With news that Mercury will receive new product based on the forthcoming Ford Focus, the bandwagon to crown Ford as the new King of Detroit has halted briefly as its passengers take a moment to remember: oh yeah, Ford is technically still trying to compete in the luxury game. Ford’s recent luxury-brand efforts have been so half-hearted in comparison with its Ford-brand turnaround that many analysts simply overlook Lincoln and Mercury when proclaiming Dearborn’s momentum. As, apparently, have consumers. Neither Lincoln nor Mercury cracked 100k sales units in 2009, a feat achieved even by such marginal luxury brands as Buick, Cadillac, and Acura. And as the Detroit News details, the problems with Lincoln-Mercury run deep, and their solutions are far from obvious.
Do you think being the scion of a global brand is easy? Well think again, it’s hard work. No-one knows this more than Bill Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford. So, when Akio Toyoda got thrown into a quality nightmare, Bill Ford empathised with the fellow (and currently not so great) grandson of Kiichiro Toyoda, the one who had founded Toyota. Bill feels for Akio, in the family way. Read More >
As much grumbling as there is among US-based enthusiasts about increasing efficiency standards, Europe’s emissions requirements are yielding even stranger fruit than mere V6-powered Porsche Panameras. One such product of the conintental obsession with downsizing: Fiat’s new TwinAir engine, available this summer on European-spec Fiat 500s. The 900 cc turbocharged twin generates 85 horsepower while emitting fewer than 100 grams of C02 per kilometer, and uses Fiat’s much-vaunted MultiAir technology. An uprated turbo version with 105 hp will become available later, reports Edmunds, as will a 60 hp naturally-aspirated version. The only other automaker to offer a two-pot in a road car? That would be Tata, which equips its Nano with a 33 hp, 632 cc engine. Given the close ties between Tata and Fiat, could Europeans have a 100 hp+ Abarth-branded Nano in their future?
My wife and I have a 6-month-old girl. Hurray, she’s a joy! While all is cool with my wife’s 2006 Accord V6, my 2004 Scion xB just does not seem, well, safe anymore. I love the small-on-the-outside-yet-cavernous-on-the-inside quality of this car (I’m 6’4″), but feel it would not bode well for my daughter if there were a bad accident. Plus, the 108hp engine is getting boring.
I want something safe and fun to drive. By “safe” I mean solid and meaty, and AWD would be nice too (we live in eastern Massachusetts); by “fun to drive” I mean quick and with a manual transmission, or at least a manumatic. We have lots of stuff to cart on weekend trips to the in-laws, but I like wagons (hence the Scion). And we definitely don’t need/want two sedans.
The Arizona Senate Public Safety and Human Services Committee approved legislation last Wednesday that would substantially expand the size and scope of the photo enforcement program in the state. Lawmakers voted 6-1 to approve legislation allowing the use of automated ticketing machines for a number of new types of violations. Committee Chairman Linda Gray (R-Phoenix) sponsored the legislation after becoming an enthusiastic supporter of cameras.
Europe, and especially Germany, reports declining diesel dependency. From a nearly 50 percent share a few years ago, the share of diesel driven cars in Germany dropped to 31 percent in 2009. Two reasons: The favorable taxation of the oil had been scrapped. And speaking of scrapped, the “Abwrackprämie, or cash for clunkers, had favored a trend towards low displacement gasoline burners. (In January, the diesel share climbed back to 40 percent in Deutschland.) Badly mauled were the manufacturers of bio (a.k.a. “veggie”) diesel. Read More >
ACEA wants you to know that revised numbers of the January European sales figures have been posted. Figures have been updated in the market table (Portugal and Hungary) and the manufacturer table (Ford Group, Ford, Volvo, Others). Nothing earth shattering. The revised PDF is here. The revised Excel sheet is here.
5pm in Tokyo. Toyota has a news conference. Somehow, they forgot to invite me. And I’m right here, in Tokyo. From our Ota-ku apartment, the fallout from the conference as it is reported in Japanese and international media. Call it vicarious live blogging. Read More >
“Toyota is considering halting production at its factory at Burnaston, near Derby, because of collapsing sales amid the car company’s recall crisis,” London’s Times reports.
