According to CNBC, Toyota Motor’s North American President Yoshi Inaba said that U.S. auto sales could rebound to a $12- to 13-million annual sales rate within a year. Toyota is also reviewing its options regarding an auto plant in California that was part of a joint venture with Pontiac that was terminated by GM, along with a planned plant in Mississippi that has been put on hold due to market conditions.
Author: Staff (Page 197 of 202)
News broke over the weekend the VW will purchase Porsche.
Porsche SE’s controlling families will agree Thursday to accept an offer by Volkswagen to buy its sports car business Porsche AG for roughly 8 billion euros ($11.28 billion), Der Spiegel reported Saturday.
Germany’s leading weekly magazine wrote that the rival Porsche and Piech clans, which own 100 percent of Porsche SE votes, will approve the two-stage takeover at a supervisory board meeting on July 23.
There are several hurdles to the deal, however, including some tax issues, so we may not see this deal close as soon as initially reported.
Will buying a hybrid save you money on your auto insurance? That might not be a good assumption given this recent data.
Hybrid car owners may be a different shade of green than their insurers hoped.
Insurance companies often give discounts to drivers of hybrids, perhaps because the image of a tree-hugging environmentalist suggests a cautious type who is a good risk to insure. But hybrid drivers rack up more miles, more tickets and costlier accidents than conventional car drivers, according to a study released Wednesday.
“High-mileage drivers seem to be attracted to [hybrid] vehicles,” said Raj Bhat, president of Quality Planning Corp., the San Francisco firm that conducted a study of 360,000 vehicle-insurance claims made to 12 U.S. insurers over the last two years, comparing hybrid and conventional vehicles. Quality Planning is a unit of Insurance Services Office Inc., a closely held group of companies that provides data, analytics and other services.
The disconnect between perception and reality could leave insurers with unprofitable hybrid policies unless they adjust pricing to reflect the unexpectedly high costs, or make up the difference elsewhere, said Robert U’Ren, senior vice president of Quality Planning, in an interview.
For 2008 hybrid cars, the most recent model year it studied, Quality Planning found that the cost to insurers of providing collision coverage for hybrids was 13% higher than for conventional vehicles. The cost of providing comprehensive coverage, which also includes the expense of noncollision-related damage, was 17% higher. For older and particularly for larger hybrid models, the difference was even bigger. U’Ren said that the more complicated hybrid engine design likely accounted for much of the difference in cost.
The article goes on to explain that most insurance companies have not made significant adjustments relating to premiums and coverage for hybrid cars, and several insurance companies, including Farmers Group Inc., a subsidiary of Zurich Financial Services AG, and Travelers offer hybrid owners up to 10% off coverage prices. It will be interesting to see how this develops as more data becomes available.
Now that it has emerged from bankruptcy with the help of the American taxpayer, Chrysler needs to make small cars efficiently to survive. Fiat will be a huge help with its contribution of small-engine technology, but it looks like Chrysler can learn efficient production techniques from Fiat’s factory in Tychy, Poland.
The mammoth Fiat plant here, which churned out nearly half a million cars last year, may hold some of the answers for Chrysler (as well as Ford Motor and General Motors), as it struggles to regain its footing after its bankruptcy and reduce its dependence on muscle-bound trucks and sport utility vehicles.
For those who remember Fiat before its ignominious retreat from the American market — the name was said to stand for “Fix It Again, Tony” — the Italian automaker may seem an unlikely role model. It left the United States in the early 1980s after widespread quality problems.
But Fiat itself has undergone a revolution under Sergio Marchionne, who became its chief executive in 2004, raising standards for quality and reliability at plants like Tychy and mastering the art of building smaller cars with high efficiency. Chrysler hopes he can do the same thing for it now that he has assumed control of the American company.
“We are lucky there is a crisis,” said the director of the Tychy plant, Zdzislaw Arlet, unable to resist a gibe at the bigger cars and trucks that have traditionally stolen the industry spotlight. “Everybody wants to build small cars now.”
At Tychy (pronounced TICK-ee), one secret is flexibility: The latest robotic technology is balanced by workers who can quickly shift models to match demand. That is one reason Tychy is operating around the clock, six days a week, while most other auto plants in Europe and the United States are running at a fraction of capacity, increasing costly nonproductive downtime.
Marchionne has proven that he’s a great car guy, and there’s reason to be optimistic about his ability to transform Chrysler. With this visit the process has begun.
This is good news for the Saturn employee and dealers.
Less than a week after officially filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy, General Motors has announced the pending sale of the Saturn brand to Penske Automotive. The transaction, if completed, would shift the rights of Saturn to Penske, and would continue the sale of the Aura, Vue, and Outlook vehicles under a contract basis with GM.
Although the deal could save more than 350 dealerships and 13,000 jobs, according to GM, it won’t save the slow-selling Saturn Astra hatchback or low-volume Sky roadster. Penske does intend to preserve the customer-focused mentality upon which Saturn was founded in 1990. “Saturn has a passionate customer base and outstanding dealer network,” said Roger Penske, chairman of Penske Automotive Group. “For nearly 20 years, Saturn has focused on treating the customer right. We share that philosophy, and we want to build on those strengths.”
Jon Yanca of Car and Driver goes on to point out that this is a pretty good fit. Saturn might flourish as part of a smaller, more nimble company like Penske as opposed to the bloated “old GM.”
As Newsweek detailed in an excellent article, Saturn was supposed to save GM, but GM ended up crushing Saturn.
Saturn was hardly a panacea. But its fall to earth, more than $5 billion in GM money later, is about far more than the flameout of one brand. In the eyes of some automotive analysts, Saturn represents a major missed opportunity for Detroit to place a sustained bet on fuel-efficient cars that would compete with the Japanese—and to recalibrate the bitter business-labor relationship in ways that could have had far-reaching implications for the entire industry. Saturn was never able to surpass the Japanese in technology, as Smith had hoped. But the competitive knives Saturn faced within GM did far more damage than any threat from overseas: execs who felt the auto giant already had too many brands and factories; dealers resentful of Saturn’s product-development dollars; and a labor union whose leadership came to regard the brand’s workplace innovations as collaborations with the enemy. It did not help matters that from the mid-1990s until just recently, Americans turned away from small cars in favor of trucks and SUVs.
The story is tragic in many ways, as Chairman Roger B. Smith had grand plans for the first new GM brand in 70 years. Unfortunately, Smith’s bold plans at Saturn were not matched by bold reforms at the other brands. Just imagine of someone like Jack Welch had been named CEO of GM back then.
It’s a shame, but now Saturn and GM both get a new beginning, and both have a real chance of prospering in the future.
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