According to data published today by Ford, the company sold 5,313,000 units worldwide “to wholesale” (i.e. out of the door.), up 447,000 units or 9.19 percent. With Volvo eliminated, the growth was 771,000 units. Record sales in the U.S.A. and Asia were partially offset by lower sales in Europe. Ford is not strong enough in China to profit like its competitors that are strong in China. One of these competitors is Hyundai. Read More >

Adam writes:

I’ve been mulling over a car-buying decision, and see you post similar things to the main page from time to time. Here’s my dilemma if you need some more copy.

I have a 1995 Jeep Cherokee Sport 5-spd as my skiing, biking and camping car. My mom got it new, and I bought it from her in 2000. It now has almost 200k miles, but it has led an easy life- it still has the original clutch. Oil has been changed every 3500 miles or so, and it’s been generally reliable, but it has the brake-pulsation problem I can’t track down, several rapidly worsening oil and coolant leaks (main seals, oil pan, valve cover), all the rubber parts on the car are rapidly deteriorating, and it needs tires, some front end work, etc. Figure about $1500 in repair. However, then I’ll still have a 16 year old 200k car I’m relying on to get me 150 miles home from the mountain on a 15 degree snowstorm. I’m afraid electronic parts and sensors may soon leave me stranded. It’s worth high $2000 range- it runs fine; the body and paint are very good.

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With California’s Air Resource Board and the EPA set to unleash new 2016-2025 CAFE standards, the Alliance of Automotive Manuacturers, which represents foreign and domestic automakers, is lashing out, telling Automotive News [sub]

We all want to put the most fuel-efficient vehicles as possible on the road, but for the 2017 rulemaking, policymakers still need to gather and analyze much data to determine the maximum feasible fuel economy standards that avoid negative impacts on affordability, safety, jobs and vehicle choice. No one knows what the 2025 target should be yet, and the data needs to drive the rulemaking.

But not everyone in the industry is on board with the AAM’s CAFE-skepticism. Already, Hyundai Motors USA CEO John Krafcik tells TTAC his firm plans to “Overcomply” with the coming CAFE standards, and now Toyota is joining Hyundai in breaking ranks, with Jim Colon, VP for Product Communications saying

The administration is engaged. That’s the direction Toyota is already going. Whatever goal they establish, Toyota will be prepared to meet. If it’s 62 miles a gallon, we’ll be able to achieve that.

Andy writes in

Hi – I wonder if you can help a confused Scotsman who is coming across for a 3 week holiday (flying into Boston) in September.

Four of us are going to drive around New England and we would like to hire a comfortable SUV or Crossover but we are not familiar with your models.For example I could have gone for a Chevy Uplander but I understand it is a complete dog. In Scotland we have a Jaguar XJ and a Merc 320ML so we want something that drives nicely and preferably has ”armchair” type seats in the second row so that our wives don’t moan too much. Can you help??

Which are the safest cars you can buy in Europe? The results of Euro NCAP tests will rattle established Euro carmakers: Out of 5 categories, 2 were won by a Japanese car, one by a Korean car. In 2010, Euro NCAP crash tested twenty nine vehicles. 65 percent received  five stars.

Here are the best-of-class cars, according to Euro NCAP: Read More >

After releasing global sales results of 8.418 million units a few days ago, Toyota today announced the all-important global production number. Toyota established a more comfortable lead before GM. A few days ago, unconfirmed numbers floating around the media made it look like GM had come within touching distance of Toyota.

All three Toyota Motor Corporation companies (i.e. Toyota, Daihatsu and Hino) together produced 8,557,351 cars in 2010. Now why is the production number more important than the sales number? Read More >

Yesterday, I changed my base of operations to Tokyo for a month to escape the Chinese New Year festivities (i.e. one month of WW III worthy fireworks, combined with closed shops and restaurants.) If I would have stuck it out a few days longer, I could have enjoyed a ride in a fuel cell vehicle. Read More >

Toyota “Lessons” TV Spot from electrocinema on Vimeo.

