“As West Germany debated last week whether it should have an army, East Germany was unmasking one.

Five thousand jackbooted, blue-uniformed toughs swarmed into the border districts to put down disturbances by farmers trying to save their homes as the Reds bulldozed a three-mile-deep isolation corridor between East and West Germany. The blue-uniformed men, part of a 100,000-man force, are called the People’s Police (Volkspolizei, or Vopos, for short).”

Oh, just the tone of that article (from TIME) makes me nostalgic for the days when American journalists kind of, you know, liked baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and freedom. Nowadays, the Times would probably “embed” somebody with the Vopos and he would enthusiastically shoot farmers while talking about the need for social justice.

But I digress. The car in the photo above is also a “VoPo” — a Volkswagen-Porsche. Styled by the consumer-goods design firm Gugelot, who were the folks responsible for the Kodak “Carousel” slide projector, it was assembled by Karmann in Germany. In Europe, it was sold as a Volkswagen; in the United States, as a Porsche. Although I’m personally a bit of a 914 fan, the car has to be understood as an aesthetic, critical, and commercial failure for Porsche. Most importantly, it was yet another episode in the strange “Inside Baseball” relationship between Volkswagen and Porsche. From the day Ferdinand Porsche started thinking about the “People’s Car” to the very last who-bought-whom stock manipulation of 2009, Porsche and VW have been engaged in a bizarre, operatic, and occasionally fraudulent relationship — and Porsche always loses. Every. Single. Freaking. Time.

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Toyota pulled back on incentives last month, and paid the price with a 6.8 percent decline in sales compared to July 2009. Between this and the fact that year-over-year comparisons are skewed by July 2009‘s Cash-For-Clunkers effect, it’s almost no surprise that Toyota’s smaller and value-oriented models were almost uniformly down on the month. But a look at last July’s report shows that the Yaris, Corolla and the Scions actually lost volume during the first month of Cash-For-Clunkers. A similar situation is playing out at Honda, where the Fit has fallen for the second July in a row, and the Civic dropped hard after gaining only three percent last July. Stranger still: both firms, which earned their US market spurs on the back of efficient cars, beat their July 2009 “truck” numbers but failed to match car volume. My, how things change!

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What’s the difference between these two compact crossovers? American readers will recognize the vehicle on the left as the forthcoming facelift of the Nissan Rogue. The crossover on the right is a recently-released update to the European-market Nissan Qashqai. The Rogue is slightly larger in most dimensions than the Qashqai (not counting the extended-wheelbase Qashqai +2), and only offers a 2.5 liter engine while the Qash has a palette of four two-liter and smaller gas and diesel engines. But it’s not the Euro model’s cramped quarters or low-displacement engines that we find ourselves wishing could find their way to the American market… it’s the Qashqai’s updated styling that we want. Sure, these things are subjective, but the updated Rogue just doesn’t seem like much of an improvement on its predecessor’s looks. The Qashqai, meanwhile, has gone from filler to killer.

Nissan may have broken its own incentive record last month, but it was GM that blew the lid off the competition. According to Edmunds’ True Cost Of Incentives Index, The General loaded up nearly $1,000 more in incentive spending compared to its closest competitors, and killed the industry average by $1,340. Combined, Detroit spent $1.7 billion, or 57.3 percent of the total incentive expenditures last month. And according to Edmunds,

Analysis of incentives expenditures as a percentage of average sticker price for each segment shows large cars averaged the highest, 13.5 percent, followed by large trucks at 12.4 percent of sticker price. Premium luxury cars averaged the lowest with 3.5 percent and sport cars followed with 3.9 percent of sticker price.

Ford may have beat its July 2009 number last month, but sales at the Blue Oval brand still fell compared to the month before. Perhaps more embarrassing still is the fact that the recently-canceled Mercury brand managed to move more volume than Lincoln, despite the fact that both brands underperformed compared to both June 2010 and July 2009.

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Set the way-back machine to our July 2009 Chrysler Group sales post, and a certain amount of deja-vu might just set in. Last Summer, Chrysler’s version of success was a mere single-digit percentage volume decline. This July, Chrysler’s big accomplishment was a five percent improvement over last July’s number. Last July we thought the Chrysler brand in particular was “toast,” and based on this July’s numbers, we can’t say we’ve found much to change that opinion, as ChryCo’s eponymous brand dropped 11 percent year-over-year, and shed over 3k units of volume compared to June. Chrysler Town & Country outsold the rest of the brand alone at 8,083 units, an 18 percent gain.

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Yes, GM’s “core brands” Chevy, Buick, GMC and Cadillac combined for a 25 percent improvement over their Cash-4-Clunker-fueled July 2009 performance, although The General moved so many Pontiacs and Saturns during July of ’09 that overall sales were up only an anemic 5.5 percent. Because C4C boosted sales of value-oriented models last July, Chevrolet was up a mere 12 percent, while GMC was up 27.2 percent. The big gains in year-over-year volume came from Buick and Cadillac, which 136 and 141 percent combined. In short, every year-over-year number we’re looking at has been deeply skewed by last year’s C4C program, meaning volume numbers and month-to-month numbers will be the keys to properly analyzing this month’s sales results.
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Is this the turn-around? Dead cat bounce? Unloading of 2010 inventory? July US new car sales are a closely watched indicator. The following table lists July sales reported by Automotive News [sub]. Watch this spot for all numbers as they come in during the day. Read More >

China’s red-hot growth numbers are coming down to earth. Which doesn’t mean that the Chinese are stopping to buy cars. We are now getting into a territory where previous year sales increases were so insane that any more outrageous growth would simply be certifiable. In July 2009, sales in China had exploded by 70 percent. A month later, in August 2009, sales nearly doubled from a year earlier. Any growth that betters these numbers is amazing. Read More >

Sales numbers for the US market in July should drop today, and based on an early analyst survey, the market’s only recovered to a 12m SAAR at best. Estimates aside though, it’s beginning to look more and more like the US market for new cars is approaching a “new normal.” How so? Automotive News [sub]’s Jesse Snyder figures it’s

Because discipline is breaking out all over– at manufacturers, suppliers and dealerships.

Even Snyder’s headline captures the mood of cautious realism that’s suddenly taken hold of the auto industry: though the market appears to have moved towards 12m annual units in July, Snyder’s analysis is headlined Life at 11 million U.S. sales.
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Good news for Chinese parts makers: Volkswagen, by far the biggest brand in China, wants to gradually achieve full localization in China. In regular English: Volkswagen’s Chinese joint ventures plan to locally source all auto parts and components needed to make cars in China, and will stop importing them. Read More >

Unlike a Texas appellate court, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled last Wednesday that reaching one’s own driveway during a traffic stop can avoid more serious consequences. In November 2007, Officer Blood of the Cornelius Police Department attempted to stop Richard Chaves Gonzales for a traffic violation. Gonzales was just two or three blocks from home, so he did not stop until he reached his own driveway. Blood wrote Gonzales a ticket for driving on a suspended license and began searching the car without a warrant after declaring that he was going to impound the vehicle. Blood insisted that the search was valid.

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You can watch Ed Niedermeyer here if you didn’t already watch him live. Great show, Ed!

Official numbers for July sales in Germany are out now, and did we mention that the Verband der Importeure VDIK (German Association of Car Importers) is usually reliable? They said 237.500 cars in July. The official number, as reported by the Kraftfahrtbundesamt, is 237.428. The official drop is 30.2 percent. Read More >