Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, via its investment vehicle AMubadala Development Co, has sold back its 5 per cent stake in Ferrari to Fiat. It’s not that the sheiks were tired of Ferrari. Fiat wanted their shares back. Fiat had an option that gave it the right to buy back the stake that Mubadala had acquired in 2005 from Mediobanca, Italy’s largest investment bank for €114 million, domain-b reports.
Fiat paid €122m ($167m) to buy back the stock. Now their holdings climbed from 85 percent to 90 percent. Why would you want 90 percent in a small sports car maker if you already have 85 percent, and you need every penny of cash? (Read More…)
Did you know that there’s an Electric Drive Transportation Association? It’s a group that wants you to ditch your ICE-powered car and run on battery instead. Their member list is huge. Just about every important automaker is on it. Utility companies from Austin Energy all the way to the Tennessee Valley Authority are members. Battery manufacturers, component suppliers, infrastructure developers are members. The City of New York is. Hertz is. And if things get dicey, the association can call upon their member L-3 Communications-Combat Propulsion Systems to provide fire support.
But as big as they are, they are scared. They are worried that customers may not plug in. Or, as Reuters put it, they are concerned that “the ‘range anxiety’ drivers of plug-in electric cars may suffer is preceded by anxiety over the wisdom of buying one.” And what do they do to allay these fears? Cheaper cars? Longer lasting batteries? Free charging stations? (Read More…)
General Motors went public at $33/share today, generated huge trading volume (452m shares traded) and ended the day at $34.19. Automotive News [sub] reports that the government stake in GM “could” be as low as 33 percent post-IPO. Only five percent went to “large foreign investors,” including one percent to the Chinese bête noir SIAC, which hinted at future cooperation with The General on “exploration of overseas markets.” The only bad news? Had the Treasury sold its entire stake at the closing price today, it would have been down $9b. Now GM’s stock price needs to hit $48.58 before taxpayers make good on their investment. But with a market capitalization of about $63b, GM is at least worth more than the taxpayers put into it. Which, using a variation of Project Car Hell logic, is a real accomplishment.
The LA Auto Show was our first opportunity to get out hands on the new Saab 9-4x. Since the 9-4x is mostly a re-skinned Cadillac SRX, the Saab should offer similar driving dynamics, especially from the turbo V6 model. The interior is certainly a step in the right direction for this downtrodden Swede, but does seem like long-term exposure might make one weary of the acres of black plastic inside. While all the materials feel fairly premium, I’m not sure I care for the style of the center console where there are a heap of small buttons and a small nav screen in a sea of flat black plastic. Models without the Nav system get a much smaller screen with more plastic and some small buttons. Aside from this quibble the interior and interior are well sorted. Still, it will remain to be seen if the 9-4x can score any success in American markets with the extremely well executed Q5 and XC60 already in play not to mention the redesigned X3 on its way to our shores.
If you read one thing today, read “Ghosts Of The Old GM” by Paul Clemens in today’s NY Times. At a time of increasing triumphalism over the “success” of the Auto Bailout, Clemens unflinchingly reminds us of the terrible price we’ve paid to bring America’s auto industry back to halting life. From deserted plants, to the world of “surplus industry service providers” (yes, taking apart industry is an industry), Clemens chases down the the truth with tenacity:
For General Motors, divided into its “Old” and “New” halves, there’s an inescapable paradox: the only possible route to future profitability is to create, through plant closings, monuments to past unprofitability. Old G.M. may have gone away for the purposes of the stock offering, but it didn’t go away in what might rightfully be called actuality.
You have to imagine that plenty of Lamborghini Gallardo owners have been hauled in front their local magistrate for daring to allow their Italian stallion to stretch its legs… but surely none of them were ever treated as well as Leone Antonino Magistro of Perth, Australia.
On-road fatalities per vehicle-mile-traveled in the United States have fallen to their lowest level in recorded history (and dropping fast)… so safety advocates must be thrilled with the success, right? Wrong. After all, success is almost more dangerous to a crusade than failure. Luckily for the hand-wringing faction, a study by the National Research Council has re-defined what it means to be safe enough on America’s roads: rather than comparing fatalities to America’s past (which makes the current environment seem great), the key is comparing America’s safety record to completely different countries. Take it away, New York Times:
While France and 15 other high-income nations cut their traffic fatalities by half from 1995 to 2009, the United States showed only a 19 percent reduction over that same time period. Britain dropped the number of fatal accidents by 39 percent over the last 15 years, and Australia by 25 percent.
