Ford did not disappoint and today announced its biggest annual profit in a decade. According to a Ford release, the company booked $8.3 billion in pre-tax profits for 2010. That is a $3.8 billion increase from a year ago. Read More >
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After Hyundai delivered a record profit of $4.7 billion yesterday, smaller sibling Kia announced its results today. The Kia’s 2010 net profits rose 55 percent to approximately $2 billion. Some analysts expected more, but the fourth quarter had only a rise of 4.6 percent.
Kia adds another 2,131,531 units to the combined Hyundai/Kia grand total, which now (according to our unofficial TTAC calculations) stands at 5,744,018 units. Where does that leave Ford? Read More >
GM has just dropped a press release [in .docx format here] announcing that it has withdrawn its request for $14.4b in low-cost government retooling loans through the Department of Energy’s “Section 136” or ATVM loan program. Says CFO Chris Liddell
This decision is based on our confidence in GM’s overall progress and strong, global business performance. Withdrawing our DOE loan application is consistent with our goal to carry minimal debt on our balance sheet. Our forgoing government loans will not slow our aggressive plans to bring more new vehicles and technologies to the market as quickly as we can. We will continue to make the necessary investments to assert our industry leadership in technology and fuel economy.
Color us stunned. The “136” loan program was nearly used as a slush fund to bail out GM and Chrysler before President Bush ruled that the automakers qualified for TARP relief. Shortly after the bailout, GM said that the loan program was “one of the sources of liquidity GM is factoring into its plans in order to meet its capital requirements in the future.” More recently, it seemed that the loan program was on hold while GM and Chrysler were qualifying for loan requests that would have drained the program of funds. Now, with GM’s request dropped from the queue, there could be as much as $10b left for other manufacturers. Plus, by turning down cheap government loans, GM has made its first major (voluntary) step towards beating back the Government Motors moniker. Good for them.
Volkswagen workers in Wolfsburg are looking forward to a long weekend. No work on Monday, come back Tuesday. Are people not buying enough cars? Im Gegenteil. They are buying too many. Volkswagen is seriously running out of parts. Read More >
There’s a new show on cable called “Shameless”. Supposedly it has Emily Rossum in a topless kitchen sex scene. Actually, I’m going to go watch it right now, come to think of it.
…And we’re back. Hmm. That was shameless, alright, but you know what’s even more shameless? Writing a story that exposes you as a hack, a dupe, and what the Communists used to call a “useful idiot”. Yesterday’s opinion piece on Autoblog, entitled How Bob Lutz Made Four Journalists His Secret Weapons, is just such a story. Let’s dig in.
It probably won’t come as too huge of a surprise to many of TTAC’s regular readers that the first car blog I ever read was Pete DeLorenzo’s Autoextremist.com. This was years ago, years before I ever imagined that I would get pulled into the crazy world of the auto industry, and at the time I was deeply impressed. Here was a guy who, having seen the Detroit machine from the inside, was documenting the self-destruction of an industry with an unmistakable bravado and flair for storytelling. In retrospect, it’s strange to realize that my tastes for automotive coverage were well-defined before I ever considered entering the profession.
In any case, writers are forever challenged when the stories they grow to love take a turn for the unexpected, and DeLorenzo seemingly abandoned his caustic style by the time the auto bailout hit. But cheerleading never quite sounded right coming from the man peddling “bare-knuckled, unvarnished, high-octane truth,” and TTAC took the Autoextremist to task for some of his more brazen pom-pomery during the fevered bailout debates. Still, when the bailout-era wagon-circling was over, DeLorenzo could no longer contain the angry spark that once inspired TTAC’s founder to offer to post Autoextremist rants on this very site. And after warming back up over the past year by using Ed Whitacre as his rhetorical punching bag, I’m pleased to say the Autoextremist is back to his bombastic pre-bailout form. His inspiration: the leadership (or lack thereof) of GM’s latest CEO, “Lt. Dan” Akerson…
I came home tonight to see that Consumer Reports is trying to scare me out of buying a Honda Insight. The joke’s on them! I was going to buy a 2003 Crown Vic LX Sport!
Really, though… Did you ever think you’d see the day when CR wouldn’t recommend a Honda? Even in the darkest moments of the Acura transmission fiasco, the lab-coated crew could barely bring themselves to diss the brand. After all, they were too busy using robots to roll Troopers.
On Friday, Ford will show something it didn’t have for a long time: Money, and lots of it. The Freep thinks that Ford will report a profit for 2010 of about $8 billion excluding onetime charges. That would be the biggest annual profit Ford saw in a decade. Read More >
Beep.
Whooosh. I couldn’t take it any more. “Why, why, WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT? STOP TOUCHING THE SCREEN!”
