Unless a major disaster happens, (such as a falling sky, or a combined blood, fish, frog, and snake rain) Ford will retake the #2 slot from Toyota this year in the U.S. The DetN came to this conclusion after studying the year to date market share of both. In his monthly sales call, Ford’s analyst George Pipas said that Ford has increased its domestic sales at nearly twice the market’s growth rate. Ford’s market share stands at 16.4 percent at the moment, up from 15.3 percent last year. And Toyota? Read More >
Bailing out the U.S. auto industry was all in the name of jobs, jobs, jobs, and the recent sales increases in new cars should have made a decent dent into the jobless rate. It just didn’t work out quite as expected. By the end of the year, J.D. Power expects that 11.8 million units will have been made in North America, up 38 percent from 8.5 million units in 2009. And where did the jobs go? They went mostly south. Read More >
Newly freed from the government’s controlling interest, GM is turning the tables back on the government by accelerating its lobbying efforts some 83 percent in the third quarter of this year. GM spent $2.72m on lobbying in the second quarter of this year, and $2.49m in the third quarter, a massive increase over the $1.36m GM spent in the third quarter of last year (Chrysler spent $846k last quarter). Bloomberg reports
The Detroit automaker had nine registered lobbyists speaking with federal agencies and Congress on free trade agreements, distracted driver legislation, tax credits for electric vehicles, pension legislation, climate change bills [as well as] Wall Street reform; fuel economy regulations; U.S.-Asia trade; pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama; funding for renewable fuel research; defense spending; emergency response privacy regulation; event data recorders; pedestrian safety and other issues
But let’s be real about something: some of these issues are just a little more important than others….
Due to missing parts, GM, Ford and Chrysler had to shut down plants in the U.S. and Canda, or put them on half shifts for the second day, Reuters reports. Read More >
Remember the Schadenfreude when the Department of Justice shook down Daimler for $185 million for corruption allegedly perpetrated in U.S. jurisdictions such as Russia, China, Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria, Iraq, Turkmenistan, and a host of others? To add insult to imbursements, Daimler even had to endure former FBI director and Lewinsky-sperm-on-blue-dress investigator Louis Freeh as anti-corruption compliance officer. In the bargain, the NYSE lost Daimler as a listing, because no NYSE listing, no more SEC probes. Everybody knows that these inducements are quite common in the industry. As evidenced by a massive raid involving around 100 police officers. They descended today on Ford’s German plants, on an unidentified company in Leverkusen and on the private homes of Ford employees. Read More >
The recent “Carpocalypse” has not been kind to automotive engineers, as automakers cut back on Research and Development and fired white collar workers with abandon. Now, with sales regaining some momentum, OEMs and suppliers are hiring engineers again… and they’re having to work to make the hires. The supplier Ricardo recently had to take out billboards and radio ads in order to hire qualified automotive engineers… and this in a state with 12.8% unemployment. CEO Kent Niederhoffer tells Bloomberg
We’re all playing in the same sandbox, competing for some of the same talent. It isn’t as simple as throwing a shingle out there and saying ‘Job Opening.’ Attracting this kind of talent has gotten absolutely tougher and we’re trying to raise our head above the crowd.
The WSJ has come up with a list of the top fifty Gawker passwords. The most common is “1n5i9t7t2f8a6g5m7y5c1t4t2a2o9tc$%”, which is part of the Fibonacci prime sequence interlaced with the first letter of each word of the phrase “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country”, ending with two non-letters to slow down brute-force attacks.
Oh, who am I kidding! The most popular password was 123456! Other popular choices: password! qwerty! superman! iloveyou!
Luckily they haven’t figured out my Jalopnik password yet; I know of one fellow who will be personally offended when it’s retrieved.
Having been cut off the lucrative (and in the end deadly) derivatives business, Porsche looks for other sidelines. And it seems very much like they have found one: Consulting.
