By Bernie Woodall

(Reuters) – A history of Ford Motor Co (F.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) could be told with the succession of slogans it has used over the decades – some remembered within the company as rallying cries, some more as punch lines.

Now, six years into a comeback from near collapse, the automaker has a new slogan that underscores confidence that its recovery is almost complete: “Go Further.”

For an automaker with 166,000 workers worldwide and a history of riding boom into bust, the slogan is intended in part as a warning against complacency after three years of profits, executives say.

“Go Further” will be used in marketing campaigns, replacing “Drive One” in North America and “Feel the Difference” in Europe. Those slogans were coined to help overcome wariness on the part of consumers about the quality and performance of Ford cars as the car maker bounced back.

“We are at a different point now in our company’s history,” Jim Farley, global head of sales and marketing, told Reuters.

Ford is not the only automaker that has relied heavily on a catchy slogan. Crosstown rival Chrysler, now under the control of Italy’s Fiat SpA (FIA.MI: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), has played up both sides of its heritage with the year-old “Imported from Detroit.”

DETROIT, Jan 9 (Reuters) – Ford Motor Co chief financial officer Lewis Booth plans to retire in the first half of this year, two people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

Booth, 63, became CFO in 2008 after running Ford’s operations in Europe and Asia. He joined the board of British aircraft engine maker Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc in May last year, a move that marked a transition to a career beyond the automaker where he has spent the past three decades.

Booth declined to comment on his plans in a meeting with reporters on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show.

The British-born Booth had been seen as a potential successor to Ford’s CEO, Alan Mulally.

Booth steered the automaker’s sale of Swedish luxury brand Volvo to Chinese automaker Geely and was credited with bringing a more collaborative approach to a Ford leadership team that had sometimes been split by in-fighting, people with knowledge of the company’s operations have said.

In a sign of confidence in Ford’s turnaround, Booth said the automaker would realize a one-time tax-related gain when it reports fourth-quarter results because the automaker has grown more confident in its sustained profitability.

That one-time boost to net income could be as much as $13 billion, he said, as Ford reverses a valuation allowance it made against deferred tax assets in 2006 when the automaker was on the cusp of three years of losses.

DETROIT, Jan 8 (Reuters) – The agency that monitors U.S. vehicle safety is “comfortable” that a proposed fix to the Chevrolet Volt eliminates the risk of fire days after the electric car is involved in a crash, a senior official said on Sunday.

David Strickland, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said a solution proposed by General Motors Co addresses the causes of fires observed in the Volt in federal safety tests last year.

“We felt comfortable with it,” Strickland said on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show.

NHTSA launched a probe of the Volt’s battery pack in November.

Last week, GM said it had developed a fix for the Volt that would better protect the vehicle’s 400-pound lithium ion battery by adding steel reinforcements and taking other steps to prevent coolant fluid from leaking and triggering a fire.

GM said it had shared its engineering and test results with NHTSA and was optimistic that its proposed fix would allow the U.S. safety agency to close its investigation.

GM said it would begin making the repairs at Chevy dealerships in February. The automaker has sold about 8,000 Volts in the United States, just over half of the target it had set for the past year.

MILAN/DETROIT (Reuters) – Italy’s Fiat SpA (FIA.MI: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) has raised its stake in Chrysler Group LLC by 5 percent to 58.5 percent, meeting a final target set by the U.S. government as the two groups move closer to creating one of the world’s leading auto makers.

Fiat has managed Chrysler since a 2009 bailout deal with the U.S. government when it paid around $2 billion for its majority stake and agreed a number of conditions to be met before a full merger could take place.

Sergio Marchionne, CEO of both groups, has made Fiat one of Europe’s top turnaround stories and wants to elevate the company to a global player through Chrysler.

“The acquisition of a further 5 percent of Chrysler is a fundamental step in completion of the integration between our two groups,” Marchionne said in a statement on Thursday.

