Detroit area teens looking for a summer job can now get a paid internship with GM, and will recieve education, training and service projects to carry out over the summer. Sure beats my prior summer jobs as a carnival barker (I’m not kidding).

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Following in the footsteps of Spanish bank Santander, GM Financial announced that it would enter the prime lending market in 2014.

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Now that Opel workers in Bochum refused a plan to keep the factory open, now that an intervention by UAW’s Bob King went exactly nowhere, the question is where to move production of the Opel Zafira when Bochum closes its doors by end of 2014.

In the running: Rüsselsheim, Germany, and Ellesmere Port, UK. (Read More…)

Forward contracts on popcorn skyrocketed at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as former TTAC Chief Editor Ed Niedermeyer drew massive fire for his recent op-ed  in the Wall Street Journal.  On Sunday, GM’s PR Chief Selim Bingo blasted Niedermeyer for “stepping through the looking glass” and for “carelessly comparing GM’s spending in China to that in the U.S.”

A day later, Bob Lutz joined the fray. (Read More…)

Last month, GM CEO Dan Akerson said that GM might move production away from South Korea if tensions with North Korea escalate. Korea labor unions were not amused, saying that Akerson was using the crisis as a pretext to gain the upper hand in upcoming labor talks.

Last week in Detroit, Akerson told GM’s South Korean union leader that he won’t pull GM out of South Korea. He also said he is unhappy with the Korean union, and that he will bring up the matter this week with South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye, when the “Iron Lady” will visit the U.S. this week.

Now, the union is fuming. (Read More…)

 The days of Government Motors are slowly coming to an end. “The U.S. Treasury will begin another round of sales for General Motor stock acquired during the government’s bailout of the auto sector,” the Treasury told Reuters. (Read More…)

Chevy Cruze in Beijing

While GM’s head-flack Selim Bingol was swearing at Ed Niedermeyer, and that it’s not true that GM is sending its money to China, GM’s Chinese operation again outsold America. GM China sold 261,870 units in April, up 15.3%. In the U.S., GM sold 237,646 in April. In the first four months of the year, GM sold 821,707 vehicles stateside. Meanwhile in China, it sold 1,078,243. (Read More…)

A terrorist, about to enter the RenCen

Even after Ed Niedermeyer put on coat and tie as proper attire for our Via Dolorosa to  GM’s towers, GM’s Über-PR Chief Selim Bingol did not like him. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” said Bingol, frustrating my naive attempts at fence-mending. Instead of being sent to Gitmo,  one of the terrorists writes frequent op-ed pieces at the Wall Street Journal, causing Bingol to go on the counter-attack. (Read More…)

Porsche is looking to fill 1,400 jobs in for its expanded factory  in Leipzig, where the new Macan SUVlet will be built by the end of the year. A lot of these jobs will go to current Opel workers, says Germany’s Focus. (Read More…)

Our beloved Ed Niedermeyer is back in the Wall Street Journal with another op-ed, entitled “Welcome To General Tso’s Motors”. I’m sure you can all figure out the gist of it. Check it out here. Anti-GM-bias police, grab your defibrillators.

We don’t get enough good questions from the readers, and it’s a damn shame. Reader Steve Hofer sent us a great one via email; what if Elon Musk was running General Motors?

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GM’s pickup truck changeover has received all the attention of TTAC’s commentariat, but GM knows it needs more than new trucks to make up for decades of deteriorating market share. All hopes are on a wave of new showroom offerings. “Seventy percent of the automaker’s U.S. portfolio will be refreshed between the start of 2012 and the end of 2013, and 89 percent will be refreshed by 2016,” writes the Detroit News. (Read More…)

Bob King’s attempts to ingratiate himself with German unions, and to make Opel’s Bochum workers reconsider their decision to turn down Opel’s restructuring plan, are being ignored. Actually, it appears as if they had the opposite effect. Days after King’s comment, Bochum plant manager Manfred Gellrich rejected new discussions, saying Opel does not want to “waste precious time,” Reuters says. Over the weekend, Opel dropped another bomb: Bochum will be closed completely. A parts depot that was supposed to stay open, will also close its doors. (Read More…)

Companies – or so they say – pay their executives the big bucks to keep them from leaving, or, in corporate-speak to “retain” them. In the case of GM CEO Dan Akerson, they pay him more because he will leave. Nasty people will say “to make him leave.” (Read More…)