Cars! Cars! Cars!

bd popeye

The Last Jedi
VIP Professional
If you want my genuine opinion, American cars are not any more unreliable than European cars and at least tend to cost cheaper despite the UAW wages, suggesting European wage and capital structures are not as well either. And yes, I have seen major quality goof ups on Mercedes Benz and BMW cars. Its hard to believe given the awe they tend to project.

Intresting point.

I onced worked for the largest auto rental agency in the World. I would say without prejudice that most autos are very even as far as quality & reliablity is concerned.

Some models from Europe such as Volvo(owned by Ford) are quite troublesome when new. We had major complaints & problems with new Volovos. But after all the bugs were worked out they are fine autos.
 

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
The new Honda Insight, their first dedicated hybrid. The body style is just way too obvious who the intended competition should be.
 

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crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
A great way to name a new car company.


Revving China's Auto Industry

By Peter Day
Global business correspondent, BBC News

A model poses by a F3DM electric vehicle at 2008 China High-tech Fair (October 2008) in Shenzhen
The BYD F3DM is a petrol-electric hybrid plug-in vehicle
Cars leave me cold, but not the BYD F3DM. I drove it the other day, and it really is remarkable.

In one way, it is a rather ordinary compact saloon car, though it did have exceptional acceleration when I put my foot down zooming round the factory grounds in Shenzhen, the vast new Chinese city just north of Hong Kong.

This is a plug-in electric car, hence the acceleration, but when the electric battery runs out after 80 miles (128km), the petrol engine switches in seamlessly.

"Oh, just like one of those new eco-friendly hybrid cars," you may think.

But the makers argue that hybrids are more gas-guzzler than battery driven, whereas this model tries to be half and half.

And the makers? Well they are called BYD, a Chinese company which has been in existence for a bare 13 years, and which only recently started making any kind of car at all.
Shenzhen skyline
Shenzhen has become a byword for China's manufacturing base

This new dual mode rechargeable car makes its launch appearance in China on 15 December, but BYD's Paul Lin let me have my test drive the other day.

And then when he showed me the company museum, he really set me thinking.

What is a business only 13 years old doing with a museum anyway?

Because the company has such enormous ambitions it wants to tell the world how far it has come and how much further it intends to go.

Rapid growth

Paul Lin showed me how BYD has evolved, starting with rechargeable batteries that soon became standard parts for one third of all the world's mobile phones, following the research speciality of the founder and chairman Wang Chuanfu.

And the modest battery making company grew and grew.

Wang Chuanfu soon saw that battery powered cars might be the future.

The size and scale of what BYD has already achieved is breathtaking, but that is nothing compared to its ambition

BYD knew a lot about batteries, and it was not daunted by the complexities of car-making either.

Six years ago, it bought two established Chinese car firms, and now BYD has seven huge plants with 130,000 employees.

The car I drove is made at the new headquarters factory - a giant one in Shenzhen, a city which was just a fishing town 30 years ago, with some 70,000 inhabitants.

Thanks to China's rush to modernise, Shenzhen is now part of the global manufacturing powerhouse in the Pearl River Delta, with an estimated population of 14m.

Wheel of modernisation

BYD's vast new factory did not exist 15 months ago, and they had to level several hills and fill in several lakes to create the site.

The workers mostly live in vast dormitories close by.

Like most of the Shenzhen workforce, they have migrated into the city from distant country places, moving from poverty in search of the fabled better life, spinning the great wheel of China's modernisation.

The size and scale of what BYD has already achieved is breathtaking, but that is nothing compared to its ambition.

Visitors view an engine developed by BYD Auto at 2008 China High-tech Fair (October 2008) in Shenzhen
The F3DM uses a petrol combustion engine to charge the car's battery
This company has already made public its aim to be the number one car firm in China by the year 2015, and then - deep breath - number one in the whole world in 2025.

Despite my scepticism, Paul Lin had no doubt about this. The current fate of the American car industry suggests there may be room at the top some time before that date.

But to Paul Lin and the company he is part of, this ambition is entirely natural.

Car making is less difficult than high technology, they argue, and many of the techniques they have learned in high tech can now be applied to the automobile.

Remarkable endorsement

I put my foot down and revved almost silently across the factory campus in my (sample) new car, and wondered about the future.

As an exporter, China is going to be badly hit by the global recession, but already the best factories are evolving up the technology chain in much the same way as BYD has transformed itself from a supplier of other people's mobile phone batteries into a car maker with its own name on the front.

Critics say this is a copycat car, but that is how the Japanese auto industry started.

