Only three automakers lost retail market share last year, as the market for new cars struggled back from the depths of “Carpocalypse.” Battered as it was by a recall scandal that engulfed most of the auto media coverage for the first half of the year, Toyota’s 1.2% dip came as little surprise. But with all the positive spin surrounding GM and Chrysler, the bailed-out automakers loss of 1.8% and .6% retail market share was a pretty huge disappointment. Ford, on the other hand, drew a huge distinction from its cross-town rivals, recording the second-largest growth in retail market share of all automakers in the US market, snagging an additional 1.2% of the market. Projecting 2010’s trends forward a year (a speculative exercise, no doubt) Ford would actually surpass GM in terms of retail market share, putting it second only to Toyota (and within spitting distance (.3%) of first place). As the bailed-out automakers lose ground in the battle for consumers (rather than volume), Ford makes a strong case for exempting itself from the “Detroit” pejorative: at least as far as consumer perceptions go, Ford has little in common with GM or Chrysler. Not that there aren’t still trouble spots…
On the surface, GM had a fairly passable 2010, as the newly-public automaker posted a 21.3% volume increase for its four core brands. In contrast to Toyota’s humbly grateful tone, GM’s VP of US Sales Don Johnson sounded a distinctly triumphal note, arguing
Our sales this year reflect the impact of GM’s new business model. The consistency of results that we achieved demonstrates the focus on our brands, dealers and customers, and how we compete aggressively for every sale, every day.
And on a superficial level, the argument certainly seems to ring true, as Buick (+51.9%), Cadillac (+34.7%), and GMC (+31.7%) were the three most-improved brands in the business last year in terms of volume. GM also delivered more vehicles than any other automaker last year, with 2,215,227 vehicles sold. Great success, end of story… right?
Directs the Secretary of Transportation to study and report to Congress on the minimum level of sound that is necessary to be emitted from a motor vehicle, or some other method, to alert blind and other pedestrians of the presence of operating motor vehicles while traveling.
But that’s not all. Once the SecTrans determines the minimum standard for alerting blind pedestrians to a vehicle’s presence, he is required to
initiate rulemaking to promulgate a motor vehicle safety standard
(1) establishing performance requirements for an alert sound that allows blind and other pedestrians to reasonably detect a nearby electric or hybrid vehicle operating below the cross-over speed, if any; and
(2) requiring new electric or hybrid vehicles to provide an alert sound conforming to the requirements of the motor vehicle safety standard established under this subsection.
Toyota’s December sales [PDF here]dropped 5.5 percent compared to last December, capping a rough year for the largest foreign automaker in the US market. Toyota ended 2010 with a total sales volume of 1,763,595 units, down 6,552 from last year’s pre-recall performance. But despite holding volume basically flat and suffering the industry’s second-worst retail market share loss (at -1.2%), Toyota still finished the year with the highest retail market share of any automaker in the US market, at 17.3 percent according to our anonymous industry informant. Dig this: after the nastiest recall scandal since Ford’s Firestone debacle the Camry is still the best-selling car in the country, Lexus is still the top luxury brand, and Toyota still attracts more retail buyers than any other maker or brand. Would you have predicted that last February?
As we wade through our year-end sales number reports, one of the important metrics that we’ll be looking at are incentive spending rates. Detroit continues to dominate both Edmunds’ True Cost of Incentives index (above) and TrueCar’s incentive forecast (after the jump), with little serious competition for their supremacy in this profit-sapping and brand equity-squandering category. Still, the foreign firms are increasing their incentives while Detroit has generally scaled back over the last year, so the incentive race is slowly getting tighter…
Chrysler Group’s December sales were up some 16 percent compared to December 09, as the bailed-out automaker finished the year with 1,085,211 sales, a 17 percent increase over last year. But with the overall market steadily recovering, those year-over-year comparisons hardly tell the story, so Chrysler sales boss Fred “I Am Ram” Diaz brought it back to the firm’s five-year plan, saying
Chrysler Group 2010 sales of 1.1 million units are consistent with our sales objective that we presented in our Nov. 4, 2009 five-year business plan. We are extremely proud of the sales strides we made during this transition year. Chrysler Group launched 16 all-new or significantly improved models last year, most of them during the fourth quarter. We can now share our excitement with our customers as our new 2011 models arrive in dealerships in greater volumes over the coming months.
