After making rather disparaging remarks about the management culture at Jaguar Land Rover, Tata CEO Ratan Tata is attempting to do some major damage control after he criticized the Brits in a May, 2011 interview with The Times.
Although the article is hidden behind a pay wall, Tata is widely quoted as saying that “…nobody is willing to go the extra mile, nobody.” At the Delhi Auto Show, Tata essentially backtracked on his comments, saying his fairly explicit comments were misunderstood.
While Detroit is getting ready for NAIAS, the archetypical Detroit company is showing its newest truck in India. At the New Delhi Auto Expo, Ford today unveiled the second generation of its EcoSport “compact SUV.” Our friends at India’s Motorbeam.com were there to snap some pictures for you. According to Ford’s press release, the SUV “will eventually be sold in nearly 100 markets worldwide.” So why haven’t you heard of a Ford EcoSport before? Read More >
Today, Nissan/Renault’s Indian partner Rajaj introduced an ultra low-cost car. Actually, Rajaj does not call it a car. Rajaj calls it a “four wheeler.” An analyst called it an “upgraded rickshaw.” Rajaj thinks the analyst is right on target. Read More >
Yesterday, the alleged enthusiast blog did play its usual “if we would tell you, they would shoot us” about a possible suitor from India:
“We are not allowed to reveal the identity of the company yet, but we are allowed to reveal some facts about it. They are of course based in India but acts on a world-wide basis with much more than 100’000 employees worldwide. They are a multi-billion dollar company, that work on multiple fields such as energy, logistics, real estate and of course within the aerospace and automotive industry.” Read More >
Another day, another disappointment for American fans of the Indian automaker Mahindra’s rugged, diesel-powered trucks. Earlier rumors that Mahindra might build its trucks with Navistar in Alabama turn out to be false, as a press release published at MahindraPlanet notes
MUMBAI, India, December 17, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — “There have been reports in certain quarters of media and online space stating that Navistar USA will produce Mahindra’s T20 and T40 pick ups in Alabama, USA in 2012, which are completely baseless & incorrect. If & when there are any material developments, Mahindra & Mahindra Limited will communicate them directly and transparently.”
If you haven’t given up on the Mahindra dream, now might be a good time to consider it…
Car sales in India got it under the chin in October. In October 2011, sales of passenger cars were down 23.77 percent, utility vehicles were up a hair at 0.41 percent, sales of vans decelerated by 17.57 percent. Read More >
Designed to be the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano is supposed to compete with scooters and three-wheelers rather than full-priced, global-brand vehicles. But the Nano has already seen several price increases since the target MSRP of $2,500 was announced, and the price in India for a base-level Nano is now about $2,870. And when you talk about such low prices, even small increases can wreak havoc on expected volumes, and as a result the Nano is turning into something of a flop (helped along by its pyromania problem).
Read More >
As I noted earlier this week, GM’s decision to bring a pure-electric version of the Chevy Spark to the US opens up an interesting challenge to its “range anxiety”-centric marketing approach. But WardsAuto reports that there’s another challenging question coming out of the decision: where will the baby EV be built? And as I’ve found, GM’s reticence on the topic of the Spark EV program only deepens the mystery for Wards, which writes
Some media are reporting the EV will come from South Korea, where gasoline- and diesel-powered Sparks currently are produced. If so, that’s news to the folks at GM Korea.
GM confirms
Chevrolet today announced it will produce an all-electric version of the Chevrolet Spark mini-car – the Spark EV. It will be sold in limited quantities in select U.S. and global markets starting in 2013, including California.
A123 Systems will supply the advanced nanophosphate lithium-ion battery packs that will power the Spark EV. Details on specific markets, range, quantities and pricing will be announced later.
Well, I was wrong about the battery supplier. Otherwise, we should have seen this coming. The only question now is this: how does GM overcome its own “range anxiety” fearmongering? And by doing so, will it hurt the Volt’s marketing?
GM seems hell bent on convincing the automotive media that it’s better to stay behind their keyboards than show up to events like the Chevrolet Centennial event I was lured into. While my fellow oblivious “automotive journalists” and I were shuttled around GM’s facilities for some luxurious but entirely un-newsworthy “access,” the folks that aren’t here have scooped us suckers on the only remotely relevant news to come out of this event. The Detroit News‘s Christina Rogers reports that a news conference scheduled for about 12 hours from now will give GM occasion to announce that it will bring a
a small, battery-powered vehicle designed for urban market
to the US market. And, in the time-honored blogging tradition of speculating about speculation, GreenCarReport‘s John Voelcker has connected the dots that seem to confirm that this forthcoming EV will be based on the Spark City Car. All while us event attendees were still at the bar, drinking on GM’s dime. Oy…
While the discussion about the value of the yen continues (also at TTAC), the exodus from Japan is picking up steam. Toyota is joining other carmakers that quietly turn India into a car export nation to be reckoned with. Toyota’s Chief Engineer Yoshinori Noritake (above) soon will be able to smile: Toyota’s subsidiary in India will export Toyota’s and Noritake’s “BRIC car”, the Etios, to South Africa in March 2012. Read More >
India will likely report a good September for most of its carmakers. The final numbers are not expected until a week from now, but here are the results of some of the most important ones. Keep in mind that these “sales” numbers are the total of what has been sold in India and what has been shipped abroad. The Indian domestic market is still a bit sluggish, but exports are picking up nicely. Read More >
The NYT’s opinion page has a provocative piece by Siddhartha Deb today. It explores the role that automobiles play in the class dynamics of a modernizing India. Deb writes
Until the mid-1990s, cars had been mainly available in two models in India: the unglamorous, onion-shaped, sturdy Ambassador and the more aerodynamic Maruti 800. Both were produced by state-run companies (though the latter had a partnership with the Japanese company Suzuki). But when India began to open its markets, a wide range of cars became available, just as rising middle-class incomes and cheap consumer credit made buying such cars feasible.
In many ways, the marriage between the Indian middle class and the automobile culture has been disastrous. Roads remain awful, drivers continue to be erratic, and traffic in cities like Delhi and Bangalore is worse than ever. And yet the car has become deeply enmeshed with upward mobility, while also complicating that mobility. In the India of the Ambassador and the Maruti, the distinction was largely between those who owned cars and those who did not. In the India of Ford, Fiat, Hyundai and Mahindra — where there is even a very cheap indigenous model called the Tata Nano — distinctions are parsed in terms of the model one owns.
Drom the Bollywood producer’s suit-matched Bentley Continental to a struggling middle class couple’s divorce over the wife’s aspirations to a red Mitsubishi Pajero, Deb documents the cars, and other forms of transportation, which help define the emerging class order in India. It’s a brief but intriguing glimpse into the social impact of cars in a rapidly-growing economy, and it illustrates how cars both affect and reflect the fabric of social order. Give the whole thing a read if you’ve got a spare minute.
The board of GM has a week-long meeting in Shanghai. Someone just happened to be in the same place at the same time, and quite possibly unearthed the secret all of India is dying to hear: Under what brand will the Wuling cars be introduced once they hit India? Apparently, not Wuling. Read More >
After only 18 months on the job (and he did a good job) Carl-Peter Forster resigned his job as group CEO and managing director of Tata Motors. In a press release, Tata cites “unavoidable personal circumstances”. The industry is scratching their combined heads: What are those reasons? Are they real, or the usual BS? Read More >
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