Tag Archives: april

Ford and Chrysler Shorten Shutdowns, Add More Jobs

Chrysler and FordGoing into summer 2013, Ford and Chrysler are working furiously to produce more of their most popular vehicles. In an effort to keep up with the high demand, both automakers have announced that they will keep more of their plants open throughout the summer.

Typically, Ford and Chrysler will shut down their plants at certain points during the summer. Ford has a two-week summer shutdown, and Chrysler will usually shut down plants for a week or so. This year, Ford is reducing the two-week shutdown to one week, and some of the Chrysler plants will run through the whole summer with no shutdown. Ford will also add approximately 3,500 hourly jobs to keep the plants open. During that time, Ford plans to produce an additional 40,000 units.

So far this year, sales have been very good for Chrysler and Ford. Ram Trucks had a 49.3 percent volume sales increase in April with 32,124 units, and Ford had a 17.7 percent increase with 204,969 units. It is likely that sales for pickup trucks and other sporting vehicles like SUVs will increase even more as the summer goes on, so it makes perfect sense to keep the plants open longer and hire more employees.

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How Will May Auto Sales Stack Up?

Every month seems to have the obligatory article about how well the auto industry is doing. There have been months of happy reporting about sales increases here and demands increasing there. It is a success story that is an easy topic. The question has always been, though, at the back of my mind how long that luck will hold out. I’ve wondered what the industry was doing to make sure that this increase in sales is the new standard and not just a moment in time. May could be the month that puts all of this progress to the test.

Auto Finance News posted an interesting read that posed that very question. The month of May was a bad month for the economy. The jobs reports that come out were dismal with only 69,000 jobs added, making it the weakest monthly growth in a year. It was bad enough that the report raised the unemployment rate up to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent, but additionally, the confidence of the US consumer fell from 68.7 percent in April to 64.9 percent in May.

The question remains if this is going to have an impact on the upward swing of the auto industry. May is a notorious month for strong sales, so this might just be pessimistic thinking. I like to think that the industry is doing a good job of riding the wave, especially with many of them such as Chrysler making sure to keep people engage by bringing out new products like the Dodge Dart. Edmunds also made the prediction that car sales in the month of May would increase by 30 percent due in part to light vehicles continuing to sell well. Only time will tell if the rough economic reporting this last month is going to make a dent in the comeback story of the auto industry.

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