The new 2012 Mercedes-Benz SLK could give you reason to keep its trick roof up at all times, especially if you wrinkle your nose at diesel smell. Yes, the Daimler’s new roadster will be available with an oil burning option. (Read More…)

“Honda Reports First Profit Drop In Five Quarters”

Headline of a story about Honda’s October-December results, published in  The Nikkei [sub].

And then, there is: (Read More…)

Today, none of the 50,000 workers employed at Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg plant have to punch in at work. The factory is waiting for parts. You may think that is their good or tough luck.

Not so, says Dan Sharkey, a Detroit lawyer who counts many auto suppliers as his clients. The shortages affect us all. Parts shortages are “”beyond a trend; it’s an epidemic,” Sharkey told Automotive News [sub]. These shortages are stopping assembly lines around the world, just when demand is beginning to pick up.

Here is a current snapshot, taken by Automotive News: (Read More…)

Back in 2003, nearly a third of the vehicles I bought were either Volvos or Subarus. An auctioneer friend of mine described these cars as ‘wanna-be’s’. Since most of the buyers of these vehicles at his uncle’s car lot seemed to all fit the bill of an aspiring Yuppie. A lot of education. A lot of debt. Very little knowledge about cars beyond the Consumer Reports and monthly car mags. These buyers were a near nuisance in the Atlanta outskirts due to their pickiness and excessive question asking. For me though it was a different story.

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125 years ago yesterday, Carl Benz was granted the first patent for his Motorwagen, marking the birth of the automotive industry, as well as the company that would become Mercedes-Benz. Both have come a long way in the last century and a quarter, and the mind boggles at what might be in store for the next 125 years. Especially if they keep building the kinds of cars that outshine everything else on the road for decades after they’re built.

Well, the problem isn’t so much that compact cars aren’t youthful… it’s that the buyers of compact cars are surprisingly un-youthful. The C-Segment, compact cars in the class of Honda’s Civic, Toyota’s Corolla, Ford’s Focus and Chevy’s Cruze, are typically thought of as “Kid Cars,” or first-time automobile purchases for younger buyers. That stereotype may still be true, but if it is, the young buyers aren’t actually buying the cars. This week, Ford’s executive in charge of launching compact cars like the forthcoming 2012 Focus turned my perspective on the C-Segment upside down by telling me that Ford’s research showed that the average age of a compact car buyer was… get this… 57 years old. Given that TTAC has questioned the viability of the Buick brand for having an average buyer age in the low-to-mid 60s, it’s worth considering the reasons for the surprising age of C-segment buyers. And while we’re at it, let’s throw another stereotype on the fire, namely the old chestnut that compact cars are “basic transportation” for folks who can’t afford a car in the next class up. According to Ford’s data, 50 percent of C-Segment buyers come from households making $75,000 per year or more.

I wish TTAC had more of this kind of demographic data to share, so we could track changes in compact car-buying demography over time, but it seems fairly clear that the compact class is attracting older, more affluent buyers than it once did. So we want to know: how do you interpret these trends? Will older, richer buyers continue to downsize, or is this a short-term phenomenon driven by gas prices and economic recession? Meanwhile, what impact will this shifting demography have on compact cars themselves?

Again, China’s vaunted export machine received a black eye: China imported more cars in 2010 than it exported. Of the 18.27 million cars China produced in2010, a pittance of 2.98 percent left the country according to statistics released by China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) via China Autoweb. (Read More…)

Another indicator that the Chinese car market is not about to collapse, as projected (hoped?) by some: Daimler is guiding towards robust sales in January. “I hope that we will see double digit gains again in January,” Mercedes sales Chief Joachim Schmidt told Reuters. With the month nearly over, executives won’t “hope” what they don’t already know. And what does that have to do with China? (Read More…)

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy said in a speech to a joint session of Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” On 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the Moon. The Apollo 11 crew returned safely to Earth on 24 July. Three years later, the Moon had its last visitors. The Sea of  Tranquility lives up to its name.

In last week’s State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama’s set an even more audacious goal. (Read More…)

Venturing into part four of the Pictorial History of the  Brazilian Car, a five part series, brought to you by our boy in Brazil, Marcelo de Vasconcellos, we finally get into times where most of our readers were alive.  Part one one took you back to the beginnings, part two did let you revisit the turbulent 60s. Part three took your to Brazil’s malaise years, with nothing more than facelifts. This part takes you to …

The 90s (Read More…)

In my Nissan Frontier Capsule Review, I briefly mentioned the fact that I’d had a Saab 9-3 prior to said Frontier. Well, as it turned out, I ended up having the Saab after the Frontier, as well. Before I could take possession of said little turbocharged hatchback for the second time and send it back to the lease company where it belonged, however, I had to beg, threaten, and — depending on your definition of the word — perhaps steal.

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Porsche’s legal troubles aren’t over yet. A group of hedge funds appealed the dismissal of their $2 billion lawsuit against Porsche. The lawsuit had been thrown out by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer on December 31 for lack of jurisdiction. (Read More…)

During the government’s bailout of General Motors, the UAW agreed to a number of concessions, including management’s ability to use “Innovative Labor Practices” in order to build a fuel-efficient subcompact car in the US. As a result, the 1,600 workers at the firm’s Lake Orion plant had a choice: the 800 most senior workers would return at the $28 “tier one” wage, while another 500 workers would be able to return only if they accepted a 50% pay cut, pushing them into the union’s “second tier” of wages. Workers forced into the tier two, which typically applies only to new hires, were not allowed to transfer to other Michigan plants, and could neither vote on the agreement, nor strike because of it. After all, the bailout’s green-tinged sales pitch meant that building a subcompact in the US was a politically necessary move, even if it went against every UAW principle… which is why it’s awfully ironic that the safety valve for this deteriorating situation is a factory building trucks.
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I snapped this shot of an Austin Mini (technically a Morris 850) and a Buick Electra 225 parked side-by-side in an Alameda, California parking lot before I left the West Coast, and every time I look at it I wonder: would I rather have an early Mini or a Malaise Era Electra? I can’t decide! (Read More…)

Now that most of the large car companies have supplied their numbers, TTAC has compiled its annual table of the world’s largest automakers. In doing so, we have attempted to come as close as possible to the methodology used in the official OICA list, which will be published some time this summer. Here is the 2009 version as a reference. And here are TTAC’s Top Ten of 2010: (Read More…)