UPDATE: Toyota confirms:

Recent reports have incorrectly stated that the 2012 RAV4 EV will only be marketed to fleet and car sharing programs.  We’d like to set the record straight.  The 2012 RAV4 EV will definitely be sold to the general public.  We anticipate robust public interest in the RAV4 EV and are keen to inform consumers that their future vehicle options include a battery electric Toyota.

Toyota is the only manufacturer bringing two battery electric vehicles to the market in 2012 – the RAV4 EV and the Scion iQ EV.  While the RAV4 EV will be available to the public, the Scion iQ EV will be marketed to fleet and car sharing programs only.

A number of major auto outlets got clowned yesterday when a Pike Research blog item seemed to quote Toyota Business Planning Manager of Advanced Vehicle Marketing Geri Yoza as saying the Tesla-developed RAV4 EV would not be sold to private customers, but would distributed to fleets and car sharing services. Not so, it turns out, as Toyota has corrected the Yoza quote by confirming that only the electric version of the iQ city car will definitely not be offered for public sale. But by the time Pike Research got its facts straight, the misinformation had ben regurgitated by the biggest names in car blogging, and had even made its way over to the other side of the Atlantic. The worst part: the real issue brought up in the Pike Research piece was largely lost in the autoblogosphere’s rush to prove Mark Twain’s adage that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And, as usual, the slow-dressing truth is a lot more interesting than the globe-trotting lie…

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It’s been 27 months since I wrote a check for $5,000 to Tesla Motors, my deposit on a Model S sedan. As owner number P717, I’ve gotten some modest bennies to keep me interested till the expected delivery date of mid-2012: a test drive in the Roadster, an invitation to the opening of the New York Tesla store, and some nice promotional swag (T-shirt, coffee mug, and, most recently, a cool little remote-control toy Roadster) .

Last week I was invited to an owners-only preview before a Model S promotional event in Greenwich, Ct. Set in the posh clothing store Richards, just across the street from an Apple store, the event featured a sinuous dark red early proof-of-concept prototype of the Model S. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to drive, sit in, or even touch the car (“It cost more than $2 million to build,” we were told). But the black-clad Tesla reps on hand offered some intriguing technical info about the car that, to my knowledge, had not been previously revealed. Among the more interesting tidbits:

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Having overplayed the youth marketing angle, only to find its cars being bought by folks well outside its “target demographic,” Scion seems to be making the first hesitant steps towards accepting reality. Autoobserver’s Dale Buss reports:

The economic woes of America’s twenty-somethings have forced Scion to broaden its demographic target to include the rest of the Millennial generation, up to age 35. “It’s a function of affordability and the state of economics for 18- to 24-year-olds, with high unemployment,” said Owen Peacock, national marketing communications manager for Scion. “They’re focused on things like college and debt load. At the end of the day, do you go with a small target or go after those who can actually buy a car now? So you need to adjust.”

But how is the “Zeus”-themed online marketing campaign actually supposed to expand Scion’s appeal to an older demographic?
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It’s every manufacturer’s worst nightmare:

Between the top 911 model [the $245k GT2 RS] and the 918 Spyder [projected price point: $845k], there’s a price range that we’re not serving, but where other manufacturers are selling one or another product. We’re currently examining what options can be derived from this… [and] there already are initial ideas that look very promising on paper. It makes fundamental economic sense to serve demand that exists in the marketplace in a wise way

Poor Porsche sales boss Bernhard Maier. I mean, how does someone sleep at night knowing there’s demand in the $250k-$850k price range that you’re not exploiting? After all, Porsche currently offers nearly 30 “models” with base MSRPs between $80k and $200k. That, on average, comes to a different “model” every $4,000. So, according to the “fundamental economic sense” that Porsche applies to the $80k-$200k market, this new “hole” in the lineup should “be served in a wise way” by no fewer than 150 new vehicles. [via Automotive News Europe [sub]]

The US car market contracted by 23 percent between the 2006 and 2010 model-years according to WardsAuto data [via the Detroit News], but over the same period the total number of hatchbacks sold per year has increased some 63%, from 291,853 to 475,048. That’s right hatchback fans, after decades of underachievement in the US market, your favorite bodystyle is back in a big way.

