Archive for July, 2010
2010 New York: Finally, Some New Products for Scion
Scion violated its own product code three years ago, when it introduced a second-generation xB box to the U.S. market. When the Toyota youth sub-brand launched early last decade, the plan was to never do more than one generation of a single model. For 2011, the new Scion tC launching this fall gets new sheetmetal and its 2.4-liter engine is replaced with the new 2.5-liter from its large four-cylinder family, making 180 horsepower, up 19, and 11 foot-pound of torque more than the old engine. A six-speed manual or six-speed automatic with paddle shifters will be available.
It has, of course, a “sport-tuned” suspension, plus bigger brakes, standard 18-inch alloy wheels and a new electronic power steering system.
The new tC’s sheetmetal is familiar, but distinctive, with a more organic look, especially to the front clip. But not the c-pillar, which has a more techno, trapezoidal look. Scion calls it very “masculine,” in hopes the tC will again be a hit with sport compact customizers. The interior has been upgraded with what Scion calls a new dual-dial combo with orange gauge lighting and a racing-style flat-bottom steering wheel. The front buckets are generously bolstered and high-back, and the rear seat has a 60/40 split.
Scion chief Jack Hollis describes the tC as an “aspirational” car “for a young person who has had earning success in his career …”
Fair enough. Guess that means the “young, metropolitan” buyers who go for the 2011 Scion iQ “micro-sub-compact” might not have quite the earning power. Taking a stab at the competition, Hollis called it “mini-er” and “smarter.” Hah. Anyway, at 120.1-inches long, 66.1-inches wide and 59.1-inches tall, it will be the smallest four-seater on the U.S. market when it goes on sale in early ‘11.
Thankfully, we won’t get the Japanese-market 1.0-liter, but instead it will be powered by a 1.3-liter engine making “at least” 90 horsepower and “at least” 85 foot-pound of torque, Toyota says. The only transmission available will be a CVT.
We get the 3+1 seating of other markets, the front passenger seat is set ahead of the driver’s seat to leave more room for the front passenger’s rear-seat counterpart. Plan to load the tiny little car accordingly. It will come standard with vehicle stability control, anti-lock brakes, traction control and 10 airbags, including the industry’s first rear-window bag. The driver’s center stack is vertical and asymmetric, to make good use of the space, and the instrument panel is described as “techno-organic,” whatever that is.
Toyota’s hope is that young urbanites will take to it better than to, say, mass transit and bicycles and buy more iQs than they’ve bought smart fortwos. And if you need something slightly bigger, there’s always the Chevy Spark.
Be sure to stay tuned to Motor Trend Online for all your 2010 New York Auto Show updates with our continuing live coverage today and tomorrow, direct from the show floor.
2011 Suzuki Kizashi Sport, an AW Flash Drive:
What is it?
2010 New York: Alan Mulally’s Feel Good Speech
New York - Three years after he joked about saving President Bush by keeping him from plugging in a hydrogen-powered Ford Edge, Alan Mulally gave a sort of pep rally to an adoring automotive press who have singled out his company as a rare winner in a bad economy. “Everybody associated with Ford is feeling really good,” Mulally said in his 2010 New York auto show keynote speech. He also took a subtle swipe at his Metro Detroit rivals.
Ford Motor Company, as you know, took out a seemingly prescient $23.5-billion home equity loan three years ago, before the home, credit and automotive markets went to hell. Ford has started to pay it back, but Mulally says the company will keep the line of credit in place going forward. Obviously, the highly favorable terms, said to be well below 0.01-percent interest rate, are fixed, and not variable.
“I’m very pleased we respected all our debt-holders and all our stockholders,” he said, to enthusiastic applause, obviously a reference to the General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcies last year.
On the question of how Ford didn’t get the same United Auto Worker concessions as GM and Chrysler, Mulally was a bit more diplomatic. “I’ll always be appreciative, to one of the stakeholders, being the UAW and Ron Gettelfinger, in particular, because we could not make cars in the United States profitably, before. And we knew if we were going to grow the business in the United States and provide jobs that we needed to deal with that.”
Mulally said One Ford is working, that the company is successfully integrating its global operations to take advantage of the economies of scale, and make small cars, as well as large trucks, profitable where they are made, and that the focus on the Ford brand - now with the sale of Volvo to Geely virtually completed - hearkens back to the philosophy of the company’s founder, 80 years ago. He said that Ford will continue to make big cars and trucks where they are in demand (North America, of course), although he did not commit to rear-drive, beyond the F-Series platforms.
“So how’s it going? It’s going pretty well.” Sales are up, he said, thanks to a combination of revived consumer confidence and eased credit, and Ford’s market share has been up for 14 of the past 15 months. “We’ve made it through the worst recession since the depression.” And Ford is converting truck plants to car plants in a fight for the survival of manufacturing in America.
