As the following table will demonstrate, June sales rose a tepid 14 percent over an extremely low June in the year before. 860,004 light vehicles had changed hands in June 2009, a drop of 27.7 percent from June 2008. This June, 983,821vehicles left dealer lots, nowhere near the 1,189,518 units that were sold in June 2008. (Read More…)

It’s that time of the month again. Today, sales in the U.S. will be reported. “Yucky” will probably be their nicest adjective. “U.S. auto sales this month probably posted the smallest increase since February as consumers concerned about unemployment and the economy avoid large purchases, analysts said” to Bloomberg.

Analysts polled by Bloomberg think June SAAR will be anywhere between 10.4 and 11m, the averaged number comes out to an annualized rate of 11.2 million units. More than last year’s horrendous June number of 9.7m, but less than 11.6 million in May. There will be little reason to celebrate. (Read More…)

Toyota is getting out of the carmageddon-caused  and recall-related funk and is moving forward with worldwide expansion plans. According to The Nikkei [sub], Toyota has resurrected all key projects planned before the financial crisis. (Read More…)

Brazil beats America! Over at well-known Brazilian communications giant Globo, they are reporting that little ole Brazil has overcome big ole USA in car production and has taken 5^th place worldwide. Can this be true? It depends on how you look at the numbers… (Read More…)

Complete numbers for U.S. January 2010 light vehicle sales are pretty much in (subject to change.) They look mildly promising. Overall, Automotive News [sub] records a gain of 6 percent over January 2009 so far. Here are the sales reported: (Read More…)

Volkswagen has grand plans for the U.S.A. Volkswagen wants to “increase sales and market share in 2010.” Ok, who doesn’t.  Now, for the delusions of grandeur part: By 2018, Volkswagen wants to more than triple annual car sales in the U.S. to 1 million a year, with  Audi accounting for 200,000 sales, reports the Wall Street Journal. Seen any flying pigs lately?

Why 2018? By 2018, Volkswagen wants to rule the world, and trounce Toyota in unit sales, profitability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and most likely size and quantity of cup-holders also.

Everybody in the company has to do his or her share for the grand plan.
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Come 2010, U.S. customers will storm the few remaining dealerships. GM will go public with a healthy pop that makes the taxpayer rich. The good old times will be back. The Japanese don’t think so.
(Read More…)

Toyota had slammed hard on the brake when it came to capital expenditures. So hard that ToMoCo (and Sony) were rapped on the knuckles by the Japanese Ministry of Finance for hobbling Japan’s economy. Suddenly, Toyota starts pouring concrete and installing machinery again. Not because of newfound faith in the auto market in general. Two factors made them do it: The Yen has become so expensive that manufacturing in the USA is cheaper. And China is gobbling up cars faster than Toyota can make them.

According to the Nikkei [sub], a Toyota plant in the US and one in China will increase ToMoCo’s annual output capacity by 200,000 units before the Japanese 2010 fiscal ends on March 31, 2001. The construction will cost Toyota a little over $1b, depending on the vagaries of the greenback and its pegged follower, the Chinese Yuan. Here are the blueprints:
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In January, China’s auto sales for the first time in history exceeded America’s, making China the world’s largest auto market for the month. As we said, sooner than later, China is bound to outclass the US of A solidly. Xu Changming, director of China’s economic consultative center under the State Information Center, thinks that it is quite possible that China will overtake the United States as the World No.1 car market for all of 2009: “Chinese auto sales are expected to grow 4 percent to 5 percent from 9.38 million units sold last year, more than the estimated 9 million unit sales in the U.S. this year.”

“But this figure is not something we should feel proud of since the U.S. was just plunged into an economic recession,” Xu warns according to Gasgoo. “Once the recession ends, America can retake the sales crown by selling 16 million–17 million vehicles annually.” So even if China takes the crown this year, they might lose it, and then “China still needs at least four to five years to eventually catch up with the U.S. in the auto sales total,” said Xu. And he has reason for caution . . .
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Here’s a surprise: American cars hold their value much better than other major markets, including Japan and Europe. Cost of ownership is the culprit. In the US, owning a car generates relatively little in the way of year-to-year expenses. Registration is usually about $30. Inspections are infrequent and rarely costly. While the repairs required to keep a “beater” on the road can reach four figures, they rarely exceed the value of the vehicle itself. As a result, it’s unusual to see a used vehicle in America (even “heaps”) listed for sale under $1k. Also as a result, the cash-for-clunkers proposals, as envisioned, are a horrible idea.

In an effort to boost sales, the German government has been running a “cash for clunkers” program. The government is offering 2,500 Euros for any eligible old car traded in towards a new car purchase. After some initial cheering, the program has been leaning toward scandal land. The reason for this nexus: gaps.

