Hyundai Motor Co. today released impressive results. Net 2010 profit increased 77.8 percent to 5.3 trillion won ($4.7 billion) on global sales of 3,612,487 units. That’s a 16.3 percent sales gain from a year earlier. Whoa, says the attentive observer of sales data, didn’t they make some 4.6 million last year? Where is the increase? The 4.6 million were Hyundai and Kia together.
Many journos will trip over that today. (Read More…)
After releasing global sales results of 8.418 million units a few days ago, Toyota today announced the all-important global production number. Toyota established a more comfortable lead before GM. A few days ago, unconfirmed numbers floating around the media made it look like GM had come within touching distance of Toyota.
All three Toyota Motor Corporation companies (i.e. Toyota, Daihatsu and Hino) together produced 8,557,351 cars in 2010. Now why is the production number more important than the sales number? (Read More…)
Yesterday, I changed my base of operations to Tokyo for a month to escape the Chinese New Year festivities (i.e. one month of WW III worthy fireworks, combined with closed shops and restaurants.) If I would have stuck it out a few days longer, I could have enjoyed a ride in a fuel cell vehicle. (Read More…)
Volkswagen workers in Wolfsburg are looking forward to a long weekend. No work on Monday, come back Tuesday. Are people not buying enough cars? Im Gegenteil. They are buying too many. Volkswagen is seriously running out of parts. (Read More…)
When Ed Niedermeyer reported about Volkswagen’s new sub One Liter (235 mpg) car, the XL1, currently on display in Qatar, he prognosticated that this “One Liter car represents a step closer to production.” A very close step, as it turns out. (Read More…)
Toyota “Lessons” TV Spot from electrocinema on Vimeo.
Edmunds’ has looked over its in-house shopping patter data, and has some bad news for the number one automaker in the US:
In December, 17.9 percent of car shoppers considered Toyota vehicles — 2.3 percentage points below levels seen in December 2009, before the 2.3 million-vehicle recall for potentially sticky accelerator pedals. Overall, Edmunds finds that 2010 consideration for Toyota vehicles was down about 3.8 percentage points year over year…
Evolving cross-shopping patterns on Edmunds.com also demonstrate the diminished power of Toyota’s brand. Consumers interested in traditional competitors like Nissan and Honda considered Toyota vehicles less often in 2010. Meanwhile, Suzuki shoppers – who qualify for higher interest rates, accept longer loan terms and make lower down payments, suggesting a lower economic status — increased their Toyota shopping considerably in the last year.
In recent months, though, some specific Toyota models are elbowing back in on traditional competitors. The rate of Edmunds visitors cross-shopping the Nissan Altima with the Toyota Camry, for example, has approached levels seen before the reports of unintended acceleration captivated the media and its audience last year.
The car-shopping site’s takeaway: Toyota isn’t just struggling against negative perceptions brought on by last year’s unintended acceleration recall… it needs new products. Which means Toyota’s plan to unveil 11 new or refreshed models through 2012 is coming just in the nick of time. Still, if those products don’t actually wow consumers rather than simply skating by on Toyota’s faded reputation, Toyota’s greatest strength, the trust and loyalty it enjoys from consumers, could be slip away. And given how disappointing the refreshed Corolla seems (at first blush… testing is still needed) in comparison to its hot-and-fresh competitors from Ford, Hyundai and Chevy, there’s a real risk that this could happen. Scandals come and scandals go… but resting on laurels is what really kills in this business.
After receiving an award from the Italian car magazine Quattroruote, Ralph Nader used the opportunity to tell the assembled crowd that
Now that Fiat has purchased Chrysler, it has the moral obligation to remedy the deadly fuel tank design in the Jeep Grand Cherokee before more innocent victims are burned today, not only in the United States, but also in Europe,
Nader’s beef according to Automotive News [sub]: the 1993-2004 JGC
“is a modern-day Pinto for soccer moms” because the fuel tank is behind the rear axle below the rear bumper… In addition, the 1993-98 Grand Cherokees are flawed because the filler hose goes through the frame rail and is pulled out of the fuel tank
NHTSA has been investigating the 3m or so Grand Cherokees built with this “design flaw” since August, based on evidence that this issue played a role in 22 “fiery crashes” and 14 deaths. Initial NHTSA reports claim the JGC has no disproportionate risk of fires, but Nader contests the claim, arguing that some 44 crashes involved the “design flaw” which he argues caused some 64 deaths. Given the many problems with NHTSA’s reporting system, it’s tough to tell who has the truth on their side in this conflict, but Chrysler insists that the investigation should end even though
it moved and shielded the fuel tank, starting with 2005 models
TTAC Commentator David Holzman writes:
Sajeev, among the many inconveniences of winter: the frequent need to scrape snow and ice off of the car windows. You should be glad to be down there in Texas where you don’t have to deal with pieces of solidified atmosphere that congeal on the windshield. Is there any device or method that takes the tsuris out of window clearing?
