With 15 “new or refreshed” Chrysler Group products launching over the next 4 months [complete product plan in PDF format here], we’re about to find out definitively if a company’s product can be turned around in a little over a year. Given how complex automobiles are, and how deeply uncompetitive many of Chrysler’s products have been, the odds are obviously stacked against Auburn Hills… and Chrysler’s $50m loss on the Grand Cherokee launch is a sign of how scary things can get in a product blitz. But the real question here isn’t how many recalls Chrysler is risking, or how much money it could lose on launch costs and “associated industrial inefficiencies” but whether consumers will actually notice a difference.

The “mid-cycle refresh” is a familiar phenomenon for the American consumer, and few of them fundamentally change the character of a car. Though Chrysler is doing “deep refreshes” on cars like the 200 (neé Sebring), reworking the body, drivetrains, suspension and interior (also, the Durango, 300 and Charger will be “all new”), a number of the new launches will be of plain-old refreshes… like the 2011 Town & Country pictured here. Will the deep changes to some vehicles be lost in the flood of refreshed Chrysler Jeep and Dodge vehicles? More importantly, will refreshes like this one convince consumers that Chrysler has really changed?

While reading the responses to a recent BMWBLOG posting by Josh Lewis, I noted that one of the posters had put together a very interesting comparison of the BMW M3 and the Porsche 911. To put it mildly, somebody’s gone Kirstie Alley while somebody else has stayed Goldie Hawn:

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The NY Times reports on a growing phenomenon: the crash tax. Though ambulance fees have long been born by those who use their services, Police, Fire Departments and other first responders in 26 states are reportedly charging users for their services, and they’re generating quite a bit of debate in the process. In one instance, Mr Cary Feldman of Chicago Heights was in an accident that he didn’t cause, did not use any emergency services, and was still billed $200 for the dispatch of a fire engine to the scene of his wreck. The AAA’s take on such fees

Generally, we see that public safety services are a core government function that should be properly budgeted for with general taxes and not addressed by fees after the fact

On the other hand, charging those who cause accidents for emergency response costs helps keep taxes lower for safe drivers and provides an incentive against reckless driving. So are fees worth the occasional misapplication, or are they an unfair tax on victims?

Your faithful editor just dodged a bullet. And no, not from our owners, who might have wondered why I just took off for the better part of a weekday. Truth is, for the past several hours I’ve been trying to buy a car I don’t particularly need… but now it seems that circumstances have forced me to postpone my rash decision. At least until Saturday. And though it’s always best to consider big purchases thoroughly before pulling the trigger, this car has simply been lodged itself in my brain, screaming at me to buy it for the last several days. I like to think of myself as a fairly reasonable person, but I find myself stripped of objectivity, common sense and practicality, all of which have been replaced by slobbering, single-minded lust. In fact, I’m so unreasonably set on this acquisition that I’m not going to even say what kind of car it is, for fear of jinxing the deal (feel free to guess though… unless you’re one of the two people who actually know).

Now that you’ve had a taste of the madness that’s afflicted your loyal devotee automotive truth, I invite you to crack open a judgment-impairing beverage and let me know what car you might buy in the throes of automotive insanity. Keep in mind that this is not a lottery fantasy question… you should be able to acquire this car in real life (you just might not want to tell your spouse, children, or financial planner until it’s too late and madness has become reality). Alternatively, tell us about the impulse buy that taught you to overcome the insanity of blind automotive lust.

Gasoline with up to ten percent ethanol have been approved for public sale in the US, and the ethanol industry has been pushing to increase the maximum allowed blend to 15 percent. Or 12 percent until the EPA can figure out if E15 damages engines. But with automakers turning against the e15 push, fears about E10-related engine damage (which primarily began with boat and small engine operators) are being more widely heard. So why is E10 allowed if it damages engines? For one thing, trailerboats.com points out that

Yamaha warns that due to the fungible nature of fuels in transit from refinery to service station, some E10 fuels may actually get an extra dose of ethanol

In other words, E10 may be safe but you may not actually be getting E10. But more importantly, the market is answering the call of consumers. Over at pure-gas.org, a site dedicated to connecting Americans with stations offering ethanol-free gasoline, the number of registered “pure gas” pumps has skyrocketed since June of last year. But, warns the site’s founder (a BMW motorcycle enthusiast),

We buy [ethanol-free gas] because we want to fuel our vehicles with it. If you want to save money on gas, this site is of no use to you – it will NOT have gasoline prices on it. They vary from day to day and this site isn’t about saving money. It’s about finding pure gasoline for your machine.

