The US Department of Justice is deploying all of its legal muscle to avoid paying the price after an FBI agent destroyed an exotic car during a joy ride. After nearly two years of trying to recover the money owed by the government, Motors Insurance Company filed a lawsuit against the government seeking the full $750,000 value of the wrecked 1995 Ferrari F50.
Say what you want about Tesla, but people are buying. Not so much the cars, more so shares in the company. According to a regulatory filing, Tesla plans to sell 5.3 million new shares to the public, and up to 795,000 more to the underwriter, at $26 each. That would raise up to $158.5 million. According to Businessweek, “CEO and co-founder Elon Musk will also buy 1.5 million shares at the same price in a private sale. Blackstar Investco LLC, an affiliate of Daimler AG, will buy 644,475 shares directly from Tesla at the public offering price. That would bring total proceeds of $214.3 million.” The proceeds are mostly for developing a crossover Tesla. Read More >
TrueCar released its May 2011 sales forecast. At this time in the calendar, these forecasts, based on real transactional data, usually come close to reality. For May 2011, TrueCar expects new light vehicle sales in the U.S. to be 1,060,392 units, down 3.7 percent from May 2010 and down 8.3 percent from April 2011(unadjusted basis for sales days). This would be a Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate (SAAR) of 11.85 million new car sales, down from 13.18 million in April 2011 and only slightly up from 11.63 million in May 2010. Why the sudden reluctance? Read More >
The “B5” Passat, which signaled the beginning of Volkswagen’s brief but luminous arc of twenty-first-century success in the United States, was priced at $20,750 including destination charge. For that kind of money, the buyers, of which your humble author was one, received a 1.8T engine, full-sized interior room, German assembly, and a fabulous set of luxurious appointments which usually did not completely self-destruct until the car reached its fourth or fifth birthday. It was a gorgeous game-changer of a car and for many people the juice of the driving experience was worth the painful squeeze of frequent dealings with VW’s “service” departments.
Fourteen years later, the price is the same — $20,765 including destination — but the game has definitely changed.
See that? Looks a bit like a first-generation Scion xB, doesn’t it? It’s actually a new Kia, codenamed “Tam,” built on its new A-segment Picanto Morning platform, but featuring first-gen xB-style tall-body MPV packaging. The Picanto’s wheelbase is actually slightly smaller than the xB’s, and there’s another key difference here as well: see that rear door? Look where the handle is placed. That’s right, it’s a slider! But that’s not all…
When I visited GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant back in October, I was greeted with a few surprises. One was a small fire that flared briefly on my sweater after a cinder from the Volt’s body-welding station struck me. The other was the sight of GM’s latest, most high-tech green car being assembled on a line that was filled with GM’s oldest-school dinosaur cars, the Cadillac DTS and Buick Lucerne. The scene was no doubt intended to inspire appreciation for the changing face of GM, but the scarcity of Volts amid the oceans of giant front-drive barges (production was just beginning) made it clear that it would be a while before Volt production would occupy much of the sprawling facility. With the DTS and Lucerne headed for retirement, the new 2013 Malibu will be taking up residence at Detroit-Hamtramck later this year, even as Volt production capacity is increased to hit next year’s 60k unit goal. And now GM is announcing that the next generation of Chevy Impala will be built at Detroit-Hamtramck as well, leaving folks in Oshawa saying “eh?” (or words to that effect).
The release of A Road Forward: The Report of the Toyota North American Quality Advisory Panel [PDF], probably raised a few eyebrows around the industry this week, particularly at the headquarters of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington D.C… but not for any obvious reason. The report’s findings about Toyota’s internal reforms in the wake of last year’s recall scandal aren’t particularly mind-bending, and are well summarized in an introductory passage
First, the Panel believes Toyota needs to continue to adjust its balance between global and local control giving weight to local control in order to improve its communication and speed in responding to quality and safety issues. Second, the Panel believes that Toyota needs to ensure that it listens and responds as positively to negative external feedback as it does to negative internal feedback. Third, the Panel believes that Toyota must persist in more clearly distinguishing safety from quality and continue its efforts to enhance its safety practices and procedures.