We’ll forgive Diaz the 15k unit “round-up” that gets him to 1.1m units, but with 2010 closing out an 11.5m unit year for the industry, Chrysler’s 1.085m units puts it behind the market-share projections trumpeted in the five year plan (closer to a 9.5 percent share, per slide above). And when you start looking at retail share, the situation looks even more grim. Chrysler may have gotten close to meeting its 2010 goals, but it pulled out the stops to get there. And things only get tougher next year.
It’s looking like 2010 will end with the auto industry selling 11.5m units in the United States, as the SAAR over the last quarter of the year rose to about 12.4m units. We’ll update our table of December sales results as they become available, and in the meantime we’re preparing some year-end reporting of sales by automaker in the year that was. Stay tuned…
Hyundai just hit us with this teaser image, showing the forthcoming Veloster, which we (and everyone else) thought was a two-door. Apparently not. Look for the full reveal this Monday, live from the Detroit Auto Show.
Automotive News [sub] reports that Audi may be going against the wishes of its parent company by introducing a Wankel rotary range-extender for the trial version of its A1 E-tron EREV, which will begin fleet testing in Germany later this year. Volkswagen reportedly wants each of its ten brands to agree on a common EV strategy in order to cut costs, but Audi is looking for a more refined concept for its range-extender in order to compete with BMW’s forthcoming Megacity lightweight city car, a consideration which caused the luxury brand to settle on a rotary range-extending engine. The German press reports that Audi’s decision has left it “at odds” with its parent company, and they describe the situation as “anarchic.” An Audi spokesman, however, tells AN [sub] that
There is no problem between VW and Audi
But a Wankel engine is hardly the kind of cost-cutting move towards commonality that VW had envisioned for its concern-wide EV effort, and bosses from the firms corporate headquarters have not yet commented on the story. And considering that the Wankel-powered Mazda RX-8 was recently yanked from the European market for its gas-guzzling ways, it’s hard to see Audi making the Wankel work. Still, we’ll wait for VW to comment and for the results of the A1 E-tron’s fleet testing (which will determine if the concept is production-ready) before we pass judgment.
Yes, this is for real (if not brand-spankety new). Multimedia artist Soomi Park swears that her LED eyelashes are a comment on cross-cultural notions of beauty, explaining
The LED Eyelash project is brought into the world from a simple question: Why do women want larger and bigger eyes? Asian women tend to have stronger needs for bigger eyes as a standard of beauty, but relatively few of them are born with naturally big eyes. Those without big eyes can only look for alternative ways to make their eyes look prettier, i.e., larger, by using a repertoire of skills such as putting on makeup and wearing jewelry. Sometimes, the desires for bigger eyes can become almost obsessive, and many women opt for plastic surgery in order to make their dream come true. Soomi calls this, the fetish of Big Eyes.
Speaking of platform-sharing between brands, Volkswagen’s division of labor debates have been progressing this year with the result that Audi will develop the conglomerate’s SUVs, while Porsche is in charge of sportscar development, as well as the erector set that will become VW’s modular platform menace. Future luxury sedan development (think Porsche Panamera, Lamborghini Estoque and Bentleys) are also said to be the purview of Porsche, although the German newspaper Der Spiegel recently revealed that
Volkswagen’s boss recently decided that, in 2014, the brand will distance itself from sportscars, instead offering a sedan based on the Audi A8.
Which is an interesting choice. After all, the king of über-luxury sedans, the Rolls Phantom, is based on a unique platform, whereas the A8 shares greasy bits with even the lowly Volkswagen Phaeton. Initially the Bugatti sedan strategy was to build the most expensive luxury sedan (as envisioned by the Galibier Concept) on the market to out-Phantom the Phantom, while (VW-owned) Bentley nips at its heels with the new Mulsanne, but that plan fell apart as a worldwide recession took hold. Now the idea seems to be to create something considerably more modest and brand-engineered… which doesn’t sound like much of a payoff for the most superlative of modern brands. We’ll just have to wait and see where this goes.
Toyota, possibly more than any other automaker, epitomizes a major tradeoff inherent in mass-market success: mechanical and stylistic homogeneity. Subaru, on the other hand, traditionally occupies the other end of the spectrum, slinging mechanically unique but ultimately niche-oriented products. Since Toyota took a 16.5 percent stake in Subaru’s parent company Fuji Heavy Industries, observers have wondered how the relationship between two so different automakers would play out. And since Subaru had already cultivated a fiercely loyal following with its dedication to niche values, the outcome has largely been that Subaru fans have decried the perceived “Toyotafication” of Subaru. And now, if a new rumor from Motor Trend is anything to go by, the uproar is about to get a little bit louder.
The UAW today released its complete “Principles For Fair Union Elections” [full PDF here], the document that it wants every transplant auto manufacturer in America to sign ahead of its organizing campaign which kicks off later this month. With so-called “card check” legislation dead in congress, the UAW hopes to shame foreign automakers who manufacture vehicles in America to guarantee certain concessions to the union that, having helped kill off its Detroit “partners,” now owns large stakes in the bailed-out successors to GM and Chrysler.
In the past the UAW has failed to organize a number of transplant factories, including Nissan’s Tennessee plants and Toyota’s Kentucky factory, and the introduction of these principles ahead of the next organization attempt signal’s the UAW’s perspective that “manipulation” by management prevented UAW organization in transplant factories. If bosses from Nissan, Toyota, Subaru, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes don’t sign onto these principles, they will be on the menu for the UAW’s new campaign… but are the principles worth agreeing to? Let’s take a look…
Longtime TTAC commenter/contributor David Holzman has a piece in Environmental Health Perspectives entitled Vehicle Motion Alarms: Necessity, Noise Pollution, or Both? tackling the problems and effectiveness issues associated with audible vehicle warnings. He writes
For all their ubiquity, backup beepers are poorly designed for their job, and some of their most annoying attributes are part of that poor design, says Chantal Laroche, a professor in the Audiology/Speech Language Pathology Department at the University of Ottawa, Canada, who has devoted much of her career to investigating the practical shortcomings of alarm sounds. Their single tones, with a typical volume of 97–112 decibels (dB) at the source, are loud enough to damage hearing and can be heard blocks from the danger zone, says Thalheimer. Their sound is so commonplace that their warning can lose its authority through the cry-wolf phenomenon. For reasons having to do with the physics of sound, they also are notoriously hard to localize, further undermining their utility, says Laroche.
Fiat split its auto business from the rest of its industrial operations today, creating two new companies: Fiat and Fiat Industrial. Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne announced the move as a way for Fiat to unlock its share value and concentrate on its core business, telling the AP [via Newser]
This is a very important moment for Fiat, because it represents at the same time a point of arrival and a point of departure. Faced with the great transformations in place in the market, we could no longer continue to hold together sectors that had no economic or industrial characteristic in common.
But with Fiat Industrial taking care of the truck-and-tractor side of the business independently, Fiat SpA is focusing on the task at hand: Chrysler. With a 35 percent stake in the bailed-out American automaker in the bag, Fiat is aiming for a controlling stake when Chrysler’s IPO hits the markets later this year. And though the spin-off of FIat’s non-automotive business opens the door for a full merger of Fiat and Chrysler, Marchionne denies that a full merger will take place, saying only that
I don’t know whether it is likely, but it is possible that we’ll go over the 50 percent mark if Chrysler decides to go to the markets in 2011. It will be advantageous if that happens.
But don’t mind Sergio’s equivocation. Fiat will almost certainly snap up the remainder of a controlling stake by the end of this year. Here’s why…
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