And what makes the US different than these other countries (other than the fact that we apparently don’t care about traffic deaths)? The problem, it turns out, is our insufficiently intrusive government.
We’re coming to the end of KOREA! WEEK! and we still haven’t answered the question: When did Hyundai start becoming a serious player in this market? When did the image change from Deadly Sin to default-choice affordable car? One can go back as far as the second-generation Excel, which cracked the reliability equation while still being rust-prone as all get out. Alternately, perhaps it wasn’t until the arrival of the current Sonata that the brand became worthy of being chosen by the frozen Middle American masses.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, and I’d suggest that the car you see above was the true turning point. The first-generation Elantra (Lantra to the Cammy Corrigan crowd) was pleasant enough, but it didn’t even pretend to compete with Civics and Corollas. Hyundai was assumed to know its place, and that place was among the credit criminals, desperately poor, and the hopelessly stupid. Ten years ago, however, the Elantra woke up and decided that nobody was going to put it in a corner. (Read More…)
Let me say this as clear as I can, I do not think there will be any concessions in 2011. People want to reward our members and it will be a key component of the 2011 bargaining. When the industry comes back, just like we’re sharing in the downside we’re going to share in the upside. That’s a key foundation of what we’re doing in 2011.
UAW President Bob King gives his best “we will fight them on the beaches” impression, telling Reuters that his union has sacrificed enough, thanks. And though the people who want to reward UAW members are notably absent from public debate, that assertion wasn’t nearly as double-take-worthy as King’s opinion that
There’s no competitive gap between Ford, GM and Chrysler right now
As Bertel reported this morning, the debut of Toyota’s first potential mass-market pure EV has not been an occasion for the Japanese automaker to trumpet battery-electric technology as a world-beater. In fact, given the kind of rhetoric that usually accompanies concepts like this Tesla-developed electric RAV4, Toyota is still treating electric vehicles as a limited, and relatively short-term trend that poses little threat to the gas-based core of its business. And there’s strong evidence that this is the right approach. Hybrids are the mass-market face of green motoring in the here-and-now, and a wave of hydrogen vehicles scheduled for 2015 could take considerable wind out of the EV bandwagon’s sales long-term. No wonder Toyota shoved development of the RAV4 EV to its idealistic “investment,” Tesla. This car is not the future… it’s an insurance policy.
Stefan Jacoby, CEO of bought-by-Geely Volvo needs to bring down the cost of Volvo’s European-made cars.
So where will the new Volvo factories be? You have two tries.
China? Check. Volvo might actually open three factories in China, Stefan Jacoby said recently in Stockholm. Details should be forthcoming within the next weeks.
Volkswagen’s budget knows no bounds lately. With sales on a roll and VW picking up Porsche for a song, they decided to cast off their normal “nobody” booth babes for Heidi Klum to flog the lightly redesigned EOS convertible. This seems like an odd choice to me since the EOS has long been known as the hairdresser’s convertible, so bringing in a german model and fashionista isn’t really butching up the place. Still, the new EOS will continue to thrill the ladies with the same 2.0T engine now mated to a DSG gearbox. For those out there that can’t figure out how to park in normal perpendicular parking spots, the new EOS will do that for you. How’s that for butch?
EV startup skeptics that we are, we’ve been keeping a jaundiced eye on Coda ever since we realized the $45k Chinese EV“makes the Volt look good.” Along the way, the news has mostly been of the “lightly dusted with pathos” variety… right up until the firm lost its CEO just months before launching its car. Now the pathos is starting to stack up in deep drifts. Automotive News [sub] reports that the firm has delayed the launch until the second half of next year in order to “build buffer time into the schedule.”
According to the firm’s new interim CEO, the delay is not being caused by problems with its electric sedan, and that former CEO Kevin Czinger “remains an important part of this company.” So, why the delay, and why no specific launch date? This is not a good sign, especially because if Coda wanted a chance at survival it had to get into the market before the major OEMs. A year from now, Nissan and Chevy will be battling for EV customers, and Ford will just be launching its Focus EV. The window of opportunity for a marginal player to sell a $45k electrified Chinese sedan in any numbers will have passed.
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