We had intimated it a few days ago, now it’s official: Toyota’s Prius is no longer primus (or make that ichi ban) in Japan. The hybrid that had been Japan’s best selling car for 20 months in a row had to relinquish the throne to Honda’s Fit. Read More >

Marc writes:

As a long time reader and a new financial advisor, I am seeking advice from you and your readers concerning choices for a second-hand automobile. Here are the constraints:

1) $10,000 or less

2) Would prefer avoiding GM & Chrysler

3) 4-doors required (for clients and/or two under-five children)

4) Reasonable annual maintenance

5) Sporty OK but not flashy — message is ”prudently successful” not ”mid-life crisis on the client’s dime”

6) I’m a 47 year-old, married, 2 children, in southwestern Connecticut.

As a starting point, I see this as two basic options — Audi/BMW/Acura on the sporty side or Mercedes sedan on the prudent side. Which cars(year/make/model) do you or your readers suggest I consider? Thanks!

Read More >

As any sales-watcher knows, volume isn’t everything. Fleet-retail mixes, incentive spending and transaction prices are all important considerations for putting volume numbers into context. As usual, we’ve assembled Edmunds’ True Cost Of Incentives index as well as TrueCar’s Transaction Pricing and Incentive Spending forecasts, for a complete picture of these important metrics… and after the jump, we’ve added a few notes on the discrepancies between the two firms’ numbers.

Read More >

Going through my old 2X2X2 35mm stereo slide pairs for posting on Cars In Depth (I’ve been messing around with twin-film-camera 3D for about 15 years now), I came across some shots of the ever-varied fleet of late-80s/early-90s Japanese subcompacts I owned during the heyday of San Francisco’s notorious City Tow car auctions. Read More >

To develop a new car takes a lot of cash, with unsure payback in some 5 years. During carmageddon, most large automakers delayed or stopped development of new cars. These new cars are missing now, especially at GM and rival Toyota.

Volkswagen went through carmageddon relatively unscathed and never stopped developing. Actually, they approved a record R&D budget of $71 billion for vehicle development and to boost production capacity from 2011 to 2015.

A preview of what all that money can buy will be given at the Geneva Motorshow, to be held from March 3 through 13^th. Read More >

My home state of Oregon has the unfortunate distinction of pioneering the practice of pay-per–mile taxation, having studied the GPS tracking approach to road taxes in a pilot program back in 2005-2007. Originally, the track-and-tax scheme was envisioned as a replacement for the gas tax, but now it’s being raised as a way of taxing motorists who go without gasoline altogether. The Eugene Register Guard reports

A bill before the Oregon Legislature aims to deal with the government’s potential beefs with a growing fleet of cars and trucks that never stop for fuel at a gas station: that they don’t ever pay the gas tax that helps cover the cost of state and local road construction and maintenance.

Under House Bill 2328, those drivers would pay a “vehicle road usage charge,” starting with model year 2014 electric vehicles and plug-in gas-electric hybrids.

Proponents say the bill will build on lessons learned from the pilot testing, and avoids the legitimate concerns about pay-per-mile which were first raised by the pilot project’s report. But does taxing EVs actually make sense, or is this just the politically-palatable first step towards an Orwellian nightmare of GPS vehicle tracking? Meanwhile, doesn’t the State of Oregon give up to $750 in tax credits for EV purchases? Mixed messages much?

