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Nissan ReviewsThe Nissan name was first used in 1933, but the company's history goes back much further. Originally known as Kwaishinsha Motorcar Works, the company produced its first automobile, the DAT, in 1914. DAT later became Datsun (son of DAT) in 1931 and Datsuns went on to become the first mass-produced vehicles in Japan. Americans got their first look at the Datsun in 1958 - the 1200 Sedan. The Datsun 240Z was released as a 1970 model and it became the best selling sports car in the world, selling 500,000 units in less than 10 years. |
Japan’s carmakers are slowly returning back to normal, hobbled only by unsure supply of parts and sometimes power. It will be slow going and full of surprises. One thing is for sure: The March 11 tsunami will have an ugly effect on carmakers’ books. Combined losses for the Japan’s carmakers and suppliers could “the biggest ever,” surpassing those during 2008 to 2009 financial crisis, Noriyuki Matsushima, an analyst in Tokyo at Citigroup Inc., told Bloomberg. Read More >
It might still be a bit early to put a sub-head on this month’s sales, but if GM can serve as Bertel’s China car sales oracle, perhaps they’ll indicate the US market as well. And if they do, we’ll be seeing strong year-over-year sales increases, with much of the new volume coming from compact cars, while large trucks sit flat. If GM doesn’t indicate the market well this month, then we’ll be sure to update our headline when we update the developing sales table which you can find just after the jump.
How many Civics could a Honda make, if a Honda could make Civics? Here’s a hint: “half as many” would be too optimistic a guess. Honda has warned its dealers to expect “severe shortages” in supply of the new 2012 model, and virtually every other Honda model will have the same availability issues until later this year. Toyota’s in the same boat.
What does this mean for TTACers who want to buy a Japanese-brand car?
Nissan’s NV200-based entrant into New York City’s Taxi of Tomorrow contest has won the contract (reportedly worth over a billion dollars), reports Reuters, beating out two other finalists, one based on Ford’s Transit Connect, the other from Turkey’s Karsan Otomotiv. The decision may be taking a few New Yorkers by surprise, as Reuters reports that the Turkish entrant’s clear glass ceiling made it a crowd favorite, and that
Karsan also hoped to gain favour with city officials by promising to assemble the cars in Brooklyn, vowing to use union labour. The plant would have marked a return of auto-making to the city for first time in about a century.
Though New Yorkers may have preferred a locally-built model to take over from the 16 vehicles currently serving as NYC Taxis, the NV200 seems like a sweet little van. So congratulations, Nissan… now, are we ready to start talking about a civilian version?
As predicted a month ago, the full brunt of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan’s auto industry in April. Sales of new cars, trucks and buses crashed 51 percent from April a year earlier. Most of Japan’s auto industry was closed in the first half of April and operated at reduced capacity in the second half of the month. Read More >
Wanna buy a Hummer? You can buy them as cheap as dirt these days. There was a beautiful one that went through the block at a weekly public auction in Oakwood, GA. Nice leather interior. Well kept. The H2 models in particular were an easy piece to market and sell not too long ago… but not last Thusday. It no-saled. Not even the hope of a bid at $13k. Then came the H3. No sale at 10k. No takers. Only two no-sales from new car stores that generally sell everything. Why?
1903 Columbus Electric Model 1000 on display at the 2011 SAE World Congress. From the collection of Peter Fawcett.
Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth
The theme of this year’s SAE World Congress was “Charging Forward Together”. In case you haven’t noticed the electrification of the automobile industry, to make the phrase even more obvious the logo includes an electric plug. Keeping with that theme the automotive engineers’ professional association put a couple of early electric cars on display, a 1915 Detroit Electric and a 1903 Columbus Electric.
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We haven’t tried to review movies here at TTAC since Bertel rejected my piece on Ai No Corrida with the single sentence “Go home, delete that file, and then kill yourself,” but that won’t stop me this time. Fast Five is out, and it hits its marks as precisely as Jenson Button does in wet qualifying. It’s not Senna, and that’s a good thing; instead of being mired in the past and catering to old people, Fast Five lives, awesomely, in the youthful present.
Even if it’s supposed to have happened seven years ago.
To make sure that I gave the newest street-racing superfilm a fair shake, I invited a bona-fide star from the original movie to watch it with me. Those of you who are fast and/or furious with the pause buttons on your DVD players may notice a wingless white Toyota Supra prowling around during the “Race Wars” segment of F&F 1. The fellow standing by the car during the Johnny Tran scenes still owns it, and he also owns half of my Plymouth Neon racer, so naturally we had to see if this new movie was granny-shifting its plotlines or double-clutching the excitement like it should. Spoilers, as they say, are below.
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After Argentina and Brazil some weekends ago, our whirlwind tour around the globe takes us back to the American continent this weekend, further up north, on a visit to Mexico.
Now if Mexican cars don’t excite you as much as a plate of nachos, that’s ok! There are 153 other países to explore in my blog. You will enjoy it mucho mucho, te lo prometo! Read More >
Forecasts for April U.S. new vehicle sales differ widely amongst the industry soothsayers this month. Read More >
We’ve seen a fair number of outstanding engine swaps in 24 Hours of LeMons racing— the Saab B Turbo-powered 300ZX comes to mind— but most such projects tend to have reliability and/or performance issues in the car-slaughtering arena that is LeMons. At the frozen Campaign To Prevent Gingervitis race a couple weeks back, the much-anticipated radial-engined MR2 ate its drivetrain after a single lap, but there was one outlandishly butchered machine that actually contended for the overall win: the Alfa Romeo quad-cam V6-powered Bertone X1/9 of Team Launcha Splatos. Read More >
“This is the worst situation we’ve faced since the war,” a source close to Toyota told the Yomiuri Shimbun. The Japanese car industry is facing post-war-like shortages when it comes to auto parts. Toyota is short 150 parts positions, which can be anything from a bolt to a complete dashboard.
Dealerships are empty – of cars. Test drive cars do double duty as display vehicles. “We get a lot of customers coming in, but we don’t have cars to sell them,” a salesperson told the Tokyo paper. Read More >
Toyota wasn’t the only Japanese manufacturer getting hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Toyota isn’t even the hardest hit – at least not in percentages.
Japanese output of the eight major Japanese carmakers’ plunged 57.5 percent in March from a year earlier to 387,567 units. That is some 465,000 units less than planned, The Nikkei [sub] reports. Here are the March Japan production numbers for the individual automakers: Read More >
Like I did for Libya and Yemen, it is my duty to keep you up-to-date on which cars are bought in the countries you are hearing about in the news.This is why this weekend we are going where the French special forces lately went: To the Ivory Coast, a very interesting, fast evolving market with French, Japanese and Chinese influences. Read More >
Last week we discussed a rumor that suggested the new 2013 Malibu’s rear legroom might be compromised as a result of its redesign, and in the original post I included the official manufacturer numbers for rear legroom in the “big six” midsize sedans. This led to an interesting discussion in our comments section, and the comparison apparently caught the attention of at least one boss of a global automaker’s US operations. This exec (who has admitted to being a daily TTAC reader), wrote in to point out that there are two different SAE standards for measuring rear legroom, the L33 “Effective legroom” test, in which the front seat is placed at the appropriate distance for a driver in the 95 percentile of height, and the L34 “Maximum driver legroom” test, in which the front seat is placed all the way before measuring. As a result of our conversation, I thought I’d share a comparison of the six best-selling D-segment sedans using a different (and hopefully less-confusing) metric: combined legroom. You can move the seat, but you can’t run away from this metric…
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