Somewhere above the 70th parallel

January is upon us, and with it the seasonal rise in traffic at big car sites such as TTAC. Over the past days, the load on our servers was unseasonably and unreasonably high. My unconfirmed hunch is that it is all the future authors checking their standings. We’ll never know. To address the problem, and hopefully to increase your class-leading browsing experience, the TTAC Geek Squad, billeted in an abandoned NORAD bunker in the darker reaches of Canada, decided to move TTAC to another server. (Read More…)

Die, sucker!

Automortal Sins will be an infrequent series about the true sins in the auto business. It won’t be the sins which some bloggers regard huge. We won’t blame lapses in styling, branding, we won’t lambast OEMs for abandoning sports cars in favor of appliances. Building the wrong car once in a while is a minor iniquity compared to the huge, most egregious, and definitely mortal sins committed by automakers every day, without the smallest amount of remorse. Here is the first one:
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GM’s troubled European daughter Opel finally will get a more permanent CEO.  As rumored since last year, it is the former Volkswagen manager Karl-Thomas Neumann.  German Automobilwoche [sub] expects Neumann to be confirmed by Opel’s supervisory board on January 31. (Read More…)

Takeshi Uchiyamada, not really meaning it

Toyota “appears set to choose Vice Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada as its next chairman,” The Nikkei [sub] writes today. Uchiyamada used to be Toyota’s R&D Chief, and is celebrated as the “father of the Prius.”  He was made Vice Chairman last year. If confirmed, he would replace the 75 year old Fujio Cho.  A Chairman at Toyota has more of an oversight role. The executive power rests at President and CEO Akio Toyoda. (Read More…)

It’s TTAC Future Writers Week where YOU decide who will write at TTAC in the future. This could be their first (or last) step on the way to their eventual Pulitzer or Wurlitzer Prize. Please choose wisely, carefully, and fairly. It’s your, the future of several nations, and most of all, the auto industry that is at stake. (Read More…)

The echo to Writers Wanted was is phenomenal. 22 applications poured in so far, and they still keep coming. I quickly looked over them. Some are good, real good. Some are real funny. Some are funny, even if they are not trying to be funny. YOU will decide who makes the grade. (Read More…)

TTAC has always been proud of the quality of its writers. Founder Farago did set a very high standard. His wit was lethal at TTAC, he had a killer instinct for a good story, he was dead on target with GM. Knowing that, the fact that he now writes Thetruthaboutguns.com has me mildly worried. TTAC turned into a flow-heater for successful careers. We had Brock Yates , before he chose a better paid career in screenwriting and television. We had Jonny Lieberman, who, after a stint at Jalopnik, found his calling at Motor Trend. Ed went to The Dark Side. If you want to make TTAC a stepping stone in your career, or if you simply love to write, then let’s talk about it. (Read More…)

Shaved head: Works council chief Uwe Hück. Needs new suit: Mayor Fritz Kuhn. Regulation Volkswagen white hair: Porsche CEO Matthias Müller

One would think that a card carrying environmentalist visits Porsche’s plant in Zuffenhausen only for picketing purposes, or as a target for bags with paint or worse. Today, Porsche was visited by a card-carrying environmentalist, and by Stuttgart’s mayor. The two are the same. The usually deeply conservative Stuttgart, home of  Daimler and Porsche, elected  Fritz Kuhn, member of the Green Party, as its mayor.  Mainly because the other candidate Sebastian Turner was a disaster, along with being an adman who is not without criticism in his own ranks. But I digress. Anyway, His Green Honor was at Porsche today. (Read More…)

Someone I know tried to cut down the boredom of daylong drives up and down I95 with roaches in his car – the smokeable kind. Not that the drives became any shorter, they just appeared longer. With the relaxed marijuana laws in Washington state and Colorado comes a fresh look at how to handle dopers behind the wheel. Dopes behind the wheel are easy to gauge, dopers not so much. (Read More…)

At the sidelines of the Detroit Motor Show, GM conceded what we had said all along: Toyota is the world’s largest Automaker again, with GM in #2, and – surprise – Volkswagen right behind GM.

After Toyota had announced, on a preliminary basis,  that they had produced 9.92 million units in 2012, and sold 9.7 million, Volkswagen announced on Monday global deliveries of 9.1 million for the year.  We expected  GM to announce, as usual, when they surrender the report for their last quarter.
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Johan de Nysschen, at home in Hong Kong

New Infiniti-boss and former Audi U.S. chief Johan de Nysschen wants to bring Infiniti home to Japan. He had said this to me last September in his office in Hong Kong, and he reiterated it again in Detroit when talking to the Wall Street Journal’s man in Japan, Chester Dawson. Back home in Yokohama, people are sucking air through their teeth. “Muzukashi desu ne.” This will be difficult. (Read More…)

Toyota sold 236,659 Prii (all kinds) in the U.S. alone in 2012, all of them imported from high-yen Japan. This is a major drag on the car’s profitability. Long import routes are a hindrance, offshore production also tends to impact the granularity of options and trims. U.S. production of the Prius was expected for last year, it did not happen. Yesterday, Shigeki Terashi, head of Toyota Motor North America Inc. came as close to announcing as possible that Toyota plans to produce the Prius in North America. He didn’t really say it, and you needed to be Japanese to hear it. (Read More…)

New car registrations dropped a painful 16.3 percent in Europe in an acceleration of a long, and initially slow a downward trend. The European carmaker association ACEA calls the decline ”the steepest recorded in a month of December since 2008.” For the year the EU market was down 8.2 percent to 12,053,904 units, which is the “lowest level recorded since 1995,” says the ACEA. (Read More…)

Investigative reporter

We have a new car show season. With it come new car releases, and with them comes a contagion that is as tiring and headache-inducing as a Cobo Hall flu on top of an after party hangover. The disease goes by the name of embargo, and it comes with  the embargo breach as a secondary infection.

In case you have studied Pol.Sci. instead of HTML, you might be thinking that we are talking about real embargoes, such as those of Iran or Cuba. We don’t. In our biz, an embargo is when an OEM sends a blog a picture or a story, and then asks not to “print” it until later. If you think that the outcome is both predictable and inevitable, then you are absolutely correct. We could put the matter right to sleep without wasting (ha!) precious HTML column inches, would the new car season not also be marked by an excited chattering, twittering, OMG+1000ering over busted embargoes in what goes as the automotive media these days.

So let’s do what we rarely do, let’s talk about embargoes.

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The Paris Five. All aborted

Another inspiration for wet dreams of easily impressed juvenile car bloggers is dying, is bleeding to death and has a “do not resuscitate” note nailed to the head.  Lotus has been given up for dead.

Blogs from autoevolution all the way to our sister pub Autoguide reprint the happy PR fluff that Lotus wants to “boost sales five times by 2015.” With sales crawling along at homeopathetic 1,043 units allegedly produced in 2012, making 5,000 by 2015 doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Trust me, it is if you want to sell them also. By 2015, the Lotus cars will still be sitting on technology that is ripe for the museum, and there is no relief in sight. Only poor car bloggers would be a target group ripe for a 20 year old Lotus – if sold used, preferably with a salvage title. (Read More…)