Monday, January 9, 2017

GM Lied To The Public And To Trump About Where Chevrolet Cruze Sedans Sold In The USA Are Assembled

Submitted via Duane of Free Market Shooter
On Tuesday, president-elect Trump tweeted about General Motors, stating the GM was building its Chevrolet Cruze in Mexico, importing them to the US tax-free, and selling them at US car dealers:

GM quickly denied Trump’s tweet, and in a press release that same day, the company claimed that all Cruze sedans sold in the US are “built in GM’s assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio”, and that GM builds the Cruze hatchback for global markets in Mexico, with only a small percentage being sold in the US…
GM

…and the MSM and other liberal outlets were quick to pounce on GM’s statement, using it to slander the president-elect.  US News, ABC News, and many others, including the Wall Street Journal, all published articles containing the information in GM’s press release.  US News went out of its way to post a clickbait headline which alluded to “the truth” about Trump’s tweet, with the following quotation:
General Motors Company (ticker: GM) is pushing back after President-elect Donald Trump early-morning Twitter attack, in which the incoming president took aim at GM for making its Chevrolet Cruze in Mexico and shipping them tax-free to the U.S. for sale.

That’s not the full story, says GM.

“General Motors manufacturers the Chevrolet Cruze sedan in Lordstown, Ohio,” a General Motos spokesman told U.S. News & World Report in a statement Tuesday. “All Chevrolet Cruze sedans sold in the U.S. are built in GM’s assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.”

GM says it also builds the Cruze hatchback in Mexico to sell in global markets, and only a “small number” of those are sold in the U.S. It did not clarify the number. The hatchback model went on sale in the U.S. for the first time this fall.
Of course, the liberal think-tanks like Politifact, ThinkProgress, GOOD, Addicting Info, Salon (whom I refuse to link to), and countless others got in on the act.  Addicting Info in particular went out of its way to imply that Trump was wrong, and dangerously so:
But as a result of Trump’s accusations and threats General Motors’ stock price tumbled briefly and then recovered. Keep in mind that General Motors was nearly wiped out of existence at the beginning of the Great Recession, which would have cost thousands of Americans their jobs. Trump’s attack on General Motors could have harmed the company in a way that would have harmed American workers he the stock price fallen more than it did.

Trump just flat-out lied to the American people and got busted for it by General Motors. Next time Trump decides to attack an American company he should do his homework first and then look in the mirror because his company has most of their products manufactured in China and Mexico, which make Trump the biggest hypocrite in America.
It appears that in the MSM’s rush to fact-check Trump and call him hypocritical, no media outlet bothered to fact-check GM as well.  So, who did the fact-checking work that the MSM didn’t bother doing?
Auto enthusiast and Twitter user E.W. Niedermeyer, that’s who.  Niedermeyer brought the GM and Trump saga up on Thursday, January 5th in a series of tweets that began innocently enough…

…Niedermeyer quickly got to the nitty-gritty of his argument, noting the the VIN sequence (3G1) used at the beginning of GM cars made in Mexico…

…and finally, Niedermeyer provided evidence on where the autos sold in the US were built:

Think about that for a second – GM  is selling Cruze sedans manufactured in Mexico, in the same Ohio town that builds Cruze sedans.  And at the same time, GM is brazen enough to say it doesn’t sell Cruze sedans built in Mexico in the US, saying all Cruze sedans in US dealerships are built in its Lordstown, Ohio plant.  And GM did so in the face of the president-elect of the United States accusing the company of building Cruze sedans in Mexico, shipping them to America tax-free, and selling them in your local dealerships. 
Niedermeyer’s entire tweet thread can be viewed here.  Neidermeyer provides ample evidence demonstrating the truth about where GM Cruze sedans sold in the US are built.  Feel free to check the VIN numbers on your local Chevy dealer’s Cruze inventory, and see where they were built for yourself.
GM was caught red-handed lying to the public and to Trump, and we might never have known if it weren’t for everyday people like Niedermeyer.  It is crazy enough to wrap your head around; a regular guy did the fact checking the MSM never bothered to do.  The MSM took GM’s word as gospel in their rush to criticize Trump, without bothering to check if GM was just lying to save its own skin.
If you think GM is somehow more credible than Trump, recall that this isn’t exactly the first time the auto maker has been caught lying.  In fact, they have been caught lying again, and again, and again.  Sometimes their lies result in people losing their lives.  They have been caught lying so many times, it would be impossible to list them all here.  But the MSM gleefully took GM at their word, using any chance it could get to refer to the president-elect as a dangerous, reckless liar, when a simple fact-check has shown GM was falsifying the truth, not Trump.
Allow this revelation to resonate in your head for a second, and keep it in the back of your mind next time the mainstream media tells you Trump is a dangerous liar and/or hypocrite in his latest tweet.  Because you just might be the fact-checker that gets the last laugh, right alongside Trump himself. 
Trump

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As a quick follow-up, The Daily Caller is reporting that GM effectively confirmed the analysis above.  But don't worry because all of the imports in 2016 were just a 1x thing to "supplement the launch of the Cruze" at it's Ohio plant.
A spokesman for General Motors told The Daily Caller, “Any Cruze sedans still on dealers’ lots built in Mexico were sold to dealers in 2016. We built a small number of Cruze sedans in Mexico in 2016 for the US market to supplement the launch of the Cruze at Lordstown.”

“The only Cruze model being shipped to the US market now is the Cruze hatch,” the GM spokesman added.

The Trump transition team and the United Auto Workers union did not respond to requests for comment.
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