Here is today’s other baffling science story: In its quest to save weight, Volkswagen is ripping aluminum out of plans and bills-of–material, to replace it – with steel. Not good old steel. They replace it with much better new steel. According to Reuters, “Volkswagen AG is using new high-strength steel to make cars lighter and comply with strict emissions rules, confounding forecasts that aluminum would be the metal of choice for reducing weight.” (Read More…)

Reuters has a highly interesting oil and gasoline story. If you are one of the “peak oil” types
, you may not want to hear it. As a matter of fact, it could shake your belief system so much that you scream “BIASSSSSSSS.” As a service to all our readers, we give you a chance to stop before it gets ugly.
(Read More…)

The Wednesday installment of TTAC’s Future Writers Week, where YOU decide who will write for you, ended better than the round the day before. This time, you voted for three serviceable writers, and they are:

(Read More…)

Just married: Toyoda, Reithofer

Ever since Toyota and BMW started their trial marriage a year ago while sharing secrets and the occasional good time, things went very well for the Japanese/Bavarian couple. Japanese and Bavarians (and I can say that from years of experience) love to have fun, but also are stickler for form. In summer, the happy couple was formally engaged via a Memorandum of Understanding. In the rural parts of old style Bavaria and old style Japan, formal marriage often did not commence until there was proof that the arrangement would indeed be fruitful. With successful fertilization having been achieved, today, papers were signed for a formal and official alliance between Toyota and BMW. (Read More…)

From the press conference:

Toyota and BMW to collaborate on

– Joint sports car (joint technology, separate design)
– Lightweight technology (carbon fiber, also for sports car)
– Lithium air battery (air, not ion )
– Fuel cell

Electric power train DROPPED from the list.

More to come …

GM’s North American president, Mark Reuss, was in the running as CEO in 2010, but was passed-over for an alleged “lack of seasoning,” says Reuters after reading an upcoming book by GM’s former CEO, Ed Whitacre. Instead of Reuss, who had shown that he knows what he is doing, a completely unseasoned Dan Akerson was put at the helm of GM.

According to the book, Whitacre recommended Reuss as his replacement when Whitacre stepped down after the bailout. Whitacre writes:
(Read More…)

Will meet again: Fröhlich and Uchiyamada

Rumors are floating around in Tokyo that Toyota and BMW are about to enter an agreement where Toyota will provide its fuel cell technology to the Bavarian maker. The Nikkei [sub] says BMW plans to build a hydrogen prototype by 2015, and wants to have a hydrogen car ready for market by 2020. Other carmakers,  Toyota included, plan a limited market release in the “hydrogen year” 2015, with hopes for volume production by 2020. (Read More…)

The Tuesday round of TTAC’s Future Writers Week ends with no new writers selected. That round definitely did not trigger mass excitement among our judges. Some even wanted to be able to assign demerits. Contestants 13 and 14 were the only halfway real entries in what otherwise was email snippets and proposals nobody wanted. Getting the most votes (from a definitely apathetic panel of judges) while running virtually unopposed does not constitute a win. (Read More…)

Separated at birth

We are in receipt of complaints that question our assertion that former Volkswagen executive and future Opel CEO Karl-Thomas Neumann “looks like an ostrich.”

Recently released documents show that he indeed does.

The winners are Michael Trainor, George William Herbert, and Grant Tillery. TTAC congratulates thee. You shall drop the masks of your screen names, and step out into the harsh lights of the public, and the etching-strength vitriol of TTAC’s feared commentariat.

Previously known as Contestants 4, 7, and 1, the three garnered the lion’s share of the votes in the Monday round of TTAC’s Future Writers Week, where, in true interactive fashion, you decide who will write for you in the future, and whom you will criticize for the biased and one-sided reporting, especially on a slow news-day. It is in your hands, and it will be so for the rest of the week. Remember: Today is another day of the battle of the writers, and another day where you decide the outcome. (Read More…)

Go get them, tiger!

So far, Steve Girsky, dispatched on a mission impossible to Deutschland to clean up Opel, has been dancing like a butterfly, no stinging involved. Apart from targeted leaks, and an announcement to stop making cars in Opel’s Bochum plant after 2016, which really did not surprise anyone, there were no big dispatches about the heroics of Steve the hatchet man, who was sent to the Old Country to stick it to the socialist metalworker Nazis. Today, and most likely after increasingly impatient prodding from Detroit, Steve took his gloves off, and a swing at some 20,000 unionized workers in Germany.

(Read More…)

Somewhere above the 70th parallel

January is upon us, and with it the seasonal rise in traffic at big car sites such as TTAC. Over the past days, the load on our servers was unseasonably and unreasonably high. My unconfirmed hunch is that it is all the future authors checking their standings. We’ll never know. To address the problem, and hopefully to increase your class-leading browsing experience, the TTAC Geek Squad, billeted in an abandoned NORAD bunker in the darker reaches of Canada, decided to move TTAC to another server. (Read More…)

Die, sucker!

Automortal Sins will be an infrequent series about the true sins in the auto business. It won’t be the sins which some bloggers regard huge. We won’t blame lapses in styling, branding, we won’t lambast OEMs for abandoning sports cars in favor of appliances. Building the wrong car once in a while is a minor iniquity compared to the huge, most egregious, and definitely mortal sins committed by automakers every day, without the smallest amount of remorse. Here is the first one:
(Read More…)

GM’s troubled European daughter Opel finally will get a more permanent CEO.  As rumored since last year, it is the former Volkswagen manager Karl-Thomas Neumann.  German Automobilwoche [sub] expects Neumann to be confirmed by Opel’s supervisory board on January 31. (Read More…)

Takeshi Uchiyamada, not really meaning it

Toyota “appears set to choose Vice Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada as its next chairman,” The Nikkei [sub] writes today. Uchiyamada used to be Toyota’s R&D Chief, and is celebrated as the “father of the Prius.”  He was made Vice Chairman last year. If confirmed, he would replace the 75 year old Fujio Cho.  A Chairman at Toyota has more of an oversight role. The executive power rests at President and CEO Akio Toyoda. (Read More…)