GM shows new vigor in its largest market China. October sales across all of GM’s Chinese joint ventures were up 14.3 percent on an annual basis. The Chinese market is of increasing importance for GM. In the first 9 months of the year, 30 percent of GM’s global sales were in China, trailed by the U.S. with 28 percent of GM’s global business. Read More >
Tata Motors is one of the biggest and oldest vehicle manufacturers in India. The company has been building trucks and buses for a long time now. The first passenger vehicle from Tata Motors came in the 1990s and there has been no turning back since then. Tata Motors sells many vehicles in Europe, Asia and Africa, including the Indica Vista, Indigo Manza, Safari and Aria (pictured above). However, these products haven’t shaken the market so far. Read More >
TTAC alumni Ed Niedermeyer has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The piece discusses the spin surrounding the bailout in this year’s campaign. Check it out here.
Hyundai and Kia being called on the carpet for inflated fuel economy claims is a great story for a slow Friday; everybody likes to see a rising star get taken down a notch, and the two Koreans have been the Cinderella story of the auto industry for the last couple of years.
Small wonder then, that in 2010, TTAC reported on some suspect fuel economy figures over in Detroit, similar to what happened with Hyundai/Kia. And nothing was ever done about it.
photo source: Wikipedia
Statistics Canada reports that there are more than 26 million registered vehicles deemed fit to ply our 900,000km of Canadian roadway. Not bad for a group of souls who wear wool socks for six months of the year and feast on poutine. Transport Canada sets regulations for such things (the cars, not the poutine) and is thus charged with crashing, smashing, and otherwise ruining brand new vehicles with single digits on their odometers – all in the name of safety, of course.
Germany’s new car market was up 0.5 percent in October. What looked like bucking the European downtrend was quickly discounted by market observers who noted that October had two more working days than October last year. Taking this into account, Germany is down with the rest of Europe. Meanwhile, sales in France dropped 7.8 percent, and those in Spain are down a gutwrenching 21.7 percent. Read More >
Deciding what to do with a 662 hp muscle car was hard enough. Deciding what to do with the last pristine nearly new RX-7 in the country is even harder — because you can’t do anything with it, really. You certainly can’t street park it. I left it in an open lot the first night, only to discover that someone had put out their cigarette on the decklid. That was it. I ended up paying prices that would make a Manhattanite blush just so I could leave it in a covered multi-story garage visible from the bedroom window of my condo. Night after night I would stare at the slippery yellow shape under the glow of the cheap halogen lights, like a father staring at his premature baby in the neo-natal unit, checking and re-checking despite the near zero probability of anything bad actually happening.
Super-Sandy rained into the sales plans of automakers and destroyed the predictions of America’s best analysts. All, except one: Rod Lache, Deutsche Bank’s star automotive analyst. Read More >
The Ford C-Max’s first full month on sale was a fruitful one for the Blue Oval – the C-Max managed to beat its arch rival, the Toyota Prius V.
Toyota managed to move 2769 Prius V’s in October, compared to 3182 C-Max’s. According to AutoGuide, 25 percent of C-Max sales occurred in California.
TTAC’s inbox was inundated this morning with reports of Hyundai’s revised mileage claims, which remove a number of its vehicles from the 40 MPG club.
According to Hyundai
Procedural errors at the automakers’ joint testing operations in Korea led to incorrect fuel economy ratings for select vehicle lines.
Maybe it’s time for a new way to measure fuel economy standards?
After a rash of interim-CEOs, Opel may have found a more permanent one. It’s the former Volkswagen manager Karl-Thomas Neumann. The successful recruitment was first published by Financial Times Deutschland, the report was quickly confirmed by wire services and major German newspapers. Read More >
European car sales are about to hit lows not seen in two decades, and things aren’t likely to get better any time soon, Reuters writes.
Thailand will be the recipient of a $358 million dollar Nissan plant, with a maximum capacity of 150,000 cars, with half of those set for export.
Sergio Marchionne announced a drastic reorganization of Fiat. In a teleconference today, Marchionne announced the end of Lancia among a wide-ranging change of the company’s brand and model strategy. Read More >
Hyundai has long been in the top spots of America’s most fuel miserly vehicles. Over night, Hyundai will drop a few rungs down. Audited and found wrong by the EPA, Hyundai and Kia agreed to restate the fuel economy ratings on many of its cars. Cars in showrooms will be relabeled. Customers of more than a million 2011 through 2013 vehicles in the U.S. and Canada will receive debit cards. Read More >
Recent Comments