“We are, literally, fighting for the soul of manufacturing in the United States, right now.”
Relaxed and comfortable in his role as the nation’s - perhaps the world’s - most admired corporate executive, Mulally said nothing that would surprise anyone who reads this website regularly. He joked with journalists who asked him questions. He spoke of how important it was to have the credit line making it possible to spend on research and development, and to update Ford’s core products in the midst of that recession. That had been Ford’s biggest problem in the past - it didn’t update good products (except for the F-Series), letting them go to seed even when the economy was good.
“The plan was to finance as much as we could to finance the plan. I could remember finishing that meeting, and everybody was ready to go up to New York to present that plan, and we were going to present a business plan. And we all know what that’s like. You go into a bank and you present your business plan, and they want you to be successful. They don’t want your assets, they want you to pay your money back. So I said, ‘you know, it’s a great plan, tune it up a bit more, and let me know when you get back what the bankers say.’ And the room just got deathly silent. I said, ‘what’s wrong?’ And they said, ‘we think you need to present the business plan to the bankers. You’re the only new model we have.”
Mulally says he flew out that day, “you know, 500 bankers, all looking at you with their beady eyes … and they want to know, do you have a plan, a solid plan.”
Within weeks, Mulally had raised the $23.5 billion, which later staved off bankruptcy. All because Mulally had a plan, a real formula for reviving the company, not the empty “Way Forward” Ford had presented before his arrival. And that’s why the automotive press adore Mulally as much as he adores his own job.
2010 Volvo XC60 T6, an AW Drivers Log:
EDITOR WES RAYNAL: This was a great vacation vehicle. It’s a good-looking little ute and drives well and was a handy size for the various vacation activities we did.
The 2010 Land Rover LR4, an AW Drivers Log:
EDITOR WES RAYNAL: This car gets my vote as one of the most improved vehicles over its predecessor.
Volvo Deal Transforms Both Ford, Geely
Ford Motor Company has sold Volvo to China’s Geely for $1.8 billion, some $4.6-billion less than it paid back in the Jacques Nasser era. Ford will complete the deal and hand over keys to the Swedish automaker and its Swedish and Belgian factories by the third quarter of this year. Meanwhile, Geely plans to make Volvo a Sino-Swedish company, while keeping those European plants open. The deal transforms Ford as much as it transforms Geely.
It transforms Ford back to the kind of company its namesake envisioned. It’s one in which the Ford brand, like Ferdinand Piech’s Volkswagen (the nine other, mostly high-priced niche brands notwithstanding), can badge a range of cars and trucks from entry level to premium. If not for the Leland Brothers’ struggle with their nascent Lincoln brand, sold to Ford in 1922, Ford could be a single-brand automaker, again. Unlike Piech and VW, Ford sees no need to manage multiple brands, especially in Europe.
In the ’90s, it was believed the world’s automakers needed to combine, or at least, work together to build and market certain high-volume models to survive. In the past two years, we’ve learned that the global market could no longer support so much production capacity and so many brands. We’ve lost, at least, most of the old British Leyland/BMW’s “English Patient,” plus Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer, Isuzu (save for medium- and heavy-duty trucks). And companies like Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Peugeot and Citroen are struggling to be more than small, regional automakers.
Save for the Chinese market, which has saved some of the MG and Rover bits of BL, and tried to save Hummer. Chinese automakers, including Geely, have been trying to dazzle Western Europe and North America with what they could do, but the cars their myriad automakers have displayed at Detroit’s North American International Auto Show and others have mostly been fodder for jokes and derision at online auto magazines, including this one.
But China’s reputation for turning out shoddy, sub-standard cars designed to look like Western and Japanese models will be fixed eventually, and Geely’s purchase of Volvo is a huge step in that direction. Geely is perhaps best known for its CK compact sedan, which looks vaguely like a Toyota Corolla. Its Coupe looks like an alternative design for the first-generation Hyundai Tiburon. Geely has raised $900 million over the $1.8 billion purchase price of Volvo in order to develop new cars. While this is barely enough for a new engine or transmission program in North America, Europe or Japan and South Korea, it won’t take long for Geely cars to benefit from Volvo’s platforms and safety features like Ford has.
I’m sure we’ll soon see Volvo supplying architecture, components, powertrains and engines — not to mention design and engineering — to Geely, not the other way around. What Volvo needs to worry about is how much of its future export capacity comes out of China, rather than Sweden or Belgium.
The Ford Taurus, Flex, 2012 Explorer, Lincoln MKS and MKT all are on a version of the Volvo S60/S80 platform. Ford has concentrated on safety better than its domestic competition since at least the 1950s, but now it has an indigenous safety program, and also has taken advantage of Volvo’s multi-airbag technology and its blind spot system, to name just two.
