Chrysler

New car sales in Europe have dropped 74 per cent since January, the decline attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Just 292,180 new cars were sold across the 27 European member states – plus the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway and Switzerland – in April 2020, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association. That’s a 74.8 per cent decrease (or 842,940 sales) against the 1,135,120 new car registrations recorded in January 2020.

US car giant Jeep says it has no plans to walk away from right-hand-drive markets – even though its rival General Motors will retreat from Australia, Thailand and New Zealand by the end of 2021 after getting out of the UK, South Africa and India over the past three years. The man in charge of Jeep in Australia, Kevin Flynn, said he has been advised by parent company Fiat Chrysler Automobiles that it is committed to right-hand-drive production.

Fiat Chrysler (FCA) has revealed the design and features of its new Uconnect 5 infotainment system. As revealed last year, Uconnect 5 is based on the Android mobile operating system. The underlying hardware now includes 6GB of memory, up to 64GB of flash storage, and a faster processor said to make the whole system five times faster than today's iteration.

General Motors (GM) has filed a lawsuit against Fiat Chrysler (FCA), claiming the rival's bribery of officials from the United Auto Workers (UAW) union caused it serious financial damage. GM alleges FCA instigated a “multi-year pattern of corruption” to “undermine the integrity of the collective bargaining process and cause GM substantial damages".

An advanced plan hatched between Groupe PSA (owner of the Peugeot, Citroen and Opel brands) and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) to join forces would create the world's fourth largest global automotive OEM by scale. The proposed super-merger between the keen French and Italian-American giants, with a combined 410,000 direct employees, would create a new group half-owned by each party with equal board representation.