#Production

If you’ve visited an airport recently, you probably heard on CNN that cases of COVID-19 are on the rise in jurisdictions that largely escaped the earlier wave. Against this backdrop, General Motors came under pressure this week to cease operations at its Arlington, Texas assembly plant.

Home to four full-size SUV models currently undergoing a generational metamorphosis, the plant lies in a state experiencing an upswing in infections. It’s also a key player in GM’s post-lockdown recovery. The automaker says it’ll stay open.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reportedly cracking the whip again, spurring his company’s workforce into a frenzy of car-building as the end of the second quarter looms.

After posting a surprising first-quarter profit in early April, Tesla warned that the full weight of the coronavirus pandemic — and related lockdowns and sales implosion — would land on its balance sheet in Q2. To keep investor enthusiasm alive, the push is on to make those numbers as rosy as possible.

Rivian wants to dazzle you with excessive range and dirt-flinging tank turns. Ford wants you to feel virtuous while behind the wheel of an F-150. General Motors wants to crush things beneath the wheels of the monstrous GMC Hummer EV.

Lordstown Motors’s electric pickup, on the other hand, doesn’t want to be everyone’s best friend. The fledgling automaker, owner of GM’s former Chevy Cruze plant in Northeast Ohio, unveiled its first product Thursday, beating Ford and GM to an electric pickup debut.

There’s a big to-do coming up in Tesla’s social calendar. Dubbed “Battery Day,” the occasion seems to have something to do with…well, you can probably read.

Battery Day, on which Tesla will presumably storm the beaches of electrification technology, is slated for September 15th — the same day as a postponed shareholder meeting.

Are your ready for Air?

It’s been a long time coming, but funding and an actual assembly plant have a way of making things happen. And such is the case at Lucid Motors, which plans to reveal its production Air sedan on September 9th.

Thanks to last year’s prolonged UAW strike and this year’s global pandemic, production of Chevrolet’s new Corvette is way behind schedule. As reported previously, GM had already dialed back the expected number of 2020 C8s headed to dealers by roughly 20 percent before the coronavirus touched down in North America.

Unfortunately, reopening factories hasn’t magically transported the manufacturer into a scenario where C8 ‘Vettes are abundant and customers can rest assured they’ll see their new toy by the end of this year.

Plenty of orders have already been rolled over for 2021 model-year vehicles, especially if they’re convertibles. Now, supply chain troubles all but guarantee 2020 will be an unfortunately weak year for the mid-engined Corvette, and GM knows it. The company’s doing everything it can to get as much product out the door as possible. However, the obstacles placed in GM’s path have proven too large — and timed too perfectly — for it to ever had much of a chance at a normal product launch.

Pour one out for a car you likely didn’t have a hope in hell of affording — and that’s if you even desired one in the first place. Arriving on the market as a plug-in hybrid wonder car in 2014, the scissor-doored coupe found roles in top-grossing flicks and prompted saliva production among underpaid, tech-obsessed writers.

Well, the last i8 has left the factory. How much of an impact did it make?

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made it painfully clear that Texas is his first choice when it comes to locations for a second U.S. vehicle assembly plant. The executive, disillusioned and annoyed with Silicon Valley and the general California experience, had somewhere in the central or southern U.S. on his mind when he started hunting for a new plant location.

A report out of Austin Monday suggests Tesla could be close to sealing a deal.

Ford’s utility vehicle lineup may grow too crowded to sustain the midsize Edge and its Lincoln Nautilus sibling for much longer. That’s the opinion of AutoForecast Solutions’ Sam Fiorani, who claims the Blue Oval has cancelled next-generation versions of both models.

Introduced for the 2015 model year and facelifted for 2019, the two-row Edge and Nautilus (formerly, the MKX) slot between the compact Escape and three-row Explorer, but the appearance of new models in the coming years might trample these models into the dust. If so, it could spell the end of Ford’s vehicle manufacturing presence north of the border.

Don’t let that beer in your hand (and the public patio surrounding you)fool you into believing everything’s normal — the novel coronavirus is still causing headaches, including for automakers attempting to return to full-scale production.

For Volkswagen, it means the plants supplying U.S. dealers with strong-selling models will remain offline for a while longer, complicating the return to normalcy.

Few models can boast of a debut year as dysfunctional as that of the C8 Corvette’s. Chevrolet’s newly mid-engined sports car saw production delayed by a lengthy strike, then kiboshed by a strange virus, leading to no shortage of frustration for those seeking to get their hands on a 2020 model.

Production is again underway, but the automaker already has 2021 on its mind. It seems the minds at the Renaissance Center felt it necessary to maintain as much of the status quo as possible.

Shifts are returning to Ford Motor Company plants across North America, with the automaker claiming Thursday that full production will return sooner than you might think.

At the same time, Ford dropped details on when consumers might expect to see an electric vehicle that hauls heavy loads, rather than steals past glory and heritage from one of America’s most beloved vehicles.

Production of certain Honda vehicles ran into another roadblock on Monday, as the automaker claims it was the victim of a cyber attack.

Reuters reports that production ceased at many of Honda’s manufacturing facilities in the wake of the suspected attack out of fear that quality control processes may have been compromised.

Months ago, I was supposed to board a plane to Old Blighty to drive the new Land Rover Defender.

Given the vehicle’s heritage and importance to the brand, I was excited to see if it was a worthy successor to the famous series of SUVs that came before. I was also excited to go to England for the first time. My Austin Powers impression would be so much cooler if performed in the Old Empire (narrator voice: It would not).

Before I could even finish the paperwork for an international excursion, my flight — and everyone else’s — was canceled. As you know, the pandemic killed off new-car launches for the foreseeable future, although JLR merely “postponed” this one.

There’s a production backlog to be made up for, and industry giants Ford and General Motors don’t want to ease up on the throttle.

Rather than schedule a normal amount of summer downtime for plants and their employees, both automakers plan to pare back their normal idle period for select plants, ensuring a healthy flow of product that’s only just now ramping up after two months offline.