*no Reserve**maryland State Inspected** on 2040-cars

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FCA worker in Indiana tests for coronavirus, but the plant will stay open

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV said Thursday that an employee has tested positive for COVID-19 at its Kokomo, Indiana, transmission plant, but the location will remain open. The Italian-American automaker said the company placed the employee and his immediate co-workers and others he may have come into direct contact with in home quarantine. The automaker said it is “deploying additional sanitization measures across the entire facility, re-timing break times to avoid crowding and deploying social spacing.” Fiat Chrysler is canceling all in-person meetings unless “business critical” and conducted meetings through video conferencing technologies. Automakers also have canceled non-essential travel. Ford, meanwhile, said its plants in North America remain unaffected. General Motors spokesman Jim Cain said the Detroit automaker has not had any cases of the coronavirus in its North American plants yet, citing such measures as reduced travel and restricted entry to plants as helping. How the No. 1 U.S. automaker would respond to a positive test would depend on the situation, he added. “You do plan to operate with a certain amount of absenteeism, but every facility has a different operating plan,” he said. The Fiat side of the FCA operation, meanwhile,  is temporarily halting operations at some plants in Italy and will reduce production rates in response to coronavirus in the country, the largest outbreak in Europe, a spokesman for the automaker said on Wednesday. FCA said in a statement it had stepped up measures across its facilities, including intensive sanitation of all work and rest areas, to support the government's directives to curb the spread of the infectious disease. "As a result of taking these actions the company will, where necessary, make temporary closures of its plants across Italy," it said. The spokesman said affected plants were Pomigliano, Melfi, Atessa and Cassino, each of them halted for two or three days between Wednesday and Saturday. FCA said that to allow greater spacing of employees at their workstations, "daily production rates will be lowered to accommodate the adapted manufacturing processes." However, a source close to the matter said FCA did not expect an impact on overall production rates. The source added that temporary closures were in no way linked to disruptions of auto parts supplies following anti-virus measures imposed by Rome all over Italy.

FCA and iPhone maker plan Chinese electric vehicle joint venture

MILAN — Italian American automaker Fiat Chrysler and Taiwan's Hon Hai plan to set up a joint venture to manufacture electric vehicles and to engage in the business of wirelessly connected vehicles, Hon Hai said on Thursday. Fiat Chrysler (FCA) and Hon Hai are negotiating to set up a 50-50 joint venture, Hon Hai said in a statement. It added Hon Hai would hold its 50% share both directly and indirectly and that its direct shareholding would not exceed 40%. Hon Hai is the parent of Foxconn, the Chinese assembler of Apple iPhones. FCA last month reached a binding agreement for a $50 billion tie-up with France's PSA that will create the world's No. 4 carmaker. The joint venture with Hon Hai will produce vehicles for the Chinese market, but many details of the accord are still to be worked out, one source close to the matter said, adding that a final deal was expected to be signed in the coming months. Foxconn has been investing heavily in a variety of future transportation ventures for several years, including Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride services giant, and Chinese electric vehicle startups Byton and Xpeng. Foxconn also has invested in Chinese battery giant CATL and a variety of other mostly Chinese transportation tech start-ups. FCA will launch its first full-electric model - the 500 small car - this year. Reporting by Giulio Piovaccari in Milan, additional reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit. Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.

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.