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Senior management changes at Stellantis UK have led to its group managing director Maria Grazia Davino taking direct responsibility for the event of its retail network. It comes lower than six months after Davino took over the lead at Stellantis UK from Paul Wilcox, was tasked with improving group performance and restoring the religion of its Peugeot, Citroen, DS, Vauxhall, Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Jeep dealers as retailer morale had hit all-time low. She told AM in December how she rapidly paused plans to modify to agency contracts until significant issues were ironed out and each Stellantis plus its retailers can…
Unite has issued a warning to Ford on the potential of strikes across its UK sites involving white-collar employees unless the corporate engages in negotiations. The union is insisting that the automotive manufacturer must take part in talks with the conciliation service Acas, or else Unite will proceed with preparing its members for industrial motion balloting. Ford’s proposals for over 3,000 salaried staff and managers have been overwhelmingly rejected by greater than 90% of each groups, based on the union. Specifically, many salaried staff have been offered a one-time, unconsolidated payment of 5% of their salary for 2024, effectively leading…
Two years after being written off, physical auctions are actually being operated again by all of the principal vehicle remarketing providers, reports Shoreham Vehicle Auctions (SVA). It said online-only auction operators succumbed to pressure from each vendors and buyers during Q4 2023 to operate physical auctions to create market confidence and take care of the challenge of multiple price realignments. “Even those firms which have been running ‘online only’ auctions since 2020 are actually investing in refurbishing facilities and re-employing staff to get back to physical,” it noted. SVA said it was one in all the primary auction firms to…
Eight out of ten insurance firms have agreed to pause sales of Guaranteed Asset Protection (GAP) insurance on the request of the financial watchdog. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said it would perform a second round of discussions with those GAP providers that may proceed selling the product even though it said that these have agreed not to make use of latest GAP distributors within the interim. GAP insurance is usually sold alongside automobile finance. It covers the difference between a vehicle’s purchase price or outstanding finance and its current market value, within the event it’s written off before finance has been repaid.…
James Lett, technical expert at Autodata, asks how the industry can encourage more people to enter the sphere. As National Apprenticeship Week comes around again, we recognise that the UK’s trade industry continues to be facing a labour shortage issue. This is very true within the automotive sector, where it’s predicted we’ll experience a shortfall of 160,000 employees by 2031 resulting from an ageing population, a discount in migration and plenty of people leaving the career all together. This shortage of ambitious people doing exertions with their hands begs the query: How can we encourage more people to enter the…
Arrival, a UK-based start-up which hoped to launch electric vans, has called in administrators from EY after it became insolvent. Its assets, including electric vehicle designs, software, mental property and R&D assets, will now be offered on the market by the administrators. Founded in Banbury, Oxfordshire, in 2015 by Russian billionnaire Denis Sverdlov, Arrival aimed to make electric vans and taxis cheaply and easily, and it floated on America’s Nasdaq stock market in 2021, briefly gaining a valuation of $13bn (£9bn). However it struggled to show its designs into production reality, and last 12 months it declared it could switch production from…
Steer Automotive Group has bought Lovells Auto Body Centres and Pronto Accident Repair Centres, adding to its current East Midlands footprint. Lovells and Pronto have established approvals from leading manufacturers resembling BMW, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz Van, Audi, VW Skoda Seat, Kia and Hyundai at its 11 sites across the East of England. Owners Chris Hammond and Duncan Exton said Steer’s business ethos and approach played a vital role of their decision to proceed with the sale. The operations team will remain in place to proceed the day-to-day running of the business and might be supported by the senior leadership team of…
Volvo Cars reports that its gross profit margins on its electric cars increased fourfold in the course of the second half of 2023, contributing to a record trading 12 months for the corporate. The development, to 13%, was versus the top of 2022 when high lithium prices heavily hampered EV profitability, but the corporate saw a transparent uptick within the underlying profitability of those cars from the second half of 2023 as lower lithium prices and the results of increased pricing materialised. Volvo said while there continues to be a niche in gross margins on the EVs in comparison with…
The boss of an independent garage appeared before magistrates charged with drink-driving while on a “road-test” of a customer’s Audi A5 coupe. Southampton magistrates were told he’d decided to make use of the automotive to drive home from work, but stopped off to satisfy friends at a bar in the town for some time. Jhalman Rai, owner of J S Autos in Southampton, was spotted by police driving erratically in August 2023, and he was unsteady on his feet once they stopped him and asked him to exit the automotive. PC Russell Tribe told the court: “I discovered it highly unlikely for…
The Financial Conduct Authority has just told AM it has “no intention of banning GAP Insurance”, in response to unsubstantiated reports that the product have to be scrapped this 12 months. The insurance industry regulator has made its concerns concerning the sales practices around GAP insurance for several years, and recently warned that customers weren’t being given good value from GAP, also often called return to invoice (RTI) cover. It is anxious that GAP insurance often earns high revenues for insurers and their dealers/brokers, but lower than £1 in every £10 spent by consumers on GAP is ever paid out…
