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  Alcoa adds 1,000 jobs as demand grows for lightweight auto materials

  June 13, 2012 at 12:28 pm

  Earlier this month, Reuters reported that aluminum maker Alcoa is among the U.S. companies now adding jobs: “We have been hiring over the past 12 months, about 1,000 people across our business, the majority of those in the U.S. In the last quarter, we have been hiring as well,” a spokeswoman said. This includes hiring at facilities in Davenport, Iowa and Lafayette, Indiana. At an industry meeting in New York on June 13th, Randall Scheps, the company’s director of automotive […]

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  How smart standards create jobs: Shuttered Indiana plant gets new life as Chrysler moves to boost fuel economy

  June 12, 2012 at 12:31 pm

  During my years working in communications at the United Auto Workers, I started each workday looking at news of the U.S. auto industry. Much of the time, it was pretty grim reading: lost market share, lost jobs, closed plants. It’s a lot more fun to read the auto pages these days. A key factor: The push to advance fuel economy is driving a burst of new investment in R&D, engineering and manufacturing, as companies re-tool to meet higher standards. Case […]

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  Survey: Fuel economy #1 factor in car purchases, says Consumer Reports

  May 23, 2012 at 12:29 pm

  Back in the Mad Men era, “Safety Doesn’t Sell” was a widely-accepted axiom about automobile advertising. A few decades later, conventional wisdom has shifted 180 degrees: Seat belts, air bags and other safety features now a prominent feature of many car and truck ads. Now, new numbers are in which should lay another old saw to rest: That U.S. car buyers are more concerned with muscle than mileage. A widely-reported April survey by the Consumer Reports (CR) National Research Center […]

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