It was best of auto shows, it was the worst of auto shows. Actually, it was neither; it was simply a well-planned event which suffered from a near-deadly lack of new product introductions. Probably the most interesting thing I personally saw was the journosaurs hitting a cupcake stand like they were trying to save Private Ryan or something.
There were a few news items and observations which didn’t fit in with our model-by-model reporting method, however, starting with a curious surplus of supercars…
However Limited LF-A Production Was, It Apparently Wasn’t Limited enough. Wikipedia sez that, of the model’s planned 500-unit run, Lexus allocated 150 LF-As to the United States. There were four of them on display at Chicago, in four different colors, lined up very neatly on a raised platform. That’s almost three percent of total production; equivalent to putting seven or eight thousand Camrys in McCormick Place as a promotion tactic. Why? It has nothing to do with the media. Rather, it’s a Hail Mary pass to the Chicago one-percenters who may wander over to McCormick next week during their three-martini lunches. Lexus must be hoping those Masters Of The Universe are still drinking their dejeuner, because very few sober people will seriously contemplate buying a $375,000 Japanese car that isn’t really any quicker than an $82,000 Japanese car. Full disclosure: your humble author is actually a fan of the LF-A. If given such a vehicle as a “long-term tester”, I promise to annoy all of my Facebook friends by vomiting endless LF-A-related status updates. “Just went to McDonald’s — in the LF-A.” “Took the LF-A to the Lion’s Den.” “It’s easy to clean vomit from the passenger side carpet of the LF-A’s spacious and tasteful cabin.”
Cadillac Needs To Let The Ring Thing Go. Back in 2005, I had an STS Northstar AWD as a company car for a while. I liked the car’s relatively sporty stance and demeanor. It made a nice contrast to my Phaetons. How odd, to have a luxurious Volkswagen and a German-feeling Cadillac. Eight model years later, Cadillac is still beating the faux-Kraut drum at deafening volume. The ATS may well be faster than some random 3-Series around the ‘Ring. Nobody cares. This is the same kind of marketing myopia that led GM to think they could sell the Pontiac 6000STE based on skidpad numbers. I’ll tell you a car that for sure is not faster than the 3-Series around any closed course in Europe or America: the Lexus ES350. Odd that anybody buys it, huh? They must think it’s a luxury car.
Meet The New Elantra GT, Same As The Old Elantra GT. When the first five-door Elantra arrived in the United States, I remember thinking that putting red trim and spoilers on a car that was no faster than its sedan counterpart amounted to almost a Eurosport’s level of heresy. And now Hyundai’s doing it again. Put a motor in the car, guys. You have a couple of ’em from which to choose. The easy thing to do would be the Sonata’s 2.4. The fun thing to do would be to drop the Sonata Turbo engine in. Why not?
The Camcord mold is now officially broken. Remember the so-called Univeral Japanese Motorcycle, or UJM? Maybe not. It was a long time ago. The UJM was one of the visually identical early-Seventies Hondas, Suzukis, Yamahas, and Kawasakis that introduced an entire generation to motorcycling. I had a UJM myself — a ’74 Honda CB550, as a matter of fact. Well, it wasn’t that long ago that we seemed to be on the brink of the Universal Japanese-esque Midsizer. The Camry, Altima, and Accord all looked nearly identical. The Sonata looked just like the Accord. The friggin’ Impala got an face-and-ass-lift that aped the Accord of the day more closely than Chinese Smart copies aped the Smart. I still frown when I see that Impala: it’s a visual copy of an Accord that is about to be two generations old, forced onto the template of a platform that dates back to the 1988 Cutlass Supreme. That’s GM for you.
Back on subject. Look at the midsizers now. The CamCordTima may be the same, but have you seen an Optima lately? What about this new goofy-looking Malibu? Let’s not forget the Sonata, which is kind of a poor man’s CLS. Top of the pops is the new Ford Fusion DB7 Edition. None of these cars look like Accords. That’s good news for everyone, including Honda.
Volt’s Lisa Moment Arrives. Last year I suggested that the Volt had a lot in common with the Apple Lisa. Seeing plug-ins from other manufacturers reinforces my already strong inclination to believe that everything I’ve ever written has been completely correct. Time for GM to get the plug-in Cruze and Malibu on the streets. If they hurry, those units could play HHR to the Fusion Energi and Prius Plug-In PT Cruiser, which is to say the usual GM late-to-the-party timing redeemed by strong sales.
