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The Wall Street Journal [sub] reports that after dragging employment down for the last several years, auto manufacturer is back to driving job growth.
Manufacturers added a seasonally adjusted 36,000 jobs in July, and, within that, the motor vehicles and parts industry added 20,700 jobs, the U.S. Labor Department said in its jobs report earlier this month. Since January, that segment has added more than 52,000 jobs, while manufacturing has added 183,000.
Before the recession, the motor vehicles and parts industry tended to lose between 50,000 and 60,000 jobs in July, without adjusting for seasonality. This year, it shed only 15,700, counting the same way.
But to sustain that growth, manufacturers need overall employment to continue growing. And as Wells Fargo analyst David Vitner points out,
manufacturing has come back much stronger than it did in the last two recessions. We had a huge inventory cycle that’s helped the sector, but we’re beginning to see it peter out a little bit.
How does a brand built on small, fun, efficient city cars build up to its inevitable first-ever SUV? Apparently the answer is very little. MINI’s seems to be aiming its forthcoming Countryman squarely at current MINI owners, with the first US market ads portraying the Countryman as little more than a MINI Cooper with four doors and All-Wheel-Drive (as opposed to Subaru-style outdoor lifestyle marketing). In other words, it’s not so much a Countryman as a city hipster with a flair for rural evangelism. But are four doors, AWD and a “sliding center rail” enough to bring new buyers into the fold? There’s almost no doubt that the Countryman will be a hot fashion item for a while, but the world’s first Austrian-built MINI is going to face high prices, weak power in the base spec (1.6 liters moving over 3k lbs), and intra-brand anti-SUV snobbery. On the plus side, it’s apparently very hip.
Redflex Traffic Systems of today reported to the Australian Securities Exchange that it had rebuffed the $275 million offer from toll road giant Macquarie Bank for outright control of the company. The Australian red light camera maker believes that it can spark a bidding war to drive up the purchase price and enrich shareholders.
According to The Global Times, China’s burgeoning love affair with the automobile is maturing nicely: though sales have slowed in the Middle Kingdom, the engines are getting bigger.
In July, smaller cars accounted for only 65.38 percent of overall passenger vehicle sales, which totaled 946,200 units, declining 1.42 percentage points month-on-month and dropping below last year’s average of 69.5 percent for five months in a row.
“Small cars,” it should be pointed out, means cars with 1.6 liters displacement or less. This despite a 3,000 yuan ($443.37) government subsidy on 71 qualifying “small car” nameplates. And if an uncooperative market weren’t enough to cause some head-wagging in Beijing, only one Chinese-brand car made the China Association of Auto Manufacturers “ten best-selling sedans” list: the BYD F3. And no, not the plug-in hybrid version.
Reuters [via ABC] reports that GM has completed its S1 filing and will file Monday, after a Friday the 13th filing was delayed in order to
add a management risk factor after Chief Executive Ed Whitacre announced on Thursday he would step down and be succeeded by Dan Akerson effective September.
And that won’t be the only “risk factor” warning to investors in GM’s S-1. Bloomberg found a number of analysts ready to support the headline
GM’s Akerson to Struggle in Proving to IPO Investors Europe Fixable
Any bets on the number of times the word “Opel” appears in tomorrow’s filing?
Thanks in part to help from TTAC readers, TrueDelta received a record number of responses to last month’s Car Reliability Survey—nearly 18,000. Updated car reliability stats have been posted to the site for 458 cars, up from 404 three month ago. There are partial results for another 351.
These stats cover through the end of June. Other sources of car reliability information will not cover the most recent months until the summer or even fall of next year.
Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist.
That’s the thesis of UCLA professor of urban planning, Daniel Shoup’s new book The High Cost of Free Parking. Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen explains Shoup’s line of thinking in an NYT Op-Ed.
Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it’s in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway. Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block.
If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.
The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life.
Cowen points to San Francisco’s market-based parking meters as one potential solution for the waste and stealth subsidies of automotive overuse caused by free parking (which Shoup reckons amounts to a staggering $127b annual subsidy). But will market-based parking pricing be any more politically palatable than other green behavior-modification efforts like, say, a gas tax? On the other hand, if municipalities can get rid of speed cameras due to increased parking revenue, perhaps the compromise might be more worth it to motorists. Either way, one gets the feeling that the free parking phenomenon isn’t going to disappear overnight.
