Suzuki is not buying into the „once in a millennium tsunami.” Suzuki has a lot of its production near the waterfront in Japan’s Tokai region. Scientists give the area between Toyko and Nagoya an 87 percent chance of getting hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of about 8 within the next 30 years. Suzuki’s answer: Let’s get out of here, fast. Read More >

Though Hyundai owns a controlling stake in and shares platforms with Kia, the two Korean car companies continue to operate more independently than GM’s divisions did back in their heydays. So the decision between related products often comes down to something beyond price. Take, for example, the Kia Sportage. Why buy it instead of the related Hyundai Tucson? Read More >

I have had a love affair with Chrysler that defies logic for years. Back in 1988 my parents had one of the [then] new Chrysler minivans. (Yes, I know a love affair that starts with a minivan has to be unhealthy.) When it came time for me to buy my first car, I had my eye on a very lightly used  1997 Eagle Vision TSi, then came a brand new 2000 Chrysler LHS, the very pinnacle of the Iacocca years in many ways.Large, FWD, competitive. Then Mercedes came on the scene promising to “synergize” the product development and lineup. The plan sounded good and had a promising start with the Chrysler Pacifica and the Chrysler 300 HEMI C convertible concept which looked so hot I wanted to have ovaries implanted so I could carry its children. Ultimately however the production 300 turned out to be one of the bigger disappointments due to its plastactular interior. Since then, Chrysler had been trying to see how many vehicles can be built from the Chrysler 300. Chrysler soon created the EU-only Chrysler 300 wagon, Dodge Magnum, Dodge Charger and Dodge Challenger to join the 300 sedan. Problem was; there was only enough cash around for a few nice interiors or half a dozen chintzy boxes. Guess which Chrysler chose? Read More >

Have you ever been to an auto auction? Some may consider an auctioneer to be a ‘carny’. He talks at over 200 mph. Mumbling what appears to be nothing more than gibberish and random numbers.

But if you added all the sales up by those supposed hucksters, you would soon realize that only Wall Street and Walmart sell more goods over the course of a year. Over ten million cars are bought and sold at auctions by these professionals. Hundreds of thousands of dealers have access to the vehicles. With all that free market competition taking place, Carmax is just one of many dealers that must compete for all those cars.

Can Carmax offer a ‘good value’ compared to all that competition? Read More >

According to The Nikkei [sub] “Toyota Motor Corp. said Wednesday it will start offering on Thursday a free application for smartphones that sounds an alarm if the user’s home electricity use reaches a preset level.” Don’t believe it. The Nikkei made it up. Read More >

You’ve seen them before, photos from some godforsaken place of insurgent warfare. A half dozen rag tag soldiers, if you can call them soldiers, bristling with Chinese Kalishnikov knockoffs, piled into a Toyota Hilux with a heavy machine gun or some other armament like a recoil-less rifle or ack-ack gun mounted on the roof or in the bed. The Toyota Hilux has been the choice of low level combatants around the world since the 1960s. As noted by China Car Times, when Muammar Gaddafi (is there a world leader whose names, first and last, are spelled in so many different ways?) had one of his snit fits and invaded Chad in 1987 to overturn the government, both sides used so many Hiluxes that Time magazine dubbed it the Toyota War. In the early 90s, the war in Somalia brought us the term “technical”, interestingly enough derived from the NGO practice of hiring local gunmen to protect their employees, and paying them with funds earmarked as “technical assitance grants”.

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Today, I went on a very early morning Shinkansen to Nagoya. The idea was to have me kind of certified as a Toyota-accredited journalist. I don’t know whether I qualified. I flunked the required rattling-off of the 12 Toyota plants in Japan. However, I was invited into Toyoda’s house. Read More >

In the battle for market share, Detroit is making something of a comeback. After decades of decline, the unprecedented taxpayer investment in Detroit seems to be yielding dividends in the form of solidifying signs of recovery. Of course, these firms still have a long ways to go before they’re done reversing their long declines, and the turnaround has doubtless been fueled by temporary phenomena like the Toyota recall and the Japanese tsunami. Still, these are some of the first big-picture signs of a serious change in fortunes for Detroit, and deserve the attention of market watchers (graphs can be found in the gallery after the jump, along with a graph of June and Y-T-D market share).

