In what are normally slow weeks ahead of northern hemisphere summer plant shutdowns, BMW and Toyota bubbled to the surface this week with news of a new flagship Munichmobile and interesting joint ventures with PSA Peugeot Citroen and Fiat for the German firm, and something of a U-turn in the US for the Japanese.
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Toyota’s US June results – and not just theirs – said it all. Pickup trucks and SUVs languished on dealer lots while the fuel-friendly stuff was gone in days. So Japan’s No.1 took action – Highlander out and Prius in to a plant still under construction. Tundra trucks to be consolidated in a new(ish) plant in Texas and truck and SUV production elsewhere rearranged and halted for three months. Temporary workers go but the permanent staff will be retrained, possibly do some ‘voluntary’ work, even. A new plant opening will be delayed a few months, yes, but the company has built in enough flexibility to do all this far more easily than their Detroit rivals.
Electricity was in the news again – Toyota putting solar panels on the next-generation Prius as well as plug-in (I remember Mazda putting panels in the 929 sunroof to power a fan to keep the car cooler when parked, and that was early 90s), BMW finally admitting to electric Minis after German media broke the story earlier and Mitsubishi, according to the usually-reliable Nikkei business daily, bringing forward private buyer sales of its volts-powered city runabout.
Oh, and one of our contributors had another look at his notebook to bring us additional details from a recent Renault EV event we’d previously reported on.
All of this is encouraging – no matter what politicians, greenwash merchants and all the rest throw at the often unfairly maligned motor industry, the boffins set to and develop the technology required. Only today Ford has rolled out a new Fiesta it expects to achieve 99g CO2 emissions per kilometre. So where’s the congratulatory telegram from the EU and the anti-car green lobby?
Just once in a while the vehicle owner wins one against the likes of London’s non-driving former mayor and the UK’s non-driving prime minister with their taxpayer-funded gas-guzzling chauffeured ‘official’ cars (do as we say, not as we do). That mayor, one Ken Livingstone, proposed a swingeing GBP25 a day congestion charge for high CO2-emitting cars, prompting a challenge, much criticised in certain quarters, from Porsche. This week, newly elected mayor Boris Johnson axed the proposals and, better yet, the sports car maker got its costs back, deciding, sensibly, to donate them to a city charity. Struggling with rising living costs and soaring fuel bills, UK vehicle owners are now hoping the government’s move to retrospectively more than double annual road tax on some cars bought new as far ago as 2001 will have the same effect on Labour at the 2010 ballot box as Livingstone’s planned ‘congestion charge’ hike did for him at the local council elections on 1 May.
A beer to celebrate, I think.
Enjoy your weekend,
Graeme Roberts
Deputy Editor
just-auto.com
