The Congressional Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight and Government Spending held hearings this week on proposed CAFE standards, as part of Chairman Darryl Issa’s investigation of the regulations. The first panel’s testimony can be seen in its entirety in the video above (all prepared testimony can be found in PDF format here), and it’s worth watching. Though the predictable D.C. partisanship certainly shows up, Anwyl’s testimony was the highlight the hearing, being a tough but fair analysis of the standards. Hit the jump for a brief roundup.
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No, it’s not a special-edition 911 with a few extra horsepower and leather-wrapped mirror-adjustment levers. Nor is it a water pipe built to the most exacting standards ever imagined by German engineers. No, Porsche has a freaking palace for sale, Schloss Bullachberg to be precise. Conveniently located in Bavaria’s castle district, near  some of Germany’s most famous castles, Bullachberg was once the seat of the von Thurn und Taxis dynasty… and can now be yours for an undisclosed sum. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports that Porsche bought the property five years ago, for some six million Euros, with plans to turn it into a luxury resort hotel for “kaufkräftig” (literally purchase-powerful) customers and management retreats. Fast forward through one financial crisis and one overambitious attempt to buy Volkswagen, and Porsche has decided to let the property go. But be warned, as the FAZ reports that

only the most necessary work was done on the building’s upkeep.

Now that Ferrari even has its own amusement park (conveniently begun before the financial crisis), there’s no way Porsche will ever match its Italian rival in terms of cross-branded destination tourism. Which is fine. After all, we’re talking about car companies here… right?

Over at CNN Money, Alex Taylor III makes an astute observation about Bill Vlasic’s new book “Once Upon A Car,”

When Hollywood has tried capturing the auto industry on film, it aimed at realistic drama but wound up with suds… What filmmakers have lacked is believable characters and realistic dialogue. Until now, that is, thanks to a new book, Once upon a Car, by veteran Detroit newspaperman Bill Vlasic. Vlasic knows the industry in and out and enjoys near-universal access to its key figures. He recounts a tale filled with shrewd insights into their characters and conflicts told through verbatim accounts of their conversations. It’s the first nonfiction auto book that reads like a screenplay.

This, in a nutshell, is what I found so appealing about Vlasic’s book: it avoids the temptation to turn Detroit’s drama into a morality play, allowing the story to unfold in a personal, organic fashion. In my review of the book, to be published shortly by The Wall Street Journal, I argue that Vlasic’s approach holds a valuable lesson for automotive journalists of all stripes. Taylor, on the other hand, thinks Vlasic’s story is the perfect basis for a movie, and even goes so far as to make some casting suggestions (Al Pacino as Sergio Marchionne, Tom Hanks as Bill Ford, Tom Cruise as Alan Mulally, Sean Connery as Bob Lutz, Tom Wilkinson as Rick Wagoner). We already know there’s an auto industry video game simulation in the works, so I wonder, does the drama of the past few years make the auto industry a worthy subject for a great movie? At least worthier than, say, “The Prince Of Motor City“? If so, would you rather see a historically accurate film based directly on sources like Vlasic’s book, a fictionalized account with real-life characters, or a fictionalized film-à-clef interpretation? Also, wouldn’t Kyle McLaughlin make the better Rick Wagoner? Discuss…

When we reported sales on Monday our conclusion was that “big is big again,” as full-sized pickups dominated growth in a surprisingly up month. So, how do you sell a ton of trucks in a month where gas was still hovering around the $3.50/gal mark? Easy: just throw some cash on the hood. Edmunds Autoobserver reports

From a low that generally occurred around April, Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and the Chrysler Group LLC have markedly hiked incentive spending on full-size pickups. In April, the average TCI for the full-size pickup category – which also includes the almost statistically insignificant Toyota Tundra, Nissan Titan and Honda Ridgeline – was $3,261 per vehicle. At the end of September, the average incentive for full-size pickups ballooned by more than 30 percent to $4,281 per vehicle.

Executives from the Detroit automakers insist that this was not simply an inventory-clearing move (because, by industry standards, having three times your monthly sales on the lot is “acceptable”), but manufacturers have been trimming truck production all year and with Days To Turn rising, clearing off the lots makes sense. Especially going into the traditionally slow truck sales months of October and November. Hit the jump for more September incentive and transaction price data…

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Remember the video of Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn testing the quality of the new Hyundai i30? Thanks to Autobild, we’ve found a companion video from the Frankfurt Show, in which Winterkorn, along with VW Chairman Ferdinand Piech, gives the once-over to the new European-market Honda Civic. According to Autobild, Piech kept his nickname “Fugen-Ferdi” (Gap-Ferdi) relevant by checking the new Civic’s panel gaps. And, in contrast to the Hyundai video, the intelligible portions of Winterkorn’s commentary were less than entirely complimentary. The German magazine reports

A member of the VW entourage says that “(Honda) has had good role models.” But the big boss played down the praise for VW with a smile, and responded generously “they were once a role model for us.”

