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GM laying off 510 amidst slow Cadillac, small car sales

General Motors is laying off about 510 workers from two factories beginning in January, and it could be months before the automaker needs some of that latent capacity to come back on line. A combination of poor sales and high dealer inventories are prompting the cutbacks, according to Automotive News.
The largest changes come at GM's Lansing Grand River plant, where the Cadillac ATS and CTS are made. An entire shift of about 350 workers is being laid off, but the automaker hopes to find positions for some of them at other nearby factories. The decision leaves just a single shift building vehicles there. According to Automotive News, the move is partially spurred by Johan de Nysschen's plan to make Cadillac a more exclusive brand.
The lost shift will likely return for production of the next-generation Chevrolet Camaro at the plant, according to the report, but GM isn't saying when that will be. A previous announcement from the Canadian Auto Workers union indicated that the Oshawa, Ontario, factory would lose the coupe in late 2015 or early 2016.

Cadillac releases updated 2015 CTS

Cadillac is in the process of applying the new wreathless emblem across its range one model at a time, but rather than simply slap the new logo on the existing models, it's taking the opportunity to roll out some revisions as well. First came the ATS coupe, followed by the updated ATS sedan, and now the flagship brand in the General Motors portfolio has quietly announced some revisions for the CTS sedan as well.
For the 2015 model year, the CTS - which was just introduced last year - gets a revised front end with that wreathless crest but also a new chrome grille with active aero elements on standard models and a black-chrome grille on the Vsport. The revised grille is flanked by new headlights, but behind them the engine lineup carries over: a 2.0-liter turbo four with 272 horsepower, a 3.6-liter V6 with 321 hp or - in the Vsport performance model - a 3.6-liter twin-turbo V6 with 420 hp that's still the most powerful V6 GM has ever made. All engines are mated to an eight-speed automatic transmission (ditching the six-speed auto on previous versions) and (apart from the RWD Vsport) can be had in rear- or all-wheel-drive flavors.
Cadillac has also given the updated CTS some new electronics (including inductive smartphone charging, onboard wifi, and more advanced parking and lane assist systems) as well as new wheels, trims and color options, details on which you can read in the press release below.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.