TTAC Commentator cc-rider writes:

Sajeev- I have written you before asking for advice for my coworker. You all had a field day with that one! I am looking for some quick advice as I now have a dilemma of my own to deal with.

I currently own two cars: a near mint 1991 Nissan Sentra SE-R and a nice 1988 BMW 325is. A situation has come up where I am thinking of trading the Sentra for a 1997 Mercedes C36 AMG. Before you spill the coffee on the keyboard, the C36 is not worth nearly as much as you would initially think. It is pretty much at the bottom of its depreciation curve.

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Forget about Europeans complaining about missing parts. Over in America, there is an acute car shortage. Dealers blame who they always blame: The manufacturers. “They’ve cut back production so much that we’ve run out of cars,” Boston dealer magnate Herb Chambers tells his hometown paper, the Boston Herald. He says he had to “beg, borrow and steal” Cadillacs from dealers in other parts of the country. Down at the South Shore, dealer Dan Quirk loses 60 to 90 sales a month. “The Big Three just don’t have enough manufacturing capacity any more,” kvetches Quirk. “Some of the automakers, particularly General Motors, closed a lot of their plants when the meltdown hit.” Supposedly it’s not just a Bostonian phenomenon. Supposedly. At closer look, it might be a fire breathing, rip-snorting chimera. Read More >

Last Friday, production of the Volkswagen Passat was stopped in Emden, Germany. Not because there aren’t enough customers for the car. There are too many. Read More >

Having ignored the first wave of EV enthusiasm, Toyota turned to Tesla in the aftermath of its recall scandal as an investment that could potentially catch it up with other EV makers, and possibly help its battered image along the way. Officially, the deal was brokered after Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda drove the Tesla Roadster, and came away impressed with its “splendid flavor.” Toyota then dropped $50m on Tesla’s stock and another $60m on the Tesla-developed RAV4 EV prototype, raising the possibility of re-starting production at the NUMMI plant, which Tesla bought from Toyota as part of the hookup. But with Toyota also developing an EV city car in-house and talking up the return of hydrogen cars, Tesla’s role in Toyota’s future is clear as mud. If the RAV4 EV makes financial sense, Tesla could contract-build them at NUMMI, adding much-needed volume to a giant factory that would otherwise be building only the Model S (at a rate of about 20k per year).  But there’s the rub: Tesla clearly needs Toyota more than the other way around; it needs Toyota’s volume, manufacturing expertise and legitimacy. But what will Toyota get out of the relationship? An expensive EV compact crossover? Goodwill from the American people? The ability to keep in-house development looking past a short-term fad for EVs?

So here’s today’s puzzle: if you were Akio Toyoda, would you A) double down on Tesla, and buy a controlling share or even roll it into the parent company, B) quietly sell the stake and move on, or C) keep Tesla around as a speculative EV offshoot of the main company? It’s a complex question, and answers should touch on the market potential of EVs, Tesla’s strategy and viability, Toyota’s relationship with EVs, the PR benefits of keeping an American EV startup alive, and much, much more. Enjoy!

With results from Audi’s driverless attempt at Pikes Peak certified, it seems that we have nothing to fear from the GPS-based autonomous drifting machine. Audi’s press release notes:

Overall, the Autonomous Audi TTS Pikes Peak completed the mountain course in 27 minutes, as verified by Pikes Peak International Hill Climb officials. No human rally driver has completed the course in fewer than 10 minutes, despite driving cars that produced more than 900 hp. The Autonomous Audi TTS Pikes Peak generates 265 hp. Race officials told researchers they would expect an expert race driver on the course to finish in around 17 minutes in a car similar to the TTS.

Take that robots! You may build cars better than humans, but you’ve still got a thing or two to learn about driving.

[UPDATE: the Stanford team writes in to remind us that the point of the exercise was to safely develop driver-assistance systems, and that the 27 minute time was ” just a measurement of our safety plan and the speed we set for the lead vehicle.” Call us insecure, but we’re still calling this a victory for H.Sapiens.]

We all knew that Bob Lutz wasn’t going to spend his retirement circulating between the golf course and the early bird special, and when Lotus rolled out the most ambitious re-boot of any car company since GM, we should have known Lutz would end up involved somehow. After all, Lotus’s CEO Dany Bahar has bragged at length about making Lotus the “Real Madrid” (think Miami Heat) of  the sports car industry… and if there’s one high-profile prima donna in the car industry, it’s Mr Robert Anthony Lutz.
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Isn’t it great to have the government as your biggest shareholder? Makes for good photo-ops. For the second time, Barack Obama went behind the wheels of a Chevy Volt, with the world press in attendance. Actually, it was the Volt’s European twin, the Ampera.

