, Ford will be slashing the number of possible F-150 configurations by 90 percent. The automaker isn’t leaving the rest of the lineup alone either. The Ford Expedition goes from 250,000 combos down to fewer than 10,000. The 2009 Lincoln MKS debuts with about 300 combinations, and the 2010 Ford Focus will offer only about 150, which is 95 percent fewer than the current model. Are you in the market for a 2009 Ford F-150 and worried that you won’t be able to get it exactly the way you want? Don’t fret, Ford will still offer more than 9 million combinations for next year’s model, including a brown one we presume.

[Source: Automotive News, subs. req’d]

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Commercial Trucks, HUMMER, Police/Emergency, Military

While General Motors looks over a stack of offers for its HUMMER brand, the fate of AM General hangs in the balance. The military contractor developed and built the original Humvee until the rights to the HUMMER name were bought by GM, who then contracted AM General to continue building the H1 (until it was discontinued) and then the Chevy Tahoe-based H2. (The Chevy Colorado-based H3, meanwhile, is built entirely by GM at its Shreveport, Louisiana plant.) With the future of its General Motors contracts uncertain, AM General has announced a new deal of another kind.

Starting in 2010, the Indiana-based company will begin producing a new series of wheelchair-accessible transit vehicles for the Vehicle Production Group, LLC. Although, as VPG points out, the usual development gestation period for such vehicles is two to three years, VPG and AM General intend to get the ramp-equipped para-transit vehicle to market in less than 24 months. Over 3,500 units have already been ordered, leading VPG to project that annual production will well exceed that number, while AM General intends to use the same workforce it currently employs for the new project. As for what the para-transit vehicle will look like, no one knows, but there was word of AM General developing a new version of the Standard Taxi (see above) with a low ride height and large doors that appears as if it could easily accommodate wheel chairs.

[Source: Detroit News]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments