“The only reason we are not making money on the net is that I pay interest on the borrowings I took from the government and I have money in the bank to cover that debt. Actually, against the Treasury we owe them nothing. We have enough cash to pay it all off. But you can’t run a business without cash, so it’s just a function of our capital structure. If we had taken those funds as equity as GM did, we would have been making money, net, right now.”

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The WSJ reports that “senior officials at the U.S Department of Transportation have at least temporarily blocked the release of findings by auto-safety regulators that could favor Toyota Motor Corp. in some crashes related to unintended acceleration, according to a recently retired agency official”. Governmental departments suppressing documents? Much like Toyota suppressed their design flaws which landed them a record $16.4m fine? You have my interest… (Read More…)

I was born in 1971 and started actively reading about cars in 1976, subscribing to Car and Driver and absorbing the work of men such as LJK Setright, Gordon Jennings, and Gordon Baxter. Those men were waiting for America to create a truly outstanding small car, one that could meet the Germans (and, later, the […]

ToMoCo is keeping the suspense up on their long awaited and hotly rumored first quarter profit numbers. Daihatsu has reported stellar numbers. Hino has reported a nice set of financials. Now, “nine major Toyota Motor Corp. group companies all reported group net profits in the April-June quarter thanks to a recovery in the auto industry,” says The Nikkei [sub]. No word yet from the mother ship. EMCON. Strict radio silence. (Read More…)

This could be the week that separates the electric hype from the electric truth.  Real EVs get in the hands of real drivers for real reviews. Our Dan Wallach drove the Tesla Roadster. Our very own Ed Niedermeyer wrote his “GM’s electric lemon” review of the Chevy Volt for the New York Times. (He didn’t really drive the thing, but the article really drove some to drink, up the wall, nuts – their choice, it’s a free country.)  And Joseph B. White of the Wall Street Journal laid his hands on a real Mitsubishi i-MiEV, for a real life test drive under the grueling conditions found within the Washington Beltway. (Read More…)

How things change: Last year, the death of the automobile was prognosticated. Maybe little cheap econoboxes. Luxury cars? Forget it, dead as dinosaurs. Don’t even mention dinosaurs. This year … just have a look at Audi. (Read More…)

When Subaru introduced the 2005 Legacy GT wagon with a turbocharged flat four, all-wheel-drive, and a manual transmission, it went straight to the short list of cars I’d buy…if I was buying a car. But I wasn’t buying a car. Apparently there were too many like me, for Subaru discontinued the manual transmission the following […]

As much as we web-based types like to smirk at the slow death of the traditional media, the real truth seems to be that, more often than not, the internet is more of a training ground than a final destination. So it is with former TTAC reviewer Jonny Lieberman. Jonny has worked at a number of automotive blogs, including a stint at TTAC that stretched from February of 2006 to January of 2009. After TTAC, Jonny went on to become the Associate Editor at Autoblog, where he primarily focused on road test reviews. Having worked his way to the biggest car blog out there, Jonny’s ambition has taken him beyond the internet to the world of print journalism, and the halls of Motor Trend where he will become Senior Editor. In his farewell piece at Autoblog, Jonny looks back at his time in the autoblogosphere, and notes

I’ve worked at some sites filled with mega-friendly people that weren’t capable of pouring piss from a boot. Other places were hyper-competent and staffed almost totally with assholes.

Anyone want to bet that the second sentence wasn’t written with TTAC at least partially in mind? And though Jonny was never the most confrontational writer at TTAC, we certainly hope that he will bring at least a tiny bit of TTAC’s take-no-prisoners ethos to Motor Trend. Or at least the raw enthusiasm embodied in such TTAC pieces as his Audi RS4 review. Either way, his hiring helps prove that even the buff books are looking to the internet for fresh blood. The autoblogosphere may not replace the print magazines, but it cant help but have a profound effect on it. Hopefully for the better.

In April, everybody who walked by the FAW display at the Beijing Auto Show, yours truly included, did a double-take and took a lot of pictures upon seeing their Red Flag CA7600L monstrosity. It was a huge crowd magnet, and everybody walked away, muttering: “They’ll never build THAT.” Boy was everybody wrong. (Read More…)

Motorvehicle production in Japan was up 25.9 percent from a year earlier in June, says the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association via The Nikkei [sub] Domestic sales are a bit more sedate, up 17.4 percent in June. Where did all those cars go? (Read More…)

Some people (like about half of the nation) are convinced the Government has a conflict of interest when it comes to Toyota. Many believe there is a witchhunt against Toyota by a government, and by unions that want GM’s major competitor bleed money and market share before the big GM IPO. 25 percent believe the criticism stems from an outright desire to help GM, while 38 percent disagree and 37 percent aren’t sure. Whatever the reason may be, Toyota is beginning to show battle fatigue. (Read More…)

Noticed that things have been a little slower around here this week? Yes, well, it’s summer and I’m much harder to motivate in the summer. Also, I’ve been working on this op-ed on the Chevy Volt for the New York Times. My conclusion on the Volt?

In the end, making the bailout work — whatever the cost — is the only good reason for buying a Volt. The car is not just an environmental hair shirt (a charge leveled at the Prius early in its existence), it is an act of political self-denial as well.

If G.M. were honest, it would market the car as a personal donation for, and vote of confidence in, the auto bailout. Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of cross-branding that will make the Volt a runaway success.

The Obama administration went here before, when it tried to quantify how much worse things would have been without its stimulus bill. And considering the task force has enjoyed access to GM and Chrysler’s business plans, it’s surprising that this graph (from the Auto Task Force’s just-released Bailout “report” [PDF]) is based on notoriously iffy BLS data. Instead of projecting how many jobs were saved by Detroit’s $86b life raft, couldn’t the White House have cited GM and Chrysler’s pre-bailout Chapter 11 plans? Or were there pre-bailout bankruptcy plans? Either way, the Task Force’s claim that 56k jobs have been created in Automotive since mid-2009 is a bit hard to swallow given the SIGTARP’s recent finding that

Treasury made a series of decisions [regarding the bailout-era dealer cull] that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls.

By narrowing a broad bailout to just the manufacturing side (the report leaves out dealer cuts and the GMAC rescue), the Task Force is simply defining its way to victory. Besides, the problem is that there’s really no way of knowing what might have happened without last year’s landslide of government sugar. For all we know, Fiat might have bought a bankrupt Chrysler with its own money. GM might have shuttered dying brands and cut its bloated capacity of its own volition. Both might even be in mediocre-to-OK shape right now. The only thing we know for sure is that the auto bailout has been a qualified success at best so far. Luckily for the bailout boosters, it will be years before Treasury fully divests from GM and Chrysler, so there will be plenty of other opportunities to declare victory.

The idea behind the Automotive X-Prize was to prove that 100 MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent) is attainable in practical, daily-driver-type cars. And with competition moving into the final stage, 15 cars are still in the running. But how good are those cars actually? With only $10m in prize money, the X-Prize attracted few established OEMs to the competition, and as a result only a single car has made it through to the finals in the Mainstream class. This class was the main focus of the competition, as its requirement that each car “must seat at least four passengers, have four wheels, and have a minimum 200 mile range” meant Mainstream entries could be alternatives to “real cars.” Instead, the competition is being dominated by the “Alternative” class (two passengers, 100 miles range and any amount of wheels), which was included to open the competition smaller teams. And despite the fact that most of the entries had few restrictions on their designs, you might assume that they have performed impressively. The numbers, however, paint a very different picture.
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