No, its not a recall. But not surprisingly, he’s trying to sell you service for your Ford. Service has always been the big profit center for dealers, and nothing has changed in almost one hundred years.

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Kudos to John Margherita for nailing the BMW 1800, and pdq. Today, we have a two-fer, for a special CC occasion. Tomorrow’s CC is in the front, but the car behind it was a previous CC. You get triple bonus points if you remember the general theme of that CC. And quadruple points if you know why that CC has historical significance (at TTAC). Rack those memory banks!

One of my pet gripes about the media and celebrities is the lack of follow-up and accountability. Remember all the hoopla about Steve Wozniak’s Prius with the mysterious electronics glitch that he could manipulate to create UA? My take was that obviously his cruise control had a minor bug that only showed up at over eighty mph. Woz readily admitted that he could disengage it with a tap on the brakes. Well, thanks to his celebrity status and the coverage, the story ended with Toyota agreeing to take his Prius for a week to test it thoroughly. So what happened? (Read More…)

Among the many unanswered questions as to what Prius owner James Sikes actually did or didn’t do to try to bring his runaway car to a stop, one claim of his definitely smells.  He says he received a recall letter from Toyota, and when he took it in to the dealer, he was told his car was not on the recall lists. Ouch! (Read More…)

An article in this week’s Advertising Age and Automotive News (they’re sister publications) investigates why the family in the new hit sitcom ‘Modern Family’ “still drives Toyota product.” The author found it “jarring” that the family “chatted happily while traveling in, of all things, a Toyota.” The answer: Toyota paid for product placement, the contract runs through the end of the season, and many of the episodes have already been shot.
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We reported yesterday that GM’s recent dealer cull flip-flop was motivated by Chariman/CEO Ed Whitacre’s desire for increased sales volume. Though that may have been the main reason GM took over 600 dealers back into the fold, there was clearly another, more sinister reason for the move: making an example of dissident, activist dealers. Automotive News [sub] reports that GM has contacted all 661 reinstated dealers, and believe it or not, none of the 7 dealer members of the Committee to Restore Dealer Rights have been contacted. Founding member Tammy Darvish tells AN [sub],

The only thing I’m confident of is that I’m sure it’s not a coincidence

A federally funded ticketing blitz in the state of Virginia landed a total of 6996 traffic tickets this weekend. The blitz, dubbed “Operation Air, Land & Speed” coincided with frantic efforts by state officials to close a$2.2 billion budget deficit. Supervisors ordered state troopers to saturate Interstates 81 and 95 to issue as many tickets as humanly possible over the space of two days.
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Financial Times calls “Volkswagen a long-time sceptic about hybrid and electric cars.” However, the pink sheet announces that Wolfsburg “has officially shifted gears.” That VW had been a sceptic is an understatement. Despite green initiatives for public and political consumption, internally, they laughed about hybrids and electrics. Their private position was that the consumption and emissions of a hybrid could be achieved with their low displacement supercharged engines and some weight savings. Pure plugins? Ach du mein Lieber. People have their next vacation in mind when they buy a car, and last VW looked, there were no charging stations on the Brenner Pass to Italy.

The official gear shifting occurred at last week’s Geneva motor show, where Volkswagen announced an “unprecedented” drive into electric vehicles. (Read More…)

Risky business. That defines the car business, and never more succinctly so than in the case of this car. Rarely has a desperate last-minute gamble paid of so handsomely as the “Neue Klasse” BMWs. Today’s new owners of Saab can only dream (hallucinate) about turning their business around so quickly and definitively as this BMW did. But  having the guts and money to back the risk taking is only part of the equation. Most of all, it’s a matter of being at the right time with the right product, and having the smarts to recognize it. In 1962, the seemingly impossible wasn’t. Today? Good luck. (Read More…)

One of the main topics at the Toyota hearings held in recent weeks is the automaker’s practice of hiring former NHTSA officials to its lobbying team. At the time, we were inclined to believe that Toyota was hardly the only firm engaging in this practice, and thanks to some Washington Post reporting, our suspicions have been confirmed. Early controversy centered around Christopher Santucci and Chris Tinto, two NHTSA Office of Defect Investigation officials who now work for Toyota. In addition to these two, the WaPo has identified former NHTSA lawyers Kenneth Weinstein and Erika Jones as former NHTSA officials who also now work for Toyota. And then there are the former regulators who work for other automakers: Jacqueline Glassman, a former NHTSA chief counsel and then deputy administrator now works for a law firm that represents Nissan and Mercedes. And that’s not all:

Former agency compliance engineer Amanda Prescott now works for Ford. Former agency director of the Office of Crashworthiness Research, Ralph J. Hitchcock, now works for American Honda Motor Co. And past agency administrator Diane Steed is a partner at Strat@Comm, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm that represents General Motors Corp.

And once again, Toyota wriggles out of some of the most damning accusations against it, not by confirming that it actually holds itself to especially high quality and safety standards, but by proving that it’s just like every other automaker. As we noted some weeks ago, this loss of exceptionalism is the ultimate price that Toyota will pay for this scandal (not counting lawyer fees).

Practice for your own sudden unintended acceleration event now, at toyotasimulator.com.

Thanks to the “optics” (if not the reality) of the latest Toyota sudden unintended acceleration scare, the story has new legs just as Toyota and Exponent were hoping to cut them off. But as much as dramatic, cop-calms-killer-Prius headlines keep the Great Toyota Panic alive, so to does the fact that the 89-odd class-action lawsuits filed against Toyota could be worth over $3b to plaintiffs and their counsel. And that’s not counting any of the incidents in which people were actually injured or killed (which are actually relatively rare). No, that $3b+ is going to the truly deserving… and their lawyers.

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By the end of the year, Nissan will, a bit belatedly, introduce their total plug-in, not range extended, all electric Leaf. They will also open a huge data center.

According to The Nikkei [sub], the location and other stats of the data center are strictly confidential. “But sources close to the company say the facility is equipped with quake protection and information-leak prevention systems so powerful it could even handle state secrets.”  What do they need it for? (Read More…)

Mazda doesn’t want to get caught in a “what did you know and when did you know it” and has decided to put brake override systems into all models to be launched anywhere in the world from now on, reports The Nikkei [sub]. (Read More…)

India is going to be an economic powerhouse, just like China. With 1.1 billion people, that’s a lot of potential customers for your goods. Suzuki knew this, which is why they pushed hard in India. Suzuki is the undisputed market leader in India. Whenever there are developments in that market, we should probably listen. Listen up: (Read More…)