Earlier this year, UAW President Bob King said that if the union didn’t organize foreign auto plants, “I don’t think there’s a long-term future for the UAW, I really don’t.” Now why would he say such silly things if chances for success on that front are slim to none? Currently an intricate plot unravels. The goal: To lower expectations in the rank & file for big breakthroughs at the Detroit bargaining sessions. After all, the UAW still holds a lot of stock in certain Detroit companies, and they don’t want to shoot themselves in both feet in that regard. But what does that have to do with unionizing the foreigners?

The Freep is peeling a complicated onion of arguments that brings us to tears. Read More >

TTAC Commentator Mazder3 writes:

Hey Sajeev,

I have an auto parts question that I’ve been meaning to ask for a while but I keep forgetting about it. Back in February, going to my car after doing some shopping, I spotted a cute college woman acting strangely around her Volvo 850 sedan. She’d walk around it a couple feet then would look underneath it.  I angled myself to take a peek and I saw her problem; there was a large black box being dragged next to the left front wheel. After exchanging pleasantries and a failed attempt to get the hood open (the car was an obvious salvage, the whole front end was visibly skewed to the right), I finally just reached under the car and popped the box out, muddy and snowy parking lot be damned. At the time I thought it was a windshield washer reservoir, as the hose that was holding it on was a similar size and had a similar fitting to a windshield washer line, but when I got home I realized it couldn’t be. There was no way of filling it or checking its level.

So what was it? My memory has faded on it a bit but it was made of jet black plastic, was roughly the size of a 124 count tissue box, had a hose at the top and two fittings at the base, there was a sponge inside of it and the whole thing came down from in front of the driver’s side axle line. It had some major road rash so all of the parts might not have been there. The thing that I really remember, though, that it was branded with the GM “Mark of Excellence”!

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Opponents of red light cameras and speed cameras are taking the offensive against city councils and camera vendors who have been taking extreme measures to keep the issue of automated ticketing off the ballot. A Cowlitz County, Washington superior court judge will hear arguments later today in a countersuit that accuses the city of Longview of violating an anti-SLAPP law. The state last year banned what are called “strategic lawsuits against public participation” with a measure that grants expedited court procedures to initiative sponsors and a $10,000 penalty against anyone found to be exploiting the legal system to thwart a petition drive.

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Guess who just had a 37 percent increase in sales in the first six months of 2011? No, it was no small Chinese car company with an unpronounceable name. It was Porsche. And guess what is putting Porsche into overdrive? No, not the 911. No, not the Panamera. It the most un-Porsche Porsche, the Cayenne (also available as the Touareg from Volkswagen.) Sitting on order books that give the Cayenne delivery times as high as 12 months in some markets, Porsche will increase production of the Cayenne next year, says Automotive News Europe [sub]. Read More >

On Tuesday, I will go to the Fuji racetrack in the hills halfway between Tokyo and Nagoya. I will test drive a Toyota that is not available in Japan, nor is it in the U.S. It is however available and quite a success in India. Can you guess which one it is?

When I pointed at the map, my wife mentioned that her father, bless his heart, has some real estate in Yugawara, and that she has the keys. Yugawara, famous for its hot springs and not much else, sits right smack in the middle of the area which has an 87 percent chance of getting hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of about 8 within the next 30 years.

I was reminded of that this morning. Instead of being woken up with kisses and a cup of coffee, the house kicked me in the butt. Earthquake. Read More >

So let’s say you don’t live in Washington or Oregon, and you don’t want to buy a GM vehicle, what do you do to save on car insurance? Easy: You say you drive it on your farm. Auto insurers offer farm-use discounts of up to 20 percent. And a lot of less-than-gentleman farmers harvest the savings. Read More >

We didn’t want to mention it when we wrote about GM’s buy a car, get free insurance deal. If we would have said it, it would have been the nasty B-word all over again. The rest of the media showed less compunction. “The worse you drive, the bigger the deal” headlined MSN Money. The deal can be staggering under the right or wrong circumstances, says MSN Money: Read More >

Ford’s Sync doesn’t get a break. It attracted undue attention from LaHood’s distracted driving crusade. Consumer Reports had issues with the system. Sync sank Ford in the 2011 J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey. Can it get any worse?