And in September there was a remarkable endorsement of BYD when even as global stock markets were plunging, the canniest American investor of them all, Warren Buffet of Omaha, Nebraska, paid $230m (£155m) for a 10% stake in the Chinese company.

Mr Buffett is a quite notorious investor for the long-term, not the quick buck, so he must recognise something in those initials BYD.

The company says they stand for "Build Your Dream", but they could mean absolutely anything.
 

flyzies

Junior Member
Thought i'll post this here. A scathing attacking on the mismanagement and failures of America's "Big 3"...

So what does everyone here think? Should the US govt, using taxpayers money, bail out the failures of GM? (The phase the article used is "privatise the profits and socialise the losses")

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Playing chicken with stupid giants

Buckle up. Two giants are playing "chicken", the game where two cars speed towards each other and the loser is the one who swerves first. Unless neither flinches, then they smash head-on. In this case the giants playing chicken are General Motors Corporation and the Republicans in Congress. If neither blinks, you can forget all the happy talk about Australia avoiding a recession because the shock wave from this collision will be global.

"None of us want to see them go down, but very few of us had anything to do with the dilemma that they have created for themselves," Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, said on Saturday. "We simply cannot ask the American taxpayer to subsidise failure."

Few global manufacturers have failed as long and consistently as General Motors, now teetering on the brink of insolvency. If the Republicans in Congress don't relent, and President George Bush doesn't intervene against his fellow Republicans, GM will have to declare bankruptcy. Hence the game of chicken.

The two sides appear set to impact just in time for Christmas. Credit has dried up in the US, the economy is in recession, vehicle sales have had their worst slide in almost 30 years, and the big three US car makers are committed to multi-billion dollar payments to their suppliers even though their cash flow has plunged.

Filing for bankruptcy protection would be bad for long-term survival prospects. A poll conducted last week by Rasmussen Reports found 51 per cent of consumers said they would not buy a car from a manufacturer operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganisation. Another 18 per cent were not sure if they would do so. Only 31 per cent said they would buy a car from a company operating under bankruptcy protection.

The Centre for Automotive Research (CAR) in Michigan says 239,000 people work directly in the United States for GM, Chrysler and Ford, but total job losses would be much larger, 2.5 million people, if GM failed and went into liquidation, because of the ripple-through effect on the economy. The worst-case scenario, all three of the car makers going into liquidation, would lead to 3.5 million lost jobs, according to CAR. That could tip the US economy into a depression.

Once again, the dilemma is that taxpayers are being asked to save stupid corporate giants - privatise the profits and socialise the losses - because the price of failure is even greater. To avoid this doomsday scenario, President Bush may be willing to override his fellow Republicans and siphon off some of the $US700 billion ($1060 billion) bail-out of the banking system, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to offer a credit lifeline for Detroit's big three. "Because Congress failed to act, we will stand ready to prevent an imminent failure until Congress reconvenes and acts to address the long-term viability of the industry," a Treasury Department spokeswoman, Brookly McLaughlin, said on Friday.

Five months ago, I wrote with disdain about GM and its prolonged failure to build fuel-efficient vehicles. Back then, GM's shares were trading at $US11.90 and the company had a market value of $US6.74 billion, down from $55 billion in 2000. It had made one strategic blunder after another. It kept making clunky cars even while losing market share to Japanese competitors. It tried to break the cycle by creating the Saturn division, which gradually lost its independence, its verve and its prestige. It junked research on the electronic car, leaving the field to be dominated by Toyota. It bought the company which made the Hummer, the quintessence of fuel-guzzling, road-hogging, conspicuous excess.

Belatedly, into this morass came an apparition known as the Volt, the battery-driven car that is supposed to save GM. It could well be called the Vault, because it is meant to leapfrog over Toyota and its hybrid Prius. Given that GM did not commit itself to trying to match and beat Toyota's hybrid technology until two years ago, and the entire company is now in crisis, GM has no one else to blame if the Volt never goes into production.

Fast-forward to last Friday. GM's shares closed at $US3.94. Its market value was $US2.4 billion, having lost 96 per cent of its value in nine years. GM says it will run out of cash by the end of the year - in two weeks. Contrast this with Toyota, which has a market capitalisation of $US100 billion, more than 40 times the size of GM. Honda has a market cap of $US42 billion. Ford has a market cap of $US7 billion. The Japanese have won.

