Over the past few months the ongoing labor strife at American Axle has brought a lot of problems to one of the company's biggest clients, GM. The automaker has been forced to slow production of many vehicles, including the Cadillac DTS and Buick Lucerne -- even the hot-selling Chevy Malibu was under threat until the automaker made other supply arrangements. Now things have taken a turn for the worse -- because of a lack of parts, the General has been forced to stop some large truck and SUV production entirely, and can no longer take orders for the vehicles.
As of May 7th, GM has suspended production of its GMC Yukon/Chevy Tahoe SUVs, GMC Sierra heavy-duty pickups in both regular and extended cab variants, GMC commercial heavy-duty trucks, as well as their Chevrolet variants. The automaker currently has all the orders it can process for the vehicles, and has been forced to send a notice to dealers saying that for now their requests won't be filled. This poses a particular problem for commercial and fleet business, and GM's vice president of vehicle sales Mark LaNeve said the company missed out on about 15,000 sales last month.
GM has previously tried to stay out of American Axle's trouble, and with a strike at their Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas City affecting Malibu production, the automaker has to deal with labor issues of its own. The company currently has a 102-day supply of GMC/Chevrolet 3500 trucks and a 178-day supply of the 2500 model, so it will most likely continue to wait for a solution. Losing sales of high-profit trucks and SUVs is never good for business, but GM had planned to cut production of the vehicles already due to a lack of demand. That said, if American Axle's problems threaten popular models like the Malibu again, the automaker may finally be forced to get involved.
Source: Automotive News (Subscription required)