“Russia is an up and coming country with a sudden influx of foreigners,” says my favorite mail-order bride site. “there is a great deal of fascination about foreigners.” No kidding. The world’s automakers must be on a speed-dating jaunt through Russia. Today, Reuters reports that GM and Russia’s Avtotor are in joint venture talks. The plan: At least 300,000 cars per year. It’s not all idle talk, because Valery Gorbunov, Avtotor’s chief executive, told Reuters that a JV is definitely in the cards. Read More >

It must be Russian week. Yesterday, it was Ford and Sollers (and Sollers minus Fiat/Chrysler). Today, it’s Volkswagen and GAZ going to the altar. The two plan a joint venture to produce 300,000 cars per year in Russia, The Moscow Times reports. Read More >

Fiat’s plans to build up to 500,000 Chryslers and Jeeps in Russia collapsed last week. Chrysler’s cross-town rival Ford may have had something to do with that. On Friday, Ford and Russia’s Sollers “signed a Memorandum of Understanding under which the parties intend to launch a new 50:50-owned joint venture called Ford Sollers for the production and distribution of Ford vehicles in Russia,” says a Sollers communiqué. Sollers also had been in talks with Fiat, which ended fruitless. The end of the Fiat talks were announced on the same day the deal with Ford was revealed. Read More >

Rumors of Jaguar Land Rover establishing a production base via a joint venture in China have been around for nearly a year now. Talks with Chery surfaced last October, but were never heard of again. What’s keeping them? It becomes higher and higher time for JLR to start making cars in China. Deliveries of Jaguar increased 50 percent to 2,655 units last year while sales of Land Rover more than doubled to 23,459 units, reported TheTycho. Now, JLR may have found another bride. Read More >

Last year, Toyota invested $50 million into Tesla. Tesla turned around and spent $42 million of the new money and bought the land and buildings of site 2 of NUMMI in Freemont, CA. As it turns out, the deal did not include the fixtures. Nothing another $17 million could not fix. Read More >

Though the the impact of nationality on the auto industry may be fading, the issue couldn’t be more central for Sergio Marchionne and his Fiat-Chrysler Empire. Having accepted aid from both the Italian and American governments, the future merging of Fiat and Chrysler raises a delicate question: will a merged Fiat/Chrysler be an Italian or American firm? When Marchionne suggested that the Fiat-Chrysler alliance could be headquartered in Detroit, Italy erupted in recriminations. The Italian government called Marchionne onto the carpet to explain himself, even as critics lashed out saying

The government is moving too late, but better late than never. Marchionne is more oriented strategically toward the U.S. than Europe

And sure enough: Fiat restated its commitment to investing some $27b into Italian production, but as AFP reports

the question of whether Fiat would remain based in its birthplace of Turin remained unclear, with local officials saying it had been put off for three years and would depend on the company’s performance.

But, while American and Italian stakeholders bicker over the “national character” of a merged Fiat-Chrysler, the proposal establishing four headquarters in Turin, Detroit, Brazil and “somewhere in Asia” points to the real issue: Fiat-Chrysler must orient itself around its markets, not any national corporate character. The longer the divide between Italy and the US is played up, the more Fiat-Chrysler runs the risk of developing a dysfunctional corporate culture like the DaimlerChrysler “marriage of equals.” It’s just too bad that, by tying itself up with the governments of the USA and Italy, Fiat allows the “national character” question to take such prominence.

Reuters reports:

Trading in the shares of China’s top carmaker SAIC Motor Corp will be suspended from February 14 pending a material corporate announcement, SAIC said on Friday.

SAIC, the Chinese partner of General Motors and Volkswagen, and owner of the MG Rover plant in Britain, said it has been notified by its holding company SAIC Group that it is working on a major plan involving SAIC and discussions over the proposal are continuing, it said in a filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

SAIC said it expects to make an announcement regarding the plan in five trading days following the trade suspension.

SAIC owns about one percent of GM, it is the majority owner of its Shanghai-GM joint venture and controls GM’s Indian-market operations… in fact, the last time SAIC suspended shares this way was when it took over GM’s Chinese and Indian ventures. So, what’s next? The mind boggles…

CEO Sergio Marchionne certainly suggested as much in a speech at the NADA convention over the weekend, in which he said

Who knows? In the next two or three years, we could be looking at one entity. It could be based here

From the perspective of the American taxpayer, this would certainly be the favorable outcome. After all, Fiat didn’t put a single Euro into the restructured Chrysler, and national bailouts don’t usually result in the expatriation of the bailed-out firm. But the US Treasury department isn’t the only master Fiat has to serve, and Marchionne’s suggestion that the Fiat-Chrysler alliance has touched off something of a “firestorm.” The Financial Times reports that

Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the [Italian] opposition Democratic party, demanding an explanation from Mr Marchionne said it was unacceptable for “Turin and the country to become a suburb of Detroit”.

Industry Minister Paolo Romani adds [via the Montreal Gazette]

The head of the carmaker must remain in Turin

And with Italian backlash against a possible Detroit headquartering of the Fiat-Chrysler alliance building, Marchionne is backpedaling furiously.
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Today, a shocking pink, rose decorated 1964 Chevy Impala named “Gypsy Rose” will lead a funeral procession of lowriders through East L.A. It will follow its owner to the grave. Jesse Valadez, a founding member of the legendary Imperial Car Club in East L.A., died of colon cancer Jan. 29 at age 64. For those who don’t know: Read More >

Developing new cars costs a good deal of money. Developing new power trains costs a huge pile of money with unsure payback. So what do you do when you are on the bottom rungs of the Top Ten, or god forbid if you traipse around somewhere in the twenties and if you have neither the money to invest nor the volume to quickly amortize your investment? You find friends to share the burden. This is what PSA and BMW do. Read More >

PSA Peugeot-Citroen is feeling its oats again. PSA “remains open to equity alliances with other partner companies in its sector,” PSA CEO Philippe Varin told the Dow Jones newswire. Well, after recent mass weddings that had produced mixed nuptials between Volkswagen and Suzuki, Fiat and Chrysler, and even Renault-Nissan- Daimler threesomes, PSA is looking for a tie-up again. The trouble is: There aren’t many attractive partners left match.com of the international auto business. Read More >

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.

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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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Developing and manufacturing new cars is expensive. You need a lot of volume to amortize the cost. That’s why more and more Japanese automakers skip the development and manufacturing part altogether. They outsource both and slap their badge on someone else’s car. Last in that development has been Mitsubishi. Ten days ago, Nissan and Mitsubishi snuggled closer and added more OEM deals to the ones they already had. Yesterday, it was announced that Suzuki would supply subcompact vans to Mitsubishi.

Suzuki will supply its latest 1.2 liter subcompact van Solio to Mitsubishi, which will start selling them as a yet unnamed Mitsubishi vehicle beginning in spring 2011. Just another OEM deal? Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun sees a bigger picture. Read More >

Talk about a blast from the past: TTAC first took note of talks between Aston Martin and Daimler nearly three years ago, and the Maybach connection first shows up a few months later. But all this time later it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of progress has been made. The FT reports that the two sides are still