Just because I want to believe doesn’t mean I should. Or that I can. Even by the gonzo standards of 1970s Italy, the Stratos was always a wild one… precisely the kind of car that has no obvious place in the homogenized, safety-crazed world of 21st Century automobiles. Besides, Lancia and Chrysler are becoming two names for the same brand, and it’s tough to imagine a Chrysler Stratos ever coming stateside (if only to avoid the “Cloud Car” associations). Besides, if Fiat is keeping Alfa around as a sporty brand, why would it develop a Lancia sportscar? Other than Old GM-style branding confusion, of course. But the least believable part of these pictures, purportedly showing a Stratos prototype testing at a Fiat test track [via Italiaspeed] are the photos themselves… and the story going along with them.

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Another month, another sales record for Hyundai/Kia. At this point, it’s getting tough to expect anything else. Elantra took top honors for the Korean concern last month, as Hyundai USA CEO John Krafcik confirms that sales of the new Sonata and the Santa Fe are both capacity restrained at this point. Krafcik tells Automotive News [sub] that an undisclosed US production capacity increase is in the works, as Hyundai is selling Sonata and Santa Fe faster than they can build them. Soul and Sorento are hitting their stride for Kia as well, with the Soul cresting 8k units last month and the Sorento topping 9k. But perhaps one of the best signs that Hyundai/Kia are in a good place is that only the aging Accent failed to beat its Cash-for-Clunker-driven July 2009 number. We’ll see what happens next month, but further out, Krafcik tells AN [sub] that Hyundai is targeting a 50 MPG fleet average for 2025. Even with no plans to sell pickups in the US, Hyundai’s prospects look bright in this market.

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Prior to going on television on Monday, I spoke to a GM spokesman in hopes of better understanding the business case for the Volt. Perhaps the most interesting thing he told me was that a major impetus for developing the Volt as an Extended-Range Electric concept was GM’s failure to achieve success with three alt-energy concepts (EV-1, Hydrogen, and yes, E-85 ethanol) due to their need for fueling infrastructure. As we talked, it occurred to me that three other less-than-entirely-successful GM “green car” projects might have helped lead The General down the primrose path to the Volt: GM’s BAS “Mild Hybrid,” the Parallel Hybrid Truck system (PHT), and the V8-based “Two-Mode” hybrid drivetrains. He admitted (somewhat grudgingly) that GM’s hybrid sales had been “disappointing” and that the ambitious Volt project was to some extent motivated by this lack of market success. What he didn’t tell me: GM is bringing back the discontinued mild-hybrid BAS system for 2011.

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Toyota pulled back on incentives last month, and paid the price with a 6.8 percent decline in sales compared to July 2009. Between this and the fact that year-over-year comparisons are skewed by July 2009‘s Cash-For-Clunkers effect, it’s almost no surprise that Toyota’s smaller and value-oriented models were almost uniformly down on the month. But a look at last July’s report shows that the Yaris, Corolla and the Scions actually lost volume during the first month of Cash-For-Clunkers. A similar situation is playing out at Honda, where the Fit has fallen for the second July in a row, and the Civic dropped hard after gaining only three percent last July. Stranger still: both firms, which earned their US market spurs on the back of efficient cars, beat their July 2009 “truck” numbers but failed to match car volume. My, how things change!

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What’s the difference between these two compact crossovers? American readers will recognize the vehicle on the left as the forthcoming facelift of the Nissan Rogue. The crossover on the right is a recently-released update to the European-market Nissan Qashqai. The Rogue is slightly larger in most dimensions than the Qashqai (not counting the extended-wheelbase Qashqai +2), and only offers a 2.5 liter engine while the Qash has a palette of four two-liter and smaller gas and diesel engines. But it’s not the Euro model’s cramped quarters or low-displacement engines that we find ourselves wishing could find their way to the American market… it’s the Qashqai’s updated styling that we want. Sure, these things are subjective, but the updated Rogue just doesn’t seem like much of an improvement on its predecessor’s looks. The Qashqai, meanwhile, has gone from filler to killer.

Nissan may have broken its own incentive record last month, but it was GM that blew the lid off the competition. According to Edmunds’ True Cost Of Incentives Index, The General loaded up nearly $1,000 more in incentive spending compared to its closest competitors, and killed the industry average by $1,340. Combined, Detroit spent $1.7 billion, or 57.3 percent of the total incentive expenditures last month. And according to Edmunds,

Analysis of incentives expenditures as a percentage of average sticker price for each segment shows large cars averaged the highest, 13.5 percent, followed by large trucks at 12.4 percent of sticker price. Premium luxury cars averaged the lowest with 3.5 percent and sport cars followed with 3.9 percent of sticker price.

Ford may have beat its July 2009 number last month, but sales at the Blue Oval brand still fell compared to the month before. Perhaps more embarrassing still is the fact that the recently-canceled Mercury brand managed to move more volume than Lincoln, despite the fact that both brands underperformed compared to both June 2010 and July 2009.

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Set the way-back machine to our July 2009 Chrysler Group sales post, and a certain amount of deja-vu might just set in. Last Summer, Chrysler’s version of success was a mere single-digit percentage volume decline. This July, Chrysler’s big accomplishment was a five percent improvement over last July’s number. Last July we thought the Chrysler brand in particular was “toast,” and based on this July’s numbers, we can’t say we’ve found much to change that opinion, as ChryCo’s eponymous brand dropped 11 percent year-over-year, and shed over 3k units of volume compared to June. Chrysler Town & Country outsold the rest of the brand alone at 8,083 units, an 18 percent gain.