Chrysler and Fiat said they had formally committed to the U.S. Treasury Department to produce the 2013 Dodge Dart sedan at a Chrysler plant in Illinois, the final performance event agreed with Washington in 2009.

That commitment, along with proving late last month to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that the new Dart can achieve an unadjusted combined fuel economy of 40 miles per gallon, triggered the 5 percent ownership increase.

The remaining 41.5 percent ownership of Chrysler remains with a healthcare trust, called VEBA, affiliated with the United Auto Workers union.

DETROIT (Reuters) – Automakers expect lower sales growth in the United States in 2012 because the economy remains weak, even though U.S. auto sales in December were strong.

General Motors Co’s (GM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) U.S. sales in December rose about 5 percent, while sales at Ford Motor Co (F.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Chrysler jumped 10 percent and 37 percent, respectively.

U.S. new-vehicle sales are an early indicator each month of consumer spending, and the United States is the world’s second-largest auto market behind China.

Automakers are headed for full-year 2011 sales of about 12.8 million vehicles, 10 percent higher than 2010. U.S. auto sales have been a relative bright spot, with many cash-strapped consumers forced to purchase cars and trucks to replace vehicles that have been on the road for a decade or longer.

GM, Ford and Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), which reported a 36 percent gain in December, all said growth would increase at a lower rate in 2012.

GM and VW expect 2012 U.S. sales in the range of 13.5 million to 14 million vehicles, which implies growth of between 5 and 9 percent. Ford sees a range of 13.2 million to 14.2 million, excluding medium and heavy-duty trucks.

“The momentum coming out of the fourth quarter gives us confidence that the low end of that forecast is less likely,” Ford economist Ellen Hughes-Cromwick said on a conference call.

DETROIT (Reuters) – U.S. new-vehicle sales for December are expected to show continued steady growth, but analysts say much of the gains are linked to buyers who delayed purchases and therefore will not an indicate a strengthening economy.

December’s annualized sales rate is expected to top 13 million vehicles for the fourth straight month as the steady growth of sales continues to belie uncertainty about the overall economy, said J.D. Power and Associates and LMC Automotive.

December U.S. auto sales likely rose 9 percent from the previous year, 30 analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters indicated, to 13.6 million vehicles sales on an annualized basis. December 2010 annualized sales were 12.5 million.

“December’s sales rate was a continuation of the rather slow and steady recovery that now symbolizes 2011,” said Jesse Toprak of TrueCar.com. “This year was absent of a blockbuster sales month but we see this pace of growth as healthy and sustainable in the coming year.”

Major automakers report December monthly sales on Wednesday, January 4. Each month, U.S. new vehicle sales are an early indicator of consumer spending.

TrueCar said it expects the biggest year-on-year sales gains for December to be shown by South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), up about 40 percent, and Chrysler, up 34 percent. Michigan-based Chrysler is primarily owned by Italy’s Fiat SpA (FIA.MI: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

Edmunds.com Vice Chairman Jeremy Anwyl expressed concern that December sales were not stronger, considering that Japan’s big three automakers, Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Honda Motor Co (7267.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Nissan Motor Co (7201.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), have largely recovered from low inventory caused Japan’s March earthquake.

DETROIT/HAMBURG (Reuters) – The United Auto Workers union is staking its future on the kind of struggle it hasn’t waged since the 1930s: a massive drive to organize hostile factories.

This time, the target is foreign car makers, whose workers have rebuffed the union repeatedly. Specifically, Reuters has learned, the union is going after U.S. plants owned by German manufacturers Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG, seen as easier nuts to crack than the Japanese and South Koreans.

It’s a battle the UAW cannot afford to lose. By failing to organize factories run by foreign automakers, the union has been a spectator to the only growth in the U.S. auto industry in the last 30 years. That failure to win new members has compounded a crunch on the UAW’s finances, forcing it to sell assets and dip into its strike fund to pay for its activities.