“Just as car enthusiasts envy Porsche drivers,” reports Automotive News [sub] “company executives salivate over the carmaker’s profit margins, the highest in the industry.” Said salivation generates juicy business at Porsche. Read More >
According to Brazil’s Globo, Brazil’s baby darling, the new Uno, is outgrowing its baby shoes. Fiat must expand to keep up with the demand. The likely winner will be the northeastern state of Pernambuco. Fiat announced that it is in negotiations with that state’s government. Though the Italians denied that a factory was in the offing, what else should an automaker discuss with a state government? Police cars? It is a well known fact that Fiat needs more capacity. It is also well-known that Fiat and various state governments have been doing the habitual mating dance whenever a maker says it’s looking for a new place to call home. Next year will witness the beginning of operations at three new sites as Hyundai, Toyota and even Chinese Chery are busy building their new factories. The Big 4 (Fiat, VW, GM and Ford) in Brazil all have two factories, except for Fiat. Fiat only has one. Market conditions are now forcing the Italians to commit: Double-up or fold? Read More >
While I was working for the German auto industry (and that wasn’t that long ago), I used to call it the last outpost of unabashed male chauvinism. From dealers (where female customers are treated with disdain) to the boardroom (where women serve coffee), the business remains a man’s world. BMW wants to do something about it. Come on, BMW? Read More >
When you think of cars and Saudi Arabia, you’d be forgiven for thinking of incredibly expensive European cars, typically modified in a particularly distasteful fashion by one of the more crass tuning houses. And indeed, the first Saudi-designed vehicle was a fairly garish SUV known as the Ghazal. But the second-ever Saudi-developed vehicle is actually a very modest, entry-level compact car, known as the Aseela (“Original” in Arabic). This strange little vehicle was developed by the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology’s National Program for Automobile Technology, and debuted this week at the Riyad Auto Show. According to themedialine.com
officials said it was to serve as the basis for a domestic auto manufacturing industry that Saudi Arabia is trying to develop
Yes Virginia, Saudi Arabia is trying to develop an auto manufacturing industry. Well, sort of. According to the report, the Saudis plan on building a $16m production line which will build between 2,000 and 5,000 of the $13,000 Aseelas per year… which makes this more of a “hobby project” than a true “industry.” By contrast, the plan is to build 20k of the ghastly Ghazals over the next three years, at a cost of about half a billion dollars. But then, Saudi Arabia might be one of the few countries where an ugly SUV would fare better than an inoffensive little compact.
Are you a Camry owner who just isn’t sure whether it’s worth surfing that Korean wave? Are you waiting for Kia to deliver that complete Toyota experience? Good news: the new Optima is such a solid competitor to the Big T, it even has its own accelerator-pedal issue!
TTAC has been keeping an eye on China’s near-monopoly on the rare earth compounds required to build hybrid and electric cars for some time now, and we’ve seen the materials become an increasingly controversial issue, culminating in this year’s diplomatic tiff between China and Japan. But, as Bertel has pointed out,
That the Chinese have a stranglehold on rare earth is not because they are the only ones who are are sitting on it. It’s due to laziness and lack of money.
Now, Toyota Tsusho (a partially-owned subsidiary of Toyota Motor Company), has announced plans to stop being lazy and spend money on a rare earth materials plant in the Indian state of Orissa. Tsusho says the factory should come online in 2012, and should produce 3,000-4,000 metric tons of the magnet-hardening materials. Meanwhile, Japanese firms aren’t limiting their search for rare earth materials to India. Bloomberg notes
The shortage in rare earths has brought delegations from Canada, Mongolia and Bolivia to Japan in the past two weeks as these countries promote themselves as alternative sources to China.
Every year, Ward’s names their “10 Best Engines” in a press release dripping with hyperbole and breathless praise. I’m often a bit mystified by their choices — the fragile, sludgy 1.8T VW? The 3.8L Nissan VR, which according to a race-engine-building friend of mine occasionally shows up with the shims on backwards, and which bore-walks under boost? The Cadillac Northstar V8??? — but the nice people at Ward’s have somehow figured out a way to make a buck creating the list and we shouldn’t begrudge them that.
Click the jump for the Ten Best Engines — and a special TTAC Bonus, the Three Worst Sentences Of The Press Release.
Though the US auto market is up 11 percent this year, Honda’s sales are up only 3.6 percent compared to last year’s weak performance. That means the Motor Company isn’t even keeping up with the growth rates of such maligned brands as Lincoln (+7.4%), Chrysler (+16%) and Mazda (+9.8%). But Team Honda isn’t sweating the details. After all, the Civic and CR-V are nearing the end of their model cycles, while the Accord is a year and a half from its replacement. And, as Honda USA’s Executive VP John Mendel tells Automotive News [sub], at Honda
no one talks about share. Chasing share gets you into bad habits. We set a business plan to sell a certain number of cars. We don’t set the plan based on an assumed share. We plan to grow 2 or 3 percent in volume in good times, and bad times. And there are times we’ll give share back.
Which is the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from an exec in Mendel’s situation… unfortunately, there are troubling indicators on the horizon that could cause Honda’s “bad times” to go on longer than anyone expected.
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