Over the daily Toyota runaway stories, it’s easy to forget the plight of GM and its children abroad. If you think that’s the idea, then you are a miserable conspiracy theorist, and you should stand in the corner. With that in mind, let’s check in with GM and its worldwide siblings to see how they are doing. Read More >

Reuters (which has been all over the Volvo-Geely deal) reports that Zhejiang Geely Holding has money “in the bank account,” to purchase Ford’s Volvo brand, citing Swedish press reports. And yet, despite having reportedly given Ford guarantees about the financing of Volvo’s business plan, and scheduled a formal deal signing for last month, a deal has yet to emerge. Last week, Geely’s chairman Li Shufu told Reuters from the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in Beijing that “we haven’t reached a final agreement so far,” but “everything is moving as planned.” Geely has also been talking up its “only one foreign brand” strategy and “new energy” car plans, while Volvo reps tell AM Online that a deal will be done by March 31 and that Chinese market access will save the brand [via The WSJ [sub]]. In fact, the only party involved that’s not issuing a steady stream of PR about the upcoming deal is Ford. Could the Blue Oval be getting cold heels?

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Chinese bought 46 percent more cars this February than in February 2009. This according to official data by the China Association of Auto Manufactures (CAAM), as reported by China’s state news agency Xinhua.

The avid TTAC reader is not surprised. A week ago, we predicted numbers along these lines, simply by looking at GM China’s February sales report. Amongst observers of the Chinese market, GM sales (all of them, including Wuling) have turned into a reliable leading indicator. A dubious honor: GM China usually is only a few percent ahead of the market, which doesn’t translate into a rapid gain of market share. This month is not much different: GM China’s February sales rose 51 percent from a year earlier, only 5 percent ahead of the market.

Aficionados of the Chinese bubble theory are now on their feet, shouting “I told you so!” Sales in January had shot up by 115.5 percent. In February, the growth was less than half.  Obviously, the bubble must be bursting. No so fast. Read More >

Even since Landwind crash test, and the Brilliance crash test, the reputation of Chinese cars in Europe has been a little, shall we say, challenging. Watching the bonnet of a car crumble like Professor Gilbert’s theory on Toyota’s UA tofu does have its effect on prospective customers.

But none of this seems to worry BYD. Europe is their next target. Autocar reports that BYD, the maker of China’s biggest selling car, the F3, will be coming to Europe in 2011. Not with their bestselling F3, but with a pure electric E6. The car was introduced at the Geneva Motor Show. Read More >

According to popular wisdom, the Chinese have no love lost for the Japanese. So wouldn’t it stand to reason that China would jump on the “down with Toyota” bandwagon with 2.6b feet? Just the opposite is true. The Chinese government urges caution, tells its auto industry to watch and learn, and to step up its quality. What’s going on here? Read More >

If news about recalls can’t bring Toyota sales in China to their knees, maybe insurance premiums will.

The Nikkei [sub] reports from China that insurance premiums on Toyotas have recently risen by as much as 40 percent. Insurance premiums are going up everywhere in China. No wonder, considering that more than 100,000 die a year on China’s roads, and about half a million are wounded. But Toyota premiums are rising particularly sharply. Read More >

China will most likely announce strong sales numbers for February. Not as strong as in January, when sales of all motor vehicles shot up by 126 percent, but still strong. How do I know this without the official numbers? By looking at GM. GM has always been a good leading indicator for China’s sales. Read More >

Renault is using their Dacia subsidiary to produce cheap cars for Eastern Europe and other emerging markets (such as Germany, where Dacias had been snapped up during the Abwrackprämien-orgy.) Meanwhile, Renault’s Japanese twin Nissan is starting to feel a little left out. Yes, they have the Nissan Pixo, which is a rebadge of the Suzuki A-Star, which is built in India (and was recalled recently), but Nissan seems to want something of their own and they want the Indian truck manufacturer Ashok Leyland to help. Sounds easy enough … Read More >

„Itai!“ Or rather, „tong!“ Ouch, that hurts: Toyota boss Akio Toyoda bowed deeply to 300 reporters assembled in Beijing, and to 1.3b Chinese who could watch the drama live on national TV. Four times in one hour, Toyota’s chief  “apologized to customers in China for the company’s quality problems and emphasized the significance of the nation’s fast-growing market to his company,” as Shanghai Daily has it. There must be nothing more painful for an upstanding Japanese captain of industry than to bow deeply in front of the Chinese. But as they say in China: „bú tòng bù qiáng.” No pain, no gain.  Even more astonishing: Read More >

