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Today marks a milestone for the Mazda Toyota partnership as their joint venture factory in Huntsville, Alabama released the first production model of the Toyota Corolla Cross. The Corolla Cross is an entirely new model for Toyota as they try to figure out their place in the Compact Utility Vehicle, CUV, segment.  Mazda Toyota factory is a state of the art autombile manufacturing facility, which was opened last year. In addition to the Toyota Corolla Cross, this facility will be producing several other toyota SUVs as well as Mazda SUVs in the future. For Mazda this is a giant leap as this will be their first own production facility in the U.S.  In the late 90s and early 2000's Mazda partnered with Ford to scale up their production. The Mazda 3 which was first introduced as part of this partnership became a huge success. However this partnership also brought in many of the reliability issues often associated with Ford. Finally in 2010 Mazda ended the partnership with Ford and relied

This week Hyundai Motor Company anniunced that they will be recalling thousands of Hyundai Hybrids over an engine fire risk.  The recall affects certain 2017 Tucsons and Sonata Hyrbids that have Hyundai's 2-litre GDI engine. The fire risk is caused by an egine part that could prematurely wear.  This is a major blow to Hyundai as they continue to increase their hybrid line up. Also the 2-litre GDI engine is one of their most popular engines.  Hyundai will be sending out recall notices to owners of the affected vehicles.

For the past few months we have been hearing about the chip shortage that has been affecting car production and causing used car prices to sky rocket. Now there is word about a rubber shortage, that could seriously hinder the production of tires and other rubber parts for vehicles. The rubber shortage is primarily driven by the covid situation in Asia, where most of the rubber comes from. In addition there is a fungus that has been affecting rubber plants. Both of these could create a major shortage of tires and drive the cost of tires way up.  This could mean that even if car production starts back up we may not be able to drive the cars off the lot without any tires. 

 For several months we have been hearing about the chip shortage. Unfortunately the situation is still on going. Car makers continue to struggle with keeping their production going. Many manufacturers such as GM, Ford, Honda have shut down factories due to the shortage.  But the fact is Car manufacturers' poor planning caused this issue. In early 2020,when the pandemic started, most car manufacturers expected the demand for cars to go down. In addition many manufacturers were faced with covid outbreaks at their factories. Both of these caused car production to go down and manufacturers cancelled orders with their suppliers. Chip manufacturers were one of them. Due to loss in demand from.the car manufacturers the chip producers were forced to find other opportunities to keep their businesses running. With more people working from home, the tech industry demand skyrocketted. So the chip manufacturers retooled their factories to meet the tech industry needs. However when car manufactu