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When a brand like Aston-Martin releases a new car, it’s de rigeur to assemble some cameras and hand out a freebie to a legend of the motoring world. But when a brand like Aston-Martin creates a deeply controversial car like the Toyota iQ-based Cygnet, the luminaries of road and track are hardly going to be lining up  for the thing. Luckily if you ask nicely enough, they might be convinced, as apparently Sir Stirling Moss was, to re-gift the thing to the wife. That way he doesn’t have to endure the embarrassment of driving the thing, but Aston still gets to hype the fact that the Sir Stirling said

Since seeing a pre-production Cygnet in January I knew that it was the perfect car for Susie; a proper little piece of British luxury and perfect for our life in town.

Unfortunately, as Pistonheads points out, the Cygnet isn’t even exempt from London’s congestion charge… which is typically an important criteria for a car to be “perfect” for life in London town. Oh, and it’s about as British as yakisoba. But hey, Sir Stirling “bought” one for his wife so…. um… yeah.

After a brief commercial, the video above shows you… a brief commercial.
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[Editor’s note: The video above depicts a Penske-era Smart ad. The new Mercedes-led marketing effort begins this fall]

Having taken over sales and distribution of the Smart brand from Penske and canceled a planned Nissan Micra rebadge, Mercedes is trying to inject some life into its flagging city car brand (Sales are down 24% YTD, at 2,556 units) with a new marketing campaign (coming this fall) and finance offers. Smart’s new General Manager Tracey Matura explains the problem to Automotive News [sub], saying

People are not avoiding the brand or the product, but there is a great majority of people who are not aware of the brand

Really? People don’t know or notice a brand that’s in its fourth year of US sales, offering a car that’s unlike any other on the market? It seems to me that the problem isn’t awareness, as the term “Smart Car” is almost universally synonymous with “hilariously tiny car,” even among non-expert consumers. The problem seems more precisely to be that Smart is neither as cheap nor as efficient as larger rivals, and American consumers are constitutionally resistant to the idea of paying more for less (a point that VW seems to be proving in spades). More promising: $179/month lease and finance deals backed by Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, not to mention the decision to ditch the snottier-than-thou Penske campaign embedded above. But even new ads and good deals aren’t likely to make Smart a truly viable brand in the US until new product arrives in 2014, hopefully in a more efficient, enjoyable-to-drive form. Or unless gas prices spike again, causing a 2008-style rush for conspicuously downsized vehicles.

At GM, Joel Ewanick and  Chris Perry need to repeat the miracles for which they became famous  at Hyundai. So what do you do in that case? “Let’s just do the same thing again.”

If GM would do a repeat of the Hyundai Assurance Plan (lose your job, return your car), with a 10 year warranty thrown in, the journos would snicker, but the cars would fly off the lot. But at GM, this would be too gutsy.  So what about the next best idea? That’s right: “Free insurance!” (Read More…)

The transition from exclusively gasoline-powered vehicles to the new panoply of permutations of gas and electric power has not been easy on the old emm-pee-gee. The imperfect-yet-universal (in the US market) measure of efficiency finds itself at a loss to compare an electric car’s efficiency with that of a gas-powered car, and completely falls apart as a relative measure of efficiency between plug-in-hybrids which use gas and electricity in different ways (see the ongoing battles over the Chevy Volt’s efficiency). Into the breach have stepped several challengers to the emm-pee-gee’s supremacy, including the weak MPGe (which was responsible for the Volt’s disastrous “230 MPG” introduction), and the “Kilowatt-hours per 100 miles” measure championed by Motor Trend in a rare display of admirable pointy-headedness. But the Gordian contradiction of efficiency measures is that they must be both accurate and easy-to-understand… and if the MPG’s history tells us anything, it should probably err on the side of the latter prerogative.

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The US market’s Seasonally Adjusted Annual Selling Rate (SAAR) hurdled the 12m mark towards the end of last year, and was cruising above the 13m mark for much of the first half of 2011, but after a rough May, June seems set to become the market’s second month back under the 12m mark.

