At the Frankfurt Auto Show, when all the festivities and pageantry are over, it is customary to stroll through the booths, stands and halls of the competition to find out what they have. The real research is done by faceless drones that pose as journalists or customers. The drones must have brought back alarming intell to Halle 3, where Volkswagen holds court: “Ach du mein Lieber, Hyundai fielded a fearsome adversary to the Golf with the new i30.”
The whole white-haired Volkswagen board dropped their coffee cups and invaded the Hyundai display, led by Prof. Dr. Winterkorn, CEO of Volkswagen. Winterkorn himself sat behind the wheel of the i30. The former head of Quality Assurance was shocked: Read More >
This must be the oddest story of the day: According to conventional wisdom, the South Korean market is pretty much closed to American cars. “Not so,” says a company that makes a lot of cars in the U.S. The odd part: The company is Japanese. It’s Toyota. If The Nikkei [sub] has its facts and sources together, then Toyota will export Kentucky-made Camrys to South Korea. Read More >
Back in April, I saw this car at Hyundai’s America Technical Center, but it was still heavily camouflaged and cameras were verboten. And unlike Hyundai’s other big 2012 Model-Year news, the wildly-improved “Grandeur” Azera replacement, we hadn’t seen photos of the updated GenCoupe leak out of Korea. Until now. Our man in Seoul, Walter Foreman, sent us these pics showing an updated Genesis Coupe sporting its own take the familiar familial fascia. Look for an official reveal at the LA Auto Show.
Good news for Opel workers: They could all get Chevys, and GM CEO Dan Akerson won’t sell them down the river, to China, to Korea, or god forbid to Wolfsburg. “We would never give Opel away. Opel contributes to our global size and is not for sale, end of discussion,” Akerson told Germany’s Financial Times Deutschland. An unambiguous statement. Opel workers would have loved to hear it a bit earlier. But better late than Hyundai.
Akerson had more news. Some good. Some, well, you decide … Read More >
According to Germany’s usually well informed AUTO BILD, Korea’s Hyundai either did or still does cast longing eyes on struggling Opel. Opel is on Hyundai’s horizon, literally: Hyundai’s German tech center in Rüsselsheim is only a few miles away from Opel. “Hyundai is growing faster than any other automaker. They are desperately seeking new engineers at the Hyundai tech center,” writes AUTO BILD, “and the plant in Czech Nošovice cannot be expanded further. Opel with thousands of well trained engineers, precious EV know-how (Ampera) and underutilized plants would be a great fit.” And this is how the latest car-cliffhanger started … Read More >
Mahindra & Mahindra’s abortive plans to bring its rugged diesel-powered pickups to the US have garnered quite a cult following here at TTAC. We follow the impending coming of M&M religiously. And now we demand license fees for the continuously coming cult car. Read More >
To bridge the time until Kia reports hard numbers for June, we did some spreadsheet acrobatics and arrived at the attached. The black numbers are hard reported numbers, the grey numbers are calculated. If Reuters’ 22 percent are correct, then the June table for Hyundai-Kia should look something like this: Read More >
The front end of the forthcoming 2013 Malibu is cleanly handsome in a somewhat bland, international style… but that booty could only come from America! We haven’t seen much of the Malibu outside of still shots, and this video (hunted down by our man in Korea, Walter Foreman) is almost as jarring as seeing a car in person for the first time. In fact, it’s beginning to seem like the Malibu, with its very different front and rear-end treatments and what appears to be a featureless wasteland in between, is going to be difficult to properly appreciate until we see it in person.
When Korean EV maker CT&T decided to crack the US market they took a high profile that left some observers scratching their heads. The plans seemed a bit ambitious. Two years ago, CT&T announced that it would begin importing and then producing electric cars in the US, eventually employing 2,600 people within five years. The small EV maker dangled production sites in front of South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama and California, looking for tax breaks and incentives. Eventually they settled on Hawaii, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, and those states greeted CT&T with huzzahs and open arms. To announce to the world that they were playing in the automotive big leagues, CT&T had a fairly large display at the 2010 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, showing their tiny EVs and a new electric sportscar, the C2, for Creative Challenge (or at least that’s what the decals on the side said).
TrueCar released its May 2011 sales forecast. At this time in the calendar, these forecasts, based on real transactional data, usually come close to reality. For May 2011, TrueCar expects new light vehicle sales in the U.S. to be 1,060,392 units, down 3.7 percent from May 2010 and down 8.3 percent from April 2011(unadjusted basis for sales days). This would be a Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate (SAAR) of 11.85 million new car sales, down from 13.18 million in April 2011 and only slightly up from 11.63 million in May 2010. Why the sudden reluctance? Read More >
See that? Looks a bit like a first-generation Scion xB, doesn’t it? It’s actually a new Kia, codenamed “Tam,” built on its new A-segment Picanto Morning platform, but featuring first-gen xB-style tall-body MPV packaging. The Picanto’s wheelbase is actually slightly smaller than the xB’s, and there’s another key difference here as well: see that rear door? Look where the handle is placed. That’s right, it’s a slider! But that’s not all…
Assembly lines at South Korea’s Hyundai Kia ground to a halt this weekend after the companies ran out of a needed engine parts. Production of Hyundai’s Tucson ix, Santa Fe and Veracruz and Kia’s Carnival has stopped. On Wednesday, production of most of Hyundai’s and Kia’s cars will be affected unless the parts shortage is solved. The Korean units of GM and Renault will suffer, as well as Ssangyong. Do they all get their engines parts from Japan? Read More >
In late December, Ed Niedermeyer reported that Hyundai’s “Euro-market midsizer, known as the i40, will debut as a wagon at the Geneva Auto Show in March, with a sedan version coming later next year:” Ed was right: The sedan will be shown at the Barcelona Auto Salon, May 14 to 22. Hyundai is taking aim at a big target: Volkswagen. Read More >
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