Placing females on the hood of cars has always been a tried if tired tactic in car selling. Putting money on the hood usually sexes up sales faster than scantily-clad vixens. The Chinese car industry is in fast growth, and in puberty. So it goes for – women.

Carnewschina found a Volkswagen dealer in Daqing in China’s Heilongjiang Province who thought that his sales charts could use some excitement. He hired some girls to stand around the cars in bikinis. Apparently, this stratagem did not quite work out as planned. Further drastic savings were called for:

The bikinis had to go.

Hit the jump only if you are home alone, or if you can prove that you are studying trends in car retailing, and that it’s all in the name of science. You have been warned … (Read More…)

The chief reason for the recent decline of the fortunes of Japanese automakers was not, as posited by pop pundits, the recalls or the tsunami. It was something more insidious, something regularly overlooked by most outsiders and many insiders. It was a reduction in development spending – an eventually deadly bottom line therapy also popular by cash-starved American peers. Japanese automakers have realized the error of their ways and have returned to funding the finding of that insanely great next generation car. (Read More…)

When an American wants to attract attention to his car & dealer woes, the tech-savvy slighted customer sets up a [name_of_dealer]sucksrealbad.com, and protests from the privacy of his webserver. The traditional types take up position in front of said sales outlet with some placards.

In China, the preferred mode of protest is by farm animal. A Chinese man called bull on his car and dealer. (Read More…)

Sweden’s Dagens Indudstri, the financial paper most hated by the Saab faithful, has dug up another interesting twist in Saab’s concentric circles around the drain: There is one party that is checking daily whether Saab has finally gone belly-up: The consortium of real estate developers that a month ago bought 50.1 percent of Saab’s land, factories and improvements for around $40 million.

This was considered about 30 percent below market. Nevertheless, a lot of people doubted the sanity of the consortium, which is backed by a large Swedish insurance agency. After all, the tenant is Saab, and with its current references, the company would have a hard time renting an apartment in downtown Stockholm. Dagens Industri just found out why the consortium is quite happy with its distressed tenant: If Saab can’t pay the rent, the consortium gets the whole shebang for no extra money. (Read More…)

What car for the Chinese man who has everything? Easy answer: A golden car! Golden cars are all the rage in the Middle Kingdom, where ostentatiousness has entered the Rococo age: The man who lives in a mansion adorned with turrets, pillars and gold-plated putti of course needs to have the wheels that complement his eclectic tastes. The car industry is happy to oblige. Carnewschina has found this gaudy Siebener parked down by the street. Perfect in hot weather, saves a lot of energy over the usual black. You think that’s an isolated case? (Read More…)

GM spent $4.26 billion for advertising last year, globally. 67 percent, or $2.85 billion were spent in  the U.S.  A good chunk of this budget, around $3 billion, are up for review. Meaning: The agencies that handle it must come up with concepts and defend theirs against concepts of other agencies that want to handle the funds. Please note that this has nothing to do with creative ideas, or not in the true sense of it. We are talking media buying here, buying time on network, space in magazines, clicks on Google. It should be as interesting as deciding whether your accounting work will be done by Peat Marwick or by KPMG. (Loud howls of protest from the media agencies, who are as proud of the cleverness of their media plans as the CPA firms are pleased with their creative accounting.)

The adworld is abuzz about the move, $3 billion possibly changing to new handlers can shake up carefully cultivated relationships. The question everybody is asking: “Why?” (Read More…)

The famous Japanese monozukuri  (craftsmanship, sometimes “the process of continually making something better”) is going down the drain. It took the combined efforts of “a consortium of 57 small businesses in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture,” reports The Nikkei [sub] before they could  “unveil a prototype one-seater electric car that can travel 100km between charges.” (Read More…)

Forecasting the success of game-changing technologies is like predicting the weather. Despite a mediocre success rate, it is done every day. Ask me what the weather will be in 2017, and if I want to be absolutely right, I will say: “During the summer months, we expect sun with occasional rain, whereas in the winter months, some snow can be expected.” This prediction would protect my career in any company, but it won’t get me any press.

