An Australian company has hired kingmakers from Chicago, Illinois to prevent Texas residents from being able to decide whether or not red light cameras should be used in their community. A “grassroots” group calling itself the Texas Traffic Safety coalition filed a lawsuit to stop the city of Port Lavaca, Texas from holding a referendum on the photo enforcement program run by Melbourne-based Redflex. Although no court order was issued in the case, the city council decided not to hold the election, despite the city charter’s instruction that the council must place a qualified petition on the ballot.

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The Japanese tsunami impacts everything, from cars to toilet paper. Most Japanese car makers were closed since after the catastrophe and will remain closed at least until mid April. Many paper mills are in the affected area, and all paper, from glossy stock to the softer kind, is in short supply. Publishers of Japanese illustrated pulp fiction have canceled the printed version and direct their readers to the Internet instead. Tokyo corporations battle a wave of toilet rolls vanishing from their restrooms, from where they find a way to the toire at home. While these may be temporary outages, the lack of stable electrical power emerges more and more as the biggest impediment to the recovery of the Japanese industry. It will affect you and your car, in one way or the other. Read More >

Dan writes:

Sajeev,

I don’t know if this adds up to material for one of your columns but here you go if you want it. I am shopping for a new WRX wagon.  These are pretty rare around here, hunted to extinction.  I’ve been checking around and the number in inventory at the typical dealership is between zero and two.  The local dealership wants to charge me MSRP, as well they might, but they have a new narrative to go with this: the factory was shut down in Fuji and there’s going to be a gap in deliveries.  Is this hooey?

Sajeev Answers: Read More >

Compared to smothering hugs, ample booze and possibly a little deniable blackmail, suing a media outlet rarely is the best way to perform the skillful art of public relations. This is what Tesla is finding out right now.

Most likely after throwing words of caution by its own PR folk to the wind, Tesla decided to bring a defamation suit against the BBC’s Top Gear. According to Tesla’s own blog, Top Gear perpetrated “serious and damaging lies,” such as claiming that “the Roadster’s true range is only 55 miles per charge. “ Of course, writes Tesla’s Communication VP Ricardo Reyes in the blog, Tesla is “not doing this for money. As the world leader in EV technology, Tesla owes it to the public to stop Top Gear’s disinformation campaign and provide the truth. “ Read More >

From the sounds of a story at the Freep, both GM and Ford appear to get ready for bigger losses from Europe. Led by fanfares inflated by their hometown paper, Ford and GM seem to embark on a PR campaign to soften the blow at home:

“Europe was GM’s only unprofitable global region in 2010, extending the company’s streak of years in the red there to 11, with a $1.8-billion European operating loss. GM is hoping to break even in Europe this year before restructuring charges.”

(It’s the restructuring charges that will be the humdinger. Even if kept as non-recurring items, they will hit the bottom line in a big way.)

“Ford unexpectedly lost money in the fourth quarter in Europe, losing market share because it refused to match competitors’ incentives. It made a profit on European operations for all of 2010, albeit just $182 million of its $6.6-billion companywide profit for the year.”

And who’s to blame? The customer of course. The Freep’s informers see a gaping perception gap that is widening every day: Read More >

Every few years, Beijing’s government lashes out against billboards that advertise an ostentatious lifestyle. These exhortations are largely ignored, which preserves an endless source of involuntary humor. Read More >

One of my jobs in China was to help out with the launch of the Passat B6. Except that there was no Passat B6 in China. In 2005, the car was introduced in Europe to great acclaim. A year later, it was supposed to be made in China.  In China, Volkswagen has two joint ventures, Shanghai Volkswagen in Shanghai, and FAW-VW in frigid Changchun. SVW made and makes the Passat and was the logical choice to make the B6. Except that SVW didn’t want it. They deemed the 1996 vintage B5 and its Chinese variants as good enough for the Chinese market.  The folks in Wolfsburg shook their heads. “They always complain that they don’t get the latest technology, and when we give them the latest technology, they  keep the old stuff.”

Making the best out of having two joint ventures in China, Volkswagen sold the B6 license to FAW-VW. As the name “Passat” was taken, the B6 received a new name, “Magotan.” Pronounced “Ma-GO-tn”. Except that in Chinese, it’s called “May Teng.” (Are we confused yet? Gee, there is a company that is proud of the mess.) The Ma-GO-tn/May Teng was launched to limited success.

