As TTAC has argued before, electric cars are great… as long as you don’t have to own one. Now, even the automakers are starting to wonder if they should even bother selling the things. BMW, which has already experienced issues with consumer EV letdown, is already starting to back away from the idea of selling (rather than, say, leasing) its much-anticipated Megacity electric city car. Sales Boss Ian Robertson tells Automotive News Europe [sub]

We’re looking for an alternative to traditional purchase or leasing of a vehicle. We don’t want to sell the car, but rather the use of the car. The ‘Car to Go’ concept “is an interesting approach. More and more people in large cities are looking for an alternative to the ownership of a vehicle

Or, more accurately, BMW is looking for an alternative to trying to sell an extremely high-cost, premium EV with killer depreciation. Either way, it seems that OEMs and consumers are starting to meet in the middle on this whole EV thing…

Yeah, yeah, we know… wood and beige leather are out, edgy and blacked-out are in. But did anyone expect that these hot, youthful trends would give rise to a murdered-out factory special Cadillac CTS-V Coupe? Now, more than ever, this thing is “Darth Vader meets Don Draper.”

Worried that Chrysler has lost touch with young buyers? Worry no more! Chrysler’s Tim Kunisis tells Automotive News [sub]

There are two paths: the traditional Chrysler path and the S path. There’s a huge customer base for chrome and wood. There are also people who want something a little edgy.

As a result, Chrysler is introducing its “S” line, a trim level that stands for Style rather than Sport, which will encourage these edgy Chrysler customers to tart up their Mopar metal with non-traditional accessories. Nor is “S” a top-level trim designation, but will be available on the standard 300, the 300 Limited and the 300C. And though Chrysler is showing an “S” version of its outgoing 2010 300, the first new “S”-branded vehicle will be the 200, which should look something like the Moparized 200 shown at the Detroit Auto Show. And if the whole “what’s in-what’s out” question is giving you some trouble, AN [sub] provides the hand guide below.

As any sales-watcher knows, volume isn’t everything. Fleet-retail mixes, incentive spending and transaction prices are all important considerations for putting volume numbers into context. As usual, we’ve assembled Edmunds’ True Cost Of Incentives index as well as TrueCar’s Transaction Pricing and Incentive Spending forecasts, for a complete picture of these important metrics… and after the jump, we’ve added a few notes on the discrepancies between the two firms’ numbers.

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Porsche is known for fleecing is customers for extras. Now, they give them away. Porsche sells two special editions of the 911 Carrera and the Boxster, filled with a lot of extras for the price of a base model. Or thereabouts. „A special edition at Porsche is as common as a total eclipse of the sun in Europe,“ writes AutoBild in Germany. Why the sudden generosity? Read More >

Throughout the month, TTAC tries to go back to recent sales numbers in hopes of providing greater context for the industry’s day-to-day decisions. On the first of each month, however, we get so overwhelmed with volume numbers, we thought we’d take this opportunity to explore the price-volume frontier. Inspired by recent rumors of a 120k unit production goal for the $41k Volt and the ensuing discussion of the BMW 3 Series’ unique position on the price-volume frontier, we thought we’d feel around the data for this mythical plateau. Sadly our unsophisticated graphing software (and overworked editor) didn’t allow for a more full exploration of high-priced vehicles reaching near-mass-market volumes, so we put together a “basket” of higher-priced, strong-selling models. And though we obviously cherry-picked a little, we did use four manufacturers to indicate an approximate “delta” between price (base MSRP) and volume (2010 numbers). Are there outliers to our “price-volume frontier”? Possibly. Did we leave out the most interesting area of the graph (the mass-market vehicles) Definitely. But in the process we have hopefully proved that selling over 100k units of a vehicle costing $40k or more is not a goal to be taken lightly.

