+++ BMW insists future mobility “will definitely depend on state-of-the-art diesels” as well as electric cars and plug-in hybrid petrol models. Speaking following the first meeting of German car makers’ new ‘National Diesel Forum’, Germany’s leading electric car maker says diesel still has a role to play. The new German diesel working group has been formed as premium brands face unprecedented criticism of diesel car engine emissions, something initiated by the Volkswagen ‘dieselgate’ emissions-cheat scandal. More recently, questions have been raised about secret technical discussions between German car makers, which have been taking place for years. Public mood is thus rapidly turning against new diesel cars, but this is unjustified, says BMW, which is calling for “objective discussions based on facts and scientific evidence”. Protecting the environment is about more than just NOx emissions, it says: “One of them is the fight against climate change. Modern, efficient diesel engines ensure lower CO2 emissions and therefore make an important contribution to protecting the environment”. As it also claims modern diesels “are just as clean or even cleaner than petrol engines”, the current argument against diesel doesn’t stack up. “Three of the four major diesel pollutant issues have been resolved and no longer have any adverse effect on air quality”. That’s particulate, hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions: as for NOx, BMW cars already emit 40 percent less than the German average, it claims, and the firm is now offering free upgrades for older Euro5 diesel cars to reduce their in-use emissions. BMW Group board chairman Harald Krüger took the opportunity to speak out in defence of BMW’s powertrain strategy, and strongly respond to all the criticism diesel is facing. “For almost 2 years now, diesel technology which is cutting-edge, highly efficient and popular with customers has been deliberately and publicly discredited”, said Krüger. “This has caused tremendous uncertainty among millions of drivers and it’s not going to get us anywhere”. BMW also “categorically rejects allegations made by some media of non-compliant technology employed in diesel exhaust-treatment systems”, said the firm in a statement. “Investigations by authorities at home and abroad confirm that vehicles by the BMW Group are not rigged for testing proposes”, said Krüger. BMW will sell more than 100,000 electrified cars in 2017 for the first time; it will launch the first electric Mini in 2019, and a battery-powered BMW X3 in 2020. The next model in its BMW i green car portfolio will launch in 2021: the fully electric BMW iNext. +++
+++ FORD ’s Mustang has a problem: the new Mustang. Sales have slumped as drivers wait for the newest iteration, and the Dodge Challenger is challenging. There is no great reason not to buy a Mustang. It’s a unicorn of a car: neither massive nor tiny, showy nor ugly, expensive nor cheap. These days, it even gets good mileage. For 52 years, the pony car has just been getting better, which puts Ford in a bit of a pickle. With a new and improved Mustang just months away, buyers for the incumbent model have vanished. U.S. sales have plummeted 30 percent (to just 50,800) through July of this year. In June, it was outsold by the Dodge Challenger, something that has happened only one other time in the past 5 years. Sales of the Challenger, meanwhile, have climbed slightly in 2017. Ford said no one was available to discuss the sales slide, though spokesman Dan Jones noted in an e-mail that the company has been teasing the 2018 iteration since January and that Mustang buyers tend to wait for the launch of the newest model. The internet has made it easier for consumers to obsess over beloved goods and made product cadence increasingly difficult for a wide range of companies. Deceiving or surprising customers has become all but impossible. “The Holy Grail is to do away with releases completely”, said Mohanbir Sawhney, professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Companies such as Tesla have smoothed sales volatility by constantly updating their products remotely, he explained. “I’ve driven a Tesla for 3 years, and I don’t