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Friday, August 04, 2006

Auto Motives: End of a SUV Love Affair & More

Sales of sports utility vehicles are falling faster than overweight rookies in the heat at football training camps.

GM's July truck sales, a big chunk of which are SUVs, were down 31.2 percent, while Ford's plummeted 44.8 percent. No word yet from Chrysler, but it is expected to do just as poorly.

Notes the acid-penned Robert Farago at The Truth About Cars:
Obviously, the whole SUV thing is on the skids. Sure, thousands of Big Three executives and middle managers continue to hold a candle for the genre, hoping against hope that America’s automotive “fickleness” resolves itself, so that the gold rush can resume. But any rational personal knows that the winds of change have blown that candle out. Any car company with a truck-heavy sales mix, any automobile manufacturer without a competitive line of cars, is, as they say, sh*t out of luck.

Baby, baby, baby; where did our love go? The simple answer: gas prices went up and truck buyers bailed out. The more accurate answer: Americans were bored of their SUV’s long before triple digit refills. The rising cost of gas simply cranked-up the average SUV buyer’s automotive ennui. I mean, why pay a premium at the pump for something you’re not so crazy about in the first place– especially if it’s trying to kill you. Yes, there is that. I reckon SUV’s music died when the Ford Explorer burst tire rollover debacle debuted. The genre’s Marlboro Man image was revealed as something of a cruel joke. Customers started asking questions.
TICK, TICK, TICK
Global auto behemoth Toyota, which does not rely on gas-guzzling SUVs to please its stockholders, passed the struggling Ford Motor Company in July to rank as the second-biggest-selling auto company in the U.S. behind General Motors.

And Honda outsold DaimlerChrysler’s Chrysler group last month for the first time.

In all, Detroit's Big Three fell to their lowest market share in history in July, just 52 percent, as buyers flocked to the fuel-efficient models conspicuously absent in the GM, Ford and Chrysler lineups.
Asian automakers took 41.4 percent of the market in July, their best performance ever, topping the 40 percent share they captured in May.
BABY YOU CAN LIGHT MY FIRE
As if things weren't bad enough for Ford, it has added another 1.2 million SUVs to the 4.5 million vehicles that it already has recalled because of cruise control systems that are prone to catching fire.
Ford had denied there was a problem and resisted recalling any vehicles until it was slapped with a series of guilty verdicts in lawsuits.
It is the third largest recall in U.S. automotive history.

X MARKS THE PRIZE
There is a neat new competition underway called the Automotive X Prize in which teams from around the world are being invited to design, build and sell super-efficient cars.

The organizers are setting the bar high:
People love their cars. They are vital links to our jobs, our community, ourselves. For everything we love about them, cars are chained to the most severe global crises of our time: oil dependence and climate change.

We aim to break this deadlock through the most radical approach to innovation yet - the X Prize.

This will be a race for the ages, with major publicity and a big sack of cash waiting for the champion, and perhaps our future hanging in the balance.
More here.
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