Do you remember when Saturn made a last ditch attempt to bring customers back to their showrooms? It asked us to “Rethink” Saturn. Whatever our perception was of them, we almost certainly had it wrong and we had to check them out once more. Ford did a similar thing with “Have you driven a Ford lately?” It’s quite a clever strategy, convince the customer that they had it wrong about your product and invite them to try them again. Well, Toyota seems to trying a similar tactic in order to woo customers back and polish up their corporate image. Now at this point you’re expecting me to unveil some hokey advert which asks us “Try Toyota” (if Toyota is reading this, give me a call and we can work out a licensing fee for my ad slogan). Wrong. It’s not their products. They are fine.
Toyota asks us to rethink the meaning of recall. Read More >
Anybody who made it through the last 12 months or so with their passion for the Saab brand intact deserves some kind of free psychological screening and endangered species protection award. Hell, anyone who made it through the last 20 years… you know what, this isn’t the moment for cynicism. Through the wrenching chaos of GM’s often-abortive attempts to sell Saab, the website SaabsUnited has stood by its brand, aggregating the most complete Saab sale coverage on the web, and generally consoling the faithful. Oh yes, and suffering through a relentless stream of cynicism from yours truly (sorry guys, it’s all we know). Anyway, for being the keepers of hope when all hope seemed lost, Saab has named and annual award after SaabsUnited which
will be made annually as the company’s way of expressing its gratitude to people like [SU founder Steven Wade] and others who continue to show us such great support.
We want the government out, period. We don’t want to be known as Government Motors.
GM Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre channels his inner Rick “Bankruptcy is not an option” Wagoner in the New York Times, telling the taxpayers who put him in charge of a bailout-rinsed General Motors to get lost. Sure Ed, we’ll all go NSFW ourselves just as soon as we get our $49.5 billion back. Talk about putting the throat-clearing guttural in chutzpah…
[Editor’s Note: The following is the transcript of a speech given by GM Chairman/CEO Ed Whitacre today at the Center For Automotive Research’s Management Briefing Seminar (via GM Media)]
Thanks, Dave [Cole], and good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to be here…and it’s no wonder why you picked this location.
This really is beautiful country up here. And as a Texan, it pains me to say this, but it’s true…your lake really is bigger than any lake in Texas.
This is my first time at this conference, so I hope you will take it easy on me. You were nice enough to invite me last year…but at the time, I was still trying to figure out my way around the RenCen without getting lost.
Like most modern corporations, car companies tend to be extremely opaque. Only rarely do non-insiders like us get a peek behind the PR curtains of a major automaker, and when we do, we have to wonder why we’re getting the show… and what are we looking at, anyway? Just such a moment has arrived, as a tipster has pointed us to coolsprings.com, where an interview with a Nissan consultant based at Nissan North America’s headquarters in Tennessee appears to be literally overflowing with the kinds of juicy scandals, corporate gossip, and inside baseball that we so rarely see in print. But can the self-described whistleblower Sharyn Bovat be trusted? Is Nissan-Renault’s upper management really locked in a global struggle for control of the company? Do Tennessee taxpayers really pay for Nissan executives’ spa treatments? Did Nissan really relocate a number of employees from California to Tennessee, only to try to fire them shortly thereafter? This is The Truth About Cars, so we’ll proceed with caution… but this story is just too juicy to ignore.
If you didn’t know, you might think it’s a Cobalt or a Camry. I don’t think there’s a lot of cachet in having the first one. It’s meant to be a people mover, not a people impresser. It’s not like when you pull into Bob’s Big Boy parking lot with the Volt, you’re going to open the hood.
I caught some flack from TTAC’s Best and Brightest for suggesting that Jay Leno was less than entirely impressed by the Chevy Volt when it showed up at his legendary garage back in December. Today though, Leno’s ambivalence towards GM’s wundercar hit the front page, when the auto-obsessed comic gave the Detroit News a withering reaction [above] to the extended-range electric car. Maybe next time GM will give Team Coco a try… Read More >
Press events are such highly-managed affairs, that it’s rare to see something go wrong at one. But that’s exactly what happened at this Volvo demonstration of a collision avoidance system onboard a new S60 sedan. And as much fun as it is to see a car that’s supposed to be (nearly) uncrashable getting crumpled up on a stationary object, perhaps the most delightfully schadenfreude-soaked moment in this video is watching Volvo’s hapless PR rep tap dancing in embarrassment while explaining that this was not, in fact, a proper demonstration of Volvo’s collision-avoidance system. Moments like these are rare… savor them.