think of it as an old car”, Sawhney said. “Every week, they give me something new”. Apple, meanwhile, keeps its outgoing iPhones on the market when it releases a new one. Olivier Toubia, a marketing professor at the Columbia Business School, said this is a tidy way to separate customers by price sensitivity. “The old phone becomes an entry point for a segment of customers”, he explained. Meanwhile, those who are willing to pay more upgrade to the new one. Assembling a vehicle, however, is more complicated than snapping together a smartphone. Carmakers retool massive assembly lines to make a new car and can’t continue stamping out the dated version. To mitigate the pain before a big release, car companies can either scale back production to match demand or roll out special editions to tempt a small number of loyalists into paying more for what is essentially the same car. Ford has done both. In 2016, it started selling the Mustang Shelby GT350, a track-focused version with a souped-up engine and bigger brakes. In October, Ford idled its Michigan Mustang plant for a week, sending some 3,702 workers home. To be fair, the Mustang pain isn’t confined to Ford. Buyers seem to be cooling on cheap sports cars in general. Sales in the segment this year through July were down 12 percent. Plenty of people still want these machines, but nobody needs them. Mustang sales will likely swell again when the new model arrives in the fall. But the recent lull shows that drivers are getting restless. In the auto industry, vehicles are usually given a full overhaul and redesign every 6 to 10 years. In the years between, a car or truck receives minor tweaks called refreshes. The Mustang received its last major overhaul for its 50th anniversary in 2015. Ford’s designers, by all accounts, knocked it out of the park: creating a vehicle with lines both atavistic and futuristic. The machines zipped out of dealerships. Yet just 2 years later, customers are already kind of over it. To bring back some buzz, the company did much more than a simple refresh for next year’s release. The 2018 Mustang comes with new LED lights and blinkers, a spate of new safety technology, 2 new transmissions (including a 10-speed automatic) and an optional V8 that will have more power than the current one. There are also some all-new colors. Opting for the Mustang in “Orange Fury,” the vehicular equivalent of a Creamsicle, is perhaps the easiest way to let the neighbors know you are driving the freshest pony on the range. Updating and relaunching a vehicle, however, gets expensive. If Ford is forced to keep tweaking its pony car so often, it will become a much less efficient economic machine. +++
+++ MERCEDES is planning to reveal a convertible version of its Vision Maybach 6 concept at this month’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. The drop-top version of last year’s Maybach 6 concept, a 750 hp four-wheel-drive 2+2 EV with gullwing doors, continues Mercedes’ vision for a product to rival the Rolls-Royce Wraith and its convertible variant, the Dawn. Insiders have suggested production versions of the Maybach 6 models could be assembled by a new bespoke coachbuilding operation to provide customers of its higher-end models with greater freedom in customising their cars. Mercedes design boss Gorden Wagener hinted at the convertible concept’s arrival, writing that something ‘surprising’ is due this summer, while showing sketches of the Maybach 6 concept and also the IAA Concept from 2015. The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance takes place from the 17 August. BMW will also reveal the Z4 Concept at the event, which previews its own future drop-top model that has been co-developed with the upcoming Toyota Supra. +++
+++ NISSAN will use the platform of its next-generation Leaf to produce additional electric models, as it attempts to offer a more comprehensive range of zero-emission vehicles. The Japanese brand’s electric line-up currently includes the Leaf, the e-NV200 Combi people carrier and the e-NV200 van, but a recent patent suggests it will soon gain an SUV model called the Terra, which is expected to share its structure and drivetrain with the 2018 Leaf.
