Have you ever been made an offer you couldn’t refuse? You never know when it might happen, so a little practice can’t hurt. Here’s the scenario: thanks to one of my old friends from New Jersey who has an amazing collection of Louisville Sluggers, 200 thousand dollars has been allocated to TTAC’s writers. $20,000 each. You’re welcome.

There is one catch.

The writers at TTAC have to buy a new car. That’s right. One new car (no BOGO free deals for a leftover Aveo). It can be anything they like. Hyundai, Toyota, Chevy… Jaguar? Fat chance! These fellows can go a little over the $20k mark on the MSRP. But the real world price before tax, title, bullshit fees etc. has to be no more than $20k.

So what car will they get? Will they follow the bleating herd of Billy Joel fans and buy something more milquetoast than a Milan? Perhaps a beige Camcord with an off-creme interior? Or maybe a Jetta that’s been as thoroughly decontented as Christina Aguilera’s last album? Or will it be something a bit more in your face? Like a… well… let me get to that later. I have to go move some mink coats. Just remember, when you’re taking favors from guys in a certain line of work, every decision has consequences…
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When you get bad service from a dealer, you either suck it in. Or you start a NameOfDealerHereSucks.com. At worst, you picket the dealer.

What do people in China do? They call in a bunch of guys with sledgehammers. To smash a $750,000 Lamborghini. (Read More…)

Carly Simon was right: When it comes to automobiles, these are the good old days. Don’t know which car to buy? No problem. Simply throw a dart at the listing of mass-market new cars for sale in the United States, purchase that car, and you can be more or less assured that you will experience 100,000 miles — or more! — of low-hassle, low-cost operation. The consumer expects that every car on the market is reliable, reasonably comfortable, and extremely safe by historical standards, and those expectations are met by everyone from Kia to Rolls-Royce. It’s a great time to be a new-car buyer, but there’s never been a worse time to be an automotive “journalist”.

Fifty years ago, a chummy cadre of insiders with million-strong captive print audiences lined up at an invitation-only perpetual buffet of manufacturer-paid perks and privileges. Today there are hundreds of media outlets, major blogs, and video producers all fighting for an ever-declining number of eyeballs, press cars, and wheel time. The journos of the Nixon era faced a delicious choice: either recommend 50,000-mile-life-expectancy garbage to the American driver and reap the considerable financial rewards for doing so, or fill up the poison pen and textually molest a lineup of sitting ducks like the Pinto, Vega, and Renault Le Car — while still making that bank. Their successors have a tougher job: explain the ever-shrinking differences between a vast array of perfectly competent automobiles in a manner which will generate “unique clicks” and repeat readership without burning too many personal and professional bridges. Get it wrong, and you’re history.

Scott Burgess got it wrong, but his mistake wasn’t an excess of ethics.

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As the former “car czar,” who led the government’s restructuring of GM and Chrysler, Steve Rattner has a considerable interest in portraying his pet projects as having turned the corner. But in a recent CNBC appearance, Rattner acknowledges that the market is “spooked” by GM’s increased reliance on incentives and the “unexpected” departure of its Chief Financial Officer. Ford, meanwhile, simply gets rapped for not communicating a slightly lower Q4 profit than Wall Street expected. And though Rattner’s not the guy to press the point home, there’s a clear distinction to be made between a much-hyped stock aligning itself with expectations (while making a tidy $6b+ profit) and a company that’s losing key personnel while leaning on incentives to recover the volume lost on brand and dealer cuts. But Rattner’s got bigger worries than short-term financial performances, or incentives or personell changes… he sees another, equally familiar problem that’s fixing to give GM (and, to a lesser extent, Ford) the fits: rising gas prices.
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Once Japanese automakers have dug out from under the rubble, cleared the ports and start shipping again, they will face a possibly bigger problem: A killer yen that has accumulated strength in an absolutely abnormal fashion over the last few days. (Read More…)

Fourteen state senators want to do away with safety inspections for vehicles in the North Carolina. Led by state Senator Stan Bingham (R-Denton), the group introduced Senate Bill 123 last month in response to a 2008 legislative report suggesting the benefit of imposing the $165 million annual burden on motorists has yielded no measurable safety benefit.

Each year, the state’s 6.1 million vehicles must be taken to a private station for a $13.60 safety inspection. Vehicles registered in half of the state’s counties must also take a $30 emissions test. The state only keeps 85 cents out of the safety inspection fee, with the remainder kept by the inspector who also earns significant revenue by repairing whatever faults he discovers.

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Chrysler brought suit against Detroit company Moda. According to Chrysler’s complaint in U.S. District Court of Eastern Michigan,  Moda engages in “blatant misrepresentation of Chrysler’s IMPORTED FROM DETROIT™ tagline, introduced by Chrysler to tremendous public acclaim during Super Bowl XLV.”  Chrysler sues the company for “trademark infringement, false designation of origin, false descriptions, unfair competition, false and deceptive trade practices and unjust enrichment.” (Read More…)

The first time I saw Scott Burgess’s review of the Chrysler 200, I very nearly posted a screengrab of the headline to TTAC as a conversation-starter. Why? Because when a Detroit automaker re-launches a worked-over vehicle in a crucial segment and then hypes it with a Detroit-boosting Super Bowl ad, the local paper just doesn’t go and slam the car in question. In fact, it’s rare to ever see a negative review of a Detroit-made vehicle in either the Detroit News or its sister paper the Detroit Free Press. Ultimately I decided against pointing out the DetN’s slam, as one headline does not a story make… unless, of course, it does. Jalopnik.com reports that Burgess has resigned from the Detroit News, and that a number of his bon mots have been excised from the online version of his 200 review. Lines like “regrettably, the 200 is a dog,” as well as his conclusion that

It’s vastly improved, but that’s only because it was so horrendous before. Hopefully, this car is a placeholder until the real redesigned 200 arrives – eventually.