Dow Jones [via Easybourse.com] has a hot release that is sure to be burning up the wires: Daimler and Chinese EV firm BYD have signed a deal to develop an electric vehicle “specific to the requirements of  the Chinese market.” The new EV will be sold under a new, jointly-run brand and will be developed at a new Chinese technology center to be built as part of the joint venture. According to the release, “the companies’ understanding also includes further discussions on additional business opportunities of mutual interests,” all of which raises some interesting questions. Like why Volkswagen was caught napping: the Wolfsburg boys reportedly signed a MOU with BYD last March, but somehow Daimler has beaten them to the punch… on the very same day that VW announced that it wants to be the electric-mobility market leader by 2018, no less. Another open question: why develop a EV for the Chinese market, when that market’s tolerance for EV premiums appears to be fairly low? After all, with Daimler providing the car expertise, BYD might have a chance at the US and European markets where EV demand is actually proven. Also, how screwed is Tesla at this point? Though these questions remain very much unanswered, BYD is certainly making progress towards becoming a major car biz player, despite the many criticisms that have been leveled against it.

A “person familiar with the situation” tells the Wall Street Journal [sub] that GM is looking into two new offers for the HUMMER brand after a deal that would have sold the brand to China’s Sichuan Tengzhong collapsed. No word on who these two firms are, where they are located, or what they’re smoking to make them interested in the dinosaur brand. The rest of the WSJ piece bemoans the opacity of the Chinese Government’s deal approval system, and details how approval hurdles have scuttled deals in other industries, much to the frustration of American firms. Of course, if GM had listened to TTAC’s Bertel Schmitt, they’d know that:

All joint ventures need to get government approval. However, the Chinese government wants its car industry with more than 100 players to consolidate to a more manageable number. Beijing wants to see four big ones and four smaller ones. What Beijing definitely doesn’t want is more car manufacturers. So instead of saying outright “no,” Beijing is letting the deal get entangled in red tape.

After a lot of to and fro, GM today officially gave up on the Hummer deal. Reuters reports that “General Motors Co will wind down its Hummer SUV line after failing to complete a deal to sell the brand to China’s Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co.”

“We are disappointed that the deal with Tengzhong could not be completed,” John Smith, GM’s outgoing vice president of corporate planning and alliances, said in a statement. This is the last in a row of failed deals Smith misengineered. Read More >

Everybody who’s ever worked in China knows that some things take some time. Nothing that is announced today, happens tomorrow. There are applications to be made, documents to be “chopped.” Sometimes, this process takes forever, as it seems to be the case with Hummer. Sometimes, things move a bit faster. Last December, we reported that GM would sell a crucial one percent of the 50:50 holdings of GM China to their joint venture partner SAIC to bring the shareholdings to 51 percent SAIC, 49 percent GM.

As China’s new year (that of the tiger) came around, China’s biggest automaker SAIC Motor Corp has won regulatory approval to acquire the crucial 1 percent stake in Shanghai GM, Shanghai Daily reports today via Gasgoo. The matter has been officially filed to the Shanghai Stock Exchange yesterday. It’s official now. General Motors officially has been relegated to minority shareholder in its key venture in the world’s largest auto market. SAIC is now calling the shots. Read More >

As connoisseurs will certify, daily Hummers are good for you. The Chinese agree and keep us supplied with the delicious staple of GM (and we don’t mean genetically modified) food.

Yesterday, we announced that time may be running out for the Hummer-Tengzhong deal. Jalopnik even went as far as saying that the deal is dead.

“Not so” said Shanghai Daily in the early Chinese morning hours of Wednesday. One of their sources said that “the chances of having the deal approved had dropped to 50-50,” another source of the Shanghai paper remained defiant: “Tengzhong has not given up hope yet to win government approval.”

This (U.S.) morning, the Wall Street Journal weighed in on the matter. Their Beijing correspondent reconnected with her “person close to the situation” after the source had returned from the Chinese New Year holidays. That impeccable source reported that “Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. has been told that the Chinese government won’t clear its deal to buy General Motors Co.’s Hummer unit.”

In the afternoon, Reuters did a straddle.  Read More >

Although the Chinese government takes much of February off for New Year festivities, GM’s deal to sell HUMMER to Sichuan Tengzhong has exactly one week left before a self-imposed deadline for completion arrives. The deal is being held up by China’s Commerce Ministry which has publicly said that it wants the Chinese auto industry to consolidate and become “greener,” two goals that are severely at odds with Sichuan Tengzhong’s HUMMER aspirations. Now, the Financial Times reports that Tengzhong may be trying to pull an end-around on the Chinese government by pursuing a purchase via an offshore investment vehicle. This would (in theory) evade the requirement for the Commerce Ministry’s approval. In reality … Read More >