Nissan waited until the second press day of the New York Auto Show. They did not want their all-electric Infiniti sedan to drown in the floods of other reveals. They should not have worried. Read More >
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Diesel engines increasingly turn into causes for divorce in the promiscuous automotive business. PSA Peugeot Citroen and Ford are calling off some of their diesel dalliances. Read More >
Subaru debuted their new compact crossover and their refreshed Legacy and Outback. As you’re probably already aware, the changes to Subaru’s mid size mainstays are more than superficial. However, they’re not very dramatic.
Nissan’s upscale Infiniti cars can only be bought outside of Japan, but most of the cars are made in Japan. That will change, said Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn in New York. Read More >
Before and after Saab had gone bankrupt, pipe-dreamers thought that the company can be revived with just a few million dollars. The number commonly used was $50 to $70 million. We maintained that it would cost a few billion dollars to get the company going again.
As it turns out, we were way too optimistic. Read More >
A year ago, Carlos Ghosn announced that Nissan is aiming for 8 percent global market share by 2016. This morning in New York, delivering the keynote address at the New York Auto Show, Ghosn said it again:
“We can achieve 8 percent global market share by 2016.”
After a pause, he continued: “Whenever I state this 8 percent goal, I get some skeptical looks.” Read More >
A month ago, I wrote about a talk with a friend of mine who still has his high-paying job at a German automaker. He had listened to Sergio Marchionne’s appeal for government intervention in a European car industry suffering from overcapacity. My friend said that his employer and other German makers are strictly against governmental tinkering and artificial resuscitation of automakers in distress. He reported that their order books are full, and they are happy to take the market share of European makers in distress. Now, this memo finally arrived on Sergio Marchionne’s desk. Read More >
The original Santa Fe used a 2.7-liter V-6 that was supposedly developed by Porsche — and the joke went that the Germans traded that engineering for the Santa Fe’s styling so they could “Design” the Cayenne.
That story no longer applies. The new Santa Fe has homegrown world-class engines and styling that beats the Porker six ways to Sunday.
The steamy erotica novel “50 Shades of Grey” is apparently inciting the passions of housewives across Manhattan. Good to know that Lexus has something for the good people of Boca Raton, Florida, in the form of the new Lexus ES.
That was an easy call: Car sales in Europe will decline again this year, Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne told his assembled shareholders at a meeting in Turin. Fiat, caught with pants and sales down in Europe’s teetering south, would be in much worse shape without Chrysler, Marchionne thinks:
“This was the only way to preserve Fiat’s future. It does not make sense anymore to talk about Fiat as an Italian or European company… With Chrysler we have fixed our excessive dependence on Europe and have the tranquility to overcome the market’s fluctuations.”
Chrysler surprised again in March with a 34 percent gain and the best monthly result in four years. Back home in Italy, Marchionne already preannounced “horrible sales” for Fiat and March.
Reuters says that the shareholder meeting approved the conversion of Fiat’s preference and savings shares into ordinary shares, which makes it easier for Fiat to buy the 41.5 percent of Chrysler it does not yet own.
The scrum of journalists and wanna-bes around the Viper has been consistently packed for two hours now. We have some impressions from Byron Hurd and NASA instructor Jeff Stutler for your consumption; later on in the show I will wander over, sit in the thing, and try to correlate it with my experiences of the previous Vipers.
We all know that the new Acura RLX will have a V6 and a neat SH-AWD system using electric motors and such – but how about the budget model, that revives the long-dormant four-wheel steering system from the Prelude, once known as 4WS!
“Imagine,” Ford’s marketing wunderkind Jim Farley suggested, “if your service advisor knew your name? If he knew your preferences? What you wanted?” Well, as a former owner of two Phaetons, I don’t need to imagine that. Everybody in VW service at my local dealer knew my name, my wife’s name, our weekend plans, and which one of the dealership’s loaners I liked best (“Blackie”, a Passat 2.0T). That’s what happens when you sell cars that require frequent servicing and have nobody on staff in the entire country who can perform said servicing in even a marginally competent fashion.
Farley, of course, wasn’t talking about 5400-pound German crapwagons. He was talking about treating Lincoln buyers to the finest dealership experience available.
There was a time when Ford had the luxury equivalent of three little pigs.
I’m not sure if Jaguar, Lincoln and Volvo were the industry equivalent of straws, sticks and bricks. But they were by all measures an ungodly mess of marques that bled billions out of Ford’s coffers by 2007.
Something had to be done. Enter Alan Mulally who blew out two of the brands, and only kept Lincoln after a Deliverance level of squealing by managers and executives at Ford.
In today’s exercise, you will need to pick one brand for Ford to keep. Yes, crystal balls and Monday morning quarterbacks are a common thing at most automotive blogs. So instead of shooting from the hip of the modern day, let’s look back to the time that was the late, late, late Bush era and figure out which brand offered the most potential.
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