In addition to identifying specific areas for improvement, the report places a heavy emphasis on “the leadership of Toyota’s top executives as they navigate the road forward, as well as the company’s leadership in the industry” as a way to avoid the traps it fell into prior to the recall scandal. And this emphasis on leadership could have some interesting effects…
TTAC reader Turtletop writes:
Sajeev:
I have a good friend who’s looking for his next chariot. I’ve wrenched on his cars for years now and am the one he calls when he has auto-related questions. He’s a tall and solid man, looking for a nice, comfortable and reliable ride that he fits into without bumping his head. After a long chit-chat, I suggested a Grand Marquis as a possible choice. Though my friend is averse to American iron after some bad previous experiences, I think Panthers are on his radar now. Problem is, I haven’t enough direct experience with them to offer confident recommendations on what to look for, and I don’t want to steer him wrong.
Fortunately, I know just the man to talk to! Thus, my inquiry to you.
What are the variables to consider when searching for a used Panther? Are there any particular engines, transmissions or model years that you would recommend over others, or avoid completely? Thanks for your consideration!
Those of you who are not stupid well-connected enough to have a bunch of autojournos in your Twitter and Facebook friend lists are missing out on all the, er, coverage coming from the “Midwestern NAMBLA pump n’ dump for morbidly obese auto journalists” track event going on today. Let me give you the precis. It turns out all these cars are ZOMG AEWSUM and track records are falling left and right as America’s finest drivers deliver Vic Elfordian levels of all-weather punishment upon them. No word on whether the Midwestern journo who cracked up a MINI at Autobahn and followed it up by driving off the first corner at MAMA’s event a few years back has caused his usual mayhem.
Expect this event to provide many tales of “pushing it to the limit” in the soul-crushing months to come. In the meantime, however, we’ve found an activity which is well-suited to the banzai buffet beasts out there: manned crash testing.
In conclusion of today’s Volkswagen-heavy fare, a peek into the future of Volkswagen’s most boring, but nonetheless highly successful car: The Passat.
Germany’s Auto Bild thinks it knows what the 8th generation Passat will look like when it hits the showrooms sometime in 2014. While their renderings most likely don’t reveal the exact likeness of the future Passat, Auto Bild’s Passat companion story probably has more than a few grains of truth. Read More >
SB Medien may call the forthcoming FT-86 a “Celica replacement,” but in this first video of the latest near-production prototype, the budget rear-drive coupe nearly runs into a Supra which apparently belongs to the development team. The Supra shows up once more in the video’s ‘ring testing footage (about 1:55 in), suggesting again that it’s somehow involved in the testing or benchmarking process. How and why? Your speculation is as good as mine…
After reaping the hurricane by forcing “Tier One” workers at GM’s Orion Assembly plant into the UAW’s “Tier Two” last year, essentially giving workers a 50% pay cut, GM has been working with the UAW ever since to mitigate that decision. Now, Bloomberg reports that the UAW’s GM negotiator is targeting the $14/hour Tier One wages for growth in upcoming negotiations, arguing that the lower pay rate is “not a middle class wage.” But, he adds
The union doesn’t expect to reach $28 an hour this year for new workers, and it doesn’t intend to make GM uncompetitive
We’ll have to wait and see what that means, but any effort on the part of GM and the UAW to reduce the gap between Tier One and Tier Two wages will help relieve the inevitable shop-floor tensions that such inequity creates.
Gallup has just released a new poll asking Americans to rate their likelihood of making certain lifestyle changes based on different hypothetical gas prices. The result: 57 percent refuse to consider buying an “electric car that you could only drive for a limited number of miles at one time” no matter how high gas prices go. Only moving or changing jobs encountered more resistance. Clearly betting the farm on pure EVs is going to face some challenges…
Surf on over to hyundaiusa.com and ford.com, and the two momentum-blessed automakers will greet you in a remarkably similar fashion: with a lineup of 40 MPG Highway-rated vehicles. Of course, Hyundai would, in its inimitable “asterisk-wrangling” style, point out that Ford’s 40 MPG requires more footnotes than a David Foster Wallace book. But then Ford might shoot back that Hyundai leaves out any reference to City or Highway ratings in its lineup, leaving consumers to play “hunt the legal disclaimer” itself. And as Autoobserver recently noted, highway ratings make for good ad fodder, but combined EPA ratings are much more helpful to consumers.
Come June, Toyota “plans to bring domestic auto production back to as much as 90 percent of targets set before the March earthquake hit, thanks to faster-than-expected improvements in parts supplies,” The Nikkei [sub] writes today. At the annual results conference in Tokyo, Akio Toyoda had said Toyota Toyoda would be on its way back to normal beginning in June, with hopefully 70 percent of production reinstated in summer. This was already a two month improvement over previous plans. Two weeks later, the outlook seems to be even better. If The Nikkei heard correctly. Read More >
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