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Humvee maker AM General reportedly for sale, with interest from FCA, GM

WASHINGTON — AM General has put itself up for sale and has hired investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd to seek potential bidders in a deal that could value the builder of Humvee military vehicles at more than $2 billion, people familiar with the matter said this week. Potential bidders include competitors in the military ground vehicle market, such as General Dynamics, Oshkosh Corp and BAE Systems, according to two people familiar with the matter. Automakers like Fiat Chrysler and General Motors may also be potential buyers. GM licensed Hummer from AM General in 1998 to build civilian SUVs. None of the companies would comment or reply to a request for comment. The South Bend, Indiana-based AM General is currently owned by private equity firms. A possible sale of AM General follows a rash of deals over the past 18 months among defense contractors. But relatively fewer makers of defense equipment have gone on the auction block. Last year, United Technologies acquired Rockwell Collins for $30 billion, and in March, TransDigm Group continued its acquisition spree with a $525 million deal for Extant Components Group. AM General could fetch about 10 times its annual earnings of $160 million, one of the people said. The company's favorable tax treatment because of its current status as an limited liability corporation, would allow a buyer to reduce the company's taxable earnings for 15 years. That coupled with recent contract awards could push the ultimate value of the company to over $2 billion in a sale. The sale, should it happen, comes as the U.S. Army is gearing up for a broad effort to modernize its forces, including seeking prototypes of its Next-Generation Combat Vehicle in fiscal year 2022. Last month, AM General was awarded an Army contract for as many as 2,800 new M997A3 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) ambulances. The contract could be worth as much as $800 million if all options were exercised, AM General said at the time. Last year, the Pentagon awarded AM General a $550 million contract to deliver HMMWVs for use as protected weapons carriers, cargo transporters and ambulances to Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Jordan, Slovenia, Bahrain, Columbia, Bosnia and Kenya as a part of a larger Foreign Military Sales agreement. The sale of AM General offers an opportunity to purchase a prime contractor that delivers a finished product to the Pentagon, and not just an add-on system or service.

GM renames its Detroit-Hamtramck plant Factory Zero

Maybe we'll win, saved by zero. General Motors on Friday announced that its sprawling Detroit-Hamtramck facility, which is being retooled to build electric vehicles, has been renamed Factory Zero — as in zero emissions, along with the promise of an autonomous future in which there are zero crashes and zero congestion. The company is spending $2.2 billion to retool the plant into a futuristic facility that is flexible enough to build a variety of cars and trucks across the GM portfolio of brands. GM says that's the most it has ever spent on a production facility, and when the plant's cranking out EVs at scale it will have created 2,200 manufacturing jobs. Factory Zero's first projects will be the all-electric GMC Hummer pickup and the self-driving electric Cruise Origin, both build on GM's new Ultium battery platform, with other EVs to follow. Factory Zero should start cranking out Hummer pickups by fall 2021. A Hummer SUV will come along later. Check back with Autoblog when the Hummer is revealed next Tuesday, Oct. 20. Sustainability will be another key feature. During construction, excess concrete from pours in the plant has been used to pave roads, and stormwater runoff is being recycled to charge the factory suppression system and circulate in cooling towers. The 365-acre site also has 16.5 acres of wildlife habitat — GM says monarch butterflies hang out there, along with foxes and wild turkeys. GM says it's committed to powering all its southeast Michigan plants with sustainable energy by 2023, the rest of its U.S. facilities by 2030, and overseas plants by 2040. To that end, Factory Zero has a 30-kilowatt solar carport, and a 516-kilowatt ground-mounted solar farm, from DTE. “Factory ZERO is the next battleground in the EV race and will be GMÂ’s flagship assembly plant in our journey to an all-electric future,” said Gerald Johnson, GM executive vice president of Global Manufacturing. “The electric trucks and SUVs that will be built here will help transform GM and the automotive industry.” Related Video:     Green Hirings/Firings/Layoffs Plants/Manufacturing GM Hummer hamtramck

GMC Hummer EV could have had the Chevrolet Avalanche's Midgate

One of the many rumors swirling around the GMC Hummer EV claimed the truck would resurrect the Midgate inaugurated by the original Chevrolet Avalanche. Although we now know there's no way to fully knock down the partition between the cab and the cargo box, the firm revealed the rumor wasn't entirely false. "There was [a Midgate] early on. We opted for the functionality of the drop glass in the back. With the package layout and things like that, it was not advantageous to pursue that one. And, the five-foot bed was kind of the industry standard in regards to price of entry in that segment," explained John Mack, the Hummer's exterior design management, during an interview with Muscle Car & Trucks. The Hummer will go on sale with a five-foot box, and it doesn't sound like a longer bed will be available, so a modern version of the Midgate would have made the model more versatile by giving users the ability to fold down the partition behind the rear seats to carry bulky items, like plywood and ATVs. It's a feature that would have inevitably made the truck more complicated to build, however, because it adds moving parts that need to be sealed. Hinges, seals, and latches in turn add weight, and complexity almost always invites high manufacturing costs. As an electric pickup built with newly-developed components, the Hummer already has enough of each. Motorists who need to carry something that's significantly longer than the cargo box aren't entirely out of luck. As Mack pointed out, the rear window drops into the partition, so owners will have the ability to haul surfboards, lumber, or anything else that's relatively long and reasonably thin by simply pushing a switch. Alternatively, the only thing limiting cargo space when the roof comes off is the sky — or, depending on where you live, bridges. Mack didn't reveal when the Midgate was dropped. GMC launched the Hummer project in April 2019, and it previously released early design sketches that show how the truck transitioned from a sketch to a prototype. As of writing, nothing suggests the Midgate will make a comeback in the near future on any member of the General Motors portfolio. It was introduced in 2001 on the first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche, which went on sale in the United States for the 2002 model year. It later spread to Cadillac's luxed-up variant of the truck, the Escalade EXT, and to the short-lived GMC Envoy XUV.