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Yes, GM’s “core brands” Chevy, Buick, GMC and Cadillac combined for a 25 percent improvement over their Cash-4-Clunker-fueled July 2009 performance, although The General moved so many Pontiacs and Saturns during July of ’09 that overall sales were up only an anemic 5.5 percent. Because C4C boosted sales of value-oriented models last July, Chevrolet was up a mere 12 percent, while GMC was up 27.2 percent. The big gains in year-over-year volume came from Buick and Cadillac, which 136 and 141 percent combined. In short, every year-over-year number we’re looking at has been deeply skewed by last year’s C4C program, meaning volume numbers and month-to-month numbers will be the keys to properly analyzing this month’s sales results.
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Sales numbers for the US market in July should drop today, and based on an early analyst survey, the market’s only recovered to a 12m SAAR at best. Estimates aside though, it’s beginning to look more and more like the US market for new cars is approaching a “new normal.” How so? Automotive News [sub]’s Jesse Snyder figures it’s

Because discipline is breaking out all over– at manufacturers, suppliers and dealerships.

Even Snyder’s headline captures the mood of cautious realism that’s suddenly taken hold of the auto industry: though the market appears to have moved towards 12m annual units in July, Snyder’s analysis is headlined Life at 11 million U.S. sales.
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When the New York Times asked me to write an editorial about the Chevrolet Volt, it never occurred to me that it would be published on the day that Barack Obama toured Michigan’s auto plants touting the success of the auto bailout. Because of this timing, however, my piece was apparently taken as a partisan attack on the White House… and it touched a nerve. How do I know? Because, according to the Washington Examiner, on the Air Force One flight back to Washington D.C., White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs joined a proud tradition that dates back to at least my first year of kindergarten: he made a Niedermeyer-based funny.

“Did you guys ever see ‘Animal House?’ Right?” Gibbs asked reporters on Air Force One. “Remember when they go, ‘Neidermeyer dead?’ I’d say his argument is largely there.”

I always feel a little trepidation about abandoning the internet for a weekend in order to focus on a new car review (2011 Jetta, coming soon), but never in my most paranoid moments did I imagine that I’d come back to find the White House press secretary comparing me to the villain of Animal House.

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Your humble editor will be appearing on America’s Nightly Scoreboard on the Fox Business channel today at 7:30 PM Eastern (4:30 PM Pacific) to discuss my NY Times Op-Ed on the Chevrolet Volt.

As much as we web-based types like to smirk at the slow death of the traditional media, the real truth seems to be that, more often than not, the internet is more of a training ground than a final destination. So it is with former TTAC reviewer Jonny Lieberman. Jonny has worked at a number of automotive blogs, including a stint at TTAC that stretched from February of 2006 to January of 2009. After TTAC, Jonny went on to become the Associate Editor at Autoblog, where he primarily focused on road test reviews. Having worked his way to the biggest car blog out there, Jonny’s ambition has taken him beyond the internet to the world of print journalism, and the halls of Motor Trend where he will become Senior Editor. In his farewell piece at Autoblog, Jonny looks back at his time in the autoblogosphere, and notes

I’ve worked at some sites filled with mega-friendly people that weren’t capable of pouring piss from a boot. Other places were hyper-competent and staffed almost totally with assholes.

Anyone want to bet that the second sentence wasn’t written with TTAC at least partially in mind? And though Jonny was never the most confrontational writer at TTAC, we certainly hope that he will bring at least a tiny bit of TTAC’s take-no-prisoners ethos to Motor Trend. Or at least the raw enthusiasm embodied in such TTAC pieces as his Audi RS4 review. Either way, his hiring helps prove that even the buff books are looking to the internet for fresh blood. The autoblogosphere may not replace the print magazines, but it cant help but have a profound effect on it. Hopefully for the better.

Noticed that things have been a little slower around here this week? Yes, well, it’s summer and I’m much harder to motivate in the summer. Also, I’ve been working on this op-ed on the Chevy Volt for the New York Times. My conclusion on the Volt?

In the end, making the bailout work — whatever the cost — is the only good reason for buying a Volt. The car is not just an environmental hair shirt (a charge leveled at the Prius early in its existence), it is an act of political self-denial as well.

If G.M. were honest, it would market the car as a personal donation for, and vote of confidence in, the auto bailout. Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of cross-branding that will make the Volt a runaway success.

The Obama administration went here before, when it tried to quantify how much worse things would have been without its stimulus bill. And considering the task force has enjoyed access to GM and Chrysler’s business plans, it’s surprising that this graph (from the Auto Task Force’s just-released Bailout “report” [PDF]) is based on notoriously iffy BLS data. Instead of projecting how many jobs were saved by Detroit’s $86b life raft, couldn’t the White House have cited GM and Chrysler’s pre-bailout Chapter 11 plans? Or were there pre-bailout bankruptcy plans? Either way, the Task Force’s claim that 56k jobs have been created in Automotive since mid-2009 is a bit hard to swallow given the SIGTARP’s recent finding that

Treasury made a series of decisions [regarding the bailout-era dealer cull] that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls.

By narrowing a broad bailout to just the manufacturing side (the report leaves out dealer cuts and the GMAC rescue), the Task Force is simply defining its way to victory. Besides, the problem is that there’s really no way of knowing what might have happened without last year’s landslide of government sugar. For all we know, Fiat might have bought a bankrupt Chrysler with its own money. GM might have shuttered dying brands and cut its bloated capacity of its own volition. Both might even be in mediocre-to-OK shape right now. The only thing we know for sure is that the auto bailout has been a qualified success at best so far. Luckily for the bailout boosters, it will be years before Treasury fully divests from GM and Chrysler, so there will be plenty of other opportunities to declare victory.