The numbers are in, and it was an interesting month. Hyundai, which has seen great improvement in its products in the past couple of years, has been enjoying a meteoric rise, as bigger companies are downsizing (I’m looking at you GM) or getting their reputations hammered in the press (ahem, Toyota). In April, however, Hyundai saw a decline in the number of sales over the previous month. This is most likely due to other manufacturers’ incentives and special financing deals, most of which are being carried over from April into May. Read on for the rest of my analysis.
Continue reading ‘Sales Figures: April, 2010′
The numbers are in, and they’re full of surprises. Toyota’s recall fiasco hasn’t hurt sales – in fact, they’re up quite a bit over February. Many automakers’ numbers were up in March, due to heavy incentives and 0% financing. Ford fell to third place in March, lead by GM and Toyota. The interesting thing is that the top 3 automakers in March were almost double the number 4 player, Honda. Nissan, Chrysler and Hyundai followed, and then another significant drop before Volkswagen, which was less than half of Hyundai’s sales.
Continue reading ‘Sales Figures: March, 2010′
Sales were up for the second month of 2010, with a total of 778,738 vehicles sold in America. The pundits were proven correct when they said that Ford stood to gain the most out of Toyota’s recent drama, as they took the #1 position away from cross-town rival General Motors.
Continue reading ‘Sales Figures: February, 2010′
Consumer Reports has released its 2010 Automaker Report Cards. Each year, they take the average score of each automaker’s products and rank the automakers. Since Toyota has so many recalls, they’ve suspended the values for the 8 recalled models, so while Toyota is in 3rd place, that’s only a subset of their overall score. The only automaker to fall from previous ratings was Chrysler, which is interesting when you consider that most of their models are carryovers from the 2009 model year. Read on for more details.
Continue reading ‘Consumer Reports: Automaker Report Cards’
Edolphus Towns and Akio Toyoda
In an audacious move, Toyota president Akio Toyoda, grandson of the founder of Toyota Motor Company, said he would only come to the February 24th Congressional hearings (“Toyota Gas Pedals: Is the Public At Risk?”) if he were formally invited. He had planned on sending Yoshimi Inaba, the head of North American Toyota operations.
Continue reading ‘Toyota Exec coming to the US for Congressional Hearings’
AutoBlog picked up on a story out of Palo Alto, where it appears that 3 Tesla Motors employees died this morning in a plane crash. The plane was a twin-engined Cessna belonging to one of Tesla’s senior electrical engineers, Doug Bourn. Continue reading for more details, video and pictures.
Continue reading ‘Breaking News: Tesla employees die in plane crash!’
The numbers are in, and it was an interesting month. Hyundai, which has seen great improvement in its products in the past couple of years, has been enjoying a meteoric rise, as bigger companies are downsizing (I’m looking at you GM) or getting their reputations hammered in the press (ahem, Toyota). In April, however, Hyundai saw a decline in the number of sales over the previous month. This is most likely due to other manufacturers’ incentives and special financing deals, most of which are being carried over from April into May. Read on for the rest of my analysis.