So we’re wondering: does ethanol-free gas exist near you, and if so, is it more expensive? Finally, is there a price premium you would be willing to pay for ethanol-free gas? Or would you even pick corn-free gas (and its groundwater-accumulating carcinogen MTBE) at price parity with E10?

When I’m bored and have 20 minutes to burn, I always go to car manufacturers’ websites and “spec out” cars I may buy in the future. Volvos, Toyota, Hondas, Lexuses etc. Ones which would look nice on my driveway. But truth be told, nothing on the market really captures my imagination. When I look on the road, nothing really stands out. Then I made a comment to myself. “If you want to stand out on the roads you’d be better off driving a Cadillac CTS!” I chuckled at first, but then I saw some sense to it. Although I don’t like Cadillac’s styling, the CTS isn’t that bad (it grew on me), it’s not that bad a car and there’s not many on UK roads. Then I thought, why don’t I take it one step further…? Read More >

Nissan was the fifth best-selling brand in the first half of 2010, but with nine new model rollouts planned for the next two years it’s looking for something its marketing team calls “breaking the mold” improvement. To do that, Nissan is leading its product blitz with distinctive products like the Leaf EV and the Juke “sportcross,” but it’s also working to bring more attention to its brand as well as its vehicles. Marketing boss Jon Brancheau explains the problem to AdAge

If you look back over the course of the last 18 months at our creative, a lot of it has been focused on individual models and there hasn’t been an overarching idea that held everything together, laddering to Nissan. That’s what’s different about this work. It’s focused on the vehicle lines supporting the Nissan brand rather than just focusing on individual launch activity. The Leaf is the most recent example to believe that Nissan is an innovative company and that’s how we want to transmit our message to consumers, we want to turn it around a little bit — Nissan is the brand, and here’s the reason you should believe in it.

Unfortunately, the vehicle for Nissan’s latest bid at brand awareness is based on the tagline “Innovation For All,” a bon mot that is unfortunately reminiscent of the ill-fated Chevrolet tagline “Excellence For Everyone.” For a brand that is respected by many but loved by few, that’s a dangerously vague approach to a marketing push, and it hardly seems like the message to propel Nissan out of its perennial also-ran status. On the other hand, it’s tough to put a finger on what exactly Nissan should stand for because it’s brand has almost always been poorly differentiated in this market. So we’re curious: what does the Nissan brand mean to you, and what are the strengths it should build on as it seeks to improve brand awareness? Or are they on the right track already?

GM’s IPO filing still has yet to appear on the SEC’s EDGAR database, but while we wait for the S-1 form to clear, Reuters has some details on what to expect from the sale. The big news:

GM is mulling a plan under which sovereign wealth funds or pension funds would serve as “cornerstone investors,” a technique often used for large initial public offerings to show that key investors are supporting the deal, four people said…

Each cornerstone investor would likely be asked to commit to buying 2 percent to 10 percent of the IPO and cornerstone investors would likely account for 10 percent to 30 percent of the total IPO, one of the sources said.

On the other hand, another source says GM is targeting 15 percent of its equity towards cornerstone investors, with 20-25% is aimed at the retail investment market. Either way, Reuters points out that another recent large IPO of a government-owned business, the Agricultural Bank of China, relied heavily on cornerstone investors… but that the politics of such a strategy could be risky.

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Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist.

That’s the thesis of UCLA professor of urban planning, Daniel Shoup’s new book The High Cost of Free Parking. Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen explains Shoup’s line of thinking in an NYT Op-Ed.

Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it’s in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway. Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block.

