Huzzahs will greet Ford’s execs this morning, as The Blue Oval Boyz didn’t lose as much as they could have, and didn’t burn as much of their cash pile as they could have. More specifically, the DOE loan-taking American automaker reported a $424 million pre-tax operating loss on net income of $2.3 billion. (“Special items” created a net gain of $2.8 billion, including a $3.4 billion gain via debt-reduction.) The automaker ended the second quarter with “Automotive gross cash” of $21 billion. That means Ford’s “operating-related cash outflow” (i.e., cash burn) was $1 billion. Before the results, Ford CFO Lewis Booth claimed Ford was “certainly confident of getting through this year” with sufficient cash. True dat. Meanwhile, business sucks: Ford’s second quarter revenues clocked-in at $27.2 billion, down $11 billion from the same period a year ago. [Ford financials here.]

It’s all change at New GM—in the sense that the same old management is shuffling the same old players to re-consolidate their power within the post-Chapter-11 automaker’s moribund corporate culture. To wit: Automotive News [AN, sub] reports that New GM’s old North American Design Chief, Bryan Nesbitt, has been named New GM’s chief of Cadillac. “Chief.” I like that! As AN points out, Nesbitt penned the PT Cruiser for Chrysler—before jumping ship from one bankruptcy-bound American automaker for another. Again, Nesbitt is now, effectively, Cadillac’s brand manager; replacing “interim” Cadillac general managers Steve Hill and Steve Shannon, who will be rebadged and reassigned.

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TTAC Commentator don1967 writes,

What’s the deal with these platinum/iridium-tipped spark plugs? Is there any reason to go through the (sometimes very high) cost of dismantling half of your engine to replace them every 100,000 miles if the car is running fine? Also, what do you think about periodically loosening and retightening them to prevent seizing . . . does that ever actually happen?

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The Porsche board kept busy all night. Porsche dismissed CEO Wendelin Wiedeking and CFO Holger Härter with immediate effect, Reuters reports. They were kicked out, wearing parachutes worth €50 million ($71million) for Wiedeking and €12.5 million ($18 million) for Härter. That was way below the sums discussed previously. (Read More…)

In a surprise announcement, Porsche Automobil Holding SE said early Thursday morning that its supervisory board approved a capital increase of at least €5 billion as part of a move toward forging a combined company with Volkswagen AG,  Automobilwoche [sub] reports.
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Toyota is the top automaker in the world, and has grown to this point by using methods put into place by one lone individual crying in the American post-war industrial wilderness. His name was Deming, and his message was (paraphrasing) “make it right the first time and it’ll be less expensive, better for the customer and more profitable for the manufacturer.” He also laid out how best to continually improve. The Japanese took this message and ran with it, patiently decimating the competition over half a century.

File this one under the “stealth bailout” file. GM dumped a number of its own pension obligations onto Delphi when the parts supplier was spun off in 1999. Now, the Detroit News reports that Delphi is abandoning $6.25 billion  worth of obligations to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, the second largest such takeover by amount. But the 70,000 affected Delphi workers and retirees will still miss out on an estimated $800 million in payments. And what does GM have to say about all this? The General’s statement (via webnewswire) betrays a guilty conscience:

There have been questions about General Motors Company’s responsibility toward Delphi’s pension plans, given that many of those covered were GM employees prior to GM spinning off Delphi in 1999. General Motors Corporation made appropriate provisions for the plans at the time of the spin-off, and Delphi became responsible for the plans from that point forward.

See how that works? Who cares that GM spun Delphi off as a means of jettisoning pensions. Once the deal was done it was Delphi’s problem. Move along now, nothing to see here . . .

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“Marchionne said he had installed a strong management team at Chrysler, the integration process was under way, and Fiat had already turned over a small-car platform to the Auburn Hills automaker.” That’s one small step for a platform, one giant leap for mankind.

Christopher Knittel of UC Davis made this graph of trends in the Honda Accord’s weight, horsepower, torque and fuel economy since its introduction. His entire report Automobiles on Steroids: Product Attribute Trade-Offs and Technological Progress in the Automobile Sector is available for download in PDF format from UC Davis. The data kind of speaks for itself though, doesn’t it?

Cash for clunkers has moved up the “hey, you know about cars, right?” list of questions. Friends and acquaintances with little intrinsic interest in the world of cars have been asking “what the deal is” with the program with surprising regularity. Needless to say, it’s difficult to explain and I usually end up pointing people to the CARS website and Kelly Blue Book’s clunker calculator. And guess what. Despite having been asked about the program by a number of people, I know of nobody who has actually qualified. In other words, the program is already a success. After all, the biggest fans of clunker-culling admit that the current plan has too many strings and not enough money to truly impact new car sales on its own. And yet, everyone knows that the program exists without knowing whether they qualify. The resulting search for information drives curious souls who don’t have automotive blogger friends straight into the arms of dealers. Cash for clunkers is a classic come-on. If there was any doubt before, Chrysler’s latest Big Summer Incentive proves it.

I’m working on a piece entitled “Five Reasons Why Car Buyers Will Avoid the Cash for Clunkers Program Like the Plague.” Sneak peak: people trust car dealers about as far as they can throw an M1 Abrams tank. I know that several of our Best and Brightest are living la vida locomota by selling cars to suspecting punters. But I can honestly say that I have never met an honest car salesman face-to-face. Charming? Yes. Knowledgeable? Absolutely. But every last man Jack of them oozed obfuscation. The best of the breed, who shall remain nameless, avoids issuing outright lies with a simple yet effective technique: he ignores any question that requires a negative reply. Seriously. He says nothing. Unlike Mr. Piven, whose latest cinematic effort seems carefully designed to lower public opinion of a profession that couldn’t go any lower (both the opinion and the profession itself). But truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Have you ever met an honest car salesman? And if you have, are you sure he wasn’t playing you for a fool?

Actually, that’s misleading. “Everyone shopping for a new car or truck qualifies for an incentive of up to $4,500 — even if they don’t have a vehicle that qualifies under the U.S. Government’s program,” says ChryCo Sales VP Steven Beahm in a press release. “This incentive is great in that it’s easy to understand and available to everyone.” Which means that it’s actually nothing like the government’s CARS program, which is difficult to understand and not available to everyone. But, if you do have a qualifying clunker, you get the Chrysler incentive on top of $4,500 bucks from the feds for a total of $9,000 off the qualifying ChryCo product of your choice. But piggybacking on a government program doesn’t exactly improve Chrysler’s welfare queen image. Especially when the program it’s riding is so convoluted, over-hyped and under-delivering. And, like most of the Pentastar’s gimmicks, this incentive is also accompanied by a zero percent interest for 72 months offer. Which may well be a better deal than the buzzword-based cash incentive. But would it be summer without a Chrysler sales gimmick?

Someone capture this before they fix it, please. [thanks to Stingray for the heads-up]