Yes, everyone loves to hate on the BMW 3 Series’ success… but nobody loves to hate it like the Mercedes C63 AMG. And with a new version for 2012, Benz’s Bavarian-burner has about as good a shot as anything else on the market of convincing Mr Prospective Sports Sedan Buyer out of an M3. Meanwhile, it also serves as a stern, 481 HP warning to Jaguar, Cadillac and the assorted Dreier-chasers: when you’re chasing such a coveted market segment, you have to go big or go home [nauseating technical details for the 2012 C-Class can be found here].

Our not-quite-colleagues at AutoWeek are between a rock and a hard place nowadays. Back in the dinosaur days of the biz, subscribing to AW made sense. The writing was usually auto-weak, and there wasn’t much insight to be found in the reviews, but it was far more timely than the rest of the color rags. If you wanted up-to-date news on the auto shows, the press-preview events, and European rallies, there was only one magazine with the goods.

Needless to say, the Mandel clan’s rather cozy little empire ran into an Outside Context Problem when the World Wide Web arrived on their shores, chock-full of Jalopniks, Autoblogs, and TTACs. I can’t think of any reason to subscribe to AutoWeek, and judging by the increasing desperation with which they are soliciting me as a subscriber, neither can anyone else.

How, then, can Dutch and company keep the lights on at AW headquarters? I dunno… how about renting press cars?

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Well, the problem isn’t so much that compact cars aren’t youthful… it’s that the buyers of compact cars are surprisingly un-youthful. The C-Segment, compact cars in the class of Honda’s Civic, Toyota’s Corolla, Ford’s Focus and Chevy’s Cruze, are typically thought of as “Kid Cars,” or first-time automobile purchases for younger buyers. That stereotype may still be true, but if it is, the young buyers aren’t actually buying the cars. This week, Ford’s executive in charge of launching compact cars like the forthcoming 2012 Focus turned my perspective on the C-Segment upside down by telling me that Ford’s research showed that the average age of a compact car buyer was… get this… 57 years old. Given that TTAC has questioned the viability of the Buick brand for having an average buyer age in the low-to-mid 60s, it’s worth considering the reasons for the surprising age of C-segment buyers. And while we’re at it, let’s throw another stereotype on the fire, namely the old chestnut that compact cars are “basic transportation” for folks who can’t afford a car in the next class up. According to Ford’s data, 50 percent of C-Segment buyers come from households making $75,000 per year or more.

I wish TTAC had more of this kind of demographic data to share, so we could track changes in compact car-buying demography over time, but it seems fairly clear that the compact class is attracting older, more affluent buyers than it once did. So we want to know: how do you interpret these trends? Will older, richer buyers continue to downsize, or is this a short-term phenomenon driven by gas prices and economic recession? Meanwhile, what impact will this shifting demography have on compact cars themselves?

Volvo has come to the kind of conclusion we haven’t heard from an automaker in some time: it’s selling too many models. With nine models currently on the market, the Chinese-owned Swedish automaker has opted to cut that number by “five or six” nameplates, and will rebuild its US lineup around its XC60 and XC90 crossovers, and S60 sedan. As a Volvo spokesman explains to Bloomberg

We have to focus on the key segments with significant volume potential.

The first model to go from the lineup will be the V50 station wagon, but from there it’s anyone’s guess. To help kick off the speculation, we present the graph above, charting the recent sales fortunes of the nameplates that Volvo is considering for death. Since the one model on the chart that has already been marked for death (the V50) has the lowest volume, it might be safe to guess that the next model up the volume ladder (C30) will be the next to die. From there, it’s a lot more complicated. Last year the S40 moved 5,623 units, the C70 sold 5,263 units, the XC70 sold 6,626 units and the S80 sold 7,724. In terms of sheer volume, there’s reason to kill every one of these nameplates… but strategically there’s just as much of an argument for investing in any one of them. Too bad there’s only marketing resources for “five or six” nameplates. So, which models would you kill?

