TTAC News Round-up: Investors Pump the Brakes, Daimler's Dig, and Chapo's Crapwagon

Investors aren’t embracing automakers’ continued enthusiasm

Even though automakers are boasting fatter bottom lines and better outlooks for 2016 over 2015, investors are wary of their optimism, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Slowing sales in China, rising interest rates and an inability to keep pace with record sales have slowed investors’ interest in automaker stocks such as General Motors and Ford. Those stocks have slid 11 percent and 8 percent respectively this month.

Suppliers have been particularly vulnerable to the slide as well. Shares of Delphi have dropped 13 percent since the beginning of this year.

Here’s the China-made Cadillac CT6

CarNewsChina released pictures of their Chinese-built Cadillac CT6, which will go on sale in that country later this year.

That normally wouldn’t mean much for U.S. customers — our CT6s will initially be assembled at GM’s Hamtramck, Michigan plant — except Bloomberg reported Monday that the plug-in version of the CT6 will be imported from China. The China-made plug-in hybrid CT6 will be the second “import domestic” from GM after the Buick Envision reaches our shores this year.

So, CarNewsChina has pictures of our next Cadillac CT6, I suppose.

Daimler’s Dieter digs at VW for diesel disgrace

(Alliterations are great. — Aaron)

Daimler’s CEO Dieter Zetsche said Thursday that the automaker wouldn’t be caught up in a scandal similar to Volkswagen’s cheating diesels because if “anyone had this kind of idea with us, this person would very quickly find someone else who would say ‘we don’t want it like that, and we will not do it like that,’” according to Reuters.

Zetsche’s comments about Volkswagen were warranted, he said, because “there is nothing else to do,” considering the damage it’s done to the entire industry.

The CEO went on to say that Daimler would stay committed to making diesel cars, despite the cloud of suspicion that those cars can’t pass emissions tests.

Billionaire drug kingpin stole battered white Jetta to escape

(Above photo is a dramatic reenactment of the beat-to-hell Mexican Jetta. — Aaron)

Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman initially drove a beat up Volkswagen Jetta with a broken transmission to escape from Mexican marines closing in on him at his compounds, Reuters reported.

El Chapo and an associate stole at gunpoint the white Volkswagen Jetta with more than 100,000 miles on the clock before ditching it after driving a mile. The duo hijacked a red Ford Focus after and calmly obeyed traffic laws before they were finally apprehended, according to the report.

A worker at an auto repair shop said she watched the druglord and an aide sit at a stoplight before calmly taking off.

“They respected the law,” Karim Barajas told Reuters. “They set off normally, nice and slow.”

GM lawyers probing ignition switch victim’s painkiller use

Lawyers for General Motors are asking whether painkillers had anything to do with the injuries sustained by a man who crashed his Saturn Ion into a tree in Oklahoma in 2014 and is suing the automaker as part of a larger lawsuit for its faulty ignition switches, Bloomberg reported (via Automotive News).

The lawsuit is a “bellwether” trial for similar complaints against the automaker for covering up a faulty ignition switch that could disable a car’s safety systems, including airbags. GM admitted that its faulty ignition switches killed 124 people and injured more, but argued in court Thursday that a man’s pre-existing injuries could be blamed for his hospitalization after the crash.

A judge ruled that GM couldn’t ask questions to determine whether the man was impaired by pain medication at the time of the crash, but lawyers for the automakers are questioning whether the man’s repeated surgeries and earlier ailments could be to blame for his neck and back pain — not the crash.