Nissan filed the Terra name at the start of August with the Malaysian patents office; a common practice for car makers hoping to hide their movements from the limelight of larger patent offices. In doing so, it brought back a name that hadn’t been used since 2012, when it was the title of an electric SUV concept first revealed at the Paris motor show. That car used the first-generation Leaf’s electric driveline to power the front wheels, but added a hydrogen fuel-cell system to power 2 motors at the back, making the car all-wheel drive. The production Terra will use Nissan’s vastly improved second-generation Leaf electric drivetrain, which is predicted to offer a range of up to 550 kilometers: more than double that of the first-gen car. The gains will come thanks to new battery pack options that will enable Nissan to sell its models in a variety of specifications. It could integrate an additional rear-drive powetrain to make it all-wheel drive, like the concept. The largest battery on offer with the Leaf is predicted to double the 30 kWh lithium/ion pack found in the highest-spec version of the current car. The use of such a battery in the Terra would give it a headline range figure of more than 480 kilometers. Lower variants will trim range for a cheaper starting price, broadening the car’s appeal and helping it to rank close to the Model 3 and its expected sub-35.000 euro price tag. This will also mean the Terra comfortably undercuts more premium electric SUV models such as the Jaguar I-Pace and Audi e-tron, which are both predicted to cost from about 55,000 euro. Nissan’s plan to spawn more models off of its upcoming Leaf platform mirrors a strategy to be used by fellow electric car maker Tesla. The American brand will build its future Model Y crossover off of the Model 3’s base, helping to reduce development costs for the second model. +++
+++ At this point, you can safely assume that SELF-DRIVING CARS are coming. Not only are tech companies like Google and Tesla hard at work developing autonomous technology, so are established automakers like GM and Ford. But when self-driving cars eventually do go on sale, it may be a long time before you can put one in your garage. Ola Källenius, Daimler’s head of Group Research & Mercedes-Benz Cars Development, said he thinks self-driving taxis are the only way forward. Why? Because privately owned cars would be too expensive. At least in the beginning. “The number of sensors you have to put on the car, the computing power and so on adds tens of thousands of dollars once you get it into production”, said Källenius. “Where do you have a business case for something like that? You have it in a robot taxi scenario, where you can take a city or a part of the city and say, ‘OK, I’m going to put a hundred, 200, 300, a thousand … into this area’ ”. And by providing a taxi service instead of selling cars privately, he thinks Mercedes could actually start to make money pretty quickly. “The amortization comes through not paying the driver. You could have a very quick amortization, so our effort on Level 4, 5 is robot taxi first. In our case the commercialization of that happens between 2020 and 2025 where we start rolling that out, either through our own mobility services that we’re building up or as a partner with other mobility services”, said Källenius. After that, if the cost of autonomous technology comes down and consumer interest is high enough, you may see Mercedes sell self-driving cars directly to consumers. But unless Källenius has it wrong, it’ll probably be a long time before you can buy a Mercedes that can truly drive itself. +++
+++ TESLA has dropped the starting price of the Model X by $3,000, citing increased margins for the all-electric SUV. “When we launched Model X 75D, it had a low gross margin. As we’ve achieved efficiencies, we are able to lower the price and pass along more value to our customers”, Tesla said in a statement. The base Model X 75D, equipped with standard all-wheel drive, now starts at $79,500, or $80,700 when factoring in destination fees, in the United States. Now, Tesla has achieved its goal of making the Model X $5,000 more expensive than a Model S with similar options. A Model S with all-wheel drive starts at $75,700 including destination. CEO Elon Musk says the Model X has reached production parity with the Model S. In base configuration, the Model X can travel 380 kilometer on a single charge and hit 100 km/h in an estimated 5.1 seconds. At the top end, the P100D that costs north of $145,000 can reach 460 kilometers and zip to 100 km/h in 3.1 seconds. Tesla has increased the value proposition of the Model X in other ways, too. The automaker has added more premium features as standard features on the Model X P100D as well as the Model S P100D. On lesser Model X trims, the Premium Upgrades package is a $6,000 option. New Model X prices follow a host of changes to the Model S. Earlier, Tesla ditched the base Model S 60 and 60D. The new cheapest version became the 75 with the larger 75 kilowatt-hour battery, and Tesla dropped prices on that model by $7,500. +++
