With full sales numbers reported for July, TTAC is proud to announce its first-ever auto analyst grades [analyst estimates via Bloomberg]. For now we’re simply grading SAAR projections, but we’ve included OEM projections where applicable, for your own comparison. For July, the top-rated analyst was Edmunds.com’s Jessica Caldwell, whose SAAR prediction was an uncanny .5% off the actual number. Congratulations to Jessica and the Edmunds team, as well as our other A-rated analysts, Rod Lache of Deutsche Bank and Peter Nesvold of Jefferies (who squeaked in with an A-). Hit the jump to see how we calculated our grades.
New car sales in Japan, excluding minivehicles, were down 27.6 percent on the year to 241,472 in July, while Japan slowly recovers from the effect of the March 11 tsunami, but continues to suffer from a contracting market. Data released today by the Japan Automobile Dealers Association shows that this is the 11th month straight down. Gory details after the jump … (Read More…)
With the luxury market defying sluggish economic conditions, Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche doesn’t want the upstarts at BMW and Audi to slip past it… which they are. Six months through 2011, the Mercedes brand found itself in third place among the German global luxury brands, at 610,531 units. A surging BMW captured 689,861 sales in the half, while Audi took second with 652,970. This, for Zetsche, is an unthinkable state of affairs. In a letter to his employees, excerpted by Automotive News Europe [sub], Zetsche makes it clear that leadership in the luxury space is a Daimler birthright.
Some of our competitors are now growing faster and more profitably than we are. Granted, those are just snapshots in time and should not be overestimated. After all, many of our best new products are yet to come… In the long run we can’t be content to be in a “solid second” or even “third” place: We are Daimler – we should be far ahead of the pack! And if that requires something that we don’t currently have, then we’ll identify and develop it.
Enjoy your summer and refill your tanks. Because in the second half of this year we’re going to continue to play some hard offense!
But does a sense of entitlement actually motivate workers?
Ian Callum, designer of the Aston-Martin DB7 (along with the new Jaguars and numerous other gorgeous things) is a really, genuinely nice guy. But even nice guys have their limits, and having seen his groundbreaking Aston design evolve with the morphological dynamism of a sturgeon over the last 17 years, Callum appears to have reached his. Bloomberg reports:
It’s still that same old basic design,” Ian McCallum, who designed the DB9 and is now design director at Tata Motors Ltd. (TTMT)’s Jaguar Land Rover unit, said in a July 27 interview. “Some will argue that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But you do get to a time when you have to move on.”
Sadly, there are a few factual distractions to deal with here before we dig further into Aston’s predicament. First of all, though a Scot, the man’s name is Callum, not McCallum. Also, it’s not clear how much of the DB9 was styled by Callum, and how much was finished by his successor, Heinrik Fisker. Clear? OK, back to Aston…
New car sales were up 9.9 percent in July in Germany, says the German Kraftfahrtbundesamt. As the picture above shows, sales are slightly above 2010 (red line) and below the Abwrackprämien-addled 2009. Normalcy ensues in Deutschland, which is mostly on vacation anyway. The summer months are not for car buying, they are for car driving. (Read More…)
Sales volume grew slowly in July, as economic uncertainty and supply interruptions continued to foil a full turnaround in US sales volume. On the other hand, TrueCar reports that the consumers that did buy cars spent record amounts on average, as transaction prices soared to their highest levels in history and incentives fell. According to our developing table, the Detroit automakers are coming through July ahead of their year-ago numbers, but the Japanese automakers (who are still releasing their numbers) are expected to take a bit of punishment as they struggle to recover from the industry-crippling tsunami. Hit the jump for a full table of July sales results (developing).
The Sea-to-Sky highway in British Columbia, Canada, carves a winding route from the gorgeous – and occasionally riotous – city of Vancouver to the world-class ski resort of Whistler. Its looping curves were rebuilt to make it a high-speed corridor for tourists and athletes during the last Winter Olympics, and as a result, it’s probably […]
Every month, Bloomberg publishes monthly auto sales estimates from the leading analysts… and as this month’s survey proves, they’re all over the place. With SAAR estimates running from 11.4m units to 12.1m units, and with Ford’s growth estimates ranging from 4.2% to 11%, it’s clear that we will have some winners and losers from the bunch. In short, the analyst community needs a little truth injection… which, of course, is where TTAC comes in. This month, and every month in the future, TTAC will be grading analysts on the accuracy of their forecasts. By comparing analyses from month to month, we hope to build a case for which analysts are the most consistently accurate. Industry analysts beware: TTAC has put you on notice!
