Volvo lance un grand plan de restructuration

"Le programme comprend ? la fois la r?duction des effectifs dans l'encadrement et chez les consultants, et des am?liorations de la productivit? dans l'appareil industriel mondial.

"La majorit? des charges de restructuration toucheront le r?sultat op?rationnel au cours de 2014" et que "les ?conomies r?alis?es s'?l?veront ? environ 4 milliards de couronnes par an (...) en produisant leur plein effet d'ici ? la fin 2015."

Volvo, qui fabrique aussi des bus, des engins de chantier et des moteurs, a pr?cis? que cette restructuration toucherait principalement sa branche poids lourds. Les r?sultats du groupe sont d?cevants depuis environ un an, et ont m?me abouti ? une perte nette au premier trimestre 2013. En janvier, il avait annonc? une alliance avec le chinois Dongfeng dans le but de former le num?ro un mondial, devant l'allemand Daimler.

Formula One: Encouraging Signs in U.S. Grand Prix's Second Year

AUSTIN, Tex. — Before the U.S. Grand Prix, the biggest question was whether Sebastian Vettel could make history and become the first driver in Formula One to win eight straight races in a single season.

He answered that easily Sunday, leading from start to finish and winning without a challenge in yet another walkover.

But the secondary question floating over the weekend was whether Austin would succeed as a venue after nine other locations in the United States in the past half century had failed to give the series a permanent home and national recognition in the world’s biggest economy.

While “two in a row” is a far more modest figure than Vettel’s winning streak, it appears after the second race here that Austin has veered away from the feared pattern of a new race’s succeeding in the first year, only to peter out thereafter.

As a whole, the event was well attended. The announced crowd of 113,162 on Sunday was just 4,000 fewer than last year, and the race was better organized, too, though it still has progress to make in a few areas.

Ross Pringle, an Austin resident who was attending his first grand prix, pointed out that the race had faced tough competition for fans, including a vast festival linked to the race and the biggest show in town: college football with the Texas Longhorns.

“It came on a very busy weekend,” he said. “You had to pick what you wanted to do. I didn’t go to the football game because I came here.”

Nearly 79,000 people attended Saturday’s qualifying session alone. That is more than double the 30,000 people who attended race day at some of the failed races, such as the Turkish Grand Prix outside Istanbul, which increasingly lost popularity after its successful debut in 2005 before it was dropped after the 2011 season.

And while the Austin race suffered again from traffic jams leading to the venue on Sunday, organizers made improvements nearly everywhere else, especially when it came to the fan experience at the circuit. The V.I.P. list was as good as any race outside of Monaco, while local media attention remained healthy.

The series has always understood that the key to succeeding in the United States is to provide a spectacle on and off the track, to allow close access to the drivers and the teams and to get the crowd participating, even though organizers in the past never followed through on that, until now.

Spectators said that the 2013 U.S. Grand Prix was better than last year’s, even with the race being less exciting because of Vettel’s dominance.

“I enjoyed this one better, because I think the organization was better at the race track. They were ready now,” said Arturo Sanchez, a Mexico City resident. Thousands of Mexican fans were in the stands, cheering on the two Mexican drivers on the circuit, Sergio Pérez of the McLaren Mercedes team and Esteban Gutiérrez of the Sauber team.

Michael Schumacher held the previous record of seven consecutive victories in the same season, set in 2004. At the Brazilian Grand Prix next Sunday, the last race of the year, Vettel will attempt to equal the record of nine consecutive victories over all. Alberto Ascari set that mark over two seasons, 1952 and 1953. But Vettel, who grabbed his 12th victory of the year Sunday, played down the achievement, as usual.

“What makes me jump into the car is not a certain number,” he said. “But certainly today, when you realize that you’ve done it, it makes you very proud in that moment and, yeah, I think it’s very difficult for all of us to realize what it actually means.”

While Vettel’s race may have been yet another walkover, there was action up and down the pack behind him, with one high point being when Pérez and Gutiérrez fought a wheel-to-wheel battle for seventh position on Lap 31 of the 56-lap race. Pérez finished seventh and Gutiérrez finished 14th.