Meanwhile, in China, where Ford Motor Company has been far behind General Motors and Volkswagen AG in taking advantage of the world’s quickest-growing market, Alan Mulally recently handed the keys to the country’s first new Fiesta customer. China is a key component in Mulally’s One Ford program, especially when it comes to small cars and crossovers.
And so, with its sale of Volvo, Ford looks much like the Ford of the ’20s and ’30s, with a mainstream brand that can serve most of the world. Like Mercury, the Lincoln brand has become essentially a small nameplate that can take advantage of incremental sales with relatively low incremental cost. In an era in which younger buyers seem less interested in owning cars and in which GM struggles to redefine itself as a much smaller company, Ford is in a good position, so long as it can pay off its considerable debt. And Geely, potentially, is in position to become the world’s next Hyundai.
Is Rear-Wheel Drive Dead in Mainstream Cars?
BMW’s own research shows that 80 percent of customers who buy the 1 Series think their new car is front-wheel-drive. The automaker’s chief executive officer, Norbert Reithofer, revealed this in an analysts’ conference call. Presumably, Reithofer was speaking about all customers around the globe, not just the Americans that embraced the brand as a yuppie-mobile in the ’80s.
Reithofer’s statement is self-serving, of course, coming shortly after reports that BMW would soon build a small front-wheel drive car despite the company previously making it clear that rear-wheel-drive was part of the brand’s DNA, with front-wheel-drive reserved for its Mini brand.
With those oft-cited draconian European CO2 and U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards on the way, we’ll soon see a raft of sub-1 Series BMWs and of sub-C-Class Mercedes-Benzes, most or all with FWD. The Toyota FT-86 and its unnamed Subaru sibling notwithstanding, FWD is the way to go for interior space packaging and cost, especially if you can share the sub-1 Series platform with the next-generation Mini. Or, in the case of Mercedes, update and expand the A- and B-Class platform.
It has become painfully clear since General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler shifted most of its mainstream models to FWD from the 1980s and early ’90s that maintaining a fleet of both FWD and RWD is costly and difficult. Getting rid of unibody RWD wholesale by the ’90s, so that the automakers would have to re-start from scratch is one of the bigger mistakes Detroit has made in recent decades. Ford has wiped out its RWD unibody models, save for the live-rear-axle Mustang. Chrysler went back to RWD for its big Chrysler and Dodges only with the help of Daimler, so you can’t say that “merger of equals” was entirely fruitless. And GM has struggled to return to rear-drive large cars since the early ’00s.
In our story on GM’s new Alpha platform, which supplies RWD to the future Chevy Camaro, Cadillac ATS and CTS, and perhaps one or two more cars, I report that the taxpayer-owned automaker needs to decide whether to develop a new eight-speed automatic for FWD or RWD.
I know what many of you will say: why not both? The answer is that doing both would just about double its cost. It could be the difference between spending $1 billion on FWD only and $2 billion — yes, that’s with a “b” — on FWD and RWD. And while you’d think the logical solution would be eight speeds for the more prestigious rear-drive cars, the plain economic fact is that the new tranny would pay for itself much more quickly if adapted for the higher-volume FWD models.
While you and I do care about which wheels motivate the car, the fact is, most buyers, the ones who create the volume at GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda et. al. — and even BMW, apparently — don’t, unless they live in a snowy state. In this case, most would prefer to have front-drive to buying a second set of tires. Lineups consisting purely of FWD-based cars and crossovers would be by far the most cost-effective strategy for any full-line automaker.
RWD is more dynamically pleasing, at least on mid-size to large cars and sports cars. There are plenty of fun FWD cars out there, such as the Volkswagen GTI, the original Honda CRX, and the Mini, both old and new. But RWD has an aesthetic advantage, too, particularly on larger cars, making for a better proportioned dash-to-axle relationship. Of course, Audi has solved that problem with its unique engine-transmission layout. Try explaining a new A4 quattro to that 80 percent of BMW 1 Series owners.
I’ve tried to make the case for RWD for large cars. I’ve often cited the Mercedes-Benz E250 Bluetec, an E-Class with a 2.2-liter turbodiesel four projected to get a combined 32 mpg. That’s just 3.5-mpg shy of the 2016 CAFE standard, easily offset by fleets of A- and B-Classes. Hyundai has managed to add two rear-drive cars to its North American lineup, with a third, the Equus, on the way, plus one in the works for Kia. John Krafcik says the RWD cars will be of such low-volume that they won’t hurt Hyundai in its goal to be the most fuel-efficient brand in the U.S. But that really points to Hyundai’s success and its ability to spend big money on low-volume cars, compared with GM and Ford, these days.
