DETROIT – It’s official. Fiat is making a bid for General Motors Europe. If it can do that, the Italian automaker plans to merge Fiat Auto with Chrysler and General Motors Europe and spin that off as a new automaker that will have 80 billion Euros in annual sales, or about $105 billion. But I keep asking, where is Fiat going to get the people with the managerial skills needed to pull this off? Fiat has a very flat management structure where all its top executives already have two different jobs. And it’s hard to see where they’re going to get the time to work on such a large merger.
Meanwhile, back in the �??States, car sales fell 34 percent last month. Bad news. But that�??s compared to a year ago. The worse news is that car sales in April were lower than they were in March – about 8 percent lower. Every single major automaker saw a drop in sales with two notable exceptions. Honda sales were up 10 percent month over month. And General Motors saw a 6.6 percent increase in sales. In fact, GM gained a big jump in market share to just over 21 percent. The GM divisions that posted the gain in sales were Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Hummer. You heard right. Hummer! I guess those stupid rally caps really do work!
Several weeks ago we reported that Volkswagen was thinking about a reverse takeover of Porsche to wipe out Porsche�??s debt it acquired when purchasing VW. But Wolfgang Porsche, head of Porsche�??s supervisory board says the company won�??t be sold to VW. According to Reuters, this puts Wolfgang at odds with his cousin, Ferdinand Piech, who advocates a sale of Porsche to VW. Piech also said Porsche should replace its CEO and chief financial officer with VW�??s. The sale could be worth 11 billion Euros.
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