The Automakers Don’t See The Same Future I Do. I desperately want to believe that all the recent “the recession is over” editorializing I’m seeing across the national media represents something besides free campaign ads for the sitting President. I’d really like to think that things are getting better for the average American. My pragmatic side, and the evidence I see on the streets, tells me otherwise. Jobs are going to China and they aren’t coming back.
Ratan Tata bet his fortune on the idea of an affordable family car and he lost a lot of that fortune as a consequence, but in a country where used-car prices are out of control, average fleet age is at record highs, and it’s extremely common to see families going to work and school in vehicles with 150,000 miles or more, surely there is a pot of gold for the first manufacturer to come up with a genuine low-cost solution to American personal transportation. Something with the room of the Camry, the economy of the Prius, and the pricing of the Yaris. Or even cheaper than that. Leave the center airbags, Bluetooth integration, stitched leather dashboards, and 18″ steamrollers on the cutting-room floor. This country is poor. It’s getting worse. Let’s come up with safe, affordable cars. Look at it this way: it’s a considerably less-crowded segment than, say, $85,000 four-doors pretending to be coupes for the Viagra crowd.
And that’s it. TTAC auto show coverage will return for the New York event at the beginning of April!
So is Ford showing off the refreshed Flex at this show?
Yes, they had three of them there.
Baruth you wonderful SOB, go figure that it would start with Marshall Stacks
Pukka video. Seriously. ;-)
Cost isn’t the problem but access to new car loans.
Is the $10k Versa selling?.. it does have 4 door and will handle a family.
RE: Elantra GT – They really have at least 4 easy choices. The two you list, plus the 1.6 turbo coming to the Veloster and the new Genesis turbo engine. That one may be cheaper for them to produce versus the Sonata turbo since it is a more basic non DI setup. Purely my assumption. But any way you look at it 4 200hp + engines! Why not offer one in the GT and coupe!?
Bingo. Somehow they think different doors, (worse) front ends and rear ends solves all. Wrong. Motor, tranny, STEERING and SUSPENSION first. Gain the rest of the credibility, THEN move forward!
Your August Volt=Lisa editorial only rings more true after we’ve witnessed five more months of mediocre sales, no doubt hurt by the car’s high price, four seats, and the fallout from that little battery fire incident.
Chevy seems content to write off 2011 as a practice year, but alas: going by January 2012 sales, the Volt is on pace for…drumroll…7,236 sales, less than 2011’s 7,671. Not a good start!
I shudder to think how much Chevy’s (ineffective) marketing is costing per Volt sold. Chevy wanted a game changer, but I think if the Volt was going to change the game, it would have done so by now.
It may hurt, but the lesson needs to be learned, and Chevy needs more affordable conventional hybrids out there fighting off Toyota and Ford (and Hyundai!) “Eco” “e-Assist” trims are starting to smack of dawdling.
Between the Original, C & V ‘Yota is on track sell twice as many Prii PER MONTH as annual Volt sales.
This IS a game changer for GM. What car have they ever built before that sold in such tiny quantities as the Volt? Think about it – they probably lose more Impalas than that.
Jack that video is pure gold!!
I agree with your future statement.
But it just seems like OEMs are addicted to adding high profit margin crap that for the most part does not make the car safer, more comfortable or thrifty on gas and more importantly low maintenance costs.
For example, can you imagine the poor devil who has to pay for a replacement MyFordSync system after warranty expires?
I think the Versa, Soul, SX4, and maybe the Jetta all come close to your safe, affordable car idea.
And Magnetic Ride Control debuted on the Seville in 2002.
So the manual on the Titanium Focus is confirmed to be 6 speed? Cool…
Still not on their website though :(
I wouldn’t expect it until they start up the 2013 model year.
Statistically, cars are better made and more reliable than they have ever been, as a general group. They also have much greater residual values than they used to, meaning that is is much easier to justify repairs and general maintenance. These are trends that have been on a slow upward spiral for the last 30 years. Given these factors, why WOULDN’T fleet age continue to creep upwards? Many people are realizing that in most cases, you don’t NEED to trade in your car every five years if you want to avoid repairs and reliability issues.