If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.

The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life.

Cowen points to San Francisco’s market-based parking meters as one potential solution for the waste and stealth subsidies of automotive overuse caused by free parking (which Shoup reckons amounts to a staggering $127b annual subsidy). But will market-based parking pricing be any more politically palatable than other green behavior-modification efforts like, say, a gas tax? On the other hand, if municipalities can get rid of speed cameras due to increased parking revenue, perhaps the compromise might be more worth it to motorists. Either way, one gets the feeling that the free parking phenomenon isn’t going to disappear overnight.

I recently attended a fancy-pants dinner held by Chrysler PR for some Houston-area bloggers. We were wined, dined and introduced to the 2011 Grand Cherokee. While free food and journalistic integrity are a tough combo to swallow, I found something entertaining and inherently blog worthy: the castrated 2011 Ford Explorer is in the new Grand Cherokee’s gunsight. Why? One of the SUV’s most famous nameplates is now a crossover, while another is still an SUV. But neither of them like being called names.

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This week’s “Haggler” column in the Sunday New York Times was ripped from the pages of TTAC’s beloved Piston Slap series, with a Wendy Marek writing in to complain that

In July 2008, I made a huge mistake: I bought a Ford Explorer. It was a 2006 model with 40,000 miles, and it cost $17,000. At first I thought I got a great deal, but after a few weeks of driving, the radiator started leaking. Then the replacement radiator started leaking. Then the radiator that replaced the replacement started leaking. To date, six new radiators have been installed in this vehicle. Six.

After some research, The Haggler found that both carcomplaints.com and Consumer Reports showed a record of radiator problems in 2006 Explorers. Furthermore, Ford issued a TSB on 2006 Explorer radiators in 2009, which the automaker insists covers its liability. Since the Explorer in question is a used car, Ms Marek’s only real recourse would have been to file a breach of warranty claim, but the statue of limitations had already run out. Since so few protections exist for used-car buyers, one has to assume that the moral of the story is that buying used Explorers is a risky business… but is that the truth? Or is the outgoing Explorer a good value that’s getting a bum rap?

Yesterday, Cammy asked what could be the ugliest car. She said  “currently on market,” but that limitation that was soon forgotten. Being a customer centric blog, we opened it up to the ugliest of all times. And who knows, ugly as they are, they still might be  “on market,” looking for a buyer with a vision problem. Or a warped sense of humor. And with this, we present to you:  TTAC’s Top Ugly Car Picks Pics. The Best and the Brightest pick the worst of the worst. Read More >

There seems to be an appetite debate about this issue, not just here at TTAC but in the industry as a whole. Just look the philosophical divide between the “One Ford” strategy and Volkswagen’s 2011 Jetta strategy. So instead of filling up the Jetta review comments with this debate, let’s have it out… right here, right now.

Well, the debate over the viability of the Chevy Volt has been well and truly joined, as political and auto writers around the web spent the last week weighing in on the issue. Needless to say, a scan of these opinions shows that my NY Times Op-Ed has drawn a wide variety of reactions, ranging from complete agreement to utter contempt. But, in a phenomenon that seems all-too common on the internet these days, very few commentaries on my opinion (positive and negative alike) bring more detail or nuance to the issue. Which is too bad, because I’d be the last person to argue that I’m capable of doing complete justice to an issue as complex as the Volt in only 900 words. The variables and unforeseeable consequences floating around the Volt’s future are so vast and varied, no writer could possibly hope to cover them all. And one such problem didn’t even emerge until the day after I wrote the Times Op-Ed: dealer markups on the Volt.
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The Fiat brand returns to the US later this year, spearheaded by the Mexican-built 500 minicar and followed next year by Abarth and convertible versions of the A-segment hatchback. With some 200 Chrysler dealers in major urban centers preparing to add the Fiat brand to their portfolios, Automotive News [sub] reports that the brand hopes to reach at least 50k units and as many as 100k units by next year. For comparison, the MINI brand sold 45,293 units in the last 12 months (ending in June) and 48,562 in the previous 12 months.
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