Yesterday, I wrote about how GM had beaten the French and made them concede benefits in return for job security. Well, it seems that the French got their own back on GM in a round about sort of way. Bloomberg reports that Opel sales in France dropped a massive 30 percent to 6,462 units in July. This doesn’t bode well for Nick Reilly, head of GM’s European division, as he tries to make Opel attractive enough for the corporate mothership to finance a turnaround with American taxpayers’ money. Shall we take a closer look at the French sales figures…? Read More >

Hot summer. Hot deals. Time to clear out the lot for the 2011 models. Bloomberg figures that July sales broke all records since last August’s short-lived cash-4-clunkers frenzy. Eight analysts, polled by Bloomberg’s, predict a July SAAR of 11.9 million.

Real numbers will be released tomorrow, and TTAC will be there for the blow-by-blow.

In the meantime, all indicators are in the top band. Read More >

It’s that time of the month again, and welcome to another episode of Chinese Numerology. As it has become a TTAC tradition, the China Automotive Technology & Research Center jumps the gun again with an off-the-wall number. Shameless Bloomberg prints it and reports that “retail deliveries of cars, sport-utility vehicles and multipurpose vehicles rose 15.4 percent last month from a year earlier to 822,300, the China Automotive Technology & Research Center said in a statement today. That compared with 10.9 percent growth in June.” No, it did not. The CATRC is known for pretty good safety research and for awfully wrong numbers. You can safely ignore them, along with the rest of that Bloomberg tale. Read More >

One can always count on the Japanese to be first with a precise sales count for the preceding month.  New car sales in Japan rose for the 12th straight month in July, up 15.5 percent compared to July of the previous year. Customers bought 333,403 units in July, the Japan Automobile Dealers Association told The Nikkei [sub]. Read More >

If you want, and if you don’t feel discouraged by Ed’s op-ed piece in the New York Times, you can go to your friendly GM dealer and pre-order the 2011 Volt for an MSRP of  $41,000 (before a $7,500 federal tax credit). A 36-month lease costs $350 a month, with $2,500 down. Bring a cot, we are given the impression that there are long lines at the dealerships. GM’s spokesman David Darovitz told Automotive News [sub], that based on customer reactions, GM expects demand for the Volt to exceed the 10,000 units it will build between its launch and the end of 2011. Read More >

How things change: Last year, the death of the automobile was prognosticated. Maybe little cheap econoboxes. Luxury cars? Forget it, dead as dinosaurs. Don’t even mention dinosaurs. This year … just have a look at Audi. Read More >

Motorvehicle production in Japan was up 25.9 percent from a year earlier in June, says the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association via The Nikkei [sub] Domestic sales are a bit more sedate, up 17.4 percent in June. Where did all those cars go? Read More >

Some people (like about half of the nation) are convinced the Government has a conflict of interest when it comes to Toyota. Many believe there is a witchhunt against Toyota by a government, and by unions that want GM’s major competitor bleed money and market share before the big GM IPO. 25 percent believe the criticism stems from an outright desire to help GM, while 38 percent disagree and 37 percent aren’t sure. Whatever the reason may be, Toyota is beginning to show battle fatigue. Read More >

The Chinese market keeps going, and going, and going. It was up  47.7 percent in the first six months of 2010. Can’t be, you say? Well, the rest of the Asian markets are not far behind. The six major ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore) bought 41 percent more cars in the first six months of 2010 than in the year before. Read More >

OK, so none of these cars are actually “competition” for the Chevrolet Volt, but think of them as a benchmark “basket” and they can help define the market the Volt will soon be thrown into. Read More >

China isn’t Porsche’s largest market quite yet (it’s only a matter of time, now they are #3), but China is now officially the world’s largest market for the Porsche Cayenne. Porsche China CEO Helmut Broeker said it himself to Gasgoo. The luxo-SUV is popular with China’s well-heeled and high-ranking military figures. Read More >

Except for Nissan, which outpaced the market, the big Japanese automakers are having a bit of a hard time in China. Toyota and Honda received a lot of bad press in the Middle Kingdom. Toyota for its recalls. Honda for its series of strikes. Whatever the reason, both are losing market share. This doesn’t bode well for the rest of the year, when the red-hot Chinese market is expected to cool down a bit. Read More >

China Car Times reports that “Whilst the Chinese auto market is down as a whole,” (well, it’s not “down”, a growth of 23.5 percent in June is not “down”, and a growth of 48.2 percent in the first half year isn‘t “down” either – it just cooled off a bit, in a Chinese way)  “there are certain niche segments such as the luxury car business that seems to performing above and beyond expectations.”

Apart from the tortured language – no kidding. Read More >

Our six month sales by brand chart is a bit crowded, so we’ve broken out luxury brands for today’s COTD. Bloomberg assembled a grip of analysts who all say that Mercedes is going to sock it to Lexus this year… and this chart certainly proves that the opportunity is there. But then, the opportunity is there for BMW too, if Lexus so much as stops for a breath. One thing is for certain though: Ford may be ruling the mass market, Lincoln is the last stop before Volvo-ville as you work your way down the luxury volume ranking. That’s not great, but given a choice between a respectable luxury brand and a $2.6b first-half profit, I know what nine out of ten auto executives recommend.

It’s a new Wirtschaftswunder, a new economic miracle: While sales in Germany and Europe nosedive, Volkswagen can’t make cars fast enough, and produces record results. In June, German car sales were down 28.7 percent. The European market was down 6.9 percent. That should hurt Volkswagen, by far Europe’s largest carmaker big, shouldn’t it? It should, but it didn’t. In the first half of 2010, the Volkswagen Group delivered more vehicles than they hoped in their wildest dreams. Read More >