Edmunds’ has looked over its in-house shopping patter data, and has some bad news for the number one automaker in the US:

In December, 17.9 percent of car shoppers considered Toyota vehicles — 2.3 percentage points below levels seen in December 2009, before the 2.3 million-vehicle recall for potentially sticky accelerator pedals. Overall, Edmunds finds that 2010 consideration for Toyota vehicles was down about 3.8 percentage points year over year…

Evolving cross-shopping patterns on Edmunds.com also demonstrate the diminished power of Toyota’s brand. Consumers interested in traditional competitors like Nissan and Honda considered Toyota vehicles less often in 2010. Meanwhile, Suzuki shoppers – who qualify for higher interest rates, accept longer loan terms and make lower down payments, suggesting a lower economic status — increased their Toyota shopping considerably in the last year.

In recent months, though, some specific Toyota models are elbowing back in on traditional competitors. The rate of Edmunds visitors cross-shopping the Nissan Altima with the Toyota Camry, for example, has approached levels seen before the reports of unintended acceleration captivated the media and its audience last year.

The car-shopping site’s takeaway: Toyota isn’t just struggling against negative perceptions brought on by last year’s unintended acceleration recall… it needs new products. Which means Toyota’s plan to unveil 11 new or refreshed models through 2012 is coming just in the nick of time. Still, if those products don’t actually wow consumers rather than simply skating by on Toyota’s faded reputation, Toyota’s greatest strength, the trust and loyalty it enjoys from consumers, could be slip away. And given how disappointing the refreshed Corolla seems (at first blush… testing is still needed) in comparison to its hot-and-fresh competitors from Ford, Hyundai and Chevy, there’s a real risk that this could happen. Scandals come and scandals go… but resting on laurels is what really kills in this business.

As the world’s first commercially-available (ish) plug-in hybrid, the BYD F3DM is one of the few modern cars that can legitimately claim a piece of automotive history. In full knowledge of this fact, a younger, more innocent version of myself once sent a number of emails to every possible BYD PR contact I could find, in hopes of securing an early review of the car that ushered in the plug-in automotive age. Needless to say, I never heard back from BYD… but I expected that. What I didn’t expect is that, years later, I still wouldn’t be able to find a real in-depth review of this mysterious yet potentially groundbreaking vehicle. Apparently BYD is either extremely cautious about letting writers experience its vehicles outside of convention hall laps and round-the-block drives… or the automotive media has a very poor sense of history. Or, as is most likely the case, both.

Either way, this strange state of affairs just got stranger: thanks to plugincars.com, we now have the first report of the F3DM’s performance on American roads… from an LA Public Housing Authority inspector. Yes, really.

Read More >

Will writes:

I currently own two vehicles and am thinking of returning to just one, or maybe not. I own a 2005 BMW 330i sedan with 98k miles and a pristine 1986 Chevrolet Silverado 2WD short bed with 65k miles. I use the truck to work on the house I am renovating and keep the car…well, because I like it and it is more comfortable to commute to and from work.

I am making payments on both vehicles and while I could conceivably pay both off right now with little trouble, I wonder would it be a) cheaper to keep both with their associated maintenance costs, insurance, etc. or b) sell both vehicles and buy a late model car/truck/suv that is comfortable, relatively fuel efficient, generally reliable, has ABS and an airbag(s). I do a fair amount of highway driving but I need something that can haul some tools, old house paraphernalia, a dog, and a mountain bike. Also, I prefer to drive a manual, but it’s hard to find something useful with a manual.

Thoughts?

