February sales are coming in stronger than expected, indicating a post-Presidents Day boom. Chrysler and Volkswagen lead the charts with a 40 and 43 percent gain over February 2011. Read More >

Back in 1994 I bought my first and only new car. A 1994 Toyota Camry. It wasn’t anything special. 4-cylinder with a slushbox. No spoiler or leather. Nothing even remotely as advanced as a CD player or a premium sound system. But it did have one luxurious affectation that few other vehicles of the middling variety had at the time. A sunroof.

In the beginning I used it all the way long day. Sunny day in Atlanta? Plenty of them here, and a sunroof was the icing on the proverbial cake of a nice day. Open it up. Let the fresh air in. Enjoy the drive when the traffic is good.

But then I started long-distance commuting. Then I got married. Then we had kids. Pretty soon that hole on the top of my car was used as often as my old hiking shoes. It was there when the moment was right. Those moments though would stretch to months and eventually a year and change.

Read More >

In the last couple of weeks I have taken you to Oman, Israel, Belarus and Eritrea. Those of you that religiously read my column every week (endless thanks to you!) will remember that last week I also asked you which country you would want to travel to next. Well I have decided to grant not one, but ALL your wishes and the next few weeks will be dedicated to the countries you have requested.

Yes. I’m nice like that.

So this week we’re going to Chile, as per marjanmm’s wish. Why did I choose Chile? Because marjanmm was first to ask!

That’s right.

Now if you have ordered another country and couldn’t care less about Chile, I won’t get offended because I have prepared 159 additional countries for you to visit in my blog, so don’t sulk and click away!

In Chile, ‘Chevrolet’ and Nissan fight a very tight battle…

Read More >

In our last episode of Name That Car Clock, we admired the Jeco analog timepiece out of a 1978 Toyota Corona wagon. That was quite a clock, but it looks pretty drab next to today’s entry. This should be a pretty easy call for you students of the Malaise Era (there’s a hint), so let’s hear your best guess about year/make/model for this designer-edition clock. Answer after the jump! Read More >

SUVs are one of the strongest segments in an otherwise lackluster Chinese car market. Who slept through this trend? The kingdom of trucks, Detroit. “Instead, Japanese and Korean makers prevail in the compact segment, while German companies dominate the luxury segment,” writes Reuters in an article about China’s infatuation with SUVs.

In China, 2.1 million SUVs were sold last year, up 25.3 percent from 2010, reaching 11.6 percent of light vehicle sales, data by J.D. Power and LMC Automotive show. In the same period, the Chinese market as a whole eked out only a small 2.45 percent gain. China already buys about half of the 4.1 million SUVs sold in the United States last year. A monster market, ignored by American SUVs. Read More >

Published in Speed:Sport:Life 26 months ago, but still true today, I believe — JB

This past Friday, I was seated in a long-lead briefing for another auto manufacturer when the whispered word was passed down the line of seated journalists: “There’s an emergency conference call regarding Saab in ten minutes.” Not too long after that: “Saab is dead. There’s no deal.” All around me, I saw men with their heads cradled in their hands, though I could not tell whether it was from sympathy, misery, or simple world-weariness. From the seat next to me, a sorrowful, poignant comment: “I don’t want to live in a world where the ES350 is a best-seller and Saab is dead.”

What a perceptive statement! For there were more than fifteen long years where people willingly deluded themselves into believing that this world was one where the Camry-by-Lexus could rule the sales roost and, yet, Saab could live. With evidence to the contrary literally surrounding them, Saab’s incompetent, careless stewards at General Motors continued to push the lie: Saab is premium, Saab is luxury, Saab can compete with the Japanese and Germans on equal ground. By the time Saab’s lifeless body finally thumped against the ground, the story had assumed the mantle of tragedy. And like most tragedies, it began with a misunderstanding.

Read More >

After we wrote about the February forecast of Edmunds, TrueCar asked whether we had seen their forecast. We had to admit that we had overlooked it, shame on TTAC.

The projections by TrueCar.com are similar to those of Edmunds and Kelley.

