End of 2008, Ford was in dire need of cash and decided to sell off a 20 percent chunk of their 33.4 percent holdings in Mazda. Both promised that their cozy relationship would not suffer over something mundane like money. Of course, it wasn’t so. Their relationship disintegrated in record time. And now, they will make it official. Ford Motor Co. has decided to reduce its stake in Mazda by selling a large portion of its remaining shareholdings to Sumitomo group firms and other companies with which Mazda enjoys close business ties, The Nikkei [sub] just learned. Read More >
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Despite losing $600m, Vauxhall/Opel is planning for the future. They’re bringing the Chevrolet Volt to Europe and they expect to be back in the black by 2012. Now, it appears, they want to fill that hole in their lineup. You know? That city car sized hole? Just below the Corsa.
A couple of days ago I wrote about how Peugeot is looking to South East Asia for the next area of big growth. I also mentioned in the article how Peugeot will have a tough time trying to crack that market. Toyota, Honda and Nissan already have a pretty tight grip on that area. Well, it appears that Toyota has put forward their first defensive stroke. Read More >
From conflict-torn Afghanistan [via Newsweek] comes this strange tale of Taliban tribute to the “the vehicular equivalent of the AK-47”: the Toyota Hilux (more famous among Western car nuts for its infamous Top Gear adventures).
As the war in Afghanistan escalated several years ago, counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, a member of the team that designed the Iraq surge for Gen. David Petraeus, began to notice a new tattoo on some insurgent Afghan fighters. It wasn’t a Taliban tattoo. It wasn’t even Afghan. It was a Canadian maple leaf.
When a perplexed Kilcullen began to investigate, he says, he discovered that the incongruous flags were linked to what he says is one of the most important, and unnoticed, weapons of guerrilla war in Afghanistan and across the world: the lightweight, virtually indestructible Toyota Hilux truck.
The European Car Manufacturers Association ACEA has released its September numbers for Europe. A quick look at the chart will tell the trained eye: Things are getting back to normal. Keep in mind, we are comparing with a totally abnormal 2009, when some countries injected amphetamines into their car sales to drive consumption to all time highs, and where other less fortunate countries saw their markets crash. Usually, it was the markets without indigenous car production that saw little sense in propping-up the economies of Germany, France, Italy and some other minor countries with car production – EU commonness notwithstanding. In September registrations of new cars decreased by 9.6 percent compared to the same month of last year. However, over the three first quarters of 2010, registrations were 4.3 percent lower compared to the same period of 2009. And that’s the not so interesting part of the story. Read More >
Back in July, the Special Inspector General for the TARP program (SIGTARP) released a damning report on GM and Chrysler’s efforts to cull dealers during their government-overseen bailout-bankruptcies. The upshot: GM and Chrysler handled the culls either inconsistently or subjectively, and the President’s auto task force pressed the issue unnecessarily and “without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impact.” And though that report, the product of a year’s worth of investigation, made the automakers and their government “saviors” look mighty stupid, the awkward walk-back of most of the dealer cuts had already made the point fairly well. But with the TARP program now largely rolled up, the SIGTARP’s office has been bulking up on investigators, targeting fraud and criminal activity around the entire TARP program. And, according to Automotive News [sub], the dealer cull is on the agenda. SIGTARP won’t “disclose the targets of the investigation or the actions being probed,” but it has “opened a follow-up investigation of possibly illegal activity in the [dealer-cull] effort.”
There are increasing possibilities that GM will be owned by two governments: The American and the Chinese. After a lot of rumor and innuendo, Hu Maoyuan, Chairman of China’s government-backed SAIC went on record today and said he does not rule out the possibility of participating in GM’s IPO. That according to Reuters. Read More >
Louisiana’s highest court will decide the legality of the red light camera and speed camera program in New Orleans. On Tuesday, state Supreme Court Justice Jeannette Theriot Knoll issued an order staying the preliminary injunction issued October 1 by a district court judge that would have shut down the program (view injunction).
Orleans Parish Civil District Court Judge Paulette R. Irons found that the city violated its own charter by placing the automating ticketing program under the control of the department of public works instead of the police department, which has the sole authority of issuing traffic citations.