Note the use of the past tense, then contrast with Winterkorn’s reaction to the Hyundai. In just two videos you can see the balance of automotive power shifting…

Yesterday, we reported that Saab was waiting for some $93 million to arrive from China. The matter has not changed. Now, people on the inside get the impression that yellow knight Youngman wants out. This morning, Swedens’s Dagens Industri cited an inside source that says that Youngman wants out, and another Chinese maker wants in. Yeah, sure. Read More >

Whenever our man in Brazil, Marcello DeVasconcellos reports on new model introductions in his home country, TTAC’s American audience is consistently blown away by the prices commanded by new cars there. Once, when asked why a new VW Amarok costs the equivalent of about $66,000 US dollars in Brazil, Marcello replied

Besides the very high taxes, there are the very, very healthy margins car makers practice down here.

Perhaps too healthy.

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In a press conference that is about to begin in a few minutes in Curitiba, Brazil, (see picture above), Nissan’s CEO Carlos Ghosn is expected to announce the expansion of an existing Renault plant, and the building of a new Nissan factory. And possibly even bigger news. Read More >

The way Jeff Glucker tells it, it was a matter of a few phone calls. The first came from Autoblogs’s Chris Paukert as Glucker was driving his 2000 Civic Si up California’s Interstate 405, letting him know that Jalopnik editor Mike Spinelli would require his attention. We’re going to run a story, Spinelli told him, and he explained that Jalopnik would be “exposing” Glucker’s double-dipping excursion with a PR firm and Autoblog in support of a Nissan Versa promotional campaign. Jeff had taken money from a PR firm to promote the contest. He’d written e-mails to his friends in the autojourno biz, asking them to post stories about the contest on their blogs… and then he’d “put on his other hat,” that hat being labeled “Associate Editor, Autoblog.com” and written a story about the contest for that site. Google “payola”, Spinelli would later message him, referring to the illegal practice of paying radio DJs to play a particular song at the expense of others.

“I don’t have Bluetooth,” Glucker told him, “I’m on the freeway. I need to call you back.” He rolled up the 405 in silence, thinking about his options. What would happen next? Paukert called one more time, asking for some additional details. When the phone rang again, Jeff saw that it was Spinelli, and he didn’t — he couldn’t — answer. He didn’t know what to say. Automotive journalism wasn’t a hobby for him any more. He’d left a lucrative job in another industry to follow his dream of writing about cars, and now he and his wife needed every dollar of his reduced salary just to keep going. Sure, he was on his way to drive a $375,000 Lexus LF-A, but the car that was taking him there, the car he really owned, wouldn’t fetch ten grand. Could he lose his job for this? What would his family say? How would he replace the income? What was going to happen next?

The last call, when it came, was from Autoblog editor John Neff, and it provided the answer to that last question: he was being terminated. Immediately.

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I don’t read MotorAuthority, not considering them to be much of an authority on motorized items of any kind, but when notorious rockstar Blake Z. Rong and “CarGuyDad” Kamil Kaluski both gave me the heads-up on a Singaporean warehouse trying to sell 150 brand new RHD Neons for $1,350 each, I had to take a look.

These are brand-new, Chrysler-badged, right-hand-drive Neons. Most export-spec Neons were fully-equipped, and indeed all the ones in these photos appear to have body-color bumpers. On the other hand, you can plainly see a steel wheel in the photo, and I’ve read that some export Neons had a 1.8L engine in place of the US-market two-liters.

Nearly everybody who looks at the photo, including the author of the MotorAuthority piece, has made a crack about a “spec series”. The original Neon Challenge was a spectacularly successful spec series, the NASA Spec Neon class had a small but devoted following, and the Neon has won plenty of victories in Showroom Stock, Improved Touring, and D Street Prepared trim. Could these 150 Neons be the basis of a low-budget American racing series?

