Word: opel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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General Motors is also sticking its corporate toes back in the water. Last year the automaker had to halt construction of a plant in Thailand that was to produce a sort of upmarket Opel, mostly for export to other Asian countries. "Frankly, the market disappeared for that car," says chairman John Smith. But now GM is reviving--though also downsizing--its plans. Instead of 100,000 midsize cars a year, it intends to produce 40,000 seven-seat multipurpose vans annually. GM has also concluded what Smith calls "a strategic agreement" with Japan's Suzuki to "work together...
...industry has already undergone considerable consolidation. Along with its equity interest in Kia, Ford Motor Co. owns Jaguar PLC and a one-third stake in Mazda and is considering an alliance with Samsung Motors Inc. GM, still the world's largest automaker, owns Germany's Adam Opel AG, the U.K.'s Vauxhall Motor Cars Ltd., Holden's in Australia, 50% of Saab Automobile AB in Sweden and about a third of Isuzu. On top of that, GM operates a joint venture in Canada with Suzuki Motor Corp. and an assembly plant called NUMMI in California with Toyota...
Heidelberg researchers pointed out that the use of children's corpses ended in 1989 and that the tests had never been kept secret in the first place. One crash study was even published by a research group representing 40 German automakers including Daimler Benz, Volkswagen, Opel and Ford. University officials quickly added that while adult bodies were supplied by homeless people and organ donors, children's corpses were used only with the permission of families, who were fully informed of what the tests would entail...
...stunning find followed GM charges that Lopez or one of his colleagues took top-secret documents when Lopez bolted to Volkswagen to head its worldwide manufacturing operations. According to GM, the recovered papers included plans for a minicar that Adam Opel, GM's German unit, hopes to roll out in the mid-1990s. Also among the papers, GM said, were plans for a superefficient new factory where the car would be built. As German investigators sifted through the documents, GM officials said federal prosecutors in Detroit were also probing charges that Lopez had absconded with corporate secrets. Lopez, once heir...
Neither Volkswagen nor Lopez would comment on the Opel documents, but Piech lashed back at GM in a more personal way. In an interview with the German newspaper Die Welt, Piech implied that Louis Hughes, who heads GM Europe, was waging a vendetta because he lost out to Piech last year in the runoff to be Volkswagen's chairman. Hughes may have the last laugh: if GM makes its charges stick, predicts industry analyst Klaus-Jurgen Meltzner, "either Lopez or Piech would have...