It was not without interest just behind the leader, either. Mark Webber, Vettel’s teammate on Red Bull, tried to grab second-place late in the race by attacking Romain Grosjean. But Webber, who started second on the grid, never could get by the Lotus driver.

A year ago, Grosjean was in disgrace after he caused several accidents during the season.

On Sunday, he stood on the podium for the sixth time this year, with his first second-place finish.

Besides the traffic jams, the race had a few other problems. Some fans who ordered tickets months in advance and made travel plans around the weekend did not get their tickets until just days before the race. The first practice session was delayed twice on Friday morning.

But it is now clear that Formula One has made a foothold in Austin in a way that few could have imagined a year ago, when the race looked compromised after the project did not finish on time. And the Austin community is quickly becoming aware of the value of the event.

“I know there are people around the world who may not have ever heard of Austin who now know it exists,” said Mike Rollins, the president of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, on NBCSports.com. “We never could have paid for that kind of media attention.”

Formula One, too, appreciates the southern hospitality.

“It’s unbelievable. It’s only our second race here and we’ve got more than 100,000 people coming on Sunday,” said Vettel. “I think this is one of the best races we have all season. The whole city is going crazy, so it’s phenomenal to race here in front of the crowd.”

Wheels: Mercedes Grand Prix Car Smashes Auction Records

Bonhams The 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196 racecar, back in its grand prix glory days.

A 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196 grand prix car driven to wins by Juan Manuel Fangio, the five-time world champion from Argentina, sold Friday for $29.7 million at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England, the highest price ever paid for a car at auction.

The sale, conducted by Bonhams, smashes the previous record of $16.4 million brought by a 1957 Ferrari Testa Rossa sports car two years ago at Pebble Beach, Calif. The sale on Friday took eight minutes, with the winner, bidding by telephone, described by the auction house only as a “wealthy enthusiast” with a history of buying racing cars. Two of the Mercedes racecar’s drivers in competition, Stirling Moss, 84, and Hans Herrmann, 85, were at the sale.

“It’s a piece of mechanical jewelry,” said Douglas Nye, a motor racing historian recruited by Bonhams for a preauction briefing on Thursday for reporters and potential bidders gathered in a marquee erected as an auction hall behind Goodwood House.

“The Mona Lisa, the Haywain and the Sunflowers,” he said, citing the great works by da Vinci, Constable and van Gogh, “are the works of a single creative mind and of a single pair of hands. What you have here is the product of many creative minds, and of many hands.”

Bonhams, the London-based auction house, used the catalog entry for the car, prepared with Mercedes, to claim a place in history for the car. It was “an absolute technological landmark in the long and glittering history of motor sport,” but beyond that, “an emblem of worldwide postwar recovery.” The description added: “It epitomizes everything achieved by the world-famous three-pointed star.”

Enthusiasts at the Goodwood festival will have a chance to witness a W196 in action. On Saturday, a different car from the original batch of 14 built by Mercedes will make runs up the long driveway to the Goodwood House with Moss and Herrmann at the controls.

Wheels Blog: Consumer Advocacy Group Calls for a Recall of 5 Million Jeep Grand Cherokees

Chrysler The Center for Auto Safety wants Chrysler to recall five million Jeep Grand Cherokees made from 1993 to 2004 for a potential fire hazard from their gas tanks.

The Center for Auto Safety is asking top officials at the Chrysler Group and its parent company, Fiat, to recall about five million vehicles. The nonprofit consumer advocacy group said, “Children are dying in Jeeps in rear-impact fires.”

In a letter to John Elkann on Wednesday, Fiat’s chairman, the center cited the deaths of three children since 2006 in fires that occurred when the Jeeps in which they were riding were struck from the rear.

The Center for Auto Safety has also been urging, since 2009, a recall of 1993-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees, saying the vehicles have two problems. The first is a gas tank behind the rear axle and somewhat below the bumper, in an area that safety engineers call a crush zone. Chrysler moved the tank in front of the rear axle when it redesigned the vehicle for the 2005 model year, but a company spokesman said the move was not related to concern about fires.

