Today must be International Backpedaling Day. Volkswagen said “Never mind beat Toyota by 2018.”  Obama says: “Never mind a million EVs by 2015.” (Read More…)

In 2007, when Martin Winterkorn took over as CEO of Volkswagen, he said that Volkswagen wants to be better than Toyota, not just in units, but in profitability, innovation, customer satisfaction, everything. This morphed into the “Strategie 2018”, which called for world domination no later than what the name says. Today, Volkswagen changed its mind. Declaring an early victory, it wants to move on. (Read More…)

TTAC’s Managing Editor Derek Kreindler shocked me with the news that he will undergo a life-threatening operation on Monday: His tonsils will be removed.  Should his doctor not know what he is doing, now he does.

Derek had even more shocking news for me: He will be out all week, nursing his removed tonsils with the vanilla ice cream they had promised me when my tonsils came out at age five. They never gave me the ice cream, but leaving me alone at the helm of TTAC, Derek gives me a big problem.  You, Future Writers, can help:

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Not to anyone’s huge surprise, the Opel Supervisory Board today confirmed  former Volkswagen exec Karl-Thomas Neumann as CEO of Opel. To make the job a little more interesting, “General Motors appointed Dr. Neumann president of GM Europe and GM vice president,” as a GM communique says. It continues that Neumann “will become a member of GM’s Executive Committee and is expected to play a key role in the global leadership of GM.” (Read More…)

Uh-oh: The price of doing car business in Germany is heading up, increasing pressure especially on Opel. “Germany’s IG Metall union may push a pay claim between 5 and 6.5 percent for about 100,000 workers at VW’s six western German factories” Bernd Osterloh, head of VW’s works council told  Reuters today. What does this have to do with Opel, you say? (Read More…)

Now about those Benz-BAIC rumors: While Beijing is going gaga, Reuters has been suspiciously quiet about an upcoming deal between Daimler and its Chinese partner BAIC. Reuters, which has good ears and feet on the ground in China, had reported two weeks ago that something might be happening. Today, Reuters breaks its silence and says: (Read More…)

Honda made cautionary noises when announcing its quarterly numbers today, taking its annual profit forecast for the year down a notch to 370 billion yen ($4.1 billion). Three months ago, Honda already had cut its profit forecast for the fiscal year to March to 375 billion yen ($4.7 billion) from its earlier estimate of 470 billion yen ($5.9 billion). $1.8 billion evaporated on the forecast, mostly due to continuing sales troubles in China. (Read More…)

They are a familiar sight – and sound – at Nissan factories and those of other OEMs around the world: Little machines that truck around the factory floor while belting out “Mary had a little lamb,” or other distinguished ditties. Now, they star in their own YouTube video. (Read More…)

You noticed that I needed to catch my breath a bit from TTAC’s Future Writers Week.  The results still have me breathless. At the start, I thought with seven a day, I probably have enough until Friday. Was I ever wrong. (Read More…)

Usually, we are not big on COTY’s, but this one is too good to pass up. According to lore, which is sometimes parroted in the comments at TTAC, there is mutual hate between Koreans and Japanese. This did not stop Korean journalists from crowning a Japanese car as Korea’s Car of the year: The Toyota Camry.  This was so momentous that Toyota Korea president Hisao Nakabayashi broke into tears when the award was presented at a Seoul hotel. (Read More…)

With only a 1.9 percent of lost sales in the black hole called Europe, Volkswagen remains relatively unaffected by the European contagion, especially compared to PSA (- 12.9 percent), Renault (-19.1 percent), Opel (- 15.8 percent), Ford (- 13.2 percent) and Fiat (- 16.1 percent). But Volkswagen can’t walk on water either. Volkswagen is throttling down the production of its bread & butter car, the Passat in reaction to lackluster demand. (Read More…)

How do you beat the Dow? Occasionally, by reading TTAC. Yesterday, we wrote about Beijing rumors that Daimler and China’s BAIC are planning a big tie-up.

While we at TTAC are busy looking for the appropriate tie-up pictures, in case the rumor should prove true, the Dow Jones Newswire reports today: (Read More…)

Germany’s metal worker union IG Metall proposed a new plan yesterday to solve the overcapacity at Opel  without undue grief on its members:  The union will agree to the closure of Opel’s Bochum plant, if Opel guarantees that no hobs will be lost until 2018. Reuters takes that as a tacit warming up to the inevitable, while demanding the seemingly impossible. (Read More…)

America, land of wide open roads and big cars, listen up: On the sidelines of Nissan showing its new day care center at its Yokohama headquarters to reporters, Nissan’s COO Toshiyuki Shiga made a comment that should resonate well with American customers: (Read More…)

Nissan-Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn said today that he does not expect any sales growth in Europe over the next three to four years. He is not giving up on growth, and said that most will come from higher demand in the United States and China, Reuters reports. (Read More…)