Four years after buying 10 percent of Porsche, the Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund Qatar Holding sold its share back to Porsche’s family shareholders, Reuters says.
Qatar kept its 17 percent stake in Volkswagen. Volkswagen owns all of Porsche’s car business.
TTAC is owned by Verticalscope, a company that quietly owns hundreds of car sites. This allows for an interesting division of labor. Colum Wood of Autoguide can drive “13 Porsches in 8 hours,” while yours truly has time to visit the Tokyo Toy Show. At work, Mr. Wood “wound up hitting 0-60 mph in three […]
Fisker is at its last gasp. After burning through $1.4 billion, “the company is out of cash,” writes Reuters, “for months, key investors have been footing the car maker’s day-to-day expenses to keep it alive in diminished form.” Reuters has an in-depth report on what went wrong at Fisker. Reuters also has the one sentence version:
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(Note: This story is not for the TL;NR crowd. If you need it in one short sentence: If your car company isn’t working on a kit architecture, kiss them good-bye.)
Call it coincidence, but immediately after TTAC flogged GM for having missed the kit architecture train, and for being chained to the antique platform model well into the next decade and possibly beyond, GM launched operation pushback. It could not be tolerated that the supposedly “New GM” was painted as a company with out-of-touch technology, so Selim Bingol rallied his troops.
The first skirmishes were fought by GM partisans dropped behind the lines of the story. Their comments seemingly were taken from a common sheet of talking points:
(This story intentionally appears on a weekend. This type of partisan usually works 9-5.)
Free trade agreements are great, as long as the trade is really free, and as long as people stick to the agreements. In Korea, foreign automakers and distributors say Korean lawmakers and government agencies try to keep them out. There is talk of “import bashing,” says Reuters.
“Korea is a highly protected market. Despite recent agreements to open up its market, the government is not helping … it’s actually doing its best to keep the barriers in place,” Reuters heard from “a senior global automaker executive.” (Read More…)
Brussels set the German government an ultimatum: Force automakers to use the R1234yf, or we’ll see you in court. Germany has 10 weeks to answer, writes Der Spiegel, before the EU will file charges. (Read More…)
In 1973, I had a little hand in launching the Volkswagen Golf. It hit the market in 1974. Today, it hit a new record. I wish I would have received a buck for every Golf sold. I would have $30 million by now. Today, the world’s 30 millionth Golf rolled past “Zählpunkt 8” and off the assembly line in Wolfsburg.
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Everybody was betting big on electric cars in China. Everybody thought China will be the world’s biggest market for EVs. It was a bluff. At the Shanghai Auto Show in April, the smart money suddenly was on hybrids. Insiders expect that the Chinese government will extend bigger subsidies to buyers of hybrid cars, after the big electric car revolution in China turned out to be a bust. This is good for Japanese carmakers – for some at least. (Read More…)
With all the troubles in Europe, one would expect Volkswagen to hurt, but the Wolfsburg company is doing just fine, thank you. For the first five months, Volkswagen Group sales are up 5.9 percent to 3.87 million units. In May, global deliveries rose 6.9 percent to 816,500.
In China, Volkswagen could edge out perennial numbers leader GM. (Read More…)
The UK, infamous for having lost most of its former automaking glory, and supplier of the short-lived “American Leyland” moniker for GM (“Government Motors” stuck) is roaring back. The island nation is set “to overtake France as Europe’s second largest automotive producer within the next five years if UK car sales and exports maintain current strong growth,” Reuters says.
Imagine the embarrassment in Paris! (Read More…)
Opel workers, managers, German politicians and TTAC have been heard complaining that Opel is being kept out of interesting growth markets and pretty much forced to suffer in Europe. The perennial nags are being thrown a bone: GM “will build a small number of its Opel Corsa hatchbacks in Belarus from next year as its European brand seeks to diversify outside its core market,” Reuters says.
GM appears to be less convinced of the second coming of Cadillac than many of its fans. In the Global Business Conference Call, Bob Ferguson, VP of Global Cadillac, did set very cautious goals for Cadillac. (Read More…)
Most large automakers are working on a modular architecture of some sort. Farthest ahead appears to be Volkswagen, which already is rolling out new car after new car on one of four related kit architectures, and which is rumored to be working on one master kit. The other day, Toyota showed me glimpses of its new kit architecture, first cars to be expected in 2015. Today, GM showed us this chart. And there are no kits on it. (Read More…)
GM says it’s not true (yet) what Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports today. The paper says it has it on good authority that by 2014, GM will move production of its Chevrolet Cruze from South Korea to the Opel plant in Gliwice, Poland. (Read More…)
AutomakerS around the world seem to have colluded to turn 2015 into the Hydrogen year. Yesterday in Nagoya (a trip into which TTAC invested 21,160 yen, and the price of a bento box, no freebie jaunts in Japan) , Toyota’s NA CEO Jim Lentz confirmed that the Hydrogen Year is still on the calendar.
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