In dozens of interviews with union officials, organizers and car company executives, a picture has emerged of UAW President Bob King’s strategy. By appealing to German unions for help and by calling on the companies to do the right thing, King hopes to get VW and Daimler to surrender without a fight and let the union make its case directly to workers.

Central to this effort is the belief that if car companies refrain from actively opposing a UAW organizing push, workers at German-American factories will gladly join the union.

But that belief may be off-base. Workers know that almost every job lost at U.S. car factories in the last 30 years has occurred at a unionized company, while almost every job gained has come at a non-union company. And most of the factories the UAW is targeting are in the South, which is historically hostile to unions.

“People have a different opinion in the South about unions,” said Robert Plisko, a retired autoworker who helped UAW organizing efforts at German and Japanese plants in the 1970s and 1980s. “It’s a lot harder now than it has ever been, and I don’t see it getting any easier.”

DETROIT (Reuters) – The United Auto Workers union has decided it will not identify an organizing target among foreign automakers with U.S. operations, a shift in strategy in a campaign that union leadership sees as central to its survival.

“We’re shifting our strategy a little bit. We are not going to announce a target at all,” UAW President Bob King said in an interview. “We are not going to create a fight.”

King said that the UAW was in talks with “almost all” of the German, Japanese and Korean automakers with U.S. factories and expected to continue to make progress toward organizing workers in their operations.

But King said that the UAW board had met on Wednesday and decided not to identify a target for an organizing campaign, a sharp change in tactics by the union that represents about 115,000 workers at U.S. automakers.

King has made organizing the transnational or “transplant” automakers a critical piece of the union’s strategy since he took over in July 2010.

King has repeatedly said the future of the UAW depends on organizing foreign automakers’ U.S. plants, something it has failed to do numerous times in the past.

King said the union will intensify organizing efforts while it changes tactics, and will concentrate on its ability to work with companies rather than against them.

By Bernie Woodall and Deepa Seetharaman

(Reuters) – U.S. auto sales rose 14 percent in November, paced by gains at Chrysler Group LLC and Volkswagen AG, as consumers returned to showrooms even without the lure of a big year-end sale.

Chrysler and VW posted the highest percentage gains at 45 percent and 41 percent, respectively.

Others posting double-digit gains were Hyundai Motor Co at 22 percent, Nissan Motor Co at 19 percent, and Ford Motor Co at 13 percent. General Motors and Toyota Motor Co trailed with increases of 7 percent.

Honda Motor, which has been the slowest of the major Japanese automakers to recover from supply disruptions caused by the March earthquake, saw sales fall 6 percent.

The sales gain for Toyota was the first since April. Honda sales have been down every month since May, and the Japanese automaker has seen its U.S. market share tumble from almost 11 percent to just over 8 percent in the same period.

On an industry wide basis, sales exceeded analyst expectations at an annualized rate of 13.6 million, the highest sales rate since August 2009 when the U.S. government was running the “cash for clunkers” trade-in incentive program.

Dec 1 (Reuters) – Strong sales gains by major automakers, paced by Chrysler Group LLC and Volkswagen AG , put November U.S. auto sales on track to hit a two-year high as consumers returned to showrooms even without a big year-end sale.

Chrysler and VW posted the highest percentage gains at 45 percent and 41 percent, respectively.

Others posting double-digit gains were Hyundai Motor Co at 22 percent, Nissan Motor Co at 19 percent, and Ford Motor Co at 13 percent.

General Motors and Toyota Motor Co trailed with increases of 7 percent.

Honda Motor sales were down 6.4 percent.

The industrywide sales rise in November came despite lower spending on discounts by the automakers compared with a year earlier. The average vehicle price rose 4 percent to top $30,000, according to industry-tracking firm TrueCar.com.

Automakers were able to charge higher prices for new cars because prices for used cars are strong and low-interest-rate loans kept new vehicles affordable for many consumers, analysts said.