TrueCar expects new light vehicle sales in the U.S. to reach 1,088,321 units in February, up 9.6 percent from February 2011.  That forecast translates into a Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate (SAAR) of 14.3 million new car sales, up from 13.3 million in February 2011. Says Jesse Toprak, VP of Industry Trends and Insights at TrueCar.com: Read More >

Edmunds has handed in its predictions for February sales. Its bottom line is similar to the forecast made by Kelley Blue Book a few days ago: More than a million cars sold, GM the big loser of the month. Edmunds has better news for Ford. And much better news for Chrysler, if that is at all possible. Read More >

Last year, President Barack Obama declared that one of the “Apollo projects of our times” is the goal for the United States to be “the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.” Companies that made and people that bought those electric vehicles received generous government money. One holdout in the rush for EVs: The U.S. government. It did not do as its President said, and ended up with a drastic cut in purchases of electric and hybrid vehicles after the speech was delivered.

Read More >

I’ve been pulling car clocks from junked cars for several years now, gathering them for a seriously unnecessary sculpture project, and now I’ve got 50 or so of the things in boxes in my office. We started this series with this 1980 Toyota Cressida fluorescent digital clock, made by Jeco, and now I’m going to make it a regular series. Today’s clock is also a Jeco, but this one is a handsome analog unit with a weird conical plastic faceplate. Before you make the jump and see the answer, guess what year/make/model car produced this clock! Read More >

It was a sunny day in 1994 when I fired up my 1990 Volkswagen Fox and took my newly acquired “Swedish Mauser” 6.5×55 rifle to the local range. At that point in time, the rifle was around eighty-two years old, having been manufactured at some point in 1912. It worked fine and was accurate to slightly under one inch at one hundred yards — the so-called “minute of angle” which is a basic standard of accuracy for long guns. Having satisfied myself that this time-worn gun was up to snuff, I went home and played some guitar. In this case, the guitar was my 1982 Electra Phoenix X130, already twelve years old but showing very little wear despite a harrowing four years following me around a college campus.

My mail had been delivered that day by a mailman driving a Grumman LLV, very similar to the one pictured at the top of this column. And although I didn’t know it, Porsche was less than three months away from building a certain white 1995 993 Carrera with factory-matched white wheels.

Approximately eighteen years later, my Mauser is doing fine service for another shooter, who reports that it has required no repair or maintenance beyond the basics. It will celebrate its hundredth birthday some time this year. My Electra rarely comes out of its case any more, but when I do play it there’s no evidence that it’s now a thirty-one-year-old guitar. My mail was delivered today by a mail lady in a Grumman LLV which could not have been manufactured any fewer than fourteen years ago. And my 1995 Porsche 993 Carrera slumbers in the cold garage dreaming of spring, shiny and corrosion-free.

The 1990 Fox I drove to the range that long-ago day? Gone, junked, rusted out, driven into the ground. In a story full of what they call “durable goods”, the Fox wasn’t truly durable at all. It was used and discarded, probably utterly worthless by the time the odometer reached the 150,000 mark. Surely VW understood how to make a consumer product as durable as a wooden Japanese guitar or a ninety-year-old rifle. The industry as a whole understood how to make durable items. My little white 993 still runs. The local mail truck still runs, although we’ll discuss later why Grumman’s understanding of “durable” differs from Porsche’s. The Fox’s lack of durability was almost certainly due to a particular decision or series of decisions made somewhere at Volkswagen. Why? What is the advantage of deliberately creating less-than-durable products? Put another way — why aren’t all vehicles “long life vehicles”?

Read More >

Europe gets the Chevrolet Cruze hatchback and a Cruze wagon – and now Hyundai does too. The i30, also known as our 2013 Elantra GT, gets its own wagon version, dubbed the Tourer.

Read More >

Forecasters with the benefit of real-time sales data predict that February sales will be up slightly to 1,050,000 units, lifting the Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate (SAAR) to 13.8 million, up 6.4 percent from February 2011. This according to new projections by Kelley Blue Book. GM is predicted as a big loser. Read More >

TTAC commentator DougD writes:

Hi Sajeev,

I put the snowtires on Dad’s 2007 Kia Rondo yesterday, and right on cue we’ve got snow today. While we worked we talked about cars, of course. My parents are in their mid 70’s, Dad bought the Rondo new and there’s a lot to like about it. Upright seating, good ingress for seniors, easy to park in the condo parking spot. It’s been reliable and still looks good, so the Rondo’s held up well. Read More >

The new Lexus corporate face will be appearing on the newest Lexus ES – a startling trend for a vehicle so conservative it makes Mitt Romney look like a chaps-wearing “lifestyle” devotee.

Read More >