Last year, a new generation Passat was launched in Europe, dubbed the B7 internally, but detractors say it’s no more than a big facelift. The Chinese version will be shown at the Shanghai Motor Show. Guess who will make it? Read More >

All told, it takes about 3 weeks for a shipborne container from Japan to reach its destination at the West Coast. To the East Coast, it’s about 5 weeks. With the Japanese earthquake and tsunami three weeks old, we should see the first real stateside disruptions by now. And we do. But not all originate in Japan. Read More >

In the (OMG) 7 years I have lived and worked in China by now, I have learned not to take the first two months of the year all too seriously. After all, according to the Chinese calendar, the first two months mostly belong to the old year. Chinese New Year  is some time in late January or early February, depending on the inscrutable lunar calendar. The nearly month long festivities mess up sales, and make comparisons pretty much useless. Confucius say: “Only the stupidest of men make predictions based on January sales.”

March is a different matter.  It’s the first “regular” month of the new year. Everybody is waiting for March sales results in China. We’ll have to wait at least a week or so until the CAAM is done tabulating the sales of the 60 to 120 automakers in China (even that number remains shrouded in mystery.) But there is our trusted indicator: GM China. Read More >

One of the toughest challenges facing industry analysts right now involves determining what the market for electric vehicles actually looks like, what kind of volumes it will support and for how long. It’s a problem that I’ve hashed over at length with an old college buddy who now works at a cleantech investment firm, and let me be the first to say that it’s not an easy problem to pick apart. The number of unknown quantities and moving parts explains why opinions among money managers can vary so wildly even about relatively marginal firms like Tesla.

Luckily, Thilo Koslowski of Gartner Research [and celebrated coiner of the term “the trough of disappointment”] has dedicated himself more thoroughly to the problem, and has some startling findings to report. For example, despite the relentless pro-EV hype present in all levels of the media, Koslowski’s research shows that more consumers are actually considering buying a natural gas-powered vehicle. Looks like Edmunds’ Jeremy Anwyl was on to something when he called for an end to EV tax credits in favor of greater support for natural gas cars.

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Compared to March 2010, Ford enjoyed the greatest improvement in sales-weighted fleet MPG in the US market on an adjusted (EPA) basis. But the new king of efficiency, Hyundai, also saw its fleetwide efficiency improve, rising to 26 MPG, some 1.9 MPG better than the next closest competitor, Honda. No wonder the Koreans are the first (and only) automaker to disclose its CAFE fuel economy (as well as the first automaker to publicize the difference between CAFE ratings and the adjusted numbers you see here). For the first quarter of this year, Hyundai’s CAFE rating (as calculated by the automaker) stands at 35.8 MPG, with some 22 percent of its sales mix coming from vehicles rated at 40 MPG on the highway (28% for March). [chart courtesy of TrueCar]

Ford has made it clear that a 250 HP “ST” version of its 2012 Focus will be making its way to America, hopefully opening a new chapter in Ford’s US-market hot hatch history. The perfect followup? How about a 180 HP Fiesta ST, featuring the new 1.6 liter Ecoboost engine? Autocar says its coming to the UK by the end of this year, and Ford is already teasing its arrival with the release of a “warm” Fiesta, the 134 HP S1600 (above). There’s no word on US availability yet, but if Ford’s going to bring us the Focus ST, why not its baby cousin? With the Fiesta getting plenty of play in rally racing and, far more importantly, Ken Block videos, this seems like an easy call. If nothing else, it will at least look like the bargain of the lifetime compared to the Fiat 500 EV.

HYPE! Yes, according to a pimptastic Morgan Stanley report [via BusinessInsider], Tesla is about to become “the 4th American Automaker,” despite the fact that it hasn’t actually built a car in any kind of volume. The report enthuses

The confluence of structural industry change, disruptive technology, changing consumer tastes and heightened national security creates an opportunity for significant new entrants in the global auto industry. California dreaming? We don’t think so. In our view, the conditions are ripe for a shake-up of a complacent, century-old industry heavily invested in the status quo of internal combustion. The risks are high. So is the opportunity. Enter Tesla.

Did you just throw up in your mouth a little? Don’t worry, there are highly convincing charts to help you learn to stop worrying and love the auto industry’s answer to Apple. After all, when it comes to Tesla, charts always tell the whole story.

For March, TrueCar has included a chart diagramming the ratio of incentive spending to average transaction price, giving us a look at two key metrics on a single chart. Short of a complete fleet sales or a retail market share breakout falling into our laps (crazier things have happened), this is one of the more important metrics you’ll want to look at to qualify the raw volume numbers coming out of March. But it’s not the only one…

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All Japanese car companies need a little good news to cheer them up. Honda has reason to smile a little. Honda’s business jet in Greensboro, NC, is a step further to production. Honda says its first FAA-conforming HondaJet light business jet achieved a maximum speed of 489 mph at 30,000 ft. and a maximum Mach number of 0.72 above 30,000 ft.  This exceeds Honda’s performance commitment of 483 mph for the production HondaJet. Read More >