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There’s a piece in the Sunday NY Times automotive section (we get it a day early) about a New York congressman, Eric Massa, who drove a Chevy Equinox fuel-cell vehicle from Corning, New York (his hometown) to DC as a demonstration of personal greenness, forward thinking and the potential of hydrogen-fueled vehicles. How is that possible; it’s 280 miles form Corning to DC and there are no hydrogen stations en route? Turns out greenmeister Massa actually drove two Equinoxes. One he drove from Corning to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he changed horses to the fully fueled second Equinox. How is that possible, since you’d think a fuel-cell Equinox would use a certain amount of hydrogen just getting to Harrisburg? Well, it turns out GM towed the Harrisburg Equinox– and also the Corning Equinox, which had to arrive there fully fueled– with a pair of hybrid Tahoes. So Massa actually used four cars and a fair amount of fuel, and produced a goodly amount of CO2, to get to Washington while “burning no fuel and producing zero emissions.”
I am stealing Jack’s thunder . I admit it. But, he opened up a tasty can of worms and I intend to eat the last drop. Or something. Anyhow, the dealership experience is absolutely insane. You’ve all heard of the dreaded four-square, right? Essentially, it’s four separate opportunities for the dealer to bend you over and drop trou. And they will, trust me. As (essentially) every car purchase involves a group people trying to screw you from multiple angles, these stories should be– and will be– fantastic. Mine, sadly, isn’t that great. But it goes like this… Back during the tail end of the dotcom boom, I was rich. Well, rich for a 25-year-old. Six-figure income and $425 a month in rent. Life was sweet. And I wanted an Audi S4 Avant more than anything in the world. So, I bop down to the Audi dealer. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have worn my ratty old Alice Donut T-shirt with a dead hooker on the front. But whatever. My plan: drive the Avant and put down $20k, hoping to get another $18k for my Grand Cherokee and only owe the remainder of the S4’s $45k price. The salesmen wouldn’t even look at me. After standing around feeling stupid for ten minutes, I approached one of them. No way could I test drive the car. Get serious. Now, I had just read an article about some new fangled car by Subaru called a WRX. It not only came as a wagon, but made 227 hp, AWD, and weighed 500 pounds less than the Audi so it was actually faster. Hmmm. Bopped over to the Subaru dealer. Got a test drive. AWESOME! They gave me $16k for the Jeep and I wrote a check for the rest. Done. The Audi dealer called me a few days later wondering if I was still interested. And I got to tell him all about my awesome new Subaru and the $45k he left on the table. You?
Top Gear presenter and Times carmudgeon Jeremy Clarkson is not one to walk away form a fight. In fact, you could say he never met a fist he didn’t lunge his towards. After Tesla and the MSM knocked Clarkson for pretending that a Roadster ran out of juice in an episode of the shark jumping car show, Clarkson mounted Ye Olde “Valid Yet Undeclared Fictional Recreation of Theoretical Facts” defense. And that, one presumed, was that. Only, of course, it wasn’t. In Clarkson’s Times column, the world’s most famous pistonhead attempts to disprove the English maxim “the first thing you do when you’re in a hole is stop digging.” “Tesla, when contacted by reporters, gave its account of what happened and it was exactly the same as ours. It explained that the brakes had stopped working because of a blown fuse and didn’t question at all our claim that the car would have run out of electricity after 55 miles.” Uh, yes it did. Anyway… “The problem is, though, that really and honestly, the US-made Tesla works only at dinner parties. Tell someone you have one and in minutes you will be having sex. But as a device for moving you and your things around, it is about as much use as a bag of muddy spinach.” Dodgy handling, high price, yada, yada, yada. And the Roadster’s greatest sin?
“400-mile total driving range
40-mile all-electric range with zero fuel consumption and zero tailpipe emissions
Jeep® Patriot EV joins the growing portfolio of electric-drive vehicles being developed by Chrysler LLC.”