Read More >

January 2011, US Light Vehicle Sales

Automaker	Jan. 2011	Jan. 2010	Pct. chng.	1 month 2011	1 month 2010	Pct. chng.
BMW Group	18,683	15,436	21%	18,683	15,436	21%
Chrysler Group LLC	70,118	57,143	23%	70,118	57,143	23%
Daimler AG	17,636	15,443	14%	17,636	15,443	14%
Ford Motor Co.	126,981	116,277	9%	126,981	116,277	9%
General Motors	178,897	146,315	22%	178,897	146,315	22%
Honda	76,269	67,479	13%	76,269	67,479	13%
Hyundai Group	65,003	52,626	24%	65,003	52,626	24%
Jaguar Land Rover	3,206	2,589	24%	3,206	2,589	24%
Maserati	114	101	13%	114	101	13%
Mazda	14,267	15,694	-9%	14,267	15,694	-9%
Mitsubishi	5,714	4,170	37%	5,714	4,170	37%
Nissan	71,847	62,572	15%	71,847	62,572	15%
Porsche	2,150	1,786	20%	2,150	1,786	20%
Saab Cars North America	658	–	-%	658	–	-%
Subaru	18,858	15,611	21%	18,858	15,611	21%
Suzuki	2,562	2,040	26%	2,562	2,040	26%
Toyota	115,856	98,796	17%	115,856	98,796	17%
Volkswagen	26,295	24,614	7%	26,295	24,614	7%
Volvo Cars North America	4,276	–	-%	4,276	–	-%
Other (estimate)	298	294	1%	298	294	1%
TOTAL	819,688	698,986	17%	819,688	698,986	17%

TTAC’s on top of all of the monthly sales news, as the industry records its first month of sales in the new year. (Data courtesy Automotive News [sub] ). Ford and GM, the first automakers to report, show solid gains, seemingly confirming analyst estimates of a 12.4m unit SAAR this month. But don’t read too much into the trend, as Reuters reports that auto sales momentum stalled in the final weeks of the month, prompting JD Power to lower its SAAR expectation from 12.2m units to “between 11.5m and 12m.” According to a JD Power spokesman,

the sudden slowdown in sales in January could reflect both the impact in winter storms and the absence of new sales incentives from major automakers. Those kinds of discounts, including cash-back offers, were down 12 percent in January from December

Check back regularly as TTAC unravels January’s sales performance from all of the automakers.

Japanese domestic new car sales (excluding minivehicles) have been down 21.5 percent in January, the Japan Automobile Dealers Association told The Nikkei [sub]. 187,154 new cars changed hands. This does not surprise anybody in Japan. Some even see a silver lining. Read More >

Poor Ray LaHood. Having endured considerable embarrassment over his department’s handling of the Toyota Unintended Acceleration recall, all the Secretary of Transportation seems to want to do is talk about the “epidemic” of distracted driving. But, as TTAC has continually reminded, changing driver behaviors is a notoriously tricky task. The government’s choice: mandate intrusive measures like in-car cell phone blocking or continual surveillance of all vehicles, or go for voluntary “cures” that don’t even begin to address the underlying problem of increased driver distraction. And despite repeatedly referring to distracted driving in epidemiological terms, LaHood seems to prefer the “it’s actually your problem” approach, telling automakers [via AN [sub]]that NHTSA will

issue voluntary standards to handle the dangers of the connected car… in the third quarter of 2011.

Which means that nothing meaningful will ever actually be done about distracted driving. After all, the automakers contend that drivers will use cell phones in cars “no matter what,” and that in-car connectivity systems simply make the inevitable sin less dangerous. Of course, the evidence doesn’t seem to back up that position, as an IIHS survey shows no significant difference in safety after a hands-free cell phone ban. But, because the industry is under intense pressure to deliver profits from new connectivity systems, the logic that more systems will make drivers more likely to unsafely use phones in their cars is simply being ignored. And though the voluntary approach is better than intrusive government-mandated workarounds, is still nowhere close to living up to LaHood’s overblown rhetoric.

Read More >

When January sales numbers will be announced tomorrow, just about everybody should have reason to celebrate. Analysts from J.D. Power to TrueCar, along with industry watchers of major banks and brokerage houses, expect a strong January. They predict the highest seasonally adjusted annual rate, or SAAR, since the shortlived cash for clunkers episode in August 2009.