TTAC’s long been used to playing the “heel” of the auto journalism world, and sure enough, our skeptical approach to the Chevy Volt is already renewing accusations that TTAC “hates GM.” For the record, this accusation doesn’t fly. We have the tendency to obsess on GM because that company’s rise and fall is the most compelling story in the automotive world. To read GM’s history is to watch a person claw their way up a cliff by his bootstraps, and upon reaching the top, spend the next several decades strangling himself with the very same bootstraps. I challenge anyone who is interested in the world of cars to look away from that.
In any case, our Volt coverage has focused thus far on dispelling myths, so in the interest of seeking the truth everywhere, I thought we should take a moment to make a few Volt myths of our own. After all, despite planning to build only “10-15k” Volts next year and 60k in 2012, Automotive News [sub] says
And even though my personal and professional obligations to the truth make me the worst marketing candidate ever, I may just have an idea of where to start…
As Ben Hamper once wrote for his book, ‘The Rivethead’… “Certain names have been changed in this book to expose the innocent and protect the guilty.” Well I say the guilty deserve every bit of publicity we can give them in this world. Especially when a few longtime criminals have names that can change by the minute and circumstance. Exposing the guilty is a public service and I will let you, the reader, know about these worthless bastards with just an absolute minimal amount of alphabetical alteration. As for the innocent…
So, how does the maker of the world’s cheapest mass-market car go about building India’s first home-grown upscale crossover? First, go buy several small European automakers…
When GM went on the begging tour around Europe, they had dire projections. They expected a loss of $1.7b or thereabouts for 2009. Can’t have such bad news before an IPO. And imagine the elation when the big bottom line was drawn under the books of the 2009 fiscal – and Opel had lost only $600m. Who dunnit? Read More >
OK, we get it. Ford’s all-new global Ranger is “90 percent of an F-150” and it would make as much sense to sell it here as it would for Toyota to sell the Hilux alongside Tacomas and Tundras. We may not completely buy the argument that Fiesta, Focus and F-150 make for an adequate replacement to a true compact pickup in the US, but having starved that segment for so long, it’s understandable that Ford would now leave it to die. After all, nobody’s offered a truly new compact pickup for so long, it’s almost impossible to say whether the consumers or manufacturers killed off the once-burgeoning segment of efficient, utilitarian trucks.
With Mahindra struggling to offer its diesel pickups to American dealers, we aren’t holding out much hope of anything compact pickup-related changing anytime soon. Sure, there are whispers of a GM compact pickup in development (and some promising talk from Nissan), but that’s strictly in “wild ass rumor” territory. Meanwhile, VW is trying to apeal to more American consumers, doesn’t have a full-size truck lineup to cannibalize, and yet refuses to send its Amarok stateside. If any of the automakers is going to take a risk on compact (preferably diesel) pickups, Volkswagen seems like the one to do it. Alternatively, Mazda has its own version of the new Ranger and no full-sizers to cannibalize. Someone step up here!
When the whole “acceler-gate” scandal broke out, there were, pretty much, two reactions.
1. OH MY GOD!!!!!! STOP DRIVING YOUR TOYOTAS!!!!!! WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!
And 2. Witch-hunt. Witch-hunt. Witch-hunt!
Well, irrespective of who was right, an investigation of the whole affair needed to happen. The US government did an investigation of their own and didn’t like the results. But Toyota also did an investigation of its own. They found something. Read More >
BMW says there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that they might be cooperating with GM. A week ago, Germany’s Handelsblatt had reported that “GM flirts with BMW.” Supposedly, there were low level talks.
“Absolutely no discussions … not on our end,” BMW Chairman Norbert Reithofer told Reuters an event at BMW’s plant in Spartanburg. “I don’t know where it comes from.” With the “not on our end,” he alluded that GM may have been talking to itself.
BMW is actively shopping its engines to achieve better economies of scale. Late September, Saab and BMW announced a deal allowing Saab to use BMW engines in next generation Saabs from 2012. Whether that will have huge scale effects is another story.
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