Konnichi wa: Hackenberg at the Tokyo Motor Show 2011, the same day Toyota announced its alliance with BMW
Uh-oh: Audi is running out of good ideas. Last year, Audi’s R&D chief Michael Dick (his real name) was sacked and replaced by Wolfgang Dürrheimer. Now Dürrheimer has to go. Hackenberg is dispatched to whip Audi in shape. (Read More…)
“Fewer drivers will take to the road during the Independence Day holiday in part due to a sluggish economy, but also because people will take less time off,” the AAA told Reuters.
Gas is around 10 cents a gallon higher than last year, but that’s not what’s keeping Americans off the highways. (Read More…)
For many years, U.S. automakers warned against the red menace of millions of cheap Chinese cars flooding a helpless American market. It never happened. What finally got the Chinese export machine going a little bit was GM, which started shipping Made-in-China Chevrolet Sails. The Sails convinced buyers around the world that those Chinese cars aren’t as bad as thought, and now China exports around 5 percent of its production. GM expects to export between 100,000 to 130,000 vehicles from China this year, and wants to more than double the number by 2015.
Ford chief Alan Mulally today joined the ranks of people calling for increased Chinese car exports. He’s ready to export Fords from China. (Read More…)
Yesterday, the Detroit News warned of a sneak attack by the Japanese on the U.S. auto market:
“Nissan Motor Co.’s take-no-prisoners approach to gaining U.S. market share has the auto industry worried that a price war is brewing that will erode the profit progress made since the recession ravaged auto sales.”
According to the Detroit paper, Nissan’s recent price reductions are
“the first sign of a Japanese automaker taking advantage of the weakening yen that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pushed down to improve Japan’s economy. That currency’s 15 percent swoon versus the dollar since Oct. 31 gives Japanese automakers an extra $1,500 per car they can use to cut prices or offer additional features while keeping prices even.”
It’s only a sign if you are both blind and fact-resistant.
The first CMF-based cars will be produced in a new section of Nissan’s plant in Chennai, India
As you know, TTAC has been following the modularization trend in the industry with great interest. At TTAC, you received an early heads-up on Volkswagen’s MQB kit architecture four years ago, and we followed it ever since. TTAC was one of the first to tell you that Toyota is working on its own kit architecture, called “Toyota New Global Architecture,” TNGA for short. More than a year ago, we told you about Nissan’s Common Module Family (CMF). Now, everybody is talking about kits and modules. Let’s talk a little more. (Read More…)
China’s car restrictions are spreading to the provinces. I always thought Beijing is one of China’s most polluted cities, but no, says the Wall Street Journal, Shijiazhuang is. And it is putting a stop to willy-nilly car buying. (Read More…)
We can’t help it that there is so much crummy news about GM, but here is something decidedly positive: GM “has no plans to make additional investments in its French partner PSA Peugeot Citroen SA which is subject to the depressed European automobile market,” Dow Jones Newswire says via NASDAQ. The wire heard it from Dan Akerson himself, so it must be true. (Read More…)
After a court in Braunschweig, Germany, dismissed two investor lawsuits against Porsche SE, it didn’t take the third one either. Instead, it delegated a lawsuit that seeks $2.7 billion in damages to a Hanover-based court that specializes in cartel matters, Reuters says. Finally, a decision after a hedge fund’s heart. (Read More…)
When GM announced last week that it wants to increase Cadillac’s share of the global luxury market from 8.5 percent now to 9 percent by 2016, we opined that from “looking at the plan, GM appears to be betting big on the success of its new Chinese assembly plant.” It turns out that Cadillac is betting big on China. Cadillac “aims to quadruple its share of China’s luxury auto market to 10 percent by 2020,” Reuters reports today.
By 2020, GM is “targeting about 250,000 luxury car sales in China,” says Reuters. It will be rough.
Toyota’s main corporate website in Japan has been hacked. According to a Toyota spokesman in Tokyo, Toyota’s main corporate website at www.toyota.co.jp was penetrated by unknown attackers. Data on the site was changed, the hack then led users to a fraudulent website, where they may have caught malware. According to a Toyota statement, the malware should be detected by modern malware checkers. (Read More…)
The sagging EU economy led to the worst car sales since 20 years (cause and effect could also be the other way round.) With so much riding on car sales, France’s La Lettre Auto K7 found a way to predict them with greater certainty: They simply ask car dealers how many orders they received. Most volume brands in Europe are built-to-order, and even in the worst economic climate, that takes a minimum of 4 weeks until the car is ready to be registered. That’s when usual statistics recognize the sale.
Reuters has received an advance copy of the new prediction. (Read More…)
Senior members of the German government are leaning heavily on EU member states, warning “that German automakers could scale back or scrap production plans in their countries unless they support weakened carbon emissions rules,” Reuters writes. Cabinet members are said to focus their strong-arming on EU countries that recently have been bailed-out, mostly with German money. “They have tried everything at the highest level to pressure member states, in particular countries in the bailout club, to support their proposals,” a diplomat told Reuters. The EU Parliament is set to finalize rules that set a 95g CO2 / km limit by 2020.
The fight however seems not so much a quest for cleaner air than an underhanded fight for more breathing room for the auto industries of some member states. (Read More…)
Howls of protests ensued when GM stopped disclosing monthly production numbers, touching off, says Automotive News [sub], “concern among industry analysts and economists, as well as suppliers that rely on the data for their production plans.“ The industry paper explains what is wrong with this move: (Read More…)
Hopes of a bottoming of the European have been frustrated, and the small April uptick turned out as a flash in the pan.
We warned in April not to read too much into car data, caused by a curious confluence of calendars. We predicted two weeks ago that the EU market will continue on its downward trajectory. And so it does. (Read More…)
Some folks still desperately stick to the fairy tale that the Japanese car market is closed. The same people became excited when European carmakers complained about different Japanese technical regulations – something that was sold as “proof” for Japan walling up its market against foreign imports. The same people claim the U.S. market is open wider than the happy hooker. Not if you ask European carmakers again. Said the European carmaker association ACEA: (Read More…)
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