Rumors of Jaguar Land Rover establishing a production base via a joint venture in China have been around for nearly a year now. Talks with Chery surfaced last October, but were never heard of again. What’s keeping them? It becomes higher and higher time for JLR to start making cars in China. Deliveries of Jaguar increased 50 percent to 2,655 units last year while sales of Land Rover more than doubled to 23,459 units, reported TheTycho. Now, JLR may have found another bride. (Read More…)

Why does Warren Buffett have a headache? For quite a while, China’s BYD had been nothing but a miracle. Now, the Buffett-backed wunderkind turns outcast. To move their cars, BYD slashes prices down to the bone. (Read More…)

No interview with a leader of the automotive industry is complete without the requisite question about electric plans. Porsche CEO Matthias Müller engineered a trick answer: (Read More…)

Porsche’s Wolfsburg-raised Porsche CEO Matthias Müller knows how to fan the flames. He’s not afraid of playing China against the U.S.A. A month ago, he dropped a hint to German media that Porsche could start production in China, or if that doesn’t work out, somewhere in “North America”. Chinese press went monkeyexcrement over the possibility of a Made in China Porsche. When they were all hot and bothered, tease Müller told China’s First Financial Daily that “Porsche currently has no such plans.” How do they put it so succinctly in China? “Aiya!”

Don’t cry for Porsche, China, Müller is at it again. (Read More…)

Visitors of the Geneva International Motor Show will be able to lay their sweaty palms on the facelifted version of Volkswagen’s pocket-Touareg, the Tiguan. The Touareg’s smaller sibling has been a surprising success, with 572,000 units delivered worldwide so far.

Volkswagen prides itself of having “the only SUV in its class that can be ordered in two different versions: one for on-road use and one specially tuned for off-road driving.” (Read More…)

Yesterday night, I skyped with Ash Sutcliffe of Chinacartimes, and he kvetched that TTAC doesn’t give him enough “link love”. I pride myself in the knowledge of esoteric ways of showing affection, but link love? Would it have something to do with chains? Finally, it dawned on me that I make link love to Ash by topping his URL with TTAC’s high traffic words. And there is no better moment than this. Ash found the first real review of a real BYD plug in hybrid, performed by a real, card-carrying member of the press. My link love goes out to you for this, Ash! (Read More…)

If you only get excited by the sausage of a car and not by the sausage making of a car factory, hop on to the next article, because this will utterly bore you. Everybody gone? Alright, talking to myself again. We’ve always said, not really in jest, that two industries profit the most from just in time manufacturing: The real estate industry and the trucking industry. Honda wants some of that money. (Read More…)

There is one area where the feared Chinese export machine is way behind, and this is cars. According to data published by the China Association of Automobile manufacturers CAAM, 566,200 units were exported in 2010. At and in the same time, China imported 813,600 units. (Read More…)

The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers finally has returned from the Chinese New Year festivities and got around to counting the real official sales number for China in January 2011. China’s auto sales in January rose 13.81 percent to 1.894 million units. Passenger vehicles did not rise 12.6 percent to 965,238 units in January, as prematurely reported by the Associated Press. Passenger vehicle sales in China rose 16.17 percent to 1.529 million units last month. (Read More…)

Beijing’s draconian license plate limits have a stimulating effect on the creativity of Beijingers. To skirt the new rules, complex schemes are being devised. Beijing’s courts are turned into accessories of the fraud. According to China Daily, the scheme goes like this: (Read More…)

Last year, Toyota invested $50 million into Tesla. Tesla turned around and spent $42 million of the new money and bought the land and buildings of site 2 of NUMMI in Freemont, CA. As it turns out, the deal did not include the fixtures. Nothing another $17 million could not fix. (Read More…)

Today, I saw a new, and so far the finest specimen of Japan’s new export products: A car factory. Remember when the Nikkei wrote about a new Toyota factory in the Miyagi Prefecture with a U-shaped assembly line where the assembly time is cut down to a third? Not only did they get it wrong. They missed the best part of the story: Budget car factories, ready for export. Of course, that’s not how it was sold to the natives.

Ohira is a little village near Sendai. Sendai is a town two Shinkansen hours north of Tokyo. The area is famous for its beef tongue, not the hottest export item. Ohira was known for exactly nothing until Toyota decided in 2007 to relocate their factory from Sagamihara, in the outskirts of Tokyo, up into the woods of Ohira.

A year later, the whole region went into shock: (Read More…)

While we were focused on the U.S. market in 2010 and were happy that it awoke from the dead and went above 10 million, the world quietly left carmageddon behind itself and set a new record: 72 million light-vehicles were sold worldwide in 2010, a number never seen before, says J.D. Power. For this year, the Westlake Village research group expects another world record. However, most of this record was not and will not be produced where most of our readership lives. (Read More…)

Delphi’s salaried retirees lost their shirts after the Delphi bankruptcy and the GM bailout. Now they lost their main voice in congress. Rep. Christopher Lee resigned last week after Gawker showed a picture of a bare-chested congressman. (Read More…)

Volkswagen had unannounced visitors last week. German police raided eight offices in four German cities to secure evidence in a big corruption scandal, the Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports. According to the paper, managers of  Deutsche Telekom had attempted to land a several hundred million Euro contract from Volkswagen by extending the sponsorship contract for the Wolfsburg soccer club VFL Wolfsburg. (Read More…)