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Honda may recall up to 1M vehicles for airbag issue, following Toyota's lead

It seems Toyota won't be the only one recalling the faulty Takata airbag inflators for long. Honda insiders in Japan claim that the company is getting close to announcing its own worldwide campaign that would begin before the end of June.
Unnamed sources close to Honda in Japan tell Automotive News that the company is pursuing an internal investigation into possibly affected models and is working with Takata to gather more information. They claim that it could involve even more than the 1.14 million cars worldwide that the automaker covered under the first recall for the problem in April 2013, including 561,000 vehicles in the US.
Toyota jumpstarted this process last week when it recalled over 2 million cars worldwide, including 844,277 in the US. Soon after, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began a preliminary evaluation into the issue following six reported incidents, and started assembling data about potentially affected models from Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Chrysler. NHTSA also began investigating Takata itself.

How GM ended up suing its crosstown rival Fiat Chrysler

DETROIT — Automakers sue each other on occasion, but no one in Detroit can remember one accusing another of bribing union officials to get an unfair labor cost advantage. Yet thatÂ’s what happened Wednesday when General Motors filed a federal racketeering lawsuit against Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. ItÂ’s based on a widening federal investigation into corruption involving officials of the United Auto Workers union, and shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the unionÂ’s president Gary Jones stepped down. The 95-page complaint could affect ongoing contract talks between the union and Fiat Chrysler, the lone automaker of DetroitÂ’s big three thatÂ’s still in negotiations. It also could cause jitters with French automaker PSA Peugeot, which has reached an agreement to merge with the Italian-American automaker. Here are some questions and answers about the lawsuit and its impact: Why did GM sue? GM alleges that Fiat Chrysler senior executives, including now-deceased CEO Sergio Marchionne, paid $1.5 million in bribes to UAW officials for nearly a decade and corrupted the bargaining process with the union in the 2009, 2011 and 2015 contracts to gain advantages over General Motors. The lawsuit says that because of the bribes, which were funneled through a joint UAW-Fiat Chrysler training center, the union allowed Fiat Chrysler to use more lower-paid temporary workers. Also, FCA in 2015 did not have to limit the number of newly hired workers who make less and get lower-cost benefits than older workers hired before 2007. GM contends it couldnÂ’t negotiate similar union concessions that FCA was able to get through bribery. GM could only hire a limited number of temporary and lower-paid new workers, called “second tier” workers, which unfairly increased its labor costs by billions of dollars. It alleges the higher labor costs had another purpose — to force GM into a merger with FCA that Marchionne wanted. GM did wind up with higher labor costs, which until the lawsuit had not been linked to the federal corruption probe. Before contract talks with all three automakers began last summer, the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank, determined Fiat ChryslerÂ’s total hourly labor costs including wages and benefits were about $55 per hour, $8 less per hour than GM and $6 lower than Ford. At a Wall Street conference in New York on Thursday, GM CEO Mary Barra said her company can compete on a level playing field.

Marchionne completed Fiat-Chrysler deal from a Florida beach

Sergio Marchionne is the CEO of Fiat, which as you may have heard, has finally worked up a deal to finish acquiring the Chrysler Group after months of bargaining with the United Auto Workers and its VEBA healthcare trust, which owned just over 40 percent of the American brand. Where was Marchionne when the deal was finally hammered out? Well, not tucked away in a frigid Detroit board room until the wee hours of the morning.
Nope, one of the largest deals in automotive history was reportedly hammered out on the beach - at the home of a banker, in the Florida resort town of Vero Beach. Marchionne traveled to the home of Alain Lebec, a senior managing director at Brock Capital LLC, one of the advisory companies for the VEBA fund, where both sides met to make final arrangements in the $4.35-billion exchange. The location of the final deal, though, is nearly as remarkable as the pace with which it came about.
According to anonymous sources pinned down by Automotive News Europe, before the meeting, the two sides were meeting in Detroit as recently as December 19, which is where Fiat made one of its final revised offers. Naturally, the VEBA made a counter offer, which led Marchionne to initiate the Vero Beach meeting.