“The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.”

Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

At the High School I attended, progress reports were never a good thing. Halfway through each term, students who were averaging a D or lower would receive a print-out of their grade accompanied by a line from the teacher explaining how the miscreant in question was failing to live up to expectations. True to form, the White House’s just-released “One Year Progress Report” [PDF] on President Obama’s “Blueprint For A Secure Energy Agenda” includes some devastating evidence of abject failure. But unlike my post-progress report conversations with the parental stakeholders, Obama has a lot more to explain to voters than a simple “insufficient homework turned in.”

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Some automakers have cars that get a stupendous mileage, but they are priced or built so that nobody wants them. We won’t name names, draw your own conclusions. A much better metric than the mileage of a car is the mileage of all cars you sell. The combined mileage of all cars sold by a manufacturer or brand used to be a top secret document. Manufacturers with stellar averages sometimes leaked theirs. But what good are these statistics if manufacturers with mediocre averages hide their data? Thankfully, last year TrueCar started tracking the MPG averages of cars sold in the U.S. And it is coming to surprising results. Read More >

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“All I need is a nice basic car. Something like, maybe, a Saturn or something.” This unassuming, if perhaps ungrammatical, combination of sentences has come to be a long-running joke in my family. You see, one of my relatives married a woman back in the Eighties and subsequently provided her with a string of relatively upscale whips ranging from an Infiniti J30 to a Siebener BMW. Every time it was time to go looking for a replacement, however, she would ardently protest to anyone who would listen that “All I need is a nice basic car. Something like, maybe, a Saturn or something.” My relative ignored her and kept shoveling the Audis, Bimmers, and Infinitis her way, and each time she would accept the new ride reluctantly, reminding us about her preference for “a basic car”.

Some fifteen years after their marriage, this woman told me at dinner, “You know what I did today?”

“No. What did you do?”

“I rode in a friend’s Saturn to lunch. You know, I’ve talked about how that’s all I really want.”

“And?”

“It was horrible! It smelled weird, the windows rolled up by hand, it was cramped inside, and it was really noisy, like something was wrong with it.”

“So, what’s your opinion now?”

“Well, I still want a basic car. But now I think I’d be happy with just a basic BMW or Lexus.” I thought this was well-said, because it allowed her to continue to champion the usual liberal virtues of “simplicity” and “consuming less” without actually being forced to drive anything worse than a 328i. As it so happens, her current car is just that – a “nice, basic” two-hundred-and-thirty-horsepower, leather-seated, alloy-wheeled Bimmer sedan.

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Western media widely reported (and still reports) that the Chinese government will only allow Chinese cars to be bought by its functionaries.

Not so. The rule exists in draft form only,and has been published to elicit public feedback.However, in a disturbing development, China Daily reports that “nearly 90 percent of respondents in a survey are in favor of China’s domestic independent-brand automobiles for governmental use.” It’s not that 90 percent said so. It’s the ominous fact that it is being published in a government-owned paper.

If the survey is correct, then Chinese citizens want to look down on the car choices of their rulers. The Chinese themselves are widely in favor of foreign cars. 70 percent of all cars bought in China are foreign branded. The appetite for foreign branded cars remains high,as the following tables show. Read More >

More than one fifth of new passenger cars sold in Japan are hybrids. For the second month in a row, hybrid sales exceeded the 20 percent mark, data released by the Japan Automobile Dealer Association (see table) show. Two companies profit most from this new hybrid boom. Read More >

“This is Infiniti’s design language for the next 10 years to come,” says Francois Bancon, and points at a laptop that shows pictures and strategy of the INFINITI EMERG-E, a concept car that debuts today in Geneva.

We are in Yokohama, on the fifth floor of Nissan’s corporate world headquarters, while Infiniti’s first range extended mid-ship concept sports car is unveiled in Switzerland. It is there, I am told “to provide a glimpse into Infiniti’s future.” The future is undecided. This car may, or may not come.

The design of the car oozes seductive sex. That, thankfully, will rub off on the whole Infiniti line, I hear.

Will the Emerge lead Nissan to a range extended future? “Not necessarily,” says Bancon, with the best sybillinic smile he can muster. Read More >

A FIAT is available in the United States for the first time in decades. It’s manufactured in Mexico. Volkswagen has an all-new Passat built in an all-new American plant. One of them appears to be defying expectations of unreliability. Which one would you bet on?

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TTAC was all set to depart for Switzerland to cover the 82nd Geneva Motor Show when tragedy befell us. My usual suite at the Hotel d’Angleterre (with a view of Lac Léman) was occupied by one B. McAleer during press days, and upon arriving at the airport, our corporate-owned Falcon 7X was padlocked, the plane saddled with a lien from a Columbus-area guitar dealer alleging non-payment by an employee of our fair publication. Nevertheless, we will be covering the show somehow. Here’s what to expect from all the big players.

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On the back of last year’s win for the Nissan Leaf, the Chevrolet Volt and Vauxhall/Opel Ampera has won the 2012 European Car of the Year award, beating out the Citroen DS5, Fiat Panda, Ford Focus, Range Rover Evoque, Toyota Yaris and the Volkswagen Up!

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You see a lot of early-90s Sentras in the junkyard these days, most of them having become too beat to be worth fixing when something breaks, but you don’t run into a lot of junkyard SE-Rs. The question in this case is: are we looking at a real SE-R? Read More >

Over the past few of weeks we have travelled to Israel, Belarus, Eritrea and Chile. Since last week you decide which country we go to next and today we make a stop to Georgia, the country, not the US State. Why? Because SexCpotatoes (cool nick!) asked for it.

Now you are sick of ex-USSR countries and have had too much vodka already, make sure you don’t drive and check out the 159 additional countries I have prepared for you to explore in my blog…

Georgia has no sales data available. So there will be no article… Just kidding.

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So what were those long gone Datsuns that supposedly will come back? Datsun 510s were built for one reason – affordability. They were peppy little cars with a practical boxy exterior that meshed well with a roomy interior.  Read More >

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A rare pro-Porsche article from the S:S:L days — JB

They call it “Trauma Bonding”, and although the exact definition is highly debatable, it’s generally understood to mean a situation in which victims come to identify or sympathize with their victimizers. It occurs in cults, domestic violence situations, and even hijacked airliners, but most importantly for the purpose of today’s discussion, it’s running rampant in the automotive enthusiast community. The most recent manifestation of the illness appears to be a fondness for outrageous fuel prices; it’s characterized by statements like, “I can’t wait until ten-dollar gasoline forces us all to drive small, economical cars,” or “The best thing for everybody would be if we were taxed into using (insert naive reference to diesel, soybeans, unicorn sweat, or whatever other smelly, sticky, low-power, improbably available fuel tickles one’s fancy). Then all the SUVs will be gone from the road and we’ll all drive the cars we need, instead of the cars we want.”

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The two-by-four, the 4×8 plywood sheet, the standard brick: Without standardized building materials, building houses would be a mess. The car industry is in that kind of a mess (more or less.) To get out of the mess, to shorten development times and to lower cost, just about every large automaker is on some kind of a standardization drive. Usually, these standards won’t go beyond the company, even alliances have problems agreeing on a common standard. When Nissan unveiled its Common Module Family (CMF) last Monday at its R&D  center in Atsugi, we asked whether this Common Module Family also would extend to Renault. After all, both companies had standardized on the same CEO. Read More >

Major carmakers around the world had their eyes on Hyundai’s growing muscle for a while. In the business, you call that benchmarking. Now, the benchmarking sensors sound alarm: Hyundai announced yesterday that its February global sales jumped 28 percent from a year earlier. Read More >