Ever since the power went out in large parts of Japan after a massive Tsunami slammed into the country on March 11, the big question no longer is “will I be able to charge my EV at home.” It is: “Will I be able to power my house with my car?” This may seem alien to you, but a Tsunami has certain effects, and this is one of them. At a press conference in Yokohama, reporters asked Nissan’s CEO Carlos Ghosn: “When will it discharge?” Meaning the Leaf into the house. A few days later, Toyota showed a house that can be powered by a plug-in Prius should the lights go out. Now Nissan finally shows its great chargeback solution. (Read More…)
Autocar reports that the new “Baby Jag” roadster, will hit the European market by late 2012, cost £40,000 (about the same as a Boxster S) and “will blow the rest of the industry away.” According to the British buff book
The styling of the XE, Autocar understands, follows the company’s philosophy of “expressing lightness”. This is a new Jaguar styling principle that should result in the shape of future models “visually reflecting” the fact that they are made entirely of aluminium.
Unfortunately, because it shares its all-alu platform with the next-gen XK, it won’t be quite as light as a Boxster, with production weight estimated at 3,300 lbs. But, because this video only shows the “XE” (the name is still a matter of hot debate inside Jaguar) test mule, the most relevant detail is the drivetrain: a V6 of unrevealed displacement, in naturally-aspirated and supercharged forms, and hitched to an eight-speed automatic. The engine in this test video exhibits a nice, “emotional” raspy edge that is sure to satisfy in top-down driving, but the final clip of the video gives me the slushbox blues. Skip ahead to the 3:50 mark, when the mule accelerates from a stop, and it’s clear that (at least in mule form) this car shifts softly enough to sound almost like a CVT. Let’s hope they were just testing “touring” or “eco” mode or somesuch, because if you aren’t going to offer a manual transmission in a roadster, the slushbox needs to at least be able to bang some hard shifts when necessary.
Mazda will show its all-new Mazda CX-5 compact crossover SUV at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show, which is from September 13 through 25, 2011. According to Mazda’s press release, “the CX-5 is the first of a new generation of Mazda products that will adopt the full range of Mazda’s breakthrough SKYACTIV TECHNOLOGY and new design theme, ‘KODO – Soul of Motion’. Pictures after the jump … (Read More…)
Every morning, children who walk to school are familiar with the smiling, friendly faces and the outstretched arms of their local crossing guard who ensures they get safely to class each day during the school year.
But what do crossing guards do when school’s out for summer?
At least some of the friendly faced school crossing guards are spending their summer vacation writing parking tickets to Chicago drivers on behalf of the city.
It began as a pilot program last summer, and as a way to give crossing guards a way to continue to bring in a paycheck when school was finished in June, according to Crossing Guard Coordinator John Maciezjewski, a retired police officer. This year it has been rolled out city wide to give summer employment opportunities to the over 1100 crossing guards working for the city.
Toyota today announced financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2011. It was the first full quarter after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami which severely affected production and sales at home and abroad. The results reflect this. (Read More…)
Polk’s Tom Libby takes a penetrating look into the obvious and reveals that American luxury car buyers rarely actually buy their cars, reporting:
Industry-wide, leases comprise about a fifth of all new vehicle registrations, but within the luxury market, lease penetration is more than twice as high at 45%. Three premium makes: BMW, Infiniti and Mercedes-Benz, actually have national lease rates at or above 50%…
These extraordinarily high lease results lead to several conclusions. First, the price of the vehicle is not the be-all and end-all. Rather, the monthly lease payment is a crucial factor. The monthly payment is not completely linked to the price, as the OEM and dealer have several tools by which to manipulate the monthly payment; these include, among other things, artificially raising the forecasted residual amount and increasing/decreasing the up-front lease payment. Second, if your premium make is not in the leasing business, you need to get there right away. Lastly, your lease rates, residuals and drive-away costs need to be competitive.
While there’s a lesson about America’s ceaseless desire to live beyond its means in there somewhere, the real lesson here is this: with sales coming out tomorrow, be sure to remember that not all of them are actual sales. Also, this is the reason you never see those “Don’t Laugh, It’s Paid Off” stickers anymore…
In an extended interview with Fareed Zakaria this weekend, GM CEO Dan Akerson repudiated a lot of GM’s previous optimism about hydrogen fuel cell cars, saying
We’re looking at hydrogen fuel cells, which have no carbon emissions, zero. They’re very expensive now, but we’ve, just in the last two years, reduced the price of that technology by $100,000. The car is still too expensive and probably won’t be practical until the 2020-plus period, I don’t know. And then there’s the issue of infrastructure
The DetN points out that GM had previously said that it would have anywhere from 1,000 to “hundreds of thousands” of fuel cell cars on the road by 2010, and most recently said (in 2009) that the technology would be “commercialized” by 2015 and “cost-competitive” by 2020. So, if hydrogen is moving to the back burner, what’s moving up? Akerson revealed that
soon we’ll be introducing “bi-fuel” engines which can burn both compressed natural gas and liquid gasoline.
We’ve seen GM take early steps towards bringing a natural gas-powered car to the road, but this is the first sign from a top executive that a dual-fuel car is a certainty in GM’s near future. By talking down hugely expensive hydrogen cars and talking up cheap natural gas powerplants, Akerson sends a strong message that GM’s green car efforts are moving in a more pragmatic direction. Hit the jump for part two of the interview, in which Akerson talks gas tax and green cars. (Read More…)
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