Welcome in, today is Monday, August tenth, and we begin with Automotive News reporting that Unifor and General Motors have opened contract talks in Canada. Unifor and General Motors have started contract negotiations, Automotive News reports. That reporting frames the talks as following the union's deal with Ford, and in Canadian pattern bargaining the first settlement is the frame every later one gets measured against. Wages, pensions and plant-commitment language at GM read straight through to supplier planning on both sides of the border. Unifor named General Motors as its next target for talks back in July, per the same outlet. The plant picture is where the pressure sits. That reporting describes GM's Ingersoll assembly plant in Ontario as currently idle, with thousands of workers laid off. The CAMI facility there stopped building vans last year, and its future is described as uncertain. Stellantis' Brampton assembly plant is also sitting idle, according to that account, with thousands laid off there as well. So the union comes to the table with the Ford agreement in hand and two dark Canadian plants behind it. What General Motors commits to, and on what timeline, becomes the reference point for the rest of this bargaining round. Also today, a development on Mercedes-Benz in China, following our earlier report on the company cutting sales and revenue guidance there on weak demand. Chief executive Ola Kallenius now expects the fierce pricing competition in the Chinese car market to stick around for years to come, Automotive News reports. Chinese brands are spending what he described as an enormous amount of money to break into the country's luxury segment and compete with models such as the S-Class and the G-Class, per that account. That shifts the China price war from a cyclical dip to a standing planning assumption, a different input into margin and volume guidance for every premium maker with China exposure. Automotive World, in a commentary, argues the admission concedes what the company's own results had already made apparent. Reaction in the trade runs two ways. Some observers liken European premium autos to the Swiss watch industry's quartz crisis, questioning how long heritage and status can carry the segment. A more cautious strand notes the sharpest declines predate the rollout of newly localized models, which some argue leaves structural share loss unproven. Separately, Schaeffler is targeting one thousand three hundred job cuts. Automotive News reports the supplier plans to reduce its German workforce through an expanded phased-retirement program, as weak automotive demand continues to pressure the business. The mechanism is the part worth carrying. Taking headcount out through early retirement avoids forced layoffs, which lowers the industrial-relations cost, but it also means the savings arrive in stages rather than at once, against a European volume base that has not recovered. Circulating commentary tends to place the move alongside other reductions across the German auto sector, with reaction leaning toward reading early retirement and natural attrition as the preferred softer exit route. For anyone modelling tier-one cost lines into next year, that is the shape to watch: cost coming out quietly, through pension mechanics rather than announced closures. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Toyota has suspended seventeen lines at nine Japanese plants for a typhoon, Automotive News reports, with Corolla, Camry and RAV4 among the models affected, as the automaker recovers from July's earthquake. Volkswagen's controlling Porsche-Piech family firm is urging swift action on cost cuts and excess capacity, per Automotive News, after reporting a first-half loss of two point two two billion euros. Daimler has upgraded its twenty twenty-six guidance as its tariff burden lessens, Automotive World reports, after Trucks North America weighed on profit in the first half. And finally, the UK government is funding thirty-three automotive projects through Drive35, Just Auto reports, spanning early innovation to manufacturing scale-up in the zero-emission transition.