One of the questions that came up in yesterday’s post, The Truth About The Ten Best-Selling Sedans Of 2010, was how to interpret a high percentage of fleet sales. After all, “fleet sales” could describe a huge variety of sales to diverse buyers at widely varying price (and profit) points. Rental fleet sales are widely seen as being far worse than other types of sales, which is why the resale value trackers at Automotive Lease Guide keep such a close eye on what they call “Rental Fleet Penetration.” In its latest newsletter, ALG notes
ALG tracks several key metrics that impact residual values and brand health. Of these metrics, rental fleet penetration (RFP), which ALG measures as the total number of vehicles sold into rental fleet channels divided by total sales, has been found to have an impact on both residual performance and perception of quality… As a general rule, ALG recommends RFP levels below 10% for Mainstream brands and <5% for Luxury brands to avoid any negative impact from rental fleet sales on residual performance.
For a company that’s crowing about its sales growth and profitability, General Motors has been doing the kind of executive shuffling we became accustomed to seeing in the bad old days before the bailout. Already this week, freshly-minted Global Marketing boss Joel Ewanick put his former Hyundai colleague Chris Perry in charge of Chevy’s US marketing, and transferred Buick marketing duties from John Schwegman to former Volt marketer Tony DiSalle. The head of Onstar, Chris Preuss, has also stepped down this week, leaving former Sprint Nextel and Verizon executive Linda Marshall in charge. And today came the big one: 49 Year-Old Mary Barra has replaced Tom Stephens at the top of GM’s new-product development team as Stephens ascends to the new position of Chief Technology Officer.
These changes come straight from the top, as CEO Dan Akerson created the chief global marketing officer and chief global technology officer positions, requiring other executives like Barra and Perry to move up in the company. But will “global” czars actually catch GM up on new product development, one of its major deficits vis-a-vis the competition? More importantly, will Barra simply become the latest GM lifer to bump up against the Peter Principle? The fact that she’s leaving Human Resources to take on The General’s most important task certainly has the scent of Old GM’s corporate politics on it…
Read More >
I didn’t get to spend much time with Chrysler’s revamped lineup at last week’s NAIAS, but my lovely assistant did take me on a brief tour of the lowlights: wiggly-jiggly dials, door handles that feel like they’re about to fall off in your hand and other overlooked details. Anyone can accuse me of anti-Chrysler bias, but in the preconception-free words of the light of my life (a non-TTAC-reading architectural historian), the updated 2011 Chrysler Group models were “the weakest bunch of cars at the show.”
Her harsh words were vindicated on the flight home, when a perusal of the latest Motor Trend (February 2011, featuring the news of late November 2010) struggled to justify the first part of its headline COMEBACK!: Can Chrysler Make It Stick This Time? Though MT gave the new ChryCo its best dose of pro-Detroit generosity (for example, determining that the 2011 Charger R/T is a “proper” transmission away from earning E39 M5-like “reverence”), nearly every write-up ended with a question or a qualification. And if MT isn’t willing to definitively say that these products will save Chrysler, who will? Apparently not CEO Sergio Marchionne, who is already hyping the products behind the next door…
Are you interested in owning your own 7.5-mile high-speed oval and five-mile road course? What about an off-road racing course for motorcycles and Baja trucks? It looks like Honda’s finally come up with a product that appeals to enthusiasts… but they only have one of them, and the pricing is likely to be even more outrageous than the window sticker on the ZDX. Check out the listing here.
Whoa! Is there a doctor in the house? We seem to have a bit of a situation here. UAW’s President Bob King threatened that the union will label anti-union companies as human-rights abusers. Read More >
Poor Professor Higgins! On he plods/Against all odds! Well, he had a tough job: changing a girl from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks into a prim and proper member of society. I had a simpler task in mind. I wanted to make sure that my hairdresser/girlfriend/bodyguard, the infamous Vodka McBigbra, could legitimately attend all this year’s auto shows with me. She actually works pretty hard at the events, lugging the Steadicam and obtaining everything from AA batteries to front-row seats so I can keep my Kiton jackets free of wrinkles, but a few of the shows don’t permit “assistants”. Publish or perish is their motto. Not a problem. I decided to make an authentic automotive journalist out of her. How tough could it be?
Meanwhile, our friends at General Motors were working on a not entirely dissimilar project. They’d identified some “bloggers”, given them all-expenses-paid trips to Detroit, and led them on a two-day adventure where they would be fed plenty of talking points to uncritically reTweet along the way. It isn’t cheap to fly people from the coasts to the Midwest, put them up in a top-notch hotel, feed them, and keep them entertained, so naturally GM would want to make sure they got their money’s worth.
The stage was set for a titanic contest. Sure, the playing field wasn’t level. After all, I’ve never gone bankrupt, the UAW doesn’t control my labor supply or my finances, and I didn’t design the 1984 Eldorado. Still, the plucky underdogs from the RenCen had a few tricks up their sleeves to even the odds…
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