The only thing this 200 proves is that good enough is never going to be good enough.

The Detroit News hasn’t yet commented on the story, but Jalopnik’s investigation creates a pretty damning case against the paper [Ed: for all we knock ’em, we have to acknowledge El Jalop’s fine work here]. The DetN may have lost a huge amount of credibility by forcing out Burgess for daring to tell the truth, but this story will only help draw more awareness to the ugly reality that still defines too much of the automotive media. Painful incidents like this one will ultimately leave the automotive media more healthy for having forced writers to stand up for the truth.

There’s an interesting (if troubling) perception out there that there is no longer such thing as “bad cars.” Certainly compared to what was available just ten years ago, the market has improved its offerings, making most new cars consistently better than the vehicles they replaced. But the corollary to this rule, that each new car is always better than the one that it replaced, does not actually hold up to scrutiny, at least according to Consumer Reports.

In fact, in its most recent auto issue, CR gave a number of vehicles worse scores than their predecessors earned, indicating that progress is not a given in the world of cars. And no wonder: automakers aren’t simply trying to wow consumers, but must constantly balance increased performance, content and features with lower costs. The VW Jetta is a poster child for the kind of decontenting that we’re beginning to see creep into the market, as Volkswagen is emphasizing the Jetta’s price in its marketing materials. But are there other, less intentional examples of automotive “value inflation”? What car is/was the biggest “step down” from its predecessor?

For years Chrysler owned the minivan market. It helped that GM and Ford kept trying much different approaches, failing miserably each time. Then, for the 1999 model year, Honda introduced the second-generation Odyssey. Though Chrysler continues to sell nearly twice as many minivans as Honda, many of these are to fleets. Also, even at retail the […]

With automakers keeping the incentive pedal pinned to the floor as they entered the new year, a price war has been brewing in the US market for a while now. Hyundai USA CEO John Krafcik has called the trend “a step backward for the industry,” pointing out that nearly every automaker had struggled to regain pricing power coming out of nearly three years of industry-wide weakness. But with GM and Detroit leading the way with high (if “targeted”) incentives, matched by uncharacteristically high incentives from import-brand rivals like Honda and Toyota, it seemed that nothing could prevent a volume-pumping, but profit-sapping price war in the US. At least until Japan was hammered by earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear accidents. Now, with manufacturers and suppliers still struggling to understand the full impact of production shutdowns and reduced inventories, TrueCar has projected current price trends forward, and finds that supply interruptions could reduce supply to the point where prices actually start coming up again. Check out TrueCar’s spreadsheet on supply and pricing projections in XLS format here, or hit the jump for a few highlights.

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The Senate’s Congressional Oversight Panel, which has been charged with monitoring the TARP program, has released its final report [PDF] before it disbands next month. Given TARP’s importance in this country’s historical sweep, we’d recommend that everyone at least glance through the document. But, if nothing else, TTAC’s readers should at least check out the section on the Auto Bailout, which not only summarizes the government’s actions, but also points out problems that arose during the bailout as well as problems that could still emerge as a result of the bailout. The “Lessons Learned” portion of the Auto Bailout section is of special interest, and so we are republishing it below the fold. For all of the hot air and ink that’s been spilled over the bailout, the reality is that it was simultaneously a success and a failure. As a purely short-term, cost-no-object effort, it very clearly prevented what could have been a messy collapse in the auto sector. But because the true costs and long-term effects of the bailout aren’t yet known, it’s still impossible to say if that short-term rescue was worth the costs or will even prevent another industry meltdown in the future. (Read More…)

At the end of last year, the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (aka “Blender’s Credit) very nearly expired before congress passed a one-year, $6b extension to the subsidy. The near-collapse of the largest “renewable energy” subsidy on the federal books came as the backlash built against the EPA’s approval of E15 (15% ethanol) blends for certain vehicles, with a huge coalition of industries, environmentalists and budget hawks coalescing around the idea of ending government support for corn-based ethanol. That coalition lost some momentum as the VEETC was extended in order to drum up support for the controversial tax bill that was passed during December’s lame duck session. But now, SolveClimate [via Reuters] reports that the brewing deficit battles have put the Blender’s Credit back on the chopping block, as a new bill seeks to cut the wasteful, inefficient and unpopular (outside of farm states) subsidy.

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Reforma, a local newspaper Mexico’s Jalisco state, writes today (via Reuters) that Honda may idle 1,100 employees at its factory there. Ruben Resendiz, spokesman fro Honda Mexico told the paper that closed airports and ports are affecting inventories. This stoppage would affect half of Honda’s employees at the plant. (Read More…)

W.B. writes:

Sajeev,

My ’05 Ranger 4wd w/5spd manual (35K on the odometer) does something strange indeed when I get ready to drive after it’s been parked for several hours. With the parking brake off, I shift to first and lightly engage the clutch. The truck strains against some kind of resistance, as if there were something obstructing the tires or as if I were starting on an incline. Neither of these are ever the case. With a little more gas and a little more clutch engaged, the truck “breaks free” with a loud “clunk,” and then drives normally afterward.

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