Why would the Republicans let the Japanese win completely by failing to bail out the US car industry when they were willing to bail out the banking system? Because they apportion half the blame for the big three's predicament to the United Auto Workers union, which has refused to bring the salaries, benefits and work rules for its members working for the Detroit big three into parity with the Japanese operations in America, which are much less unionised.

This is payback. The Democrats received hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from various unions this year to win the White House and keep control of Congress. The Republicans would like to weaken the United Auto Workers and get a more competitive US car industry in the process. The UAW is fighting to preserve itself, and the wages and conditions of its members even as the Detroit big three edge toward the precipice. It is gambling the big three are too big to be allowed to fail. This is "chicken" on a grand scale.
 

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
I think we should bail them out. In a perfect economy we should let the Big Three fail. But we are not in a perfect economy. This is a horrible time to let them fail because that will greatly deepen the overall situation. If you're bailing out AIG for over 200 billion now, Citibank for 20 billion, three big companies for $15 billion seems like a bargain.

But you know, that won't solve the problem of the car makers themselves. That's just a short term lifeline. Furthermore, expect them to keep asking for more. The begging is not going to end there.

US military cannot afford the Big Three to go under either for obvious reasons. I simply cannot see how Republicans, who stand for pro-defense, and yet stand for "free to fail' principles, can reconcile on this.
 

sumdud

Senior Member
VIP Professional
I agree with Crobato, and that 25 is a bargain, but I also think that the Big 3 should begin a 300-Retreat. It needs to get rid of some workers......although of course it will be very hard with UAW...........

And by 300 I mean the Spartans, not the Chryslers....
 
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bd popeye

The Last Jedi
VIP Professional
I agree with Crobato, and that 25 is a bargain, but I also think that the Big 3 should begin a 300-Retreat. It needs to get rid of some workers......although of course it will be very hard with UAW...........

And by 300 I mean the Spartans, not the Chryslers....

Chrysler announced today it was closing all 30 of its plants for a month.

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Chrysler closing all 30 plants for a month
December 17, 2008 at 4:26 PM | Comments (0)
DETROIT -- Chrysler says it will close all 30 of its manufacturing plants for a month starting Friday.

The company needs to match production to slowing demand and conserve cash.

Tighter credit markets are keeping would-be buyers away from their showrooms, Chrysler says. Dealers are unable to close sales for buyers due to a lack of financing, and estimate that 20 to 25 percent of their volume has been lost due to the credit situation.

Chrysler claims it is nearing the minimum level of cash it needs to run the company and will have trouble paying bills after the first of the year.

Operations at the 30 plants will be idled at the end of shift on Friday, Dec. 19, and will not come back online until Jan. 19, 2009, or later.

--Associated Press
 
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crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
:
Chinese and US automaker General Motors' officials kick off a new joint venture manufacturing plant in Shenyang, northwest China's Liaoning province on December 17, 2008, showcasing the compact Chevrolet Cruze. Beleaguered US automaker General Motors opened up a new joint venture manufacturing plant which will begin churning out up to 150,000 vehicles annually beginning 2009.

Interesting to grasp the irony in all of this.

And they love GM cars over there.

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"General Motors, the biggest foreign automaker in China, reported last week that it had sold a total of 1.03 million vehicles in the country in 2007, 18.5% higher than in the previous year."
 
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crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
I just have this weird scenario is GM is allowed to die in the US.

The carcass maybe split up into different companies that can operate independently. Saturn can end up being an independent company.

GM's international divisions will reorganize under their own, like in GM International. This is a massive combine that can include Opel-Holden-Vauxhall. Saturn can end up being part of this combine since essentially they have been making and selling cars with Opel components.

GM China may either become part of this or split off on its own. Or it may end up being partly owned by Chinese investors and by the bigger GM International body. In China, GM continues to produce the big bad American cars that happen to symbolize the American Dream the Chinese in the PRC strive for, the same car models Americans now think of junk compared to their Toyota and Honda transplants. China grows to become the world's largest car market with GM on the top of the list. The new internationalized GM becomes the world's top automaker again as it gobbles up the smaller Chinese automakers to create a new automobile empire.

GM returns once again in the US this time as an import brand and then imports Chevys and Buicks made in Shenyang, China at deep competitive prices.
 
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sumdud

Senior Member
VIP Professional
Ouch! That most definitely pushes me farther away from the rainbow badge!

Can't imagine people buying anything Made In China bigger than a tool box and my bet is that the market will be dead out here in coastal Cali. Cars noticeably below 10000 will scare people.... Unless they jack up the price in order to give competence to buyers.....

Might be a market in the poorer areas....
 
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