The second problem is a fuel filler pipe positioned so that it can rip away from the tank in a rear impact, allowing gasoline to escape from the tank, the center said. Chrysler has repeatedly denied that the Grand Cherokee posed a fire risk, noting that the vehicles met federal safety standards.

On Wednesday, the automaker issued a statement reconfirming its own analysis of the Grand Cherokee models called into question by the center, saying the S.U.V.’s “are neither defective, nor do their fuel systems pose an unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety in rear impact collisions.” However, almost a year ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its investigation of the center’s allegations were reason enough for the agency to upgrade its investigation to an engineering analysis.

In what appeared to be a direct rebuttal of Chrysler’s continuing claims, the traffic safety administration said its study found that “rear-impact-related tank failures and vehicle fires are more prevalent in the J.G.C. (Jeep Grand Cherokee) than in non-Jeep peer vehicles.” At that time the safety agency said it was expanding the investigation to include 1993-2001 Jeep Cherokees, as well as 2002-7 Jeep Libertys.

In 2011 the center released the results of crash tests it commissioned, showing that other S.U.V.’s of the same vintage fared far better in rear-impact crashes than did the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

The center says it has reports of 157 deaths in which Grand Cherokee crashes resulted in a fire. That tally includes rear impacts as well as rollovers in which the filler hose might have ripped loose, Clarence Ditlow, the center’s executive director, said in an interview. The safety agency listed 15 fire deaths, but Mr. Ditlow said it was strictly looking at rear-impact crashes.

One of the child deaths mentioned in the center’s letter was that of Cassidy Jarmon, a 4-year-old who was riding in her family’s 1993 Grand Cherokee in February 2006 in Cleburne, Tex. Her mother was stopped on a two-lane highway, trying to make a left turn, when her Jeep was hit from behind by a 2001 Chevrolet Lumina, according to the police report. Cassidy, who was in a child restraint, survived the impact but couldn’t be easily freed from the seat because the fire happened so quickly, said Detective Kelly Summey, who arrived at the crash while the rescue was under way. She died two days later from burns and smoke inhalation.

Detective Summey said her investigation concluded that the gas tank had been punctured by the Jeep’s trailer hitch. The deaths of the two other children occurred in 2011 and 2012. The safety agency’s investigation is still under way.

Wheels Blog: Baltimore Grand Prix Adding Two Porsche 911 GT3 Cup Races

Robert Laberge/Getty Images The start of the Izod IndyCar Series Baltimore Grand Prix on Sept. 4, 2011.

The Baltimore Grand Prix is getting a makeover.

In what the promoter calls an effort to offer greater variety, this year’s Baltimore Grand Prix will add two Porsche 911 GT3 Cup races. To accommodate the GT3 class, the USF2000 and Star Mazda races of past years will not be run.

The change was made because the event’s versions of open-wheel cars lead to very similar races, said Tim Mayer, general manager of Grand Prix of Baltimore. “We wanted to diversify what we had on the racetrack and add value,” he said

In past years, Mr. Mayer said, if you were to line up the Indy cars, Indy Lights, USF2000 and Star Mazda cars, they would look like Russian nesting dolls. “You would look at them and say that was a slightly smaller version of that, which is a slightly smaller version of that, which is a slightly smaller version of that,” he said.

This year will see two classes of GT3s – Platinum and Gold – running simultaneously on Saturday, Aug. 31, and Sunday, Sept. 1.

It may be a smart business strategy, said Chuck Goldsborough of Baltimore, a former driver for Team Lexus. He said the Mid-Atlantic corridor was a leading market for Porsche, which could attract casual car fans to the race. The Porsche Club of America Museum nearby in Columbia, Md.

It might also draw international attention to the Baltimore Grand Prix. “Porsche Cup has a huge following,” he said. “It is in dozens of countries. It’s a huge single-make series and very well followed.”

The race has received a lot of attention for missteps that led to three promoters in two years and several lawsuits.

Andretti Sports Marketing, lead by Michael Andretti, came in last year to rescue the event roughly 100 days before it was to run and will act as promoter again this year.