In the autumn of 2003, DaimlerChrysler introduced their first co-developed product: a “segment buster” called the Chrysler Pacifica. According to the official spin, the Pacifica married a minivan’s utility with an SUV’s machismo. In reality, the Pacifica was a six-seat station wagon on stilts, closest in concept to Audi’s slow-selling Allroad Quattro. While the Allroad pulled a Hasselhoff (more popular in Germany than its intended market), the Pacifica was born under a bad sign, raised with great expectations and expired stateside without fanfare or corporate hand-wringing. RIP Pacifica or good riddance to bad rubbish?
The NY Times has an interactive widget that shows all domestically-produced vehicles, their point of assembly, whether they’re union-assembled, and where their engine and transmission were produced. What, no parts-content-origin-percentages? Oh well, the message is clear: Americans build tons of hugely popular automobiles.
From Bloomberg’s irony-free (Saturn Aura, geddit?) article entitled “Car Buyers Spurn GM, Ford as Japan Brands Retain Aura”:
“It is very hard to open minds and get people to consider a domestic vehicle again, no matter how good,” GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said. “The product and fuel economy deficit, reliability deficit, styling deficit — all those deficits have been erased. What has yet to be erased and is going to be the biggest challenge of all is erasing the reputational deficit.”
The saga of Chrysler’s Sebring/Avenger replacement has been the proverbial long and winding road. After losing its project chief and “contemplating” stuffing the whole development thing for an Altima rebadge, Chrysler’s “Project D” is finally starting to get some traction. Only it isn’t. Automotive News [sub] reports that Chrysler’s “something better than the world’s worst car for the mid-size segment” (as Farago put it) is going to look like the 200C concept. As and when, of course. But what about the actual car bits?
Anyone remember energy independence? You know: oil addiction? Freeing America from the oppressive yoke of foreign oil importation? I guess the yoke’s on us, isn’t it children? You know, at one time, energy independence was, as Paris Hilton used to say, hot. The issue was used to justify spending billions of federal tax dollars to help our nice agribusinesspeople brew ethanol from corn. Hands up those of you who’ve heard your Mommy or Daddy saying “no one ever died defending a corn field?” Well, times change. Although the E85 federal subsidies and mandates are still there, and our corn growers are doing all they can do to ruin engines with mandatory E15 gasoline blends, you just don’t hear so much about energy independence as you used to. That’s all going to change now! I know: isn’t it exciting? And you’ll never guess who’s going to ping the people? Audi. Yes, Katy, truth in engineering. Only now it’s truth in TDI Clean Diesel!
Here’s what happened to my 2003 Murano with 145k on the clock: the “service engine” light came on. So I took the car to dealer. They said the oil was low, and they put car on computer and said it needs a new engine, for a mere $7,000. I thought they were joking: they claim the computer says the engine is failing internally and there is nothing they can do about it. I had the oil changed and by my calculations, the car is consuming about a quart of oil every 1,400 miles.
Something interesting happened with my nearest former Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep dealer (Dave Croft Motors in Collinsville, Illinois): they appear to be selling new Chrysler products again. In the days approaching the “drop-dead” date for the culled dealers, I thought it was odd that they not only kept the large “Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep” signs on their building but also kept them lit at night (I would have personally taken them down out of spite). The owner went through the motions of crying to the media, proclaiming that he would stay in business as a used dealer, and then moved all the new cars to the very back of the lot and put them in neat rows to await pickup and delivery to another dealer after June ninth.
The Microsoft Zune prides itself in being the only significant alternative to Apple’s wildly popular iPod and iTunes duo. But there’s a problem: Zune distances itself from the industry standard software and hardware systems. Considering Microsoft’s dominance stemming from the personal computer revolution, the Zune’s unique value proposition is less like the corporate mothership and more like the original Apple Macintosh: isolating and challenging. Which, considering their fashionably late entrance, makes the Microsoft Zune a tough sell.
Toyota, the automaker of choice for the green movement, is under fire by the green movement. It seems that the company wants to turn 1600 acres of cedar forests and 17th century rice paddies into a research center that’ll include 10km of road courses. The problem—in addition to the historical value of the area—is that it’s the habitat of the endangered gray-faced buzzard and oriental honey buzzard. In total, Bloomberg reports, the project will deforest 691 acres, fill in rice paddies and raze mountains. Shigemi Oda, chairman of the “Society to Consider the Large-Scale Development Project of the 21st Century,” summed it up: “Most people think of Toyota as an environmentally friendly company. Crushing mountains is environmentally destructive.”
After the GSA and Nancy Pelosi’s office turned down TTAC’s request for a breakdown of the vehicles purchased under the Recovery Act’s Energy-Efficient Federal Motor Vehicle Fleet Procurement program, we went all FOIA. The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has now released the info to us (as it should, transparency for the program is promised here). We’ve published the list after the jump, formatting the data by model, number purchased, country of assembly and fuel economy. Exactly 11,319 of the 17,205 vehicles purchased were assembled in the USA. [NB: I’ve provided fuel economy numbers for base versions with automatic transmissions, as per typical fleet practice.]
I love technology. I was an early adopter of the microcomputer (8” SS/SD floppies, anyone?). I spent way too much on a TI calculator in college because it could *gasp* do square roots. My car has rain-sensing wipers, self-leveling headlights and power headrests. However, spending a week with an Infiniti FX35 made me wonder if, just as electronic calculators have given us a generation who can’t do simple math in their heads, the technical fripperies in our cars are going to produce a generation of drivers who can’t drive.
In the left corner: One of the world’s top heavyweights. European Champion. Number two in the world league. In the right corner: A flyweight contender. Ranks at the bottom of the list. The guy in the right corner wants to knock out the one in the left. He surprised him, scored some hits. Now the big guy on the left is starting to get going.
The guy on the left just won a very rare trophy: Volkswagen’s chief financial officer Hans Dieter Poetsch said to Reuters that Volkswagen will have a “positive result” in the second quarter. As for 2009, Poetsch added that VW is also on track to having a “positive result for the full year.” A car maker that turns a profit?
A New Jersey state lawmaker wants to make it a crime for drivers to touch the screen of a satellite navigation device in a moving vehicle. Earlier this month, state Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith (D-Hudson) introduced legislation to expand the state’s existing prohibition on using a cell phone behind the wheel. “This bill would amend current law to also prohibit the manual operation of a global positioning system (GPS) device or similar navigation device by the operator of a moving motor vehicle,” the official summary for A4064 explains. “The bill would allow the operator to use a voice-activated GPS device.”
Over the years, I’ve become inured to the mainstream automotive press’s mindless Motown cheerleading and irrational optimism. But every now and then, they really get my goat. The Detroit News ran a feature today by Bryce J. Hoffman clunkily entitled “How would Henry Ford react to today’s automakers?” It’s bad enough that Detroit’s zombies have suckered the federal government into endless subsidies by re-writing recent history. (We were doing GREAT until the economy tanked!) But for a journalist to raise an important historical question and then let Detroit apologists spin it without question is, uh, enervating.
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