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Leaf or Volt? Ask the average person on the street that question, and you might get a response acknowledging that you’re talking about plug-in electric vehicles. Ask for more detail, and you may well be disappointed. Despite the many differences between the two vehicles, some simple and obvious, others subtle and complex, it’s unlikely that the average consumer is going to be able to tell you much about them. Why? Because chances are, your randomly-selected consumer doesn’t even know who makes which car. Automotive News [sub] reports that a Compete, Inc study shows

a little more than 17 percent of consumers polled knew that Nissan sells the Leaf. Another 13 percent incorrectly believed the car is offered by other brands, including Chevrolet and Toyota.

The Volt fared better. The study found that 45 percent of shoppers identified it as a Chevrolet.

Yowza. Considering that Nissan is betting bigger on EVs than any other manufacturer in the business, selling the only pure EV on the market and ramping up to 500k annual units of global battery production capacity, it needs to get on top of this branding awareness issue yesterday. Because as things stand, Nissan is making a gigantic global gamble only to find Chevrolet and Toyota stealing nearly as much credit for the Leaf as consumers give Nissan itself (13% versus 17%… what’s wrong with that picture?). Ads like this one are a good start, but Nissan needs to do more to ignore the Volt and make itself synonymous with pure-electric cars the way Toyota made itself synonymous with hybrids.

Every advertiser faces a basic choice at the outset of a campaign: come up with unique, relatable imagery for ads, or riff on an established cultural meme. Volkswagen went the latter route with its “Darth Vader” Super Bowl ad, achieving huge success: it was the most popular auto-related ad of the Super Bowl, and the Youtube version has received over 40 million views. The only problem with appropriating such popular imagery: you don’t enjoy unique rights to it, meaning you can be easily hoisted by your own petard. Which is exactly what’s happened here to Volkswagen. Greenpeace is angry that VW opposed a bid to bump the EU’s 2020 emissions goal from the agreed-upon 20% to 30% of 1990 levels (even though C02 emissions improved 3.7% last year and 5.1% in 2009, and average emissions are on track to hit the 130g/km 2015 goal ahead of schedule). As a result, they’ve turned VW’s hugely popular “Darth Vader” ad on its head, identifying the giant automaker with the evil Lord Vader, and encouraging fans to “join the rebellion.”
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Ronnie Schreiber reckoned that Chrysler would be able to protect its rights to the phrase “Imported From Detroit” in its lawsuit against local clothing firm MODA, but Automotive News [sub] reports that

U.S. District Judge Arthur Tarnow ruled that Chrysler’s request didn’t show that it would suffer irreparable harm or that it had a strong likelihood of winning its case. That means Pure Detroit’s owner, Detroit retailer Moda Group LLC, can continue selling its “Imported from Detroit” products.

Tarnow also noted that Chrysler doesn’t have a trademark on “Imported from Detroit” and rejected the automaker’s argument that trademark law isn’t applicable to the case.

Interestingly, the last time Chrysler fought over its brand intellectual property (in a dispute with a Florida high school that had adopted the Ram’s Head logo as its school symbol), it won… only to stop using the the logo for Dodges when it spun off its Ram brand. In any case, this latest ruling may take Chrysler’s tagline out of its complete control, but it should also stimulate a strong market in knock-off goods bearing the line, ultimately increasing its exposure. And, at the end of the day, Chrysler needs to look past Detroit-boosting if it wants to get its marketing back on a nationally-appealing footing and win back sales on the coasts. This ruling may not be sucha bad thing after all….

One of the greatest things about the internet is its ability to disseminate information that levels the playing field in relationships that have long been defined by asymmetrical information. Our buddies at TrueCar are tackling one such informational imbalance by posting its dealer holdback calculation for every brand on sale in the US. They note

Dealer Invoice is generally the amount the dealer pays the manufacturer for the vehicle. Because Dealer Holdback is paid to the dealer after the vehicle is sold, it represents an additional profit center for the dealers that is not immediately available to consumers. This is one reason why some dealers are able to sell some vehicles below Invoice and still make a profit.

The more you know!