General Motors is expected to tell local dealerships today whether they will be closing as part of the company’s restructuring effort. The automaker has said it will notify about 1,100 dealerships nationwide that it won’t be renewing their contracts.

The car lines include Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Saab, Saturn and Hummer. It has some 6,000 dealerships nationwide. The automaker says it eventually plans to drop 2,600 or more dealerships by 2010. It says it hopes that several hundred dealers will agree to close voluntarily.

This has has to do with growing concerns from an overcrowded dealer network that underperforms in terms of per-store sales in relation to Toyota and other Japanese automakers.

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With the continued economic downturn, Honda announced that it will cut production in North America by 62,000 units. This decision will lead to shuting down factories for 13 days in May. Production isn’t the only part of the cuts, Honda also said that it will cut pay for salaried and factory workers and will offer buyouts and early retirement incentives for 32,400 workers in the U.S. and Canada.

The Japanese automaker said that it will not be paying hourly workers for 6 of the 13 days which will be between May 1 and July 31. Previously Honda and Toyota continued to pay nonunion workers even when it shut down factories. Spokesman Ed Miller said that salaried workers will see their compensation reduced in the new fiscal year.

No details were given about the buyout program, a method Detroit automakers have used to cut payrolls sharply since 2005 by offering up-front payments of up to $100,000 per employee.

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Daimler has chosen Michigan as the site for its new $10 million research center that will focus on alternative propulsion systems, such as hybrid technology. The automaker was previously considering building the center in South Carolina or California but chose Michigan following the promise of a substantial tax credit from the Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA) board.

The new research center is said to be somewhere around the Ann Arbour area, although an exact site will not be chosen until June 15th this year. Officials from Michigan are expecting the center to provide around 450 jobs and over $16 million in taxation revenue for the state within a decade.

While Michigan may currently be the home of what the public perceives to be behind-the-times auto industry, officials are working to make the state a new hub of industrial development. On top of a new research and development center being built by Daimler, officials are also wooing Magna Electronics, a subsidiary of Canadian manufacturer Magna International that produces hybrid vehicle components, with significant tax benefits to induce them into expanding their operations as well.

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Aston Martin, the maker of luxury sports cars owned by royals and James Bond, has become the latest manufacturer to cut production amid the global fall in demand.

Workers at the company’s factory in Gaydon, central England, have been put on a three-day week. The cutbacks come less than two months after Aston Martin said it was shedding 600 jobs. A spokesman said the production cuts were “an open-ended but short-term measure”.

Aston Martin sales fell 28 per cent last year despite the high-profile use of one of its cars in the latest Bond film Quantum of Solace. Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, owns a convertible Aston Martin that has been adapted to run on environmentally-friendly bio-ethanol.

The British government on Tuesday unveiled a Stg2.3 billion ($4.9 billion) support package for the ailing car industry.

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More bad news for the auto industry today as Honda announced that it will be slashing production and even more jobs. Honda will cut a total of 3,100 temporary positions in Japan, representing its total staff of temporary employees. Honda just recently reduced the number of its temporary workers by 1,200.

Honda also eliminated 56,000 vehicles from its Japanese production schedule. For its fiscal year ending March 31st, Honda plans on producing 1.168 million vehicles, down from an earlier forecast of 1.31 million units.

Despite Honda’s economical lineup, its global sales continue to slip. U.S. sales were down double-digits in December, with January’s results expected to be just as bleak.

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A gloomy outlook for the future of the motor industry has been predicted by 200 senior executives from the sector in a survey by KPMG. They are expecting more companies to go out of business in the coming years as revenues and profits continue to fall.

Most of those polled highlighted the risk of company insolvencies or bankruptcies, with almost nine out of 10 predicting an increased number of business failures. …click here to read more

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Toyota says it has asked its Japanese workers to slash salaries in order to help recover losses incurred by halted production in response to current economic conditions. The automaker says that they are still evaluating the actual scale of the pay cut, but under Japanese law, companies must pay at least 60 percent of the average regular wages during production stopages.

Earlier this week, Toyota announced that it will idle production at all 12 of its Japanese plants for 11 days, an unprecedented move for the automaker. A formal announcement is expected by the end of this week outlining the details of the proposed cuts. Toyota employs about 70,000 full-time staff in Japan who, like workers at many major corporations in Japan, are generally protected with lifetime employment.

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