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One of the more dangerous conflicts embedded in the US auto bailout that was identified in the recent Congressional Oversight Panel report has been a TTAC hobbyhorse for some time, namely the tradeoff between GM’s success and that of its former captive finance arm GMAC (now known as Ally Financial). As we wrote back in May,

if government-owned Ally isn’t interested in underwriting GM’s volume gains with risky loans but also isn’t interested in seeing its auto lending business bought by GM, there’s trouble brewing. After all, that would leave GM with only two options: partnering with another bank, or starting a new captive lender. Either way, a new GM captive lender would likely force Ally into offering more subprime business anyway, or face losing its huge percentage of GM business.

Fast forward the better part of a year, and GM has indeed bought its own in-house subprime lender, leaving the COP to term The General’s lack of interest in taking care of “the Ally Tradeoff” as “disconcerting.” After all, with over 20 percent of GM’s equity and over 70 percent of Ally’s stick, the Government should have been able to work out some kind of deal that gets GM and Ally back on the same page… right? Not so fast, reports the WSJ. Ally turned down a $5b GM offer for its wholesale lending business earlier this year, and now it seems another deal may be in the works. But it has nothing to do with maximizing taxpayer payback, and everything to do with shoring up GM’s floorplanning credit. And it’s not coming from the government, but from GM’s newly-ubiquitous CEO Dan Akerson.

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Ignore the commas in the X-axis labeling, and you’ll see that this graph compares total sales volume for last year against each model’s year-of-introduction as we hunt for the missing links between product cadence and sales performance. Above, you can see that none of the major D-Segment competitors was introduced before 2007, and that newness alone is not linked to sales volume. In fact, in the D-Segment, volume seems to decrease with newness (although historical data indicates that this is a brand-loyalty issue rather than a consumer preference for older vehicles). Moreover, it appears that more recent introductions are merely narrowing the competitive gaps in the midsized sedan segment (although we’ll need new Accord and Camry replacements to tell if that trend is for real).

The compact segment, on the other hand, shows a far less surprising correlation between year-of-introduction and sales, as sales grow in a fairly consistent manner as you move across the x axis from older to newer nameplates. The major lesson from these graphs: Honda and Toyota continue to enjoy a “reverse perception gap” in which their aging models tend to most dramatically defy volume expectations relative to the age of the competition. But with more competition coming this year, as Chevy’s Cruze, Hyundai’s Elantra and Ford’s Focus come into the market, the consumer’s tendency to give Honda and Toyota “the benefit of the doubt”  could well be tested. And once perceptions start shifting, there’s no telling where they might end up.

Toyota released year-end global sales numbers for 2010. Thanks to an uptick in December sales, they were slightly better than estimated in December. Toyota Motor Corporation global group sales rose 8 percent to 8.418 million units. This includes Daihatsu and Hino.

Toyota sold 7.528 million units under its own nameplate, up 8 percent. Daihatsu sold 783,000 units, up 4 percent, and truck maker Hino moved 107,000 units, up a strong 35 percent.  Japanese group sales were 2.204 million units, up 10 percent. Overseas sales rose 6 percent to 5.962 million units. But are 8.418 million units enough to keep Toyota in the top spot?

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A factory that can make cars fast should be the goal of every automaker. The higher the throughput, the lower the cost. Japanese companies had for long been on the leading edge of efficient and flexible production. Now, Toyota has made a big step forward, reports Reuters.

Introduced in a new factory of Toyota subsidiary Central Motor Co, the production line is shaped like the letter “U”. It allows for more than one task to take place at once on a vehicle. The engine can be installed in the front while underbody parts are added in the back. In a way, Toyota introduced multithreading to car manufacturing that had been sequential since Henry Ford. Read More >

This is part two of the Pictorial History of the  Brazilian Car, a five part series, brought to you by our boy in Brazil, Marcelo de Vasconcellos.  Part one one took you back to Brazil’s Stone age (WW II and thereafter.) This part takes you to …

The 60s

The 50s were the golden era of Rio. The 60s marked the rise of São Paulo. Rio: sun, fun, beach and romance. São Paulo: drizzle, dirt, work and gray. Read More >