’s EV plans suck, American Airlines is preparing to furlough thousands, Subaru gets a fuel-pump lawsuit, registrations are down in California, and more in for Thursday, July 16, 2020.

GM’s offers more details on the 20 or so new electric vehicles planned across the company’s brands. For Cadillac, it will start with three crossovers and one flagship sedan. From :

For example, the report said Cadillac will reveal an electric “globally sized luxury three-row SUV.” That matches the description of its current XT6 SUV, a detail not previously disclosed.

Also new, Cadillac will offer an all-electric SUV with “attainable luxury — similar to today’s Cadillac XT4.”

Another hint at Cadillac’s upcoming EV lineup is a statement in the report that there will be a full-size, three-row luxury SUV that reflects the iconic Escalade.

Finally, GM has previously said it will hand-build a halo, vehicle called the Cadillac Celestiq, but in the report GM discloses that only 1.2 Celestiqs will be made per day.

According to the report, the only non-crossover EV vehicles coming from GM are the Hummer and Chevy pickups and the Cadillac Celestiq flagship sedan. Buick, Cadillac, Chevy, GMC, and Hummer aren’t even going to try to take on the Tesla Model S or 3, at least beyond the capabilities of the Chevy Bolt hatchback. But obviously crossovers make the most business sense, it just sucks for anyone not planning to start a family anytime soon who may have liked to have had a Cadillac!

2nd Gear: American Airlines May Cut 25,000

The airline industry is in pretty bad shape due to the pandemic and, just like United did last week, American Airlines is now warning employees it will have to make cuts this fall, the reports:

American said in a letter to employees Wednesday that it expects to have 20,000 more employees than it needs this fall. The Fort Worth, Texas-based carrier sent notices for potential furlough to 25,000 of its employees as stipulated by federal labor laws. The figure includes airport and technical operations workers who could be shifted to other locations, the airline said.

The potential cuts affect about 29% of the airline’s front-line workers. American has previously made cuts to its administrative and management employees that resulted in about 5,000 people leaving the company, a spokesman said.

Picture in your head having 25,000 coworkers, and then picture all of them losing their job. Another cut-rate federal stimulus check to people that barely covers rent may not be enough to help much longer.

3rd Gear: Lawsuit Alleges More Fuel Pump Issues For Subaru

A new lawsuit alleges that Subaru’s April fuel pump recall for Impreza, Legacy, Outback and Ascent models should be expanded to more models and more model years experiencing similar issues, reports:

The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, alleges that the Japanese automaker sold vehicles “with defective low-pressure fuel pumps that cause unpredictable acceleration and engine stalls and render the affected vehicles unsafe to operate,” court documents said.

The lawsuit points to an April recall of 188,207 vehicles in the U.S. for potentially faulty fuel pumps. The recall covers certain 2019 models of four nameplates: the Impreza compact sedan and hatchback, Legacy midsize sedan, Outback midsize crossover and Ascent large crossover. All are built at Subaru’s Indiana plant.

First of all, whoever wrote this, I know you are a lawyer, but any anemic Subaru with industry-low power ratings experiencing “unintended acceleration” caused by a fuel pump and not anything else should be considered a feature, not a bug.

Kidding aside, the suit claims more Subaru vehicles have been implicated in the fuel pump issue but have not been part of the company’s recall. Damages sought include refunded purchase price of the vehicle, incidental expense reimbursement, and further recall. Those first two things probably won’t happen, but if this is an issue on more Subarus, it’d be pretty easy to recall.

As of now, no known injuries have resulted from the fuel pump issue.

4th Gear: Oil Glut’s Second Wave?

Remember back in like March, , when the world’s major oil suppliers were attempting to drown each other out of the market by dumping hundreds of millions of barrels of excess oil into the market, sending oil prices crashing, in an attempt to flush out U.S. fracking?

Well now that (the rest of the world) feels it’s getting a grip on Coronavirus, the Big Oil idiots are back to playing their idiotic games with the world’s energy supply, according to :

The group expects oil demand to climb by 7 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2021 after falling 9 million bpd this year. OPEC wants to lift its output by 6 million bpd in 2021.

But internal research by OPEC, seen by Reuters, suggests those targets could be at risk if a second wave of the virus forces new lockdowns around the world. Such a scenario would push demand down by 11 million bpd in 2020 and, most importantly for OPEC, lead to bigger inventories, a key measure OPEC uses to monitor the efficacy of output cuts.

“It should be noted in this scenario that the overall stock build reaches an unprecedented high of 1.218 billion barrels in 2020,” OPEC said in research prepared for Wednesday’s OPEC+ panel meeting where ministers recommended easing output cuts. Such a figure would mean putting into storage the equivalent of more than 12 days of global oil output due to poor demand.

Keep in mind there are still tanker ships full of oil just parked in the ocean for months because of how much material excess there is in the market. There aren’t enough storage facilities already that we’ve turned to boat storage. Maybe these airliners can start filling their parked planes with oil to make up some cash.

5th Gear: Tesla’s Stock Party Has A Second Quarter Curfew

While Tesla may be experiencing a stock price renaissance right now on the back of a strong first quarter with the introduction of its new crossover, the Model Y, but next quarter rather obviously won’t be so rosy.

New vehicle registrations in the state of California, Tesla’s biggest market in the U.S., were down by almost half compared to last year, which could spell trouble for the automaker’s second-quarter earnings report coming up.

From :

The report released on Wednesday showed registrations in California, a bellwether market for the electric-car maker, plummeted almost 48% from a year earlier to 9,774 vehicles in the three months ended June 2020.

Model 3 registrations in the state, which accounted for more than half of the total registrations, fell 63.6% to 5,951 vehicles.

Total vehicle registrations in the 23 states from where the data was collected fell nearly 49% to 18,702 vehicles.

The automaker had earlier this month outpaced analysts’ estimates for vehicle deliveries in the second quarter, defying a trend of plummeting sales in the auto industry as COVID-19-related lockdown orders kept people at home.

Registration figures might not accurately reflect the number of vehicle deliveries during the quarter as registrations in the United States typically take about 30 days from the time of sale.

As points out, despite the dramatic drop, Tesla is performing much better than other companies struggling to make it work in the pandemic. So while the second quarter will look bad for Tesla, everyone else will probably still envy what Musk and the company were able to achieve through such a difficult time.

Reverse: To To To To The Moon

At 9:32 a.m. EDT, Apollo 11, the first U.S. lunar landing mission, is launched on a historic…

Neutral: How Will Caddy Fare?

For the first time in decades, Cadillac may actually ride the wave of a new vehicle segment to the market as it’s introduced, which gives it a unique opportunity of not having to play catch-up to other luxury automakers like it’s been for years. But is there something to say about the resulting lineup seeming to go in a direction where it may have almost no recognizable distinction or quality as a Cadillac anymore?