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| (photo: smart fortwo cabrio) |
He says a decision on the future of Smart will be made by the end of April, but there are observers who think it could come at the company's shareholder meeting in early April.
DaimlerChrysler has stopped development work on the ForMore hatchback it was going to use for its launch in the U.S. in September of 2006, and many suppliers to that car are saying it's actually a dead issue.
Smart is of course already on sale in Canada, but any decision to kill the brand would mean a fairly quick end to its availability her and that would eventually end up in decreased service for the models already sold.
Killing the Smart division would put an end to its losses, for starters, and is widely expected to make the DCX share price rise.
All of this is of course a direct conflict with what Mercedes-Benz car group CEO Eckhard Cordes and Smart CEO Ulrich Walker have been saying, but contradicting underlings doesn't always bother Schrempp. While Daimler and Chrysler executives were all telling the world that their deal was a merger, Schrempp was bragging to a Financial Times reporter that it was really a takeover and the word ''merger'' was used as a sop to American feelings.
GM PUTS OFF REAR-DRIVE CAR: In order to speed up the arrival of its hyper-critical new lineup of trucks and SUVs in 2006 and beyond, it looks like General Motors has decided to kill its plans for a new line of rear-wheel-drive cars.
The Zeta midsize architecture was to have served as the basis for a whole fleet of global cars and crossover SUVs, so GM says it is now trying to find a way to develop those models using another method.
It's not clear what future products for Canada this might involve.
VW OKAY BIODIESEL WARRANTY: Volkswagen models running on biodiesel blend fuel in Canada and the U.S. will be covered by the company's new car warranty program.
Bernice Holman of VW America says the warranty will cover diesel-powered models that burn fuel blended with up to five percent of a renewable resource, such as soybean oil.
On a per-capita basis, this is a much bigger deal in Canada, since consumers in this country buy a lot more diesel-powered models from VW than do Americans.
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| (photo: Cadillac BLS) |
Indeed, GM's product development czar, Bob Lutz, says the next BLS will be built for the world in mind when it arrives in 2010.
If that happens, it would also mean that the third generation of the Cadillac CTS would be pushed a little more up-market, to allow more room for the BLS.
Of course, a thousand things could happen to change this plan, and why might still see the current BLS in Canada long before the end of the decade.