The results of a poll by Bloomberg go like this: Read More >

Well, the problem isn’t so much that compact cars aren’t youthful… it’s that the buyers of compact cars are surprisingly un-youthful. The C-Segment, compact cars in the class of Honda’s Civic, Toyota’s Corolla, Ford’s Focus and Chevy’s Cruze, are typically thought of as “Kid Cars,” or first-time automobile purchases for younger buyers. That stereotype may still be true, but if it is, the young buyers aren’t actually buying the cars. This week, Ford’s executive in charge of launching compact cars like the forthcoming 2012 Focus turned my perspective on the C-Segment upside down by telling me that Ford’s research showed that the average age of a compact car buyer was… get this… 57 years old. Given that TTAC has questioned the viability of the Buick brand for having an average buyer age in the low-to-mid 60s, it’s worth considering the reasons for the surprising age of C-segment buyers. And while we’re at it, let’s throw another stereotype on the fire, namely the old chestnut that compact cars are “basic transportation” for folks who can’t afford a car in the next class up. According to Ford’s data, 50 percent of C-Segment buyers come from households making $75,000 per year or more.

I wish TTAC had more of this kind of demographic data to share, so we could track changes in compact car-buying demography over time, but it seems fairly clear that the compact class is attracting older, more affluent buyers than it once did. So we want to know: how do you interpret these trends? Will older, richer buyers continue to downsize, or is this a short-term phenomenon driven by gas prices and economic recession? Meanwhile, what impact will this shifting demography have on compact cars themselves?

Venturing into part four of the Pictorial History of the  Brazilian Car, a five part series, brought to you by our boy in Brazil, Marcelo de Vasconcellos, we finally get into times where most of our readers were alive.  Part one one took you back to the beginnings, part two did let you revisit the turbulent 60s. Part three took your to Brazil’s malaise years, with nothing more than facelifts. This part takes you to …

The 90s Read More >

Now that most of the large car companies have supplied their numbers, TTAC has compiled its annual table of the world’s largest automakers. In doing so, we have attempted to come as close as possible to the methodology used in the official OICA list, which will be published some time this summer. Here is the 2009 version as a reference. And here are TTAC’s Top Ten of 2010: Read More >

Car enthusiasts have been apt to criticize SUVs as irrational because few owners ever take them off-road. But, by the same token, how many owners of high-performance sports cars drive them at anything approaching their full potential? Venturing beyond cars, how many owners of diver’s watches actually scuba dive? And how many dSLR cameras are being used just like a $99 point-and-shoot? Clearly people are psychologically attracted to high-performance objects, even if they won’t actually utilize the potential of these objects. This doesn’t mean that the objects themselves don’t make sense. And yet, during my week with a Lexus LX 570, I struggled to make this 5,995-pound, technology-packed, luxurious SUV make sense.

Read More >

I was not the only journalist to feel a little let down by Volkswagen’s latest Jetta. After building a name in the US by offering classy European-style appointments without charging European sports-sedan prices, the latest Jetta is, well, just a little too American. VW insists that the stripped-out interior helps bring the Jetta’s pricetag down to American expectations, but it’s not at all clear that competing on Toyota’s turf will be a winning strategy for the German automaker. And it certainly won’t work in Europe, where VW offers the same Jetta with an improved interior, the multilink rear suspension offered stateside only in GLI trim, and more options like multi-zone climate control. But will US-market consumers ever have the option of buying a European-spec Jetta with all  of its upmarket features?? When asked by InsideLine, VW’s Jetta boss Frank Donath answered

There is the strong chance that the midlife Jetta for North America could get all of the European features. It depends on sales performance.

VW has played this game before, hinting that the Amarok pickup truck might come to the US if consumers buy 100k units. In this case, there’s a better chance of VW having to make good on the offer, as consumers could well buy quite a few Jettas. But then, if Americans are buying lots of the cheap US-style Jettas, why bring in the Euro model? Let’s face it: the days of old-style Volkswagens is as good as over. At least until it brings the very European Scirocco over.