By Barbara Liston, Julia Edwards and Patrick Rucker
In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of U.S. Toyota drivers have received a stern warning by first-class mail: Immediately drive to your dealer to replace a flawed air bag, and in the meantime don’t let anyone sit on the passenger side.
Carmakers are investing more than $30 billion by 2018 to expand or open more factories in Brazil than ever before, but that doesn’t make the market a success story.
BMW spent $250 million on its first factory in Brazil, which started operating earlier this month and will reach annual output of 32,000 cars in three to four years. That compares with a $1 billion investment in a new factory to build 150,000 cars in Mexico by the end of the decade.
By Ben Klayman
Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford said new technologies that allow cars to talk to each other and drive themselves may scare some people, so the industry will need to allow consumers to opt out of such features.
Air that’s cleaner inside your car than on the outside — in smog-weary China it’s an attractive sales pitch, and the world’s biggest automakers are racing to cash in.
Volkswagen, General Motors Co. and BMW are among carmakers whose production has been hit by a strike in South Africa today as 30,000 metalworkers take action to demand higher pay.
“The strike started today,” Castro Ngobese, a spokesman for the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, said by phone. “There are no negotiations, since they broke down. We are waiting for employers to submit a revised offer.”