You said it yourself, Jack: virtually any new car you can buy today will give you 100,000 miles of fairly comfortable, trouble-free motoring. I’ll be bold and double that estimate, given proper preventative maintenance. Increasing fleet age is going to be a continuous trend as long as product quality keeps increasing; it is not purely the product of economic hardship.
+1 Add to that the lack of compelling new features as compared to a 5 year old car and you’ve got a good reason to hang on to your old car.
As compared to your 5-year old car, your new car might have slicker cabin electronics (when they work), marginally better fuel economy and an extra gear or two in the autobox. I submit that none of these are compelling reasons to trade in your 5 year old car.
Certainly, if your economic station in life has improved during the last 5 years, you might be delighted to trade your old econobox for a new Euro-mobile or Euro-mobile wannabe from the Far East. However, judging from what’s on the floor at your show, the only people who fit that category are the top 1/2 percent who can now elevate themselves from pedestrian European production cars to limited-production true exotics that they are unlikely to meet on the road in Greewich, Conn., Atherton, CA or the Hamptons in the summer.
I think Porsche once said it best “the entry level Porsche is a USED Porsche”. Why would you want a cheap penalty box when you can buy a used nice car? Cars last FAR longer these days. They don’t really rust much anymore, even here in the North of the Northeast. And really, despite the pissing and moaning they are cheaper than ever adjusted for inflation. The current inflation in used car prices will even out once the effects of “carmageddon” work thier way through the fleet. And really, it is only the super-popular cars that are affected by that anyway. Plenty of decent cheap used cars to be found, if you can get past needing a Camry, Corolla, Civic, or Accord.
And as to the jobs going to China and not coming back, I disagree. We are already seeing the start of “in-sourcing”. As the developing world develops, they get more and more expensive. They can’t be “developing” forever. And companies are also learning that you quite often get what you pay for – China may be cheap, but they are not necessarily GOOD, nor are they necessarily EFFICIENT. And then there are the lessons of the Japanese Tsunami and Thai floods. Long supply lines can come back to bite you in the butt, HARD. And finally with the price of oil going nowhere but up, global transportation is no longer as cheap as it once was either.
Edit – just watched the video – priceless! I must say, Jack doesn’t sound anything like what I imagined – I figured he would sound like Barry White.
Kind of funny an automotive writer is saying jobs are leaving. But in the automotive world the Japanese and Germans are clearly going to be adding jobs in the US over the next 10 years.
I suspect that the rise in used car prices points in the direction of the country getting poorer, long term. The cycles may come and go, and overall America is going down. And I knew countries where my $800 Neon fetched $5500. I kid you not: that much.
However, Tata really went overboard. And there’s another problem: all the useless bling is actually pure profit for manufacturers. If they sell many stripper cars, they are going to go bankrupt despite and in the same time because of the sales success.
P.S. Just watched the video. Hilarious. Too bad I cannot indulge into watching those often. Oh, and solid rear axle car? Haters Gonna Hate.
The line of LF-As was pretty weird. The yellow one had two plastic cups of water right behind the rear wheels for some reason, I’m not sure what would be leaking out of the rear.
“Something with the room of the Camry, the economy of the Prius, and the pricing of the Yaris.”
Nissan has come pretty close with the Dacia Logan, I mean Versa.
Sure, it doesn’t have the fuel economy of a Prius, but the Prius’s fuel economy isn’t an economical feature, or an environmental feature, it is a luxury feature. It allows professionals to drive to work instead of taking the less expensive, much more fuel efficient train.
Lot’s of us don’t have trains. And even for many of us who do have trains (or buses), they are NOT cheaper. (When my commute was longer, gas would have to be $4.50+ to break even.)
Also, I’ve driven the Versa, and it’s not anything close to the room of a Camry.
The Volt = Lisa observation = pure gold.
“The friggin’ Impala got an face-and-ass-lift that aped the Accord of the day more closely than Chinese Smart copies aped the Smart. I still frown when I see that Impala: it’s a visual copy of an Accord that is about to be two generations old, forced onto the template of a platform that dates back to the 1988 Cutlass Supreme. That’s GM for you.”