Gap number one: used car values. Overseas, licensing and stringent test regimes make the cost of auto parts a far more daunting proposition than it is in The Land of the Free. Tax laws favoring company/fleet purchases create [even] dramatic depreciation for mass market models. These factors mean that the market value of a “tradable” used car is much less than it’s “government” trade-in value.

The other gap—and the source of many of the “issues” surrounding the cash-for-clunkers program—lies between a car’s “inflated” trade-in value and the cost of a new car.

At best, the money garnered from the government for a clunker represents about a 25 percent down payment on a new car. That’s at the low end. For a more middle-market car, the clunker check accounts for less than 10 percent of the cleaner, greener machine’s purchase price. On top of that, the sort of person who would be buying a €10K car is the one least likely to get financing to close the “gap”.

The sharp end solution to this gap is simple: People who can afford new cars will buy (from a private owner) a “junker” to trade. The junker’s former owner will take a fee (maybe 1000 Euros) and use the money to buy a non-tradeable old car. Hopefully a better one, but not necessarily.

Despite/because of these economics, it seems that everyone wins (and the old cars get taken out of circulation). In practice, no.

The biggest problem with Germany’s cash-for-clunkers program: it takes something that is normally not very valuable (a German jalopy) and increase its value several-fold by attaching a couple of documents. Throw in the fact that the money “pool” supporting the program is “first come, first served,” and you get fraud on an impressively large scale.

TTAC’s Bertel Schmitt has been connecting the dots between the environmentalists’ and the mob’s green dreams. Apparently some of the trade-ins are doing it the Chicago way (early and often), and aren’t even getting scrapped. This makes a mess of the real purpose of the program (culling clunkers), while doing nothing to increase sales (the spoonful of sugar to make the green stuff go down easier).

It’s a stark warning to Americans contemplating the wisdom of the whole cash-for-clunkers concept. But is the devil in the details? Could CforC be done “properly”?

First, you’d need to make the scrap credit what it is: a simple payment above salvage value to take a heap off the road. Second, you need to make the payment lower (say $1,500 or even $1,000). Third, you need to extend it to ALL eligible vehicles and run it through salvage yards (therefore only one set of books to check).

In effect, the goal would be to get “heap” drivers into a slightly newer, slightly nicer “heap.”

Aside from aesthetics and a marginal pollution reduction, the greatest benefit would be to reduce the total vehicle population on the road. This will eventually help the new car market but not for a few years and not for the reason you’d think.

While new vehicle sales had been running high until last year, the “scrap rate” has held steady at about 12.5 million a year for the last decade. Sales have far exceeded that rate; that is one reason the US has 250 million cars for 200 million licensed drivers.

A targeted cull would aim to increase the scrap rate, to 15 million annually. Make no mistake, doing it right would not be cheap, I reckon $5b dollars a year (3.5 million times $1,500) ought to do it.

Reducing the absolute number of cars would help heal the damage years of “fire sales” have had on used car prices. Getting used car prices back near “normal” would help sales down the road. But would it be worth the cost? In Bailout Nation, cost owns you.

Never has the term “Red China” been more appropriate than in the last month. The U.S. is staring into China’s taillights. In January, the unthinkable happened. China dethroned the United States as the world’s largest car market. Not for the year. For one month only—so far. Even the biggest optimists (or pessimists, depending how you look at it) didn’t expect (fear) that China would outsell the U.S. before 2015.

The story unraveled during GM’s monthly sales call on Monday. Michael DiGiovanni, GM’s executive director of global market and industry analysis, dropped the remark that an estimated 790,000 vehicles were sold in China in January. Total U.S. sales in January were about 668,000, DiGiovanni estimated. Automotive News [sub] thinks Di Giovanni is an optimist. According to their tally, 656,881 vehicles were sold in January. DiGiovanni’s Chinese number was even news to China, where official counts are not yet available.

“This is the first time in history that China has passed the U.S. in monthly sales,” DiGiovanni said. “We are estimating that China is going to come in at 10.7 million seasonally adjusted annual rate in January. The U.S. industry, we estimate at about 9.8 million SAAR.”

What happened?
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In his own ew-inducing sort of way, Oedipus defined the Tragic Hero. His story teaches us that character is fate; the arrogant King can no more escape his destiny than a bad guy on a cop show. And so it is with the Ford Taurus, a vehicle named for either the constellation of the same name (minus the Ford) or the Zodiac sign ascribed to it. According to pseudo- science, Taureans are practical, reliable, patient, affectionate, competent, ambitious, determined, lazy, jealous, inflexible, greedy and stubborn. And some people wonder why the model took twenty years to die an ignominious death…