What can you do with a $20 bill these days? Lunch with a friend? Movie tickets? Perhaps a newfound garden weasel that is being sold on national TV. If you’re cheap enough, you can actually take care of your car’s routine maintenance for quite a long time. Thanks to the consumerist Christmas known as Black Friday the season to be cheap is upon us. For instance…
A few weeks ago TTAC reported how BMW and Daimler revived a long-ago formed joint purchasing venture in order to help drive down costs for the 2 independent car makers who can’t achieve high volumes of scale. This was seen as quite a big step in a direction few expected. As our resident German put it, “If you think South Korea and North Korea have communication problems, then you should be in a meeting between Daimler and BMW engineers.” He does have a way with words, doesn’t he? But he wasn’t wrong. It’s been a bit of joke to in the industry how Daimler and BMW view each other. As the mustachioed one put it, “Daimler engineers view their colleagues as boorish Bavarian upstarts. BMW engineers think Daimler is a congregation of has-beens.” And you thought relations between GM and Toyota were frosty! At least they had a plant together. Well, it seems that relations maybe thawing between the boys in Munich and the lads in Stuttgart. Kind of… (Read More…)
DNA India reports that Tata is making a concerted effort to source parts for Jaguar and Land Rover from low cost countries like China, India (duh!) and Poland. DNA’s source for this claim said: “Earlier, Ford used to procure 17 percent from low-cost countries like Poland, China and India, whereas Tata Motors is planning to increase it to 35 percent.” Tata has buys more than just cheap parts. They outsourced low-end design and development work to lower-wage countries. But before you start the “If you thought JLR reliability was bad now…” don’t get too carried away. (Read More…)
Legislation aimed at improving the transparency of Technical Service Bulletins (TSBs) has passed the Massachusetts state House of Representatives, and awaits approval by the Senate. If approved, Bill 2517 [full text in PDF format here] would require that
The manufacturer of a motor vehicle sold in the commonwealth shall make available for purchase to independent motor vehicle repair facilities and motor vehicle owners in a nondiscriminatory basis and cost as compared to the terms and costs charged to an authorized dealer or authorized motor vehicle repair facility all diagnostic, service and repair information that the manufacturer makes available to its authorized dealers and authorized motor vehicle repair facilities in the same form and the same manner as it is made available to authorized dealers or an authorized motor vehicle repair facility of the motor vehicle.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is opposing the bill, according to the DetN, because it believes the bill is motivated by parts manufacturers who want access to parts in order to reverse engineer and sell them. Literally. And yes, it is China’s fault.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the world largest “democracy” is being built up to a global small car hub. It seems the car world has even bigger plans for the Asian tiger cub. Business Week reports that Renault is planning to double the number of parts it gets from India. Sudhir Rao, COO of Renault’s India unit says that Renault will buy about €250m ($317m) worth of parts from the Indian subsidiary. Renault isn’t the only company that is looking to India for cost savings. Naturally, where Renault goes, Nissan follows. But Fiat and Ford are also interesting in using Indian parts. (Read More…)
As reported here, Daimler AG plans to increase its sourcing of automotive components from China nearly eight-fold within four years. The luxury car maker will buy $3.25b worth of car components per year in China. Now, BMW is itching to get in on the act. Not that BMW is new to buying parts in China, they have done that for years, mostly unbeknown to their well-heeled customers. BMW and Daimler are in talks to create a huge buying co-op. They want to create critical mass, and drop the bomb on their Chinese suppliers, the German Handelsblatt reports. By concentrating their buying power, Beemer and Benz intend to save €350m per year, in discounts alone. To assuage their American clientele, they say that they will also extend the stingy hand of their allied purchasing departments to parts suppliers in the U.S.A. However, with the dollar high and U.S. parts manufactures dead, or on the brink of extinction, the BMW/Mercedes buying axis is squarely targeted at China. The “deeper discounts” news from Deutschland already has Chinese parts makers atwitter and alarmed. Here is why ….
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