2014 Cadillac Srx Luxury Collection on 2040-cars

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Cadillac SRX production moving to TN, next-gen Equinox going to Mexico

It's a good week for the town of Spring Hill, TN, as General Motors has announced that its factory in the city of 31,000 will receive a $185 million contract to produce engines. On top of that, the next-generation Cadillac SRX crossover will be built at the factory (NA models are presently built in Ramos, Arizpe Mexico), which was once famous for being the home of GM's now-defunct Saturn brand.
The factory is one of GM's six facilities around the globe that will screw together the company's new line of three- and four-cylinder Ecotec engines. Spring Hill currently builds the 2.0-liter, turbocharged Ecotec, as well as the naturally aspirated 2.4 and 2.5-liter variants.
Spring Hill's vehicle assembly lines were idled in 2009, but were reactivated in 2011. The SRX is just one of the products meant to benefit from last year's $350-million investment, and should have a positive impact, creating or retaining around 1,800 positions at the factory.

GM will stop reporting monthly U.S. vehicle sales

DETROIT — General Motors said on Tuesday it will stop reporting monthly U.S. vehicle sales, saying the 30-day snapshot does not accurately reflect the market, and will instead issue quarterly sales. GM will also no longer report monthly sales in China, its largest market, and Brazil. GM will provide monthly data to the U.S. Federal Reserve, industry associations and government agencies across the globe, but that data is not made public. Analysts and investors rely on monthly U.S. vehicle sales not just to track the performance of individual automakers, but as a barometer of the health of the world's second-largest auto market and as an indicator of consumer confidence in the U.S. economy overall. GM and its Detroit rivals Ford and Fiat Chrysler have relied heavily on sales of high-margin pickup truck and SUV sales to boost profits. GM's total U.S. sales, its second-largest market, are down 3.2 percent for the first two months of 2018, reflecting a 6.8 percent drop in retail sales to individual customers, the company reported last month. GM executives have expressed frustration that comparisons of monthly U.S. sales results among rival automakers are distorted by short-term discount programs, and by differences in strategy for selling vehicles in bulk to rental car fleets. "Thirty days is not enough time to separate real sales trends from short-term fluctuations in a very dynamic, highly competitive market," Kurt McNeil, U.S. vice president for sales operations said in a statement. GM's actions could prompt other automakers to also switch to quarterly U.S. sales reports. Major automakers will report March U.S. new vehicle sales on Tuesday. Until the early 1990s, most U.S. automakers released sales results every 10 days. The former Chrysler Corp. stopped reporting sales on a 10-day basis in 1990, and rivals followed suit over the next three years. GM executives are betting that investors will quickly adapt to receiving U.S. sales data every three months, as investors in other retail sectors already have. Retailers such as Walmart report sales on a quarterly basis. Reporting by Joe WhiteRelated Video: Image Credit: Reuters Earnings/Financials Green Buick Cadillac Chevrolet GM GMC US

Cadillac CT6 PHEV battery shape a big departure for GM's plug-in hybrid tech

Anyone with any familiarity with the electric powertrain details for the two General Motors plug-in hybrids will have noticed that the information we have about the newly announced Cadillac CT6 plug-in hybrid has a lot of numbers in common with the Chevy Volt and the Cadillac ELR, like the 18.4-kWh lithium-ion battery pack and an expected all-electric range of 37 miles. We also noticed that the announcement calls the plug-in CT6 hybrid an actual plug-in hybrid and not an "extended range electric vehicle (EREV)," which is what GM calls the Volt and the ELR. This, of course, means we needed to ask GM some questions. Donny Nordlicht from Cadillac communications told AutoblogGreen that while the Volt and CT6 batteries are both 18.4-kWh, the shape is completely different. In the Volt/ELR, the battery is T-shaped (see it here). The CT6 has four seats, with a tunnel running between the two in the rear, as you can see here, but the battery in the CT6 PHEV is "a cube-shaped pack, which is between rear seats and the trunk," Nordlicht said. "There is no pass through." GM has not yet released any technical schematics about this pack, but Nordlicht said that, "The CT6's advanced mixed-material platform was designed to accommodate the PHEV system by design so that it minimally intrudes on the cabin space." It also means that the CT6 can be ordered as an optional PHEV, while the Volt and ELR were purpose-built plug-ins. GM is also distinguishing between the EREV and PHEV powertrains in its vehicles from this point forward. "We are not discarding the EREV language," Nordlicht said. "The CT6 utilizes a two-motor system mated to a 2.0T 4-cylinder engine, which is an all-new system to Cadillac." We assume that the PHEV packs will use li-ion cells from LG Chem, just like the EREVs do, but Nordlicht did not answer our question on that point. As for other details about the CT6 PHEV – like production, full dimension, and pricing – we will just have to wait until closer to when the vehicle launches for those. Related Video: