#vote

General Motors of Canada workers are heading to the ballot boxes Sunday to vote on a plan that will bring final production of 70,000 trucks a year to Oshawa and new engine production to St. Catharines.

Vote tallies are expected Sunday evening.

After cleaning up the data as much as I could considering this smashing headache I’m managing today, I’ve crunched the numbers and come out with a magic number: 242. That’s the total number of vehicles you nominated that were eligible for this year’s Ten Best and Ten Worst.

Here they are, in order of Best to Worst, for your reading pleasure.

Ford and the United Auto Workers union announced Friday they’d reached a tentative agreement which, if ratified, will become the rules of work for Ford’s 52,000 unionized employees for the next four years.

The United Auto Workers union could make its first real break into the southern U.S. by unionizing 165 “skilled trade” maintenance workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, reported the Associated Press (via The Detroit News).

UAW Local 42 represents some workers at Volkswagen Chattanooga but does not have exclusive bargaining rights at the plant. A new election for union representation, which is being requested by maintenance workers at the plant, would give Local 42 exclusive bargaining rights for those workers.

The effort is part of a “renewed collective bargaining push” unrelated to the diesel emissions scandal, union officials told the AP.

The last election saw the UAW defeated in a 712-626 vote.

Of course Chinese cars are all craptastic patent violations on wobbly wheels. But then, the same had been said about Japanese and later Korean cars. Can Chinese carmakers repeat what Japan and Korea have done? J.D. Power thinks they are rapidly improving.

Bloomberg and car analyst Itay Michaeli spotted a new trend: The second car could be going out of style, and this “may hurt U.S. auto sales,” Bloomberg says.

Indeed, “the average number of vehicles for every U.S. driver has declined since hitting a record in 2007.” Is it a new trend that “Americans are increasingly willing to settle for owning one car or truck?”