First Renault and Nissan. Then VW buys a stake in Suzuki. Now Mitsubishi Motors  is in talks with PSA Peugeot-Citroen about a capital tie-up.

You’ve seen nothing yet, thinks Japan’s Nikkei. “The latest round of partnerships is widely seen as just the beginning of a major shakeup of the automaking industry,” says the paper that is usually well informed about these matters.

“Both Mitsubishi and Suzuki should take cues from Nissan Motor Co, which was rescued from the brink of bankruptcy in 1999 by French firm Renault SA.” says the Nikkei: Translation: Don’t just have small minority share and swap deals. Sell majority control to partners with deep pockets. And get ready for a serious battle for world market domination.
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Das Autohaus [sub] has it from India’s Economic Times that VW and Suzuki are planning a low-priced mini-car which could give Tata’s Nano some problems.
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Chinese Gasgoo is quoting Sweden’s Dagens Industri (DI) as saying that Geely will sign a contract later this week for the intellectual property rights of Ford’s Volvo Cars. Let’s hope everybody has their translations right.
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Who would have thought that they are moving that fast: VW will buy a 20 percent stake in Japan’s Suzuki for $2.5 billion. It’s announced and it is official, including a photo-op with a beaming Winterkorn next to a grinning Osamu Suzuki. Rumors of that, well, tie-up had been around for a while and had recently intensified, but the speed is nonetheless surprising. Except for those who know Piech. At the September IAA auto show, Piech had said that 12 brands are better than 10. Everybody who knew Piech knew that he was referring to MAN/Scania trucks on one end of the spectrum, and Suzuki small cars and even motor bikes at the other.
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Forget about the children starving down in China. Chinese are hungry for cars. And they are being fed.

Reports cited by China Daily and Gasgoo indicate a record November for China’s car sales, as predicted by TTAC.

Sales of passenger vehicles, including cars, multi-purpose vehicles (MPVs), sports-utility vehicles (SUVs) and minivans, more than doubled to 1.01 million last month, surging 103.7 percent year-on-year, and increased 9.5 percent from October, Rao Da, secretary-general of China Passenger Car Association, said according to Xinhua.  Total vehicle sales  in November 2009 reached more than 1.35 million units.
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Our crack team of Canadian coders has finally tracked down why many of you could not edit comments. It did not work on most browsers except Internet Explorer, and even then, it occasionally crapped out. Good news: Problem fixed.

If you have still problems with editing comments, please leave an (unedited) comment here.

It’s pretty much as clear as it can possibly be that China’s BAIC will cart off the used tooling of the 9-5 and 9-3 models, and possibly others to Beijing, and then that’s the end of Trollhättan and Saab, Reuters reports.

Other assets of the brand, including its headquarters will be liquidated, more than 3,000 Saab jobs in Sweden will go bye-bye. The Saab car brand will be retired.
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We’ve always wondered what would happen with Volvo’s current Chinese joint venture with ChangAn once someone like Geely buys Volvo. Our Best & Brightest openly did “wonder how this’ll effect Changan which already makes Volvo’s in their JV.” Well, now we know why ChangAn is so sanguine. “ Geely said today that it is interested in buying Volvo’s China operations, if Geely is successful in buying Volvo from Ford,  Gasgoo reports.
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GM’s new European Viceroy, Nick Reilly, surprised and astonished the participants of a Saturday conference call by saying that German aid, or no German aid to Opel, “it won’t make any difference to our restructuring plan, so it will not lead to more layoffs in Germany or less layoffs.”

Now what’s that all about? Wasn’t the line before “you either pay us, or you pay unemployment benefits, anyway, you’ll pay?”
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Today’s Nikkei [sub] agrees with the TTAC commentariat that Suzuki is overripe for a takeover. “Now that Suzuki has dissolved its joint venture assembly plant with General Motors Co. in Canada, the Japanese automaker, with its long presence in emerging markets and strength in subcompacts, appears an attractive partner for an alliance.”

No kidding. As it has been pointed out by TTAC’s Best & Brightest, Suzuki has what other makers need, and Suzuki needs what other makers have.
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GM (probably with a little prodding from their buddies and new Chinese overlords at SAIC) realizes where the real value at Opel is: At the Opel Engineering Center in Rüsselsheim.

After yesterday’s press conference in which he had announced the ties with a stronger SAIC in China and India, Reilly spoke to 9,000 employees at Opel’s Rüsselsheim headquarters, Reuters reports.

The good news: 548 engineering jobs at the engineering center, formerly slated to be eliminated, will stay. The bad news?
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Toyota had slammed hard on the brake when it came to capital expenditures. So hard that ToMoCo (and Sony) were rapped on the knuckles by the Japanese Ministry of Finance for hobbling Japan’s economy. Suddenly, Toyota starts pouring concrete and installing machinery again. Not because of newfound faith in the auto market in general. Two factors made them do it: The Yen has become so expensive that manufacturing in the USA is cheaper. And China is gobbling up cars faster than Toyota can make them.

According to the Nikkei [sub], a Toyota plant in the US and one in China will increase ToMoCo’s annual output capacity by 200,000 units before the Japanese 2010 fiscal ends on March 31, 2001. The construction will cost Toyota a little over $1b, depending on the vagaries of the greenback and its pegged follower, the Chinese Yuan. Here are the blueprints:
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What, GM actually has the money to BUY companies? Suzuki says they want sell the whole shebang in their 50:50 joint venture in Canada to their JV partner, General Motors, says the Nikkei [sub]. That would be the end of a more than 20-year marriage.
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China’s BAIC has received a $2.93 billion line of credit from the Bank of China, says Reuters.

The question of course is: What for?
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And so it happened. Xinhua (translation via Gasgoo) has put on the wire that General Mayhem will “transfer half of its Indian operations to SAIC Motor by setting up a 50-50 joint venture there with the Chinese partner.” As expected, “GM and SAIC have also reached an agreement to transfer 1 percent of GM’s stake in their 50-50 Shanghai car venture to SAIC.” With that little percent, SAIC has a controlling majority of the Chinese joint venture. What for?
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