Bloomberg has had a look at the U.S. new car market and it seems that American consumers are busy joining their Japanese counterparts in a new trend: hanging onto their cars until they die. “Used vehicles being traded in at dealerships averaged 6.3 years of age after the Wall Street meltdown in late 2008, about 6 months older than before the crisis, according to forecaster J.D. Power & Associates in Troy, Michigan.” And you know which way this one’s going. TTAC’s Best and Brightest have been connecting those dots for some time. Still, it’s a bit startling to see the MSM do the same. “If the industry sells fewer than 12 million vehicles this year, the government will have to write more checks” media-friendly auto analyst John Casesa told Bloomies. “Otherwise GM, Ford and Chrysler will be gone, bankrupt.” TARP this. “’Even with a drop in the price of gasoline, families aren’t changing their decision to keep running the old car’ said the Conference Board’s Goldstein. Nor will steps such as an easing of credit standards at lender GMAC be enough on their own to revive showroom traffic, said Tom Libby, a J.D. Power analyst. ‘Just because GMAC has become a bit more lenient, it’s not like a light switch,’ Libby said. ‘It will take economic stability to reignite car buying, it will take some calm. That’s what a shopper needs for the confidence to spend $26,000.'”
Next to Buddhism and Shinto, there is a third, equally important religion in Japan: “Seken tei wo kinisuru,” or be mindful of ones reputation. Japanese are neat, and polite, and they very much care of what their neighbors think. You don’t see many old and decrepit cars on Japan’s streets. Would be bad for your seken tei. Buying a new ride every few years is just the right thing to do. Make that “was the right thing to do.”
Most of the Japanese are now dead set to hang on to their current car for its dear life. Only if it dies will they set foot into a dealer again. This is the result of a study conducted by The Nikkei (sub) and C-News, a marketing data service operated by Yahoo Japan Value Insight Corp.
The question was simple and straightforward: “What do you plan to do with your current car?” 56.5 percent of the respondents said they would drive it until it breaks down, then buy a new one. Only 10 percent chose “replace it with a new one, as soon as I find a nice model.”
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An overview of what happened in other parts of the world while you were in bed. TTAC provides round-the-clock coverage of everything that has wheels. Or has its wheels coming off. WAS is being filed from Beijing this week, from Berlin next week,
Chinese Buick: The Buick LaCrosse, set to debut at the North American International Auto Show next week, is a Chinese product. Due to Buick’s popularity in China, the company’s design team there took the lead in remodeling the LaCrosse, Gasgoo writes. Sales of Buicks in China reached 332,000 units in 2007, according to data supplied to IHS Global Insight, a consulting firm. The LaCrosse was the second-best seller there, with 71,500 cars sold. Figures for full-year 2008 year are not available yet. By comparison, GM sold 137,197 Buick branded cars and light trucks in the U.S. in 2008, down 26.4 percent from 2007. The company sold 36,873 LaCrosses in 2008, down 23 percent from 2007. In December alone, LaCrosse sales dipped 59 percent to 1,451 units.
The Detroit News and The Wall Street Journal are reporting that Motown automakers’ pensions funds are no longer fully-funded. “The outgoing director of the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. warned Friday that Detroit’s Big Three automakers face a $41 billion pension shortfall. “We’re not trying to tell people that the pension house is on fire,” quoth E.F. Millard in the DetN. “The point is that in many ways this has a similar look to other situations, such as a Bethlehem Steel.” Not surprisingly, the WSJ has an even more alarming sound bite. “An awful lot of people seem to think these plans are well funded or overfunded. Each of these plans is significantly underfunded [and] in three years I don’t want people coming back and saying, ‘How come the PBGC never told us that?'” Let’s drill down, then.
This subject came up in the comments underneath my review of the Bugatti T40. [If you haven’t come across dogboxes before, they’re explained (or at least chewed over) here.] Googling to shed some light on the debate, I came across this hair-raising video of BMW supercar with a straightcut dogbox eating up the competition, sounding like something out of Star Wars. My take is that while straight cut spur gear are weaker (in principle), they can be constructed to be enough bigger in the same space that they end up stronger (in practice). Perhaps TTAC’s Best and Brightest would care to comment?
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