China’s most popular color

Forget the ATS. Now you can show that you are fiscally prudent and still project the Cadillac look.  All you need is a ticket to China and $6,700 in pocket money.  This will buy you the Guizhou Hangtian Chenggong (never mind) GHT6400. Says Carnewschina (buy Tycho a beer as a thank you for finding this Asian beauty): (Read More…)

Roger Pion, the man who rolled his monster tractor over seven police cars, was brought into court in Vermont yesterday. According to New England Cable News, the man is “accused of being a one-man wrecking crew. “ Apparently, that’s a criminal offense in Vermont. (Read More…)

Forget Mao suits: “Chinese youngsters know Justin Bieber, hamburgers and Middle East warfare,” reports the culturally clued-in Carnewschina. “They also know this thing called ‘Bikini Car Wash’, many Chinese websites are full with big-breasted American babes bikini washing big engined American cars.”

A car wash in Shanghai made it reality. Except, well, the babes are Chinese. (Read More…)

Nissan unveiled is 2013 Pathfinder in suburban Detroit and in downtown Manhattan’s Meatpacking District (just two blocks away from the PATH train, get it?) The fashionably rugged, but far from off-roadish locales were carefully chosen: (Read More…)

When GM bought seven percent of the moribund PSA Peugeot Citroen five months ago, the happy couple praised monstrous synergies and annual cost savings of $2 billion a year coming from the – ahem – tie-up. Hope springs eternal, but currently, the value of this dubious investment  is deflating faster than a popped balloon. Even GM is realizing it and tells the Treasury that it may have to write down that investment if things don’t get better soon.

The ever so vigilant Reuters actually went to the trouble of reading the complete 10-Q GM filed with the SEC in connection with GM’s recent quarterly report. In that filing, GM says: (Read More…)

Update: We are in touch with the ad network. and we were told they are stopping  the auto playing videos. Please report whether the auto playing videos have stopped for you. Please focus only on the auto playing part, i.e. video that begins to play when you bring up the page and you do not click on the video. This has stopped for me. Please comment: Stopped yes or no. And please say where you are, some ads are localized. Thank you.

Please let’s discuss other things, like in picture ads etc. later. Let’s solve this issue now. (Read More…)

Devotees of the Manchester United soccer club call for a boycott of the products made by the club’s sponsors. This famously includes Chevrolet. Last Monday, GM signed a seven year contract with Manchester United. A day before, GM’s Chief Marketing Executive Joel Ewanick, the architect of the deal, was fired. Manchester United supporters are opposed to their club going public on Wall Street. To put pressure on the Glazer family to ditch the plan, they ask the public to stay clear of the products of the club’s sponsors. (Read More…)

White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer apologized to WaPo and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer for having “overshot the runway.” Pfeifer had accused Krauthammer of falsely claiming that a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had been removed from the White House and sent back to the British Embassy. In a blog post on the White House Blog (yes, the White House blogs too) Pfeiffer produced a smoking gun: A Churchill bust that was still at the White House.  The trouble was there had been two busts. Now there is only one.  (See, and I would have sworn Bill Clinton took all available busts when he vacated the White House.)

What do busts have to do with cars? (Read More…)

I have attracted the attention of our technical people to the plight of  smartphone users. YOU can be instrumental in bringing TTAC to a new smartphone glory. (Read More…)

An angry farmer in Vermont wiped out most of the fleet of the Orleans County Sheriffs’s Department by rolling his tractor over the cruisers. Without wheels, the deputies had to liberate one of their cars from a service station before they could go into high speed pursuit of the man who left the scene in red farm tractor, the Daily Mail reports. (Read More…)

Whenever we talk about middling sales and dwindling market shares of certain carmakers, moles pop out of the holes, check their talking points, and shout: “Volume is soooo lame. Awesome profits is where it’s at!” Point taken. (Read More…)

Toyota today published its revised production and sales plan for the calendar year 2012. The plan calls for slightly more than 10 million units produced globally by all Toyota Motor Corporation companies. If this plan is executed, Toyota will be the world’s first automaker to break the 10 million unit sound barrier. Based on its half year results, Toyota was already above plan before the plan was published.  (Read More…)

Yesterday, we did one of our regular checks on the World’s Largest Automakers. Today, finally some good news for the GM camp: TTAC is up-revising its year-end projection for GM by some 300,000 units. Here is why: (Read More…)

German new car sales are no longer Teflon-coated.  New car sales in Deutschland were down 5 percent in July, Germany’s Kraftfahrtbundesamt reports. (Read More…)

GM posted better quarterly numbers today than analysts expected. Instead of jumping on the news, the GM share is down at the time of this typing? Why? Analysts and financial reporters quickly caught on to an old trick that has an air of despair: GM delayed spending into the next quarter. Says Reuters:    (Read More…)