If you consider Ford’s newfound success with its mostly FWD and FWD-based all-wheel-drive lineup of unibodies, it’s rather amazing that GM has a RWD strategy at all. Considering the success of the new FWD/AWD Cadillac SRX, which replaced a RWD-based model, and that its new large XTS sedan also has a transverse-mounted engine, it’s almost a surprise that the new, leaner company didn’t simply pull the plug on its Sigma and Zeta platforms. Cadillac asserts that its “flagship” is RWD, by the way, because it’s the Escalade. But that huge SUV won’t make Cadillac Standard of the World again.
Replacing Sigma and Zeta with a highly flexible Alpha RWD platform is a smart, BMW-like move that comes just as BMW backs into FWD platforms. Let’s hope that unlike, say, the Kappa RWD sports car platform, Alpha is a platform that GM can efficiently update, so that Chevy, Buick and Cadillac can use it for decades to come. If not, we’ll always have Hyundai.
2010 Acura TL SH-AWD Tech, an AW Drivers Log:
ASSOCIATE EDITOR JONATHAN WONG: It’s nice to see some car companies still believe in the importance of offering a manual transmission.
Moving Day in a Ford SuperDuty Afflicted with "Added Lightness"
Colin Chapman’s “add lightness” design philosophy works great for sports cars like those made by Lotus, the company he founded. But it doesn’t quite fit on a big diesel-powered truck designed to tow seven tons. Yet that is exactly the philosophy applied to an unfortunate 2011 Ford F-250 Super Duty when it was relieved of its tailgate — and its handy “man step” and backup camera — altering its cargo-hauling ability.
All this happened the day before I was going to use it to move into my new condo. If there were ever a situation calling for a generous helping of ingenious engineering, this was it.
Handling the small stuff was easy, thanks to SuperDuty’s gigantic SuperCab, which has more room than some New York apartments. With little effort, five 18×18x16 boxes will fit in the back seat with room to spare in the footwell for smaller boxes or long objects like bed rails, brooms, and hockey sticks. But when it came to the big stuff, it was time for the ratchet straps.
The first load consisted of just one object: a queen-size bed. With the collapsible bed-extender folded out (the SuperDuty extender is beefier than the one found on the F-150), it fit perfectly in the bed…but there was nothing to keep the mattress from sliding off the bed frame and onto the freeway. Two diagonally placed ratchet straps later, it wasn’t going anywhere. It should be pointed out that this situation would have occurred if the tailgate hadn’t wandered off in the middle of the night without possession of a large torx bit to remove the screws that hold the extender in place.
The second load consisted of a motorcycle with a bicycle thrown in for good measure. This was the most normal of the three loads carried that day, because straps and tie-downs always are necessary when trucking a motorcycle.
This normalcy, however, would not last. To empty out my apartment in just three loads, the entire cab — not just the rear seat, but the front passenger seat as well — was filled with boxes and assorted items, such as spare motorcycle parts, couch cushions, table parts, and cleaning supplies. The truck bed would receive a medium-size refrigerator, a loveseat, two vacuum cleaners, table top, and an office chair. Arranging all this in a way that would not only fit, but also not fall out, would take the better part of a half hour.
Aside from impairing its utility, the absence of the considerably heavy tailgate also exacerbated the stiffly sprung truck’s freeway hop, making for a largely uncomfortable unladen driving experience. Curiously, despite being the range-topping King Ranch edition, this truck was equipped with just one auto-down window. Is a rancher towing a loaded horse trailer going to care about this? Doubtful, but it’s odd that Ford chose to not fit it with four-window auto up and down switches during the redesign.
As for the moving experience, the only takeaway from that time-consuming undertaking is that yes, it is possible to move using a truck without a tailgate. Truth be told, adding lightness to a friend’s truck the night before he (or she) is going to use it would make for a great prank. Unfortunately, grand theft isn’t quite as funny.
Coming Soon: Steve McQueen A Tribute to the King of Cool
I make no secret of being an unabashed Steve McQueen fan. I’ve written a book about his cars, bikes and racing (McQueen’s Machines: The Cars and bikes of a Hollywood Icon), and have watched Bullitt and Le Mans more times than I should admit. And, don’t forget, Happy 80th Steve, as I write this on March 24.
There’s a new Steve book out soon that I think similar fans might enjoy. It consists of more than 200 first person capsules or “remembrances” by so many people that were involved in his life one way or another. It’s called A Tribute to the King of Cool, by Marshall Terrill, and will be published by Dalton Watson books. It was my honor to write the chapter about McQueen the racer, car, and bike enthusiast. I’ve seen a draft of the book, and there are some great names, great stories, and great photos contained therein. Learn more at www.daltonwatson.com.