+++ TOYOTA said it plannes to build pick-ups and possibly SUVs at a new plant in Mexico, a move that followed threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to penalize the company if it built small cars south of the border. Toyota initially planned to produce Corolla sedans at the plant it is building in the central state of Guanajuato but will now switch production of the small cars and a new Mazda cross-over to a new assembly plant planned for the United States. Trump threatened in January to impose a hefty fee on the world’s largest automaker if it built Corollas for the U.S. market in Mexico. Toyota de Mexico spokesman Luis Lozano said the global auto maker would study producing SUVs in Guanajuato, in addition to the Tacoma truck model. “We’re going to concentrate only on pickups at the beginning and are studying the potential for SUVs in the future”, he said. Pick-ups and SUVs represented some 65 percent of the North American market, Lozano said. The decision came as Toyota planned to take a 5 percent share of smaller Japanese rival Mazda as part of an alliance that will see the 2 build a $1.6 billion U.S. assembly plant and work together on electric vehicles. A move to produce SUVs in Guanajuato would mark a continuation of a “burgeoning trend” of Mexican manufacturing meeting quality standards needed to produce more expensive vehicles, said Christopher Wilson of the Woodrow Wilson International Center. “Instead of building lower value cars that generally offer smaller margins in Mexico and keeping high-value SUV and luxury model production in the U.S., they are moving in the opposite direction”, said Wilson, deputy director of the think tank’s Mexico institute. “The moves by Toyota seem to be designed to reduce political pressure on the company from President Trump”, he added. Toyota’s Lozano told he expected the company’s level of investment in the region to remain similar despite the shift in plans. “The investment that we calculated when we announced the decision to make a plant for Corolla was for $1 billion dollars”, he said. “At present, we don’t have a final figure for what this change means for our assessments. Up to now, it seems it won’t vary substantially”, Lozano said. +++
+++ New car sales in the UNITED KINGDOM fell by 9.3% in July, the fourth consecutive month in which demand has decreased. The Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders (SMMT) has attributed Brexit and economic uncertainty as the main cause for the continuing slump in sales. In the second quarter of this year, there have been 161,997 cars sold in the UK; a contrast to the record-breaking growth of the year’s first 3 months. Demand fell across business, fleet and private buyers by -23.8%, -10.1% and -6.8% respectively. Conversely, dual-purpose and sports cars sales rose by 7.3% and 10.3% respectively, although volumes were comparatively tiny. Sales of diesel cars fell to 69,157 in July, close to 17,000 less than sales were in the same month of 2016, suggesting that consumers are being affected by announcements for diesel taxes, despite the fact such policies won’t affect the latest Euro6 standard models. The same comparison for petrol shows a smaller drop of close to 3,000 units, with numbers down to 83,969 for July. One area of the market that has seen continued growth is alternatively fuelled vehicles (AFVs), which soared in sales by 64.9%. AVFs also grew their market share, but still only accounted for 5.5% of overall sales, meaning the growth was far from offsetting the slump in petrol and diesel cars. Nevertheless, 8,871 new AVFs were driven off forecourts in this quarter; a new record high. Year-to-date sales figures stand at 1,563,808, compared with 1,599,159 at this point in 2016. SMMT CEO Mike Hawes said: “The fall in consumer and business confidence is having a knock on effect on demand in the new car market and government must act quickly to provide concrete plans regarding Brexit. While it’s encouraging to see record achievements for AFVs, consumers considering other fuel types will have undoubtedly been affected by the uncertainty surrounding the government’s clean air plans. It’s important to remember that there are no plans to charge drivers using the latest Euro6 models and no proposed bans for conventional petrol and diesel vehicles for some 23 years. The lower demand in recent months will inevitably mean competition from manufacturers will intensify and it will be a good opportunity for consumers to get a great deal on their next car, with many exciting new models launched in the coming months”. The top10 best selling cars in the United Kingdom in July were: 1) Ford Fiesta – 59,380 registrations, 2) Ford Focus – 40,045 registrations, 3) Volkswagen Golf – 36,703 registrations, 4) Nissan Qashqai – 33,574 registrations, 5) Vauxhall Corsa – 33,560 registrations, 6) Vauxhall Astra – 32,408 registrations, 7) Mercedes-Benz C-Class – 27,386 registrations, 8) Volkswagen Polo – 27,205