Posted on Friday 5 October 2007
Detroit will be losing another carmaker with news today that Bentley will be moving its North American corporate headquarters to Boston by mid next year. This makes Bentley the second carmaker to be leaving Detroit following the announcement last month that Volkswagen would be moving its U.S. offices from Detroit to suburban Washington. Incidentally, Volkswagen is the parent company of Bentley.
“The U.S. is our biggest market by a considerable margin and we are making these changes now to ensure our long-term viability and success in North America,” Bentley’s U.S. sales exec Stuart McCullough said in a statement today, reports Automotive News.
Bentley is in the best financial position it’s been in for years, with sales volumes increasing for four years straight both in the U.S. and abroad. No specific reasons were given for the move apart from the official statement but more details are expected to be released closer to the move.
Wow, what an exodus! First VW and now Bentley…TOO BAD VW OWNS BENTLEY SO THAT’S REALLY ONLY ONE AUTOMAKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Congratulations for proving you didn’t even bother reading the story. “Incidentally, Volkswagen is the parent company of Bentley.”
In any case, Bentley isn’t moving to the same location as VW. This is an independent decision.
Yes, that was a brilliant observation, wasn’t it? There seem to be a lot of those recently, ready-shoot-aim!
Anyway, I didn’t even know that foriegn automakers had offices in Detroit? Kind of an ugly place to want top management to move to, and in today’s digital age it’s not really necessary to be close to the competition physically, is it?
Yes, they are starting to work that out. It makes sense for the companies that actually produce cars there, but realistically the foreign companies that import all their cars should be in their target market.
It’s also interesting to note that British Airways recently canceled their flights direct to Detroit due to lower demand.
If you’ve ever been to Detroit, you’d understand why…
It’s tough to get top management to move somewhere like that for just about any amount of money. So saving a few dollars per square foot of office space results in top talent saying “yeah, right, I’ll stay in San Diego for half the salary, thanks”…
Is it at Ford, that a top level exec refuses to move to Detroit and commutes daily on a company jet from Florida?
But Detroit is endemic of a problem for many cities in the Midwest, outside of Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston and maybe Nashville (if you call that the Midwest) companies simply don’t want to locate there and take the jobs elsewhere. Then unfortunately the talented young workers follow.
Why Beantown?