We didn’t make it down to the first meeting of the NHTSA-National Research Council panel tasked with studying unintended acceleration, but apparently we weren’t the only ones. A scan of the MSM confirms that a number of “more study is needed” stories were filed for the occasion, a good two weeks ago now, but we’ve been pointed towards the presentations for that meeting [available for download here, all 128 slides in PDF format here], and we feel comfortable drawing a few conclusions from them. In fact, we’d even argue that this data puts a lot of the controversy over unintended acceleration in Toyotas to rest.
Carquestions noticed a troubling issue with the latest Wall Street Journal report on the investigation of Toyota’s black-box data: the report cites its anonymous source as saying that “black box” event data recorders (EDRs) can lose their data if disconnected from the battery. Carquestions points out that this is not the case, cites the appropriate regulations and concludes that it sounds like this source doesn’t know what he or she is talking about. Meanwhile, Jalopnik is running with the story that Toyota planted the story… but then, why would Toyota imply that its own black boxes don’t meet regulatory standards? Especially when Toyota’s official comment is that it has yet to draw any conclusions from the investigation. For a story with such a logical conclusion (yes, most people are bad drivers) this is all getting a bit complicated.
On the back of the news from the NHTSA that they can’t find evidence of Sudden Unintended Acceleration (SUA) electronic gremlins, you’d think that Toyota would be feeling smug about themselves. You’d want to shout this from the rooftops, wouldn’t you? “It’s the drivers, stupid!” If I were Akio Toyoda, I’d show this to Bob Lutz, a bloke who took great delight in knocking Toyota throughout this affair. But what was Toyota’s European division’s reaction to all of this? Humility. Read More >
Much of the hysteria over a possible electronic cause for the Toyota unintended acceleration scandal (aka “the ghost in the machine”) stemmed from an ABC report featuring Southern Illinois University professor David Gilbert. Gilbert demonstrated to ABC’s Brian Ross that unintended acceleration could be triggered in Toyotas without generating an error code, but the report didn’t address the likelihood of this happening. Furthermore, ABC was found to have used misleading footage in that report. Gilbert went on to testify in one of the least convincing panels ever convened before congress, and even after Toyota held an event aimed solely at debunking his suspicions, Gilbert has persisted in believing that something is wrong with Toyota’s electronics. As a result, the AP [via CBC] reports that Toyota has pulled funding for two internships at SIU, two Toyota employees resigned from its automotive technology program advisory board, and another demanded that Gilbert be fired. The AP seems very keen to call these retaliations “smears,” but given recent revelations about the government investigation into Toyota’s electronic throttle control system, it seems that Gilbert and SIU are simply reaping what they’ve sown.
People “familiar with the findings” of NHTSA’s investigation into unintended acceleration in Toyotas tell the WSJ [sub] that after studying “dozens” of black boxes, the DOT has
found that at the time of the crashes, throttles were wide open and the brakes were not engaged… The results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyota and Lexus vehicles surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes.
Well, how’d you like to have a brand-new Chevrolet Corvette?
With that line, GM CEO Ed Whitacre keeps GM’s streak of giving Corvettes away to well-compensated guys alive in a speech at the Austin Chamber of Commerce. When Whitacre asked the chairman of the chamber and president of Tokyo Electron US Holdings Barry Mayer what kind of car he drove, Mayer responded that he drove a Lexus. That’s hardly a surprising response, points out the Freep, given that Mayer is the head of a Japanese company’s US operations. But it surprised and embarrassed Whitacre enough to drop some Corvette keys in Mayer’s lap and offer discounts on GM cars to everyone else in the audience. Because chambers of commerce are, after all, the truly needy. Besides, it’s just tax money…
Like GM’s infamous “payback” commercial, this Toyota ad walks right up to the point of a big lie, allowing the viewer to believe something while they’re actually being told something subtly different. Toyota never says “we spend a million dollars every hour on safety-related technology,” but they sure make you want to believe it. In reality, the “million dollars every hour” represents Toyota’s global R&D budget, some undisclosed portion of which is spent on safety-related technology. Toyota’s explanation of this intentionally confusing claim, after the jump. Read More >
For years it had been a mystery how the Texas House of Representatives, 83 percent of whose members voted to ban photo enforcement, could nonetheless endorse the use of red light cameras. An ethical storm that broke around state Representative Linda Harper-Brown (R-Irving) last month provides the answer. Harper-Brown, a Transportation Committee member, accepted unreported gratuities from a traffic camera firm in return for playing the decisive role in establishing the automated ticketing industry in the Lone Star State.
Anybody who made it through the last 12 months or so with their passion for the Saab brand intact deserves some kind of 
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