2012 Freightliner Cascadia Daycab Cab on 2040-parts.com

Obama vows to help rebuild industry to compete, win

President Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed to hold U.S. automakers accountable for "bad practices" but promised to help create a "retooled, re-imagined auto industry." In remarks to a joint session of Congress, Obama gave a sobering assessment of the nation's ills--mainly economic--but said: "We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before." About midway through the speech, the president said: "As for our auto industry, everyone recognizes that years of bad decision-making and a global recession have pushed our automakers to the brink. We should not, and will not, protect them from their own bad practices.

April new-car sales winners and losers

U.S. light-vehicle sales rose 8 percent to nearly 1.4 million in April, with strong retail sales and pent-up demand adding momentum to the industry's spring thaw. Among major automakers, Nissan Motor Co., Chrysler Group and Toyota Motor Corp.

Lincoln is promised a unique line

Lincoln vehicles will be dramatically different from Ford brand products, Ford Motor Co. executives said last week. "The strategy isn't just new products, but full differentiation from the Ford brand in not only design but in technology," Derrick Kuzak, Ford's group vice president of global product development, told a group of auto analysts at the Detroit auto show.