When my other son Will was a toddler, he loved to put on my size thirteen shoes and shuffle around the house with them. He called it Shook. This Samurai brings that memory back very vividly. Read More >
The best stories are those where you can barely wait to find out more. There are new heroes, new ideas and new sources of suspense… actually, all typically Porsche
So goes the opening to this video, introducing the new base-model V6 Panameras. Though some might argue that Volkswagen-sourced V6 engines are not in fact “typically Porsche” (an argument that carried more weight before the Cayenne came to town), a 300 horsepower engine in a 3,814 lb, four-door Porsche does technically qualify as a “source of suspense.” And attempting to charge $75k for a base Panamera V6 certainly requires a perspective that might be charitably described as “heroic.” On the other hand, it’s hard to get too down on this poor thing. You can’t blame a lazy dog for a veterinarian’s (or in this case, a CAFE standard’s) work. Besides, it’s still not as embarrassingly neutered as the Cayenne V6.
With Congress already investigating a possible Toyota unintended acceleration cover-up, the NHTSA has decided that it should probably be getting a piece of the action, and has invoked its statutory power to request documents relating to when Toyota learned of the defects involved in its recent gas pedal recall and how it reacted to them. Federal law requires that manufacturers notify the NHTSA within five days of discovering a safety defect, reports the Wall Street Journal [sub]. The WSJ [sub] also notes that Toyota is offering to disclose new details about its crisis response task force (which reportedly includes “outside quality experts”), as the world’s largest automaker struggles to respond to a rash of recalls that has affected over 8m vehicles worldwide and will cost the company at least $2b. CEO Akio Toyoda will hold his third recall-related press conference in two weeks on Wednesday evening to disclose these details and more on the company’s plans to boost testing and transparency. According to yet another WSJ [sub] report, those measures are said to include less reliance on computer modeling in vehicle design, improved consumer feedback capabilities and more stringent testing of supplier-designed parts.
Does retail always give you the best return when it comes to cars? The reflexive answer is ‘yes’. But the real answer is ‘It depends’. I’ve seen cars bought at dealer auctions that don’t have a chance in a felon’s hell of reclaiming their outrageous price. This week there was a Barney inspired purple 1998 Dodge Caravan with 118k that sold for $3000. That one will have to be financed to a hardcore Prince fan with a brood. A little while back I also saw this Farley inspired van go for $5800. That one is still at the dealer’s lot begging for monetary penance. Of course, these two extreme examples are somewhere between a lightning strike and a snow flurry in Atlanta. So what’s the norm? Read More >
TTAC GM Bashing Alert! The following article has been read and reviewed by the TTAC-GM Assault Protective Services Committee and has been found to contain material that may put GM in a negative light. Reader discretion is advised.
Unless the elves are asleep at Google, the odds are good that there will be an ad for the 2010 Chevrolet Equinox immediately to the right of this article. And it will proudly trumpet its 32 mpg EPA highway rating, like every other Equinox ad. From GM’s first gleeful announcement, it was hard to swallow from the that a tall, almost 4,000 lb CUV could actually get 32 mpg on the highway, or 26 mpg combined. It appears others are having the same blockage of the pharynx. Now that there’s a number of reviews out, they all show the same pattern: the Equinox EPA numbers are highly deceptive. But would the EPA ever come down on Government Motors? Read More >
GM is spending about $100 million a year adding flex-fuel capability to our vehicles. We can’t afford to leave this capital stranded… I think it would be very helpful if we could get government assistance. But I really want the oil industry, I want the people who are at this conference, I want the government and I want us to just work together to make ethanol a reality,
This was the message the GM’s Tom Stephens took to the Renewable Fuels Association’s National Ethanol Conference in Orlando. And though Stephens’ exhortation of the ethanol industry makes for a pleasant addition to GM’s typical ethanol message (i.e. the first sentence of the quote), it’s little more than filler. GM’s push to align itself with the ethanol industry continues unabated, as Stephens reveals that half of all GM vehicles will be flex-fuel capable by 2012. The problem is that GM reckons the country needs another 10k E85 pumps (up from the current 2k), and since the ethanol industry would effectively collapse without government support, nobody from the industry is jumping in to take responsibility for this self-serving infrastructure project.
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