Chevy dusts off its “may the best car win” theme with a series of videos “daring” consumers to compare the Cruze… with its outgoing competition. The absurdity of the alleged
“comparison” is probably best highlighted in this video, in which the 2011 Cruze takes on a 2010 Elantra… even though an all-new 2011 Elantra is already at dealerships. With a much-improved 2012 Focus coming soon as well, a similarly rigged bashing of the outgoing Focus is made only slightly less unfair by the fact that the Focus isn’t available yet. Ditto the Honda Civic smackaround. And the Corolla. It’s almost as if Chevy knows that the Cruze is about to face some of the toughest competition in the industry… with a design that has been produced since 2008. Too bad the bowtie brand doesn’t seem willing to face the challenge.

Volkswagen captures the schizophrenia of the SUV phenomenon by offering the Qatar auto show two ways to Touareg: the rugged rally-raid fantasy of its Dakar racer-for-the-street “Race Touareg” and the status-seeking bourgeois bling of the Touareg Gold Edition. Which raises an interesting question: if both were offered for sale, which would sell better? I’m sure most of TTAC’s readers would join me in saying I’d buy the Race Touareg but sell the Gold Edition. After all, urban posing is the mass-market reality underlying the rugged outdoorsy fantasy of SUV marketing.

Toyota “Lessons” TV Spot from electrocinema on Vimeo.

Edmunds’ has looked over its in-house shopping patter data, and has some bad news for the number one automaker in the US:

In December, 17.9 percent of car shoppers considered Toyota vehicles — 2.3 percentage points below levels seen in December 2009, before the 2.3 million-vehicle recall for potentially sticky accelerator pedals. Overall, Edmunds finds that 2010 consideration for Toyota vehicles was down about 3.8 percentage points year over year…

Evolving cross-shopping patterns on Edmunds.com also demonstrate the diminished power of Toyota’s brand. Consumers interested in traditional competitors like Nissan and Honda considered Toyota vehicles less often in 2010. Meanwhile, Suzuki shoppers – who qualify for higher interest rates, accept longer loan terms and make lower down payments, suggesting a lower economic status — increased their Toyota shopping considerably in the last year.

In recent months, though, some specific Toyota models are elbowing back in on traditional competitors. The rate of Edmunds visitors cross-shopping the Nissan Altima with the Toyota Camry, for example, has approached levels seen before the reports of unintended acceleration captivated the media and its audience last year.

The car-shopping site’s takeaway: Toyota isn’t just struggling against negative perceptions brought on by last year’s unintended acceleration recall… it needs new products. Which means Toyota’s plan to unveil 11 new or refreshed models through 2012 is coming just in the nick of time. Still, if those products don’t actually wow consumers rather than simply skating by on Toyota’s faded reputation, Toyota’s greatest strength, the trust and loyalty it enjoys from consumers, could be slip away. And given how disappointing the refreshed Corolla seems (at first blush… testing is still needed) in comparison to its hot-and-fresh competitors from Ford, Hyundai and Chevy, there’s a real risk that this could happen. Scandals come and scandals go… but resting on laurels is what really kills in this business.

Typically when an automaker launches its first EV, the standard procedure is to spend a lot of time talking about how this car will change the world. Not so with Audi. Having created an “e-tron” EV concept version of its Auto Union Type C pedal car, Audi is backing up its modest EV ambitions with some tough talk from CEO Rupert Stadler aimed at putting EVs in their proper place. Stadler tells Automotive News [sub] that

We are still in the early phase with the electric vehicle, in terms of commercialization and whether the cars will be sold or leased, or will just be a collector’s car. First of all we have to industrialize the lithium-ion-battery. This is happening with the hybrid cars which now have the role of a bridge technology. We should not overplay euphoria for electric vehicles. Our industry is in the middle of a system change and we still have a lot of challenges to solve.

And, just as its CEO admits, Audi still has real issues with the commercialization of EVs: for one thing, even its e-tron kiddy car is still a one-off modification of its €9,700 pedal-powered Type C racer. Audi currently has no plans to commercially produce the 1.5 HP, 25 km range EV sportster. Perhaps its too early to say for certain that Audi will be able to knock Tesla off its solitary spot atop the EV sportscar world.

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.