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The transition from exclusively gasoline-powered vehicles to the new panoply of permutations of gas and electric power has not been easy on the old emm-pee-gee. The imperfect-yet-universal (in the US market) measure of efficiency finds itself at a loss to compare an electric car’s efficiency with that of a gas-powered car, and completely falls apart as a relative measure of efficiency between plug-in-hybrids which use gas and electricity in different ways (see the ongoing battles over the Chevy Volt’s efficiency). Into the breach have stepped several challengers to the emm-pee-gee’s supremacy, including the weak MPGe (which was responsible for the Volt’s disastrous “230 MPG” introduction), and the “Kilowatt-hours per 100 miles” measure championed by Motor Trend in a rare display of admirable pointy-headedness. But the Gordian contradiction of efficiency measures is that they must be both accurate and easy-to-understand… and if the MPG’s history tells us anything, it should probably err on the side of the latter prerogative.

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To celebrate the nuptials of the Princess and the Prince of Monaco, here one of the Top Gear classics: Aston Martin DB9 against public transport.  London to Monte Carlo.  Who gets there first? Car or train? Read More >

When we think of Japanese four-wheel-drive station wagons these days, we immediately picture a Subaru product. We often forget that, in the 1980s, most of the Japanese automakers made four-wheel-drive versions of their small wagons. Honda had the 4WD Civic Wagovan, Nissan had 4WD Stanza and Sentra wagons, Mitsubishi had the Mirage and Colt 4WD wagons, and so on. Of all of the non-Subaru 4WD wagons from that era, however, the only one you see with any frequency these days is Toyota’s Tercel 4WD wagon. These things are about as common as the AMC Eagle in Colorado, i.e. you see them all the time. Read More >

After Libya, Yemen, Iran, Syria and Egypt, we are back in the Middle-East this weekend to visit Saudi Arabia. A (very dangerous) Saudi specialty is drifting a la ‘Fast and Furious’ in traffic-filled streets, as you can see in the video above. Do not try this at home please!

Now if you’re not interested in knowing more about car sales in Saudi Arabia, then I am very disappointed in you. But there are two things you can do: check out the 19 countries we have already explored each weekend by clicking here, or explore the 154 other countries available in my blog.

One thing I bet you didn’t know is that Saudi Arabia’s tastes for cars are very similar to America’s…

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OK, so Toyoda-san didn’t so much introduce the new Camry as introduce its headlight. The good news is that the headlight looks like progress. The bad news is that most Americans were probably a bit distracted by the video’s spare production values and Mr Toyoda’s somewhat awkward demeanor (to protect you from your own hypocrisy, commentary on Toyoda-san’s accent will be moderated… unless you can post it in Japanese). Net-net though, Toyota can’t help but come across as an earnestly nerdy lot (led, as they are, by the king of the auto otaku), which fits their brand image well. And for all the talk about styling being the prime mover for consumers, and the necessity of emotion in design, if this new Camry is simply a fresher take on its earnestly nerdy predecessor, Toyota will have accomplished its mission. I’m beginning to wonder if Detroit’s intense dislike of Toyota isn’t simply because it’s the biggest Japanese competitor, but because Toyota’s leadership culture is the unassuming, unglamorous opposite of Detroit’s flamboyant tradition.

Chevrolet cars have outsold combined sales of trucks, crossovers and utilities in April, May and June of this year – and are expected to represent 47 percent of the brand’s sales for the first half of 2011. The last time cars led Chevrolet’s sales for three consecutive months was in May, June, and July of 1991. That year, cars represented 52 percent of Chevrolet sales.

“Chevrolet has always been known for building great trucks,” said Alan Batey, U.S. vice president, Chevrolet Sales and Service. “Today, we are in the middle of transforming the brand with a strong lineup of cars that match the appeal of our trucks and crossovers.

“That transformation is clearly bringing new customers to the brand – as passenger cars and four-cylinder engines are driving Chevrolet’s growth this year,” Batey said. “We expect that momentum to accelerate as Chevrolet introduces three new cars over the next two years – the Sonic, Spark, and next-generation Malibu.”

And no, that isn’t necessarily a code-phrase for “our truck sales are in the toilet.” Sales of Chevrolet cars and trucks are up this year. The most interesting part of the PR release quoted above, however, relates to engine choice…

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2011 started promisingly enough, with sales soaring above a 13m unit SAAR for the first four months of the year. Halfway through the year, however, what looked like a solid recovery is proving to be less than entirely reliable, as SAAR looks to drop below 12m units for the second month in a row. While the macroeconomists fight over whether this mid-year stumble is a sign of fundamental weakness or minor hiccup in a strong market “backstopped” by a seemingly endless “pent up demand,” it’s time for us to look at the sales numbers from each firm. Check back regularly as we update our developing table of sales, and be sure to watch for  more mid-year sales analysis as we get a handle on who is best positioned to take advantage of the market, whether 2011 proves to be an up, down, or sideways year.

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