DesignworksUSA is a design consultancy and subsidiary of  the BMW Group. Together with Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), Designworks will create “a new generation of train cars that will enter service by 2017 and deliver a premium ridership experience for its passengers,” says BMW in an emailed statement, and adds that BART “presently operates the oldest fleet of train cars in the USA.” (Read More…)

“Right now, there is no specific joint development project going on with Volkswagen,” Suzuki Executive Vice President Yasuhito Harayama told reporters who came to Suzuki’s headquarters in Hamamatsu, Japan, to meet four executive vice presidents of Suzuki. Come to think of it, there had been no progress over the past 18 months in the much feted partnership between Suzuki and Volkswagen, Harayama said.

The man who just cut deep in the fraying strands of the tie-up between Volkswagen and Suzuki would have all reason to say everything is fine.  Harayama is a former bureaucrat at Japan’s economy and trade ministry who was hired by Suzuki two years ago. He is in charge of relations with Volkswagen. It is not in his interest to admit defeat.

According to comments made by Harayama to Ran Kim of Reuters, one of the sharpest reporters on the Japanese auto beat, relations between Wolfsburg and Hamamatsu turned into a deep freeze when Volkswagen tried to “wield influence over Suzuki’s management.”

“It was made very clear when we tied up with Volkswagen that we did not want to become consolidated, and that we would remain independent,” Harayama said.

Before anything will happen between Suzuki and Volkswagen, the deal needs to be renegotiated. (Read More…)

Mexico was one of the last markets to build the old VW Bug. The really old one. Mexico remains the center of Beetle-mania. Volkswagen officially began production of the new Beetle in Puebla, Mexico. (Read More…)

As we just noticed, the Volkswagen Group gained 5.7 percent in Europe in the first six months of 2011. But that’s only a small part of the story. Globally, the Volkswagen Group delivered more vehicles in the first six months of 2011 than ever. A total of 4.09 million units changed hands, up 14.1 percent from the 3.58 million delivered in the same period of 2010. This according to a communique sent out by Volkswagen today. For you, dear TTAC reader, this is old news however.  A few days ago, we told you that we “expect group sales to come in at somewhere around 14 percent and change for the half year.” (In more than 30 years working for the company, some of the clairvoyance possessed by VW’s upper management  had rubbed off …) (Read More…)

No good deed goes unpunished. While the leadership of GM refuses to comment on Opel, Volkswagen’s Winterkorn filled the void and dispensed some helpful advice.  He said that only the Chinese would be interested in Opel, and even that remains a very theoretical possibility. GM did not like that advice and fired back.

GM top echelons refused to break cover. Instead, there is a big pronouncement on GM’s website.

“General Motors has a longstanding policy of not commenting on rumors and speculation.  Unfortunately, some of our competitors do not show similar restraint. (Read More…)

Opel is casting a wary eye at parent GM. GM unleashed Chevrolet in Europe. Nobody took it seriously until Chevrolet announced today that the bowtie brand sold 23 percent more Chevys in Opel’s home market Germany than in the first half of 2010. In the first 6 months of 2011, Chevrolet sold15,077 units in Germany. (Read More…)

The Volkswagen Passenger Cars BRAND ( not the Group) reports global sales  of 2.53 million for the first six months of 2011.- Compared to the same period of 2010, this is an increase of 11.8 percent. The brand also reported an increase for the month of June, with 438,500 vehicles sold. For a gain of 9.8 percent compared to June 2010. With Audi having grown 17.7 percent in the half year, the Volkswagen Group will most probably report a nice double digit gain for the first half year. (Read More…)

Guess who just had a 37 percent increase in sales in the first six months of 2011? No, it was no small Chinese car company with an unpronounceable name. It was Porsche. And guess what is putting Porsche into overdrive? No, not the 911. No, not the Panamera. It the most un-Porsche Porsche, the Cayenne (also available as the Touareg from Volkswagen.) Sitting on order books that give the Cayenne delivery times as high as 12 months in some markets, Porsche will increase production of the Cayenne next year, says Automotive News Europe [sub]. (Read More…)

“The first half of the year was clearly better than we had expected,” said Audi’s sales chief Peter Schwarzenbauer. Audi delivered more than 652,950 cars worldwide in the first six months of the year, an increase of 17.7 percent on the same period in 2010, and a new record in the annals of Audi. (Read More…)

When I used to go to Cannes for the Cannes Lions International Festival, it was more to hang out with friends at the bar of the Carlton or the Martinez, and to boo at the choices of the jury, after the more interesting topless attractions at the beach had gotten dressed. Volkswagen had a serious reason to go. They went home with a whole safari park of the coveted “Lions.” Volkswagen received a total of 34 Gold, Silver and Bronze Lions. (Read More…)

Germans bought 288,382 new cars in June, that’s pretty much the same (-0.3 percent) as in June 2010. A month does not a year make: In the first half of 2011, 1.62 million cars changed hands in Deutschland, that’s 10.5 percent more than 2010, say data released today by the Kraftfahrtbundesamt. (Read More…)

Porsche wants to do what every car maker wants. Sell more cars. So what would you do if you would have to move more Porsches? Tout their speed? Their horsepower? Call up Jack Baruth and offer him “Buy 10, get one free?” No, Siree. Porsche positions their cars as schoolbuses. (Read More…)

In what could possibly raise eyebrows in Wolfsburg, Suzuki is getting  cozier with Fiat. According to The Nikkei [sub], Fiat will supply Suzuki with 20,000 to 30,000 1.6-liter diesel engines per year. The engines will be built in Europe. Suzuki plans to use the engines in the SX4, which was jointly developed with Fiat, at Suzuki’s assembly plant in Hungary. (Read More…)

We (well, some of us) await the autonomous auto that leaves the driving to a robot, such as not to distract us from twittering and uploading pictures of our cats to our facebookies. That technology is not quite there yet. Volkswagen however thinks  “an important milestone on the path towards fully automatic and accident-free driving” has been set. So said Volkswagen’s Prof. Dr. Jürgen Leohold at the final presentation of the EU research project HAVEit (Highly Automated Vehicles for Intelligent Transport – who comes up with that stuff?) (Read More…)

Earlier this year, the German safety nuts at DEKRA and AutoBild ran rear-end crash tests on a pair of five-star-rated (Euro-NCAP) vehicles, and found that back seat occupants were at risk of severe spinal, head and pelvic injuries. Now, the dour Deutschlanders are back at it, as the ADAC has run tests showing that rear-seat passengers are also at disproportionate risk in front impacts, a far more common cause of traffic fatalities. And again, no government crash test standard requires testing of the rear-seat effects of frontal impacts.
(Read More…)