Yes, it can. Ford is being sued for patent infringement. Read More >

When we wrote about dealer lots overflowing with trucks, especially of the GM kind, there were a lot of nods, but also many flames.  Some commenters said it can’t possibly be true. Mainly because the charts were the product of financial analyst algebra that was not readily transparent to the common high school graduate.  Then, we received messages accusing us of sleeping, because other more esoteric blogs supposedly “called the GM bulls.. months ago” ago. (Or two days later.)  Can’t please them all. However, today, Automotive News [sub] confirms that “Big pickup trucks are clogging many U.S. dealer lots, causing headaches for General Motors and other automakers, and raising concerns about price wars and lower profits later in the year.” Read More >

Our patent-pending China sales oracle is in top form. As predicted, the Chinese market awoke from the doldrums in June and rose 6.2 percent from a year earlier to 1.11 million units. This according to a data released today by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM). Read More >

Suzuki is not buying into the „once in a millennium tsunami.” Suzuki has a lot of its production near the waterfront in Japan’s Tokai region. Scientists give the area between Toyko and Nagoya an 87 percent chance of getting hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of about 8 within the next 30 years. Suzuki’s answer: Let’s get out of here, fast. Read More >

Chinacartimes did protracted research, quite literally into the dark underbelly of the Chinese car culture. As it turns out, the Chinese have not only eclipsed America as the world’s largest car market. They also found out that the car can be used for other things than driving. The know-how developed by us eons ago on lover’s lane, and in drive-ins, has been unabashedly ripped off by the Chinese who are getting at it in their cars.

The matter is all over Chinese websites, along with maps. This page shows Qingdao’s own top spots, which Chinacartimes head honcho Ash Sutcliffe (who lives there) failed to investigate in person. Travellers to Shanghai are treated to favorite spots of vehicular nookie. No big city is without a suitable dark corner. Read More >

At GM, Joel Ewanick and  Chris Perry need to repeat the miracles for which they became famous  at Hyundai. So what do you do in that case? “Let’s just do the same thing again.”

If GM would do a repeat of the Hyundai Assurance Plan (lose your job, return your car), with a 10 year warranty thrown in, the journos would snicker, but the cars would fly off the lot. But at GM, this would be too gutsy.  So what about the next best idea? That’s right: “Free insurance!” Read More >

Answer quickly, without pondering: Does Mercedes-Benz make reliable automobiles? For most of us, the immediate answer is “No.” Perhaps it’s because we’ve owned post-1995 Benzes, perhaps it’s because we’ve heard horror stories from our neighbor’s first-gen ML or W210 E-Class, perhaps it’s because it’s easy to see that recent M-B products simply don’t seem to hold up or stick around the way the old ones did.

Now imagine how your friends and family would answer the same question. Again, the “nays” are probably going to outnumber the “yays”. Thirty years ago, everybody thought that Mercedes-Benz built the best automobiles in the world. Today, very few people do. It’s common knowledge now that the three-pointed star has been affixed to plenty of cars which were underdeveloped at best and utter garbage at worst. You can’t really trust a Mercedes-Benz, can you? Not like you can trust a Lexus.

There’s only one problem with the above statements: there is a group of people who have learned, firsthand, how durable, reliable, and flat-out awesome a Nineties Benz can be. You know them, I know them…

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Things are not going well between Volkswagen and Suzuki. In 2009, Volkswagen invested $2.5 billion for a 19.9 percent share in Suzuki. Suzuki sent $1.13 billion back and bought 2.5 percent of Volkswagen. Suzuki netted $1.37 billion, domo arigatou gozaimasu, but then nothing happened. End of last year, Ferdinand Piech became impatient. Volkswagen stockholders asked discomforting questions at the annual meeting. Now, it turned into a war of the words. Volkswagen uses old media. The octogenarian Osamu Suzuki drops a massive blog bomb on Wolfsburg. Read More >