Earlier this year, UAW President Bob King said that if the union didn’t organize foreign auto plants, “I don’t think there’s a long-term future for the UAW, I really don’t.” Now why would he say such silly things if chances for success on that front are slim to none? Currently an intricate plot unravels. The goal: To lower expectations in the rank & file for big breakthroughs at the Detroit bargaining sessions. After all, the UAW still holds a lot of stock in certain Detroit companies, and they don’t want to shoot themselves in both feet in that regard. But what does that have to do with unionizing the foreigners?
The Freep is peeling a complicated onion of arguments that brings us to tears. (Read More…)
Guess who just had a 37 percent increase in sales in the first six months of 2011? No, it was no small Chinese car company with an unpronounceable name. It was Porsche. And guess what is putting Porsche into overdrive? No, not the 911. No, not the Panamera. It the most un-Porsche Porsche, the Cayenne (also available as the Touareg from Volkswagen.) Sitting on order books that give the Cayenne delivery times as high as 12 months in some markets, Porsche will increase production of the Cayenne next year, says Automotive News Europe [sub]. (Read More…)
On Tuesday, I will go to the Fuji racetrack in the hills halfway between Tokyo and Nagoya. I will test drive a Toyota that is not available in Japan, nor is it in the U.S. It is however available and quite a success in India. Can you guess which one it is?
I was reminded of that this morning. Instead of being woken up with kisses and a cup of coffee, the house kicked me in the butt. Earthquake. (Read More…)
Did you notice? TTAC loads much faster. Most likely , you did not notice. An old axiom in the nerd industry is that performance gains mostly go unnoticed. Slowdowns on the other hand drive people nuts. Our gee-whiz kids in Toronto moved TTAC to something called “Cloudflare,” which really speeds up load times. The trouble is: Once in a while, the Cloudflare suffers burnout and TTAC becomes inaccessible.
So let’s say you don’t live in Washington or Oregon, and you don’t want to buy a GM vehicle, what do you do to save on car insurance? Easy: You say you drive it on your farm. Auto insurers offer farm-use discounts of up to 20 percent. And a lot of less-than-gentleman farmers harvest the savings. (Read More…)
We didn’t want to mention it when we wrote about GM’s buy a car, get free insurance deal. If we would have said it, it would have been the nasty B-word all over again. The rest of the media showed less compunction. “The worse you drive, the bigger the deal” headlined MSN Money. The deal can be staggering under the right or wrong circumstances, says MSN Money: (Read More…)
When we wrote about dealer lots overflowing with trucks, especially of the GM kind, there were a lot of nods, but also many flames. Some commenters said it can’t possibly be true. Mainly because the charts were the product of financial analyst algebra that was not readily transparent to the common high school graduate. Then, we received messages accusing us of sleeping, because other more esoteric blogs supposedly “called the GM bulls.. months ago” ago. (Or two days later.) Can’t please them all. However, today, Automotive News [sub] confirms that “Big pickup trucks are clogging many U.S. dealer lots, causing headaches for General Motors and other automakers, and raising concerns about price wars and lower profits later in the year.” (Read More…)
Suzuki is not buying into the „once in a millennium tsunami.” Suzuki has a lot of its production near the waterfront in Japan’s Tokai region. Scientists give the area between Toyko and Nagoya an 87 percent chance of getting hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of about 8 within the next 30 years. Suzuki’s answer: Let’s get out of here, fast. (Read More…)
Chinacartimes did protracted research, quite literally into the dark underbelly of the Chinese car culture. As it turns out, the Chinese have not only eclipsed America as the world’s largest car market. They also found out that the car can be used for other things than driving. The know-how developed by us eons ago on lover’s lane, and in drive-ins, has been unabashedly ripped off by the Chinese who are getting at it in their cars.
At GM, Joel Ewanick and Chris Perry need to repeat the miracles for which they became famous at Hyundai. So what do you do in that case? “Let’s just do the same thing again.”
If GM would do a repeat of the Hyundai Assurance Plan (lose your job, return your car), with a 10 year warranty thrown in, the journos would snicker, but the cars would fly off the lot. But at GM, this would be too gutsy. So what about the next best idea? That’s right: “Free insurance!” (Read More…)
Things are not going well between Volkswagen and Suzuki. In 2009, Volkswagen invested $2.5 billion for a 19.9 percent share in Suzuki. Suzuki sent $1.13 billion back and bought 2.5 percent of Volkswagen. Suzuki netted $1.37 billion, domo arigatou gozaimasu, but then nothing happened. End of last year, Ferdinand Piech became impatient. Volkswagen stockholders asked discomforting questions at the annual meeting. Now, it turned into a war of the words. Volkswagen uses old media. The octogenarian Osamu Suzuki drops a massive blog bomb on Wolfsburg. (Read More…)
Possibly Ed’s rant against overusage of “bias” has escaped the attention of some commenters. “Bias” is no longer a welcome word on TTAC. Usage can result in permanent banning. I am inclined to put the word “bias” on our bad word list. The only thing that keeps me from doing so is the fact that the banning robot is stupid and will also kill comments that contain, “bias-ply tires”, sundry “phobias”, “suburbias” etc. Don’t make me wipe out whole suburbias.
“The first half of the year was clearly better than we had expected,” said Audi’s sales chief Peter Schwarzenbauer. Audi delivered more than 652,950 cars worldwide in the first six months of the year, an increase of 17.7 percent on the same period in 2010, and a new record in the annals of Audi. (Read More…)
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