If I want press, I need to say: “In 2017, fire and brimstone will rain from the skies, which will cause a great conflagration, because all rain will have stopped a year earlier.” These predictions can be made with little risk. Six years down the road, who will remember the nonsense I said today? That thought crosses my mind as I read studies that predict the adoption of electric vehicles. Today, we have two of those. They couldn’t be more apart. We commissioned a third one. (Read More…)

Michelle Krebs and Lacey Plache of Edmunds.com, decorated heroes of the TTAC “rate the analysts” contest (to be repeated) are raining on the parade of good sales forceasts, definitely for August, possibly for the year. Edmunds thinks that August sales will be flat. Customers are hearing mixed signals, and being confused, they do nothing. Says Lacey Plache:

“Stronger buying conditions are telling consumers to go ahead and make their car purchases, but a weak economic landscape is telling them to wait until later this year, or even longer. This is the battle that will determine exactly how much the auto industry will grow this year.” (Read More…)

Now we know the truth behind the rebels routing Kadafi in Libya. “British, French, Qatari and other special forces working inside Libya?” Bollocks! It was the skilled deployment of fine Chinese weaponry that turned the tide. Chinese guns made the Colonel collect the last cadres of his female bodyguards and head for wherever people head to for a last get-together with their bodyguards before their bollocks are removed in a less than surgical manner. (I am getting sidetracked. Where were we?) Ah, yes, Chinese weaponry!

Tycho over at Carnewschina found the picture above in Huanqiu.com, a Chinese site dedicated to the military side of China, and, to provide proper balance, to barely dressed members of the fairer sex. If you are into uncamouflaged Chinese guns & girls, this site’s for you! (Someone is trying to undermine my morals, and my writing focus.) (Read More…)

Edmunds’ always dead-on Autoobserver brings us the shocking news that Americans don’t drive enough. That, or they use the wrong cars. Whatever it may be, Americans are about to lose the carefully cultivated title “world’s biggest gasoline oinkers.” Gasoline consumption hit rock bottom in July!

Says Edmunds:

“U.S. demand for gasoline last month was at its lowest for July in a decade as the slower-than-expected economic recovery appeared to cause many people to either cut back on driving or buy more fuel-efficient cars. U.S. refinery gasoline production in July dropped 2.3 percent from a year earlier, marking the first year-over-year drop for 2011, the American Petroleum Institute (API) said in a report released late last week.”

There are multiple reasons for people taking a pass on gas. Let’s investigate. (Read More…)

Apparently, this is Camry week. TTAC has already thrown two of its most feared and revered auto testers, Michael “Hard  Plastic Killer” Karesh and Alex “Yellow Fever” Dykes, into the battle – with similar, yet finely nuanced results. Yours truly has arrived in Tokyo, where he cools his heels (as much as a thermostat set […]

The new Mercedes B-Class has been extensively discussed here, it was shown at the Shanghai Auto Show, where it found itself upstaged by the requisite Chinese copy. Slowly, it is time to show the production model. Which will happen at the Frankfurt Auto Show. After the rest of the world has seen the B-Class, now […]

Old cars, euphemistically known as “end-of-life vehicles” or ELVs are turning into a menace. It’s because of the increased used of new materials, also known as plastics. Whereas the scrap of older cars was welcome fodder for the furnaces of steel and cast iron makers around the world, the plastic piles up on landfills, or is burned. Mazda says it has “become the world’s first automaker to successfully recycle scrapped bumpers from end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) into raw material for new vehicle bumpers.” (Read More…)

When I was still working for Volkswagen, I blatantly picked up the delegations from Wolfsburg in my Eddie Bauer Expedition when they arrived at JFK. The higher paygrades were already used to it. The lower paygrades inevitably asked: “Why don’t you drive a Touareg?” While bouncing down the Van Wyck, I inevitably shouted “Silence in the third row! The Touareg doesn’t even have a third row. If I had a Touareg, you’d be sitting in a taxi.”

Soon I’d run out of excuses: If Germany’s AUTO BILD and the DetN are correctly informed, then Volkswagen will get a big SUV – big enough for Americans, even for those with a smaller wallet.   (Read More…)