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Considering the United Auto Workers’ VEBA fund is still Chrysler’s second-largest shareholder, CEO Sergio Marchionne is taking an amazingly hard line with the union. With a GM deal long done, and Ford’s deal moving towards approval, Chrysler is the last automaker on the UAW’s to-do list… and Marchionne tells Bloomberg he’s up for a fight if necessary, saying

I sincerely hope that we don’t have to get to arbitration. But if necessary, Chrysler will go there. We and GM are completely different

Marchionne is reportedly pushing the UAW for a number of tough concessions, including a mere $3,500 signing bonus (compared to $5k at GM and a reported $6k at Ford), and the elimination of a planned 2015 cap on entry-level “Tier Two” workers (at 25%). And though both of these are tough asks, he’s using UAW boss Bob King’s concept of union internationalism as a cudgel against the UAW, playing Italian unions off their American counterparts. And as a result, he could earn Chrysler a favored place among America’s unionized autoworkers.
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Whether or not the White House pressured or even contacted Ford Motor Company after the company released their recent ad appealing to anti-bailout sentiments we’ll probably never know. We’ll also probably never know if this was all just a symphony of leaks and disclaimers orchestrated by Ford. What we do know, thanks to a Rasmussen opinion poll [Sub. required, some data here], is that Ford had good reason to stoke American consumers’ resentment against it’s domestic competitors because they were bailed out by the government. The poll shows that the bailout is clearly a factor, sometimes an overriding one, in automobile purchase decisions. Not only did nearly one in five recent Ford buyers say that they or family members specifically chose Ford products because they didn’t take a government bailout, about half of all consumers surveyed said that they were more likely to buy Fords than GM or Chrysler products specifically because Ford didn’t get bailed out. [Note: Yes, Ford took Dept. of Energy loans and other government funds, but this survey was looking at people’s opinions, not facts.]

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If you live in the Houston area, you’re best off avoiding going to have a chance to meet some of your least favorite TTACers this weekend!

Start with the 24 Hours Of LeMons at MSR Houston, where no fewer than three of us — Jack, Sajeev, and Murilee — will be competing and/or judging Saturday. Then on Saturday night, check out The Hideaway where yours truly will be fronting a trio inbetween the headliner sets. Show up early and say hello, or show up late and get punched/molested/bored to tears with stories of the Volkswagen Fox!

The prospect of a Chinese auto industry growing at insane speed thanks to a booming market and resiliently low wages has long kept auto industry execs up at night, most notably inspiring Sergio Marchionne’s acquisition of Chrysler. But basic economic principles dictate that you can have a high rate of growth or low wages… but not both. Growth inevitably drives inflation, which drives up wages, which in turn slows growth. And according to a report in the Wall Street Journal [sub], that dynamic is already taking hold.

Jae-Man Noh, head of Hyundai’s joint-venture operations in China, said average manufacturing-worker wages in China—about 27,000 yuan ($4,200) a year per worker in 2009—are likely to double by 2015 from current levels.

Auto makers are expected to be affected as much as other industries by the trend, if not more, Mr. Noh said, adding that wage costs for many foreign auto manufacturers already have doubled in less than a decade. He said that a rival foreign auto maker that Hyundai has researched has seen worker wages in China rise to 49,000 yuan a year per worker in 2010, up from 24,500 yuan a year in 2003.

“We need to let go of our perception that the Chinese market is a low-cost production base,” Mr. Noh told a group of reporters at Hyundai’s office in Beijing. He didn’t offer specifics on Hyundai’s wage costs in China.

Spyker, the high-end sportscar firm formerly run by Saab “savior” Victor Muller, has been sold to North Street Capital, a US-based private equity firm, reports the FT [sub]. According to the FT,

North Street said in a draft announcement seen by the Financial Times and due to be released later on Wednesday that “the transaction is expected to strengthen [Spyker] in its efforts for new product development and stronger positioning in its factory auto racing team”. No changes in Spyker’s operations are planned. Terms were not disclosed.

Muller had planned to sell Spyker to Vladimir Antonov, Saab’s erstwhile knight in shining (or not) armor but Antonov ran while he could, and now plans to build a modern interpretation of the Jensen Interceptor. Under the proposed sale to Antonov, Spyker was worth “€15m plus an “earn-out” worth up to €17m to be paid over six years,” but because the firm hasn’t produced a single car since 2009, it’s probably been sold for considerably less than that. The firm sold 36 units in 2009, and has never been profitable, losing about $300m last year (while trying to swallow Saab), and about $30m in 2009. In a 2009 interview with TTAC, Muller had targeted “2010 or 2011” as his goal for turning a profit with Spyker, but thanks to the distractions surrounding the Saab “rescue,” it seems safe to assume that goal is nowhere in sight. Which is probably why the FT reports that

A person familiar with the North Street deal said that Swedish Automobile’s talks with CPP had collapsed.

Anyway, best of luck to North Street. Meanwhile, if the financial nightmare part of this story doesn’t particularly interest you, you can always check out Jack Baruth’s review of the $270k Spyker C8 Aileron here.