I know fanboyishness is frowned upon in this establishment, so let me make this brief: what Pagani has achieved over the nearly 20 years of its existence is one of the most inspiring stories in the car business. The number of people who decided to get into the supercar game since 1992 could fill books, and yet among them all, Pagani alone seems to have carved out a truly sustainable niche in the business. Built one at a time with creativity and flair, Pagani’s creations boast all the supercar must-haves like power, performance and presence, but add something that is increasingly absent from modern cars: character. It’s an overused phrase to be sure, but Pagani’s Zonda could not only go toe-to-toe with Ferrari and Lamborghini’s finest, they make some of the most exotic metal look and feel, well, a bit ordinary… cynical, even. In an age when even the most super of supercars have been commodified, Horacio Pagani’s love of materials, dedication to the complete car, and unconventional but classic tastes have vaulted his firm to the top of the supercar heap. His latest car, the Huayra, a 700HP carbon-fiber beast some seven years in the making, seems to be more than capable of continuing that legacy.
There’s a new show on cable called “Shameless”. Supposedly it has Emily Rossum in a topless kitchen sex scene. Actually, I’m going to go watch it right now, come to think of it.
…And we’re back. Hmm. That was shameless, alright, but you know what’s even more shameless? Writing a story that exposes you as a hack, a dupe, and what the Communists used to call a “useful idiot”. Yesterday’s opinion piece on Autoblog, entitled How Bob Lutz Made Four Journalists His Secret Weapons, is just such a story. Let’s dig in.
The accuracy of the speed cameras deployed by Forest Heights on Indian Head Highway (State Highway 210) has been questioned by local residents were claiming innocent drivers were being ticketed. Citation photos appear to show many cases that speed cameras in Forest Heights cited vehicles for speeds far in excess of the speeds the citation images indicate.
First, Forest Height’s speed cameras are a proprietary design by Optotraffic, a division of Sigma Space Corporation. These cameras are neither radar (like most cameras used in Montgomery County) nor are they exactly like traditional police LIDAR. Technical specifications for Optotraffic’s cameras can be viewed here.
To simplify it, Optotraffic’s cameras work by taking two laser sensors into each lane of traffic. The device “records the time when each sensor detected the object.” The speed is then calculated as “Measured Speed = Distance/Time.” If a vehicle is determined to be exceeding a predefined threshold speed, a short distance/period of time later the device snaps two photos a fraction of a second apart.
So why would someone think the devices are inaccurate? Well, because many people have gotten tickets from Forest Heights for speeds they know they were not traveling at. Some of them performed their own distance/time calculations from the citation images which produced an extremely different speed than what they were cited for.
It’s a nice idea: Each car is equipped with a wireless beacon, transmitting speed, direction and whatnot to other cars. For years, people have been dreaming about this. Now they could have found the killer app for the technology: By mashing up that information, collision courses could be plotted and lives could be saved. Exactly that was demonstrated yesterday to federal officials in Washington. (Read More…)
The recession must have come to a sudden end. Volkswagen can’t make enough Phaetons to meet demand. Last year, Volkswagen sold 7,000 of the facelifted Über-VW. This year, all indicators say “mehr.” You probably suspect who’s buying most of those Phaetons: (Read More…)
The privileged life of the Chinese government employee is coming to an end. The southern metropolis of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) will be using GPS to track usage of the city’s government vehicles, with the aim of preventing their unauthorized personal use. It’s not that the city is trying to curb unnecessary spending. (Read More…)
As the world’s first commercially-available (ish) plug-in hybrid, the BYD F3DM is one of the few modern cars that can legitimately claim a piece of automotive history. In full knowledge of this fact, a younger, more innocent version of myself once sent a number of emails to every possible BYD PR contact I could find, in hopes of securing an early review of the car that ushered in the plug-in automotive age. Needless to say, I never heard back from BYD… but I expected that. What I didn’t expect is that, years later, I still wouldn’t be able to find a real in-depth review of this mysterious yet potentially groundbreaking vehicle. Apparently BYD is either extremely cautious about letting writers experience its vehicles outside of convention hall laps and round-the-block drives… or the automotive media has a very poor sense of history. Or, as is most likely the case, both.
Either way, this strange state of affairs just got stranger: thanks to plugincars.com, we now have the first report of the F3DM’s performance on American roads… from an LA Public Housing Authority inspector. Yes, really.
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