The German trio – Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi – is having an intense battle in India. While the luxury car segment is not really big (20,000 units a year) yet in India, the three automakers are trying their level best to claim the number 1 position. India is regarded “the next China” , nobody wants to get caught napping. What this has resulted in, is an onslaught of vehicles. All three automaker don’t reveal segment wise sales, but are quick to claim that their cars outsold the others. That said, the German automakers will soon feel the heat from Volvo and Jaguar, which are slowly but surely building inroads in the segment. Read More >

Former Nissan racer Steve Millen’s aftermarket performance company Stillen is running a contest involving Facebook. Amateur designers can style the company’s body kit that will accompany Stillen’s performance toys for the Scion FR-S. The winner will get to attend SEMA this November, when the body kit will have its first public display. When I saw the headline my first thought was, “What, another social media hypefest?” Just the other day, Derek Kreindler questioned the value of Nissan’s efforts to crowdsource product planning via social media sites. Does the general public know any more about designing cars than it does about product planning? Read More >

Just Imagine What I Can Do To Your Car!

Everybody wants a deal. But precious few people are willing to change their habits to make their deal last longer.

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The major Indian news operations are pretty much flooding the zone in covering the riot and lockdown at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar plant. Besides whatever labor unrest there was at play in the Manesar factory riot, internal politics within the state of Haryana or competition with Gujurat state may have had something to do with it, with accusations of conspiracies and outside influences. Here is a rundown of the news. Read More >

CBS 5 – KPHO

While Arizona is battling its wildfires, Nissan is having its hands full dousing the flames of Leaf owners in the Grand Canyon state. There is a rash of reports about degrading batteries, and owners blame the scorching heat.

“When I first purchased the vehicle, I could drive to and from work on a single charge, approximately 90 miles round trip,” a Leaf owner, still an ardent fan of the car, told the Phoenix CBS affiliate. “Now I can drive approximately 44 miles on this without having to stop and charge.”

A TTAC reader reports: Read More >

Maruti Suzuki locked out the entire workforce of its Manesar factory until authorities finished their investigation of the deadly riots earlier this week. Suzuki said reopening the plant would risk lives of its employees until the workers guilty of instigating a mob are identified. Read More >

Scott Nearing was not trying to become a pioneer.

Back when the auto industry represented the equivalent of today’s dot-com companies, Dr. Nearing was a highly successful economics professor at a program that would later be known as the Wharton School of Business.

He wrote about a wide variety of economic issues that were vigorously debated at a time when differing opinions were not often tolerated in the world of academic discourse. Benefactors, like today’s corporate sponsors and tomorrow’s Ceasers, expected their due (ck) in exchange for funding and ‘exclusives’.

Anti-war. Anti-child labor. Anti-trust and ‘anti’ everything political in the end, Dr. Nearing soon found that his sole victory in court would only yield a blacklist from academia that would last for decades.

So he bought himself some land, a pickup truck, and moved to the Green Mountains of northern Vermont.

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Ford last closed a plant in Europe a decade ago, when its Dagenham assembly plant was shuttered, but the Blue Oval may be forced to do it again.

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Glancing at its diminutive footprint and tiny engine specs, one would expect superlative fuel economy from the Chevrolet Spark, right? Wrong.

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Isuzu is joining the “let’s flee Japan and the rising yen” bandwagon, and their latest venture involves assembling export-bound trucks in Saudi Arabia.

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Members of the Chinese car industry are busy hiring foreign engineers and designers. That trend apparently has not reached China’s Shaanxi Province yet. The province is home to state-owned conglomerate Shaanxi Victory. It’s automotive4 division made unremarkable trucks and vans. Very few knew of this venture. Now, Shaanxi is famous all the way to Detroit. The company copied the Cadillac Escalade as the master design for its new S102. Read More >

Police in India is seeking to arrest the entire workforce of 3,000 at the Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar factory after a Wednesday riot left a manager killed, hundreds injured and the factory torched, Reuters says.  Maruti Suzuki’s factory is closed. A lengthy shutdown that could cost $15 million a day is expected. Read More >

As if the absurdly hyperbolic headline “The day the world changed” wasn’t enough of a tip-off , the hype machine for the Toyobaru twins has officially reached its zenith, with Wheels magazine’s Peter Robinson declaring the Japanese-spec Toyota 86 to be superior to the Porsche Cayman.

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PSA Peugeot Citroen’s Chairman Thierry Peugeot lashed out against what he calls “evil attacks” by the new leftist French government and its industry minister Arnaud Montebourg. He also raised a specter that makes any patriotic politician sit up and listen: Hostile takeovers. Read More >

Less than a year ago, the Tokyo automotive press corps was summoned to Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main Japanese islands to visit a Nissan plant. Nobody knew why, until Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn had one of his trademark impromptu outbursts. He called the exchange rate “abnormal,” several times, until everybody got it. He threatened several times that Nissan and most of the Japanese industry would pack up and leave, and delivered an ultimatum: “If six months down the road we are still in this situation, then this will provoke a rethinking of our industrial strategy.” Read More >