The Prez. had to weigh national security and time at the NATO summit in Lisbon against checking out the range extended Opel, and the Opel won. Read More >

The first time I came to Houston, TX, was  in 1986. The “reverse oil crisis” had brought the price of crude below $10, and Houston was a ghost town. In nearby Port Arthur, unused oil rigs piled up at the shore, and grass grew on downtown Procter Street. Now, Houston, home of the Petroleum Club (and some clubs the greater Baruth family would fancy), could become the model city for electric vehicles. According to plan, nobody will be farther away from a charging station than five miles, and you can charge up as much as your EV can eat for a flat monthly fee. Read More >

As a newcomer to Denver, I had my worries that the junkyards here would be wall-to-wall Sables and Sephias. Would my junkyard trips be a slog through a miasma of late-model boredom? As J. Frank Parnell said about the hazards of lobotomies: Not at all! Read More >

Looking for an electric car in the $33k price range (before tax credits)? Starting soon you will have two options: Nissan’s Leaf, a 100 mile range, four-door, US-made compact hatchback or Wheego‘s LiFe, a 100 mile range, electrified Chinese city car that is barely distinguishable from the Smart ForTwo. Can you picture many Americans picking the Chinese Smart clone over the Nissan? But Wheego, which previously sold only Low Speed Vehicles, is undeterred. The company claims it will start selling the 70 MPH top-speed LiFe next month… even though AN [sub] reports that the LiFe hasn’t completed EPA certification. Meanwhile, we still haven’t seen a US crash test of the Wheego or the Shuanghuan Noble it’s based on… so we have to rely on questionable Chinese vids like the one above (where’s that airbag?). Wheego is going to need some seriously slick salesmen to make the pitch on this car…

Boring. Small. The automotive equivalent of an advanced econ class. That’s pretty much what a 2000 Elantra Wagon was in the auction world back in 07’. You know that the automotive fashionistas won’t be knocking on your door… and three years ago you wouldn’t get much more than the extraordinarily cheap and chancy taking another glance at it. Hyundai still suffered from the stigma that came with making second-rate cars in a world where sub-prime buyers could buy far better vehicles with a pulse and a paycheck. To put it kindly, this one was a tough sell.
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Subaru’s search for a consistent design language is the stuff of automotive legend, as the brand has flitted from one theme to the next, seemingly coming up with a new direction with each new vehicle. Now, starting with the Hybrid Tourer Concept from the last Geneva Show, Subaru seems to have settled into something of a groove. It’s a sleek, stripped-down, mature look that might stray towards the bland side for some Subaru fans… but at least it’s a direction. With this peek at a future look for the Impreza, we’re getting a little closer to the day when Subaru actually offers a line of consistently-styled vehicles.

“I think it will be done… I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones. We need to do a lot more if were going to save lives.”

To paraphrase Leslie Ann Phillips on her fabulous Martinis and Bikinis album, however, Ray says “save” when he means “control”.

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We’ve called Toyota’s Tesla-developed RAV4 EV an “EV insurance policy,” but it seems that Toyota is even hedging its hedges. Automotive News [sub] reports that the Japanese automaker is developing an EV version of its iQ city car in-house, the first in-house EV developed by Toyota for the mass market. If Toyota’s experiment with Tesla fails the way Tesla’s development partnership for the Smart EV with Daimler did, Toyota will be ready with an in-house developed EV. The iQ EV should have a 65 mile range when market-ready, but no date has been given for its launch. Though offering less range than the RAV4 EV, the iQ EV should be considerably cheaper for Toyota to produce… and it keeps the automaker’s engineers in the EV game. As Toyota moves towards a 2015 hydrogen car, it’s plugging EVs into the city car profile where they should remain competitive long-term. This seems to be the model for the future: EVs for short-range city commuting, hydrogen for longer distances, and continuously-improved gasoline cars for those who can’t afford either. The broad-based green car portfolio seems to be the way of the future.

Automated cameras will begin issuing tickets to the owners of vehicles that momentarily stray into bus lanes in New York City, New York beginning Monday. The cash-strapped metropolis imported the idea from London where a similar system generated 293,000 citations and more than £35 million (US $56 million) in 2008. New York’s bus lane tickets will run between $115 and $150 each.

The project marks one of the first uses of automated enforcement in the United States that drops the pretense of being a safety measure. The stated purpose of the new cameras is to give buses a travel priority over automobile traffic.

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