China has a new star. It’s the police force of Qionglai, a small city near Chengdu, Sichuan. Qionglai’s finest perform some kind of a reverse gangsta rap.
Want more? Mei wen ti! No problem. (Read More…)
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Today, at 2:46 pm, Japan came to a stand-still, again. Trains and subways stopped. People did fold their hands, faced in the general direction of the northeastern coast of Tohoku, and said a silent prayer. Japan and the world marked the one year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that left whole towns razed, more than 19,000 people dead or missing, 344,000 people displaced, and a large area around the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi power plant off-limits for decades, if not permanently.
Writers often like to equate the power released by the quake to the nuclear bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Depending on who you read and believe, it was anywhere between 31,700 and 600 million Hiroshima bombs. Large parts of the coastal areas are dotted with huge, neatly stacked piles of rubble which nobody wants to take and nobody knows what to do with. The devastation was so big that it turned into an attraction on Google Earth. Considering the immense damage, it is amazing how quickly the country did rebound. On Friday, I visited what was presented to me as an emblem of the amazing turn-around, Toyota’s plant in Kanegasaki, Iwate Prefecture. Here, 1,700 employees are working overtime to build Toyota’s Aqua / Prius c, for which everybody is screaming. (Read More…)
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“All I need is a nice basic car. Something like, maybe, a Saturn or something.” This unassuming, if perhaps ungrammatical, combination of sentences has come to be a long-running joke in my family. You see, one of my relatives married a woman back in the Eighties and subsequently provided her with a string of relatively upscale whips ranging from an Infiniti J30 to a Siebener BMW. Every time it was time to go looking for a replacement, however, she would ardently protest to anyone who would listen that “All I need is a nice basic car. Something like, maybe, a Saturn or something.” My relative ignored her and kept shoveling the Audis, Bimmers, and Infinitis her way, and each time she would accept the new ride reluctantly, reminding us about her preference for “a basic car”.
Some fifteen years after their marriage, this woman told me at dinner, “You know what I did today?”
“No. What did you do?”
“I rode in a friend’s Saturn to lunch. You know, I’ve talked about how that’s all I really want.”
“And?”
“It was horrible! It smelled weird, the windows rolled up by hand, it was cramped inside, and it was really noisy, like something was wrong with it.”
“So, what’s your opinion now?”
“Well, I still want a basic car. But now I think I’d be happy with just a basic BMW or Lexus.” I thought this was well-said, because it allowed her to continue to champion the usual liberal virtues of “simplicity” and “consuming less” without actually being forced to drive anything worse than a 328i. As it so happens, her current car is just that – a “nice, basic” two-hundred-and-thirty-horsepower, leather-seated, alloy-wheeled Bimmer sedan.
While Opel, Fiat, and PSA blame the European malaise for their lack of luck, Mercedes, BMW, and now Volkswagen can’t get the grins off their faces. Volkswagen reports global group sales of 642,300 for February; this is up 5.1 percent from the 557,900 sold in February 2011. Global vehicle deliveries by the Volkswagen Group in January and February 2012 rose by 7.7 percent to 1.29 million units. According to Volkswagen, the world automotive market was up by roughly 6 percent in the first two months. This indicates that Volkswagen won worldwide market share.
The following tables show why Volkswagen has reason to be happy. (Read More…)
Western media widely reported (and still reports) that the Chinese government will only allow Chinese cars to be bought by its functionaries.
Not so. The rule exists in draft form only,and has been published to elicit public feedback.However, in a disturbing development, China Daily reports that “nearly 90 percent of respondents in a survey are in favor of China’s domestic independent-brand automobiles for governmental use.” It’s not that 90 percent said so. It’s the ominous fact that it is being published in a government-owned paper.
If the survey is correct, then Chinese citizens want to look down on the car choices of their rulers. The Chinese themselves are widely in favor of foreign cars. 70 percent of all cars bought in China are foreign branded. The appetite for foreign branded cars remains high,as the following tables show. (Read More…)
China’s February new car sales are in, and they are whatever you want them to be. They are up a lot if you look at February alone. They are down if you look at the first two months of the year. They are confused for those who don’t know where to look. (Read More…)
It was just a couple of months ago that I shot this blue ’82 Sapporo in a California junkyard… and now here’s another Sapporo in the same yard. (Read More…)
Sixty years ago, a film called “River of No Return” was filmed in Jasper National Park Alberta Canada. The two stars of the movie were Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum.
To state that they were huge Hollywood names at the time is obvious – what’s less obvious is how they transported Hollywood royalty to and from locations on the film. (Read More…)
Ford’s revised F-Series Super Duty was announced today, and aside from the giant chrome grille, the big news here is a revamped MyFord Touch system – now available with knobs and buttons in addition to the touch screen.
This is the Honda Civic GX, a vehicle that runs on propane and propane accessories compressed natural gas. Despite the Civic GX’s title as one of America’s “Greenest Vehicles“, the Civic GX is pricey, and CNG refueling stations are few and far between – apparently there are only 830 in the entire United States, with not all of them open to the public. Honda wants to change that – but it wants dealers to bear the costs, monetary and otherwise, of building new fueling outlets.
From the nice folks at Slashdot comes a story of police laziness that may end up resulting in the reversal of “hundreds, maybe thousands” of drunk-driving convictions over the past six years.
Volvo’s Pedestrian Airbag Technology isn’t as fun as the Jiffy Pop Airbag, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless. Pyrotechnic hoods that pop-up during an impact are nothing new, but where Volvo adds value is through the use of an airbag that pops up from a cavity at the base of the windshield.
Ford is launching a reality TV show dubbed *groan* Escape Routes, which will run for 6 weeks on NBC’s 8 P.M. Saturday night slot and on mun2 (a Hispanic network) at 11 P.M, starting on March 31st. Participants will ostensibly drive around in the 2013 Escape as overly dramatic music and poorly scripted lines spew forth. As if the concept weren’t nauseating enough, participants on the show will apparently interact with fans of the show online to “tap into the fabric of the local culture”.
Multiple sources are reporting that Chrysler’s recent (and voluntary) SEC filing revealed something not normally found in those rather boring financial documents: EXCITING TRUCK NEWS!
A little over 12 years ago I got married. It was a bargain basement wedding that overlooked a beautiful lake on one side, and my mother-in-law’s house on the other. At that time I was all of three months into the free market free-for-all that is the auto auction business.
No bid calling at that point. No buying of vehicles on the side. Not even some grandiose plan to turn my auction and automotive interests into an enduring career. I just went for auctioneering tryouts at the sales and, with enough recommendations from friends in the business, hoped for the best.
My first job was to be the ringman. The guy who says, “Yep!” while pointing to a professional car buyer at the auctions. For two to three hours I took my two degrees at Emory and put them towards their most relevant use at the sales… “Yep!!!”
My daily performances may not have been Hamlet on Broadway at that time. But it was a living and a surprisingly lucrative one that has now spanned nearly 2,000 auctions and over 100,000 vehicles.
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