In the parking lot at work there is a white Impala with heavily tinted windows and an Accord of that generation of which you speak which has similarly tinted windows. I am waiting for the day they park next to each other to snap a pic. Old Impala meet new Impala.
Jack, liked the video. Have to agree with the others on used cars. The three cars in my driveway have almost 400,000 miles between them. All are reliable. Barring a wreck or theft, if we buy a new car within couple of years, it will be because we want to–not because we have to.
Courtesy says that you should introduce your friend in the Mustang, whether longtime or new-found!
Jack: excellent video.
Am I the only one who yawns at GM’s endless SUV parade? TTAC is that I can’t tell them apart – seriously – even though I consider myself to be a car guy. They all seem like overblinged, overpriced behemoths to me.
If GM doesn’t move 10,000 Volts in Q1, I think the car is in trouble. That’s not such big news in itself, but the dreamland of scaling the Voltec platform into other products will die as well. If you can’t sell Volts as Chevys, you’ll never sell them as Cadillacs. GM’s historic failure with hybrids is matched only by Honda.
Yeah, I’m going to pass on that hideous Elantra GT and the forthcoming manual (I thought it was going to have a 5-speed?) Focus Titanium with its idiotic MyFordTouch. I’ll be emailing dealers for quotes on a new six speed VW GLI Autobahn later this weekend.
The ZL1 guys have been bragging about Magnaride – “It’s just like the Cadillac Deville.” I’m not sure that was intended to be hilarious, but I certainly got a laugh out of that.
How’d you get Mick Foley to host your video?
If he wanted to do it, I would step aside. We are the same height but he has me by fifty pounds.
Jack nice tie. Volt=Lisa true. But unlike Apple there is no Steve Jobs in GM’s future. As shareholders this is bad.
“the Chicago one-percenters who may wander over to McCormick next week during their three-martini lunches.”
Not really, McCormick Place is a two and a half mile walk from the Board of Trade.
And the BoT is at the southern end of the Loop. McCormick Place is further south, and more than a wander, actually, it is kind of hard to get to unless you are trying to get there.
I was under the impression* that the LFAs at the show were all customer cars. Already sold, and on loan from their respective owners for the display. I doubt Lexus would be dumb enough to point out that they had several cars from a limited production left over more than a year after the first ones were delivered.
*Read it on Autoblog
Assuming AB has it right, one still has to wonder why Lexus is hard-selling the car like that. Ferrari isn’t doing that with the 458 :)
Assuming AB is right, it’d be their new image they’re trying to sell, not the car. Creating a familial relationship with the new GS and LFA surely makes some sense, right?
That was quite humorous. I wasn’t sure how to take it at first. There was a good 20 seconds of “is he serious? He can’t be serious.”
No, he couldn’t be serious. Whew.
Was that VMcB?
Vodka has a voice cameo in the video (telling me I am standing in front of the wrong Denali) but the brunette in the Mustang is a senior person in Ford’s marketing apparatus. Unfortunately for me she’s married to a guy who is like a total winner in every respect.
She was working that gum pretty hard there – was her husband looking on?
Glad you liked the Elantra GT – except for its unexceptional powertrain, it looks like it will do quite well, possibly at the expense of the Veloster.
Your hair was better than hers, Jack. Yikes.
So Jack, with you being a guitarist are you a singer too? Would you be a tenor or a bass? Actually, you may be more interesting than the cars are. Oh, and maybe with your bank you should make an underwater video because if you ever saw the Switchfoot “Stars” video, a lot of hair like you have looks really neat underwater.
I am a tenor… at least. My mother was a coloratura and I noticed as a teenager I didn’t have all of Domingo’s low notes.
Any note that Robert Plant could hit at 25, I can hit at 40. :)
Now, hang on now, GM’s not blind to the success of the ES350, they just haven’t done the greatest job of making the LaCrosse the ES competitor they want it to be. Hell, even Lexus has the IS, so as not to put all their entry-level eggs in one squishy basket.
Actually I meant with your hair you could look nice in an underwater video. So get one of your old guitars and jump in the deep end of the Y, we want to see you UW. Or maybe you could do a video about getting out of a submerged car, you would look nice.