Old Volvo’s don’t die. They just get increasingly decrepit. But they’re far from alone in my neck of the woods. Cars in North Georgia enjoy a low salt, smooth road diet that can keep even the worst vehicles roadworthy. Hyundai Excel? A dozen here and there. Old AMC Pacer? The weirdo down the the road has one. The paint may be toast, but the body’s intact. An early 1990’s Honda Accord? Well now we’re talking about what I lovingly call ‘a beater leader’. Like Waffle House, Baptist Churches and Kudzu, they’re everywhere.
I’m writing this as I sit in the service department of my Honda Dealership. My car (LINK: https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/piston-slap-the-annoying-lazy-civic/) was due for a service, and I had enough: I was going to get results from the dealership regarding my lazy drive by wire system in my 2007 Civic. Long and short, they test drove my car against a new 2009 Civic, and (finally) found that there is definitely something wrong with my car.
In my editorial on GM’s plant to take on the Indian market in partnership with SAIC, I wrote that Maruti Suzuki’s monstrous market share indicated the possibilities for GM. Well, the Indian market leader isn’t going to just sit on that lead. In 2007, Osamu Suzuki said that his firm’s Indian passenger car market share would never drop below 50 percent, an assertion that took two years to prove untrue. The WSJ reports that although the overall Indian market will probably grow 16 percent this year, Maruti’s share of that market has fallen over the last year from 45 percent to about 40 percent (with passenger car share down from 55 percent to 48 percent).
Last week, in our post on Hyundai’s new DI (Direct Injection) Theta II engine, we questioned Honda’s long-standing engine technology leadership. We also assumed (wrongly) that they would be joining the DI club shortly, given the advantages DI technology affords. Turns out we weren’t the only ones wondering, except that in the case of auto, motor und sport, they weren’t asking it rhetorically, but the person in the know: Honda CEO Takanobu Ito. In an interview with Europe’s leading car magazine (print edition), Ito gave DI a pass with his answer to the question: “Honda was once the leader with its internal combustion engines. Did your competitors overtake you with gasoline Direct Injection?”(Read More…)
Reuters reports that Japanese manufacturers are running scared from Hyundai-Kia. A combination of a rising Yen and South Korea sealing more and more free trade agreements with other countries has helped Hyundai-Kia immensely. Of course, copying Toyota’s business model of building reliable cars at affordable prices has helped greatly, too. All this momentum from South Korea is getting Japanese car executives a little bit nervous. “I think there’s a sense of crisis in the whole (Japanese) industry,” Toshiyuki Shiga, chief operating officer at Nissan Motor. “Whether you take the Free Trade Agreements or foreign exchange policy, I get the impression that South Korea is tackling things well.”
No, Honda’s Accord-based Crossover sin-against-nature hasn’t been canceled, but it is being cannibalized (sort of). Acura has announced [via Autoblog] that a TSX Sportwagon will be offered beginning with the 2011 model year. In short, if you begged Honda to bring a Euro-spec Accord wagon to market, your pleas have been answered… as long as you’re willing to shell out at Acura prices. More information as it becomes available… meanwhile, notch up another promising sign in the Honda column.
Go to any auto auction. Chances are you’ll see 2001 Accords and Camrys go for higher prices than 2003 Tauruses and Grand Prixs. Is that premium justified? Well, I’ll put it to you this way.
Several weeks ago, I took my 18-year-old daughter to Pennsylvania to find her a used car (I don’t believe in buying a new car for a kid). We found a Honda dealership that had a nice, clean 1998 Civic for about $4000. My daughter had $3000 saved up from working at the mall. We gave the salesman the cash and I asked if I could get a loan for the balance. “No loans”, he replied. “We had a guy in here this morning that had an 800 credit score that had to walk away from the car because he couldn’t get approved.” I then agreed to give the salesman a personal check from my account and we were able to buy the car (which, by the way, has been a real gem). The Honda dealership is right across the road from a Cadillac store. “I sold more Hondas myself in December than all the salesman over at Cadillac combined,” he told me. I think this experience is a good indicator of what’s happening in car sales in the USA right now. It’s a bloodbath.
An overview of what happened in other parts of the world while you were in bed. TTAC provides round-the-clock coverage of everything that has wheels. Or has its wheels coming off. WAS is being filed from Tokyo this week.
GM flirting with FAW: GM is holding discussions with major Chinese automaker FAW Group to form a partnership for light commercial vehicles, Reuters reports. The two parties have already registered a name with the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, which is the first step of Chinese joint venture courtship. GM already makes light commercial vehicles in China in a three-way tie-up with SAIC and Liuzhou Wuling. GM manufactures Buicks in Shanghai with SAIC, China’s largest auto maker. FAW, one China’s three biggest automakers, operates car manufacturing ventures with Volkswagen and Toyota. SAIC is also in a joint venture with VW. SAIC and FAW have been considered bitter rivals, although there are reports of a thawing. GM said its commercial vehicle venture in China sold 19.7 percent more vehicles in January than a year earlier, helped largely by sales of the Wuling Sunshine minivans. (Read More…)
When a car salesman tells you an expensive model’s pointless, nine times out of ten, it’s pointless. If he proffers this opinion in the depths of a recession, with new car sales lower than Bernie Madoff’s morals, it’s a dead cert. I’ve experienced this vehicular vertigo twice in the last week. First, when contemplating a zero-mile Honda Civic Mugen Si gathering dust in an otherwise empty former Saturn showroom. Second, whilst sitting in an Acura RL, moments away from an extended test drive. The salesman told me flat out that the Acura TL is a better car than the RL, hinting that anyone who buys an RL is a sap. As I’ve rated the TL as a one-star car, where do you go from there?
Honda reported in with their sad sales numbers with unadjusted monthly sales down 27.9 percent. Fit sales were steady, up 5.9 percent. Accord and Civic took drubbings of minus 31 and minus 32 percent respectively, with the Civic Hybrid down 62 percent. Light truck sales were down 27 percent with the Odyssey minivan trailing an unusually heavy 38 percent hit. (The number one selling minivan nameplate just took a back seat to the rebate-stuffed Toyota Sienna.) Over on the Acura side, TSX buyers ignored TTAC reviews and sent sales up 16 percent, which comes out to a little over 300 cars. The more expensive numb-feeling, shovel-nosed sedan, the TL, was down 40 percent. The Acura CUVs got similarly neglected, down 46 percent. Needless to say, Honda’s management team is on the case. Well, someone’s case.
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