Honda’s Civic Hybrid has always been something of an afterthought in the marketplace, as Honda’s “mild” hybrid system consistently fell behind the Toyota Prius in terms of mileage, electric-only range and green street-cred. Then, late last year, Honda settled a class action lawsuit alleging that the Civic Hybrid couldn’t hit its EPA numbers. And though the weak-selling Insight has replaced the Civic Hybrid as Honda’s problem hybrid of the moment, the Civic Hybrid woes are still piling up. The latest bad news comes from the LA TImes, which reports that Civic Hybrid batteries have been dying before their time, and that Honda’s software “fix” for the problem reduces mileage from 45 MPG to 33 MPG. Since the standard Civic is rated at 30 MPG, a number of Civic Hybrid owners are wondering why they paid extra for what amounts to a 3 MPG improvement on the highway… and they’re accusing Honda of refusing to replace batteries under warranty. In other words, this looks to be one of the first major battery warranty-related fiascos of the hybrid era… and it’s shaping up to be a nasty one. Electric car makers, take notice.
In its first public appearance, the Porsche 918 Spyder prototype delivers an aural experience that its cousin, the GT3 R Hybrid, just can’t match. In fact, at this point it’s probably safe to say that the 918 is already the best-sounding hybrid yet created.
Jeep’s Grand Cherokee has earned consistently positive reviews by maintaining its off-road capability and nailing one of the few untouched crossover market positions between mass-market minivan replacements and high-end luxury SUVs. Does that mean the Dodge version, which will bear the Durango nameplate, will be similarly received? Not necessarily. Expected to be less off-road capable than its Jeep cousin, the Durango will compete head-to-head with the new Ford Explorer, GM’s Lambda juggernaut, and a pack of established mid-large CUV competitors. The Durango will also be the toughest trial yet for the tortured relationship between Dodge and the ostensibly spun-off Ram brand, as the Durango has traditionally resembled the Ram off which it used to be based (need proof? Dodge is calling the Durango a “three-row performance SUV”). On the positive side of the Durango’s balance sheet: an optional Hemi engine. Sure, the Grand Cherokee offers that too, but the Jeep brand doesn’t get to call it a Hemi. Now that’s what you call differentiation!
Whatever you do, don’t talk about anything related to the car itself. Reference an obscure previous ad for the car instead. Also, if the car’s target market is young men, be sure to make the ad’s protagonist an elderly female. Finally, the concept must be strange enough to be totally unmemorable. Then sit back and watch as your over-the-hill muscle car doubles its volume and still doesn’t quite match the Mustang or Camaro’s volume. Success!
Dan writes:
My detailer suggests giving my year-old (but 20k mile) midnight-blue 911 Carrera 4S car a polish and a paint sealant. Although my detailer assures me it is safe, words like ‘mild abrasive’ and the industrial metal-clad dual-orbit application machine do not sit well with me. I trust that my detailer knows what he is doing, but won’t it eventually grind out my clear coat, with successive polishes? How many polishes does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll? And what does it mean to polish surfaces that have a clear bra application?
Thanks very much, TTAC helped me picking S vs 4S, and I don’t want my baby done wrong.
Today’s Detroit News has an interesting item on Ford’s D3/D4 platform strategy, based on the thesis that
The remade Taurus has emerged as a flagship for the Dearborn automaker, restoring luster to a nameplate that had become synonymous with “rental car,” and helping to revive an automaker that had become dependent on trucks and sport utility vehicles.
As Jack Baruth’s Capsule Review of the Ford Five Hundred shows, the D3 platform offers good space and comfort, and the recent update and return to the Taurus nameplate has been rewarded with steadily-increasing sales. And though the Taurus has fought back to become a Ford-brand flagship (likely at the expense of Mercury), its platform-mates have been consistent underperformers on the showroom floor. Flex has sold in the low 3k monthly range, while MKS and MKT have been thoroughly beaten in YTD sales by the Cadillac DTS and Escalade, themselves hardly the most competitive alternatives to the big Lincolns.
American Traffic Solutions (ATS) and its subcontractors have spent $230,648 in an effort to deprive voters in Baytown and Houston, Texas of a chance to decide whether red light cameras should be used in their city. On November 2, residents will likely have the chance to adopt charter amendments banning the use of automated ticketing machines, although ATS lawyers are working overtime to attempt to have the courts overturn the citizen-led petition drive. Earlier this month a similar ATS-funded legal attack failed in Mukilteo, Washington, but the company last year had some success finding a judge in College Station willing to overrule the public.
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