1984 was a milestone year in the car world for new cars: the new W124 Mercedes 300E; the Jeep Cherokee; The Dodge Caravan/Plymouth Voyager mini vans. But perhaps the biggest shocker was Honda’s new Civic family: four distinctly different Civics, each with its own unique body and character: The conservative four-door sedan, the popular hatchback, the remarkably roomy tall-boy wagon, and the iconic two-seater CR-X. It was a bold and expensive gamble to make the Civic the number one compact in the land, and it paid off handsomely. With a Civic for each purpose and personality, Honda dominated the niche, and set the Civic (and Honda) firmly on a path of growth and domination that shocked Toyota, crippled Nissan, and utterly blew the domestics into the weeds. Was it Honda’s peak year ever, and have they been coasting since?

Honda is clearly in a slump, and we’ve certainly done our fair share to point it out: the lackluster Insight; ugly styling highlighted by uglier front grilles; a hybrid system that simply isn’t as advanced and effective as Toyota’s; a bloated Accord; no new direct injection engines; lots of muddling about future EVs;  and a misplaced optimism about fuel cells. Honda (rightly) feels threatened by Hyundai and future competition from China. We’ve wondered openly if Hyundai has stolen Honda’s engine design mojo. Need I go on?  This week only added to their (our) woes, with the ugly and underwhelming CR-Z. It’s time for a serious consideration as to what went wrong at Honda, and how to fix it. Honda; are you listening? (I suspect so)

Tourists Flock to Detroit For GM’s Annual “We’re Importing the Holden Commodore” Festival

Detroit in January. Car fans may think of the North American International Auto Show, but there are thousands of tourists in town to attend festivities for GM’s annual announcement that it will be importing the Holden Commodore sport sedan from Australia.

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“Scion is pretty much a North American brand, so that is why it is very natural to think more development, more design work, should be done in North America,” Yoshi Inaba, president of Toyota Motor North America tells Automotive News [sub]. In other words, fans of Scion’s first generation of JDM confections who railed against second-gen bloat are probably out of luck. Sure, model four in the Scion lineup will be the iQ minicar, which is small and weird enough to have been a member of the Scion invasion team, but after that? It’s all bloat and bigger blind spots from here on out. It’s what America wants.

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Money Control reports that the French government threatened to increase its stake in Renault from 15.01% to 20%. Not because it believes in the company and its products (would you trust a Renault Megane over a Honda Civic or Toyota Auris?), but to further exert control over Renault. Why would it want to do that? Well, that could probably have something to do with the French government’s invite to Carlos Ghosn for a little “sitdown” over the rumours that Renault may produce its new generation of Clio in Turkey, rather than its plant in Flins, France, where the current generation is built.

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Remember the BRIC countries, saviors of the auto industry? Brazil, Russia, India, China.  Brazil (+11.35 percent,) India (+18.7 percent) and especially China (+45 percent) performed as advertised. But Russia? Russia’s car 2009 car sales are such a disaster that BRIC will stay BIC for the foreseeable future.

Russia’s new car sales tanked by 49 percent in 2009 to just 1,465,917 units, according to data of the Association of European Businesses in the Russian Federation. Read More >

I’ve given it some thought over the years, and there’s only one truck that I’ve seriously considered as a replacement for my F-100, and this is it. In fact, it’s almost a perfect update on the Ford, with the benefits of modern technology. Don’t laugh, but I’ll take mine with the 2.7 liter four cylinder. It’s got more horsepower (150) than the Ford (129), and a pretty healthy dose of torque. It’s not like I’m planning on pulling 10,000 pound trailers down the road. Oh wait; I actually have done that with the Ford… Read More >

Pickup Truck def: a vehicle designed to haul cargo that the owner picks up and places into its cargo bed.

I may be in the minority, but that’s how I use my truck. I haul gravel, compost, dirt, and mulch, and shovel it out the back, which is the most efficient way to do it, short of a dump bed. I also haul junk to to the dump, and load loose items by tossing them over the side of my truck’s bed, and unload them the same way. I can readily lean over into my bed’s side and reach all the items in there. I easily tip large appliances single handedly into and out of the bed. That’s why I have a truck, and that’s what I expect it to be able to do. But there are times when I think I might like to ride in something a little more comfortable and safe than my 1966 Ford F-100. So I head down to my local Ford dealer and check out a new truck, starting with the business end: Read More >

We’re at a difficult phase in the global economy. Economists would have you believe that we’re out of recession and things are starting to look rosy. But just talk to someone like Peter Schiff and he’d have you believe that a second downturn is inevitable. It really is tough to say where the economy will go and it’s showing in the car market. USA Today reports that Toyota are looking at their 4Runner & FJ Cruiser models and wondering whether to build a new generation or not.

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Normally TTAC shies away from going too crazy with daily themes, but today we’ve got such a backlog of truck-related news and analysis we’re going to go ahead and dub today Truck Thursday. After all, few automakers have invested much in trucks and SUVs since gas prices began rising in 2008, and now the segment stands at a crossroads. Firms like Toyota, which invested too much too late in the truck and SUV market have to figure out how to manage its overcapacity. Firms like GM and Chrysler, which got bad reps for becoming overdependent on trucks and utes are faced with the challenge of keeping much-needed profits flowing while weaning themselves off their body-on-frame addictions. New challengers like Mahindra are headed into the market with a utilitarian ethos that’s been missing from the segment for decades, and established players are responding. Old brands like HUMMER are dying on the vine. The result is a truck market that’s rife with change and transition. Join us as we delve into this changing world of trucks and SUVs today, during TTAC’s celebration of Truck Thursday.

The U.S.A. dispatches its Secretary of State to complain to Japan about less than 8000 vehicles exported from the U.S. not benefiting from the Japanese cash-o for clunker-u. At the same time, a new car market is starting to explode, without anybody noticing: Vietnam.

Vietnam imported 76,300 units in 2009, nearly 10 times the U.S. exports to Japan. The increase was 51 percent on the year, an all-time high, the Nikkei [sub] reports. Sales of domestically manufactured vehicles were 115,000 units in 2009, up only 3 percent, but still a record. A total market of some 200,000 units is not much compared to neighbor China, but it’s a strong start. Read More >

The prospect of US launches by Chinese and Indian auto brands like Tata and BYD have at least one of the established US-market players in a paranoid froth. Honda VP John Mendel revealed a few of the nightmare scenarios that keep him up at night to USA Today [UPDATE: more on Mendel’s fears at Automotive News [sub]]. One, inspired by BYD’s plans for a 2010 US launch without a distribution channel in place, is that newcomers could skip the dealer model altogether. Mendel worries that “warehouse stores or electronics stores” (sound familiar?) could be used to cut dealers out of the loop, “blowing up” business-as-usual for US distribution strategy.

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So they say, if you want to be a successful car manufacturer, you must have steel in your DNA, gasoline in your blood, a history reaching back generations, and an annual output of at least 5m to stay profitable. And even then it’s not a slam dunk, as we are painfully aware.

Wang Chuanfu proves them all wrong. Read More >

Automotive News [sub] reports that supplier giant Denso, which is 23 percent owned by Toyota, will launch a competitor to Ford’s Sync system. The system, named Blue Harmony, will provide music, directions, e-mail, Internet radio, news headlines and other driver distractions through a touchscreen on the center of the instrument panel, according to Denso sources. The system will use Denso apps to bring Pandora internet radio, Facebook, Flickr and other web-based services to the Blue Harmony platform.

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