German governments have long relied on (and often ignored) the advice of a council of economic advisers, called the “Five Wise Men”. Peter Bofinger is a member of the council. According to Spiegel Online, he says the only way to deal with Opel’s problems is to nationalize the company– and forget about the billions that GM reportedly owes Opel. Bofinger says there are two important reasons why this is the only way to go. Once the markets stabilize after a few years, Germany would be able to sell Opel again, and regain some or all of its investment. And that sure beats pouring money down GM’s drain. Secondly, nationalization is a deterrence to the many other companies asking for help, and the scores of companies that are expected to grovel for billions in the months to come. Picture this dialogue: “So, your hubcap-stamping business is in the dumps, you need 300m to re-tool your factory for selling ‘green’ accessories? OK, we’ll take the company off your back, free of charge.” So is Bofinger a Wise Man or a wise guy?
Posts By: Martin Schwoerer
When they built it, from 1999 to 2005, the Audi A2 was a flop. Lots of Euro-car nuts like me loved it: a sub-Golf sized, lightweight (900kg), aluminum bodied four seater with great aerodynamics (CW 0.25). Its interior was beautiful and high-quality, it was quiet and it handled well. Ideal for city driving yet happy on the autobahn. This car was worlds ahead of the competition and left the Merc A-Class in the dust. I remember renting one TDI model with but 75 horses that felt happy and smoothe at 110 mph; I drove the hell out of it for a few hundred miles and still got 38 mpg. 50mpg was reported to be easy to attain. But the market hated it. It was pricey, and with gas prices low, it only looked like a sensible buy to tree-huggers. And the looks… the Bauhausian, spartan, slimline styling I loved was judged to be week-kneed and feminine.
Note to CEOs: if you’re going to meet with your competitors at a clandestine hotel in order to fix prices, make sure nobody in your entourage is a snitch. And if you’ve already received a regulator’s multimillion-dollar fine a few years ago, be more careful the second time, otherwise you’re likely to be fined a cool billion bucks– as France’s Saint Gobain was yesterday. Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Competition: “Saint-Gobain, Asahi, Pilkington and Soliver have defrauded the auto industry and consumers for five years. The FT reports that the fines are so punitive because the auto glass industry is large (sales of $3bn/year) and because Saint-Gobain had been involved in a similar incident in the past.”
One of the theories explaining GM’s downfall is that they did not invest enough in R&D. Wrong! Booz & Co.’s latest report on Global R&D spending says: bar Toyota, GM was tops. Here’s the 2007 ranking:
Company R&D expenditures in $m
Toyota 8,386
GM 8,100
Ford 7,500
Honda 5,142
VW 4,757
Daimler 4,321
Nissan 4,001
BMW 3,995
Peugeot 2,835
Renault 2,531
Booz says in comparison to 2006, R&D expenditures in the auto industry grew by about 10 percent. European “champs” pale, with the European primo (VW) being only around half as research-intensive as the biggest spender. Here are some other findings…
First, the upsides. When I helped a pal who owns a kindergarten schlep some cinder blocks, I got unprecedented, appreciative smiles from a group of young mothers (I disapprove of porno jargon, so I won’t use the term “MILF”, but you know what I mean). I was expecting to see a lot of hate, but the only person who screamed at me was a fuzzy-bearded hippy. The TDI has oodles of low-end oomph, so it provides the particular pleasure you get from driving something that is both massive (2.4 metric tons) and muscular, especially when it’s full of stuff. This Q7’s 0 – 60 time of 8.6 seconds belies its 500 NM’s of torque. Basically flawless handling intensifies the elephant-on-dancing-shoes effect. And even when I drove it Teutonic-aggressively, I got at least 16 MPG.
Take that, GM. Formerly-sick car company Mitsubishi Motors has a working electric car; they’re already testing a fleet of a few hundred units in Japan. The Mitsubishi innovative Vehicle promises a 75mph top speed and a 100 mile range. It’ll take seven hours to recharge the battery using a normal socket (220V). If you’ve got high voltage, figure an 80 percent recharge within 30 minutes. Being a totally new car, the iMiEV benefits from the packaging advantages inherent to electric propulsion. The Li-Ion batteries are located beneath the passenger department, and the small electric engine is rear-midships. Thus, despite a sub-four meter’s length, it’s roomy enough for four. The Innovative Vehicle’s interior is airy but spartan/simple– no expensive materials for a lightweight car that wants to be affordable for commuters. I could only take the Mitsu EV for a few-minutes’ spin in a parking lot, so I can’t verify any of company’s range or speed claims. But acceleration is strong, smooth and silent, the steering is pleasant, and it brakes in a solid fashion. It feels like a proper, developed car, not like a prototype. No magic-year nonsense; commercial sales will begin in 2009. If Mitsubishi can keep their performance promises, this one’s a winner, at least for urban early adopters.
Toyota has been showing concepts, prototypes and mock-ups of its 3+1 city car for the last four or so European motor shows, but here in Paris, it’s the real thing. The theory of the design language is silly – Toyota calls it “vibrant clarity,” but that’s a state of mind I’d associate with inebriation. But the design itself is strong, clean and forward-looking. I stood in line to check out the interior of this microcar and found it conspicuously well-designed and made of high-quality materials. It didn’t quite pass the international test of anal-retentiveness (“do all surfaces refuse to give way when pressed, and sound similarly solid to a rapped knuckle?”) but not to forget, this is a tiny, lightweight car. And a wonder of packaging. My claustrophobiac 184 cm body (that’s 6 feet to you Yanks) found the driver’s and two passengers’ seats snug yet uncramped. For Toyota, the big question is, how the hell to sell the iQ at a profitable price — meaning, more expensive than its larger models? This is where new technology needs first-class marketing. If they can pull it off, then a Smart death watch may be in order.
Nissan’s concept cars have been pretty impressive for the past few motor shows. There was the Pivo, a toyish-but-feasible city car that had electric motors in the wheel hubs, enabling it to do 360-degree turns. It was a bubbly, friendly vision of driving in the future. Then Nissan presented the Mixim, which looked like Darth Vader’s mask on wheels. The idea was to make an urban electric car that looked serious, even aggressive. Both owed their design language to Mangas, guaranteeing a certain attractiveness to teenagers. Today in Paris, Nissan unveiled the Nuvo which is equally electric and inspired by Japanese comic books, but in addition integrates nature-oriented themes such as flowers, and recycled materials. I like it, despite its megalomaniac motto claiming it’s “the future of the city car”. Any car that sports a new design language has my sympathies. The Nuvo is a 3+1, comparable in packaging to the Toyota iQ. Nuvo is to be rolled out in the context of the Better Place pilot projects in Denmark and Israel 2011. The Nissan guy I spoke with claims the agressive style of the Mixim doesn’t work for urban drivers, so they had to go for something softer. This may be true for Japan and some countries in Europe, but otherwise I would beg to differ: Germans find cuteness alarmingly unserious, and Americans feel emasculated by anything distinctly unmacho. Still, it’s a fine design.
This motor show is about hybrids, electrics, the financial meltdown, whatever you want. But what attracts the crowds, what makes the most noise (figuratively), is what always has been the best point of motor shows: exciting cars. And man, the Lamborghini four-door is exciting. It looks positively evil in matte grey, and has a stance and an attitude that is stunning. I’m not sure about the RX-8ish front, but never mind. It’s the wrong car for the wrong time, but when has the time ever been right for this kind of vehicle? It’s great that Lambo isn’t hiding behind some feeble “efficiency” greenwashery. Let plutocrats drive cars that look beautiful and special and mean, is what I say. And if you saw the new Lambo in the flesh, I think you’d agree.
The facelifted Audi A6 is the first of Ingolstadt’s machines to abandon conventional front indicators; instead, they’re located on the side mirrors. Other brands are set to follow suit. This is a bad, even stupid, idea. When you hold a conversation with somebody, do you look at their ears? Of course not. You look into their eyes and try to interpret their facial expression. This is hard-wired into people’s brains, so we’re pretty good at it. Cars have faces too and car makers go long ways to make them expressive and individual. Some are supposed to be cute. BMWs for the supposed benefit of [überho] prestige are supposed to look masculine. And some are unintentionally genital. But it’s not a stretch to say that all intend to be recognizable. So why make them less readable? You’re in traffic, you want to see what the other guy is going to do, so you look at his car’s front, hoping for a signal. Sure, blinking mirrors are better than no blinkers at all. But I surmise that the average driver sees them a split-second later than he would front-mounted ones. And locating indicators on mirrors sucks anyway. They are more prone to break in normal driving conditions than fender-mounted indicators. Will you be able to get a replacement high-tech-mirror for your Audi 15 years hence? I doubt it. And some side blinkers are downright dangerous; the ones on the VW Golf glare into your peripheral vision in rainy or foggy driving conditions. Car makers should stop introducing empty styling gimmicks.
Researchers at The Institute of Traffic Engineering and Logistics in Kassel, Germany, don’t like induction loops (those things under the pavement that detect how long a car has been waiting for traffic lights to change). They say the loops are expensive, failure-prone and easily damaged. Simplistic, too: they only say how long a car has been waiting; they don’t tell you how many other cars are in line, how many are approaching and whether the other drivers plan to turn off or go straight ahead. The solution: mobile phones that automatically communicate with traffic lights. AKTIV (Adaptive and Kooperative Technologies for Intelligent Traffic, a project funded with federal millions) envisions mobile phones equipped with WLAN and GPS sensors, installed inside cars that tell nearbye traffic lights where you are heading. As a quid pro quo, the traffic lights tell your mobile how many seconds remain till the light turns green and whether you should turn your engine off. Traffic flows should improve, because AKTIV (pro-actively) times traffic light changes according to the amount of vehicles waiting. It should save fuel too, because stops are shorter and enables engine shut-down combined, with a “wake up call” to let drivers know green is on the way. A pilot project will begin in 2009. I asked AKTIV’s Walter Scholl if people fear Big Brother. “We consider data protection crucial. So all car data will be anonymized, and deleted as soon as you leave a junction.” But isn’t it so that the more gadgets people use, the less attentive they drive? “We have a working unit concentrating on ‘safety and attentiveness,’ and we need to attain empirical evidence that our system doesn’t distract from the task of driving.” Isn’t this technical overkill? Why not just replace traffic lights with traffic circles / roundabouts? “Good question… Roundabouts help, but there will always be many situations where lights are better and safer. In addition, our system will help reduce the amount of street signs as well as other distractions”. I’d like to hope so.
Snapping at the heels of the Mitsubishi Charisma (which had none), the Hyundai Excel (which didn’t), and the Smart (which isn’t), Mercedes will introduce in Paris its idea of an E-class shooting brake, which it calls the Concept Fascination (pics here via Spiegel). Fascination, eh? Swabian bubble-think (which is what this misnomer probably is a product of) doesn’t allot space for jokes about the concept of a fascist nation, and we won’t go there either. The Germlish pronounciation of the word fascination– “fast stee nation!” will, following enthusiastic repetition by Doktor Dieter at the Paris press conference, undoubtably lead to countless parodies, which we look forward to. Speaking of parodies: who selected the horrid, pornoid (no, I don’t mean paranoid) typography of the rear license plate? Why is the rear-end reminiscent of the R-class? Who are they trying to impress when they wax quarter-lyrical about the interior’s “dark saddle leather”, as if driving a car was some kind of half-assed equestrian experience? Apart from all this, the CF (let’s stick to the abbreviation, please) is probably a worthy vehicle, what with its showcasing the new Daimler Diesel (Adblue, 2.2-liter, 204hp). Although personally, I think the inner headlights are too small and look like an afterthought.
Londoners know (because a fleet of almost 100 is already running): the electric Smart fortwo is an big improvement on the original. It’s economical and smooth, without the wheezy engine and the miserable, jerky transmission of the gas-powered (or God forbid, Diesel) version. Greeny Berliners think: electric cars would be the zero-emission way to go, if you could just charge them somewhere (who has a garage in the city?) Bringing both factors together and hoping that they gel, the German government has started a project with the generic-sounding name “e-mobility Berlin”. It will be the world’s biggest e-car pilot project, involving Daimler and RWE, a utility, which will install 500 public charging stations. The charging stations will have token solar cells, but are basically about coal-derived electricity (take that, global-warming activists!) Daimler’s main motivation is to field-test its e-Smarts, scheduled for massive roll-out in the magic year (guess!) On TV, I saw Angela Merkel, Germany’s often dour, physicist-by-training head of government talk about the project with bright eyes: “It only takes two hours to re-charge the batteries? Just the time you need to go shopping!” As they say, some ways of thinking die hard.
It was Marx who said that history repeats itself – albeit the first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce. Between the World Wars, Talbot built cars that were among the most expensive in Europe, and most beautiful ever. The post-war period of austerity was hard on Talbot, and the company was integrated into what was later the European affiliate of Chrysler. When Peugeot bought Chrysler’s European operations in 1978, it unearthed this proud but almost dead brand, and sold some undistinguished cars for a few years until it changed its mind about the whole idea. Fast forward: according to Automobilwoche, PSA Peugeot Citroen is now planning the add further disgrace to injury. Renault-Nissan’s Dacia marque of superaffordable cars is a runaway success, which Peugeot would like to emulate without damaging its present brands. So it is thinking of importing cheapo third-world-built cars and marketing them under the Talbot name. Aaargh! Dacia is a great idea whose time has come, and is managed with considerable skill. No wonder the concept is attracting copycats. But some marketing people have no respect for historical significance. Why not just think up a new brand name? Personally, I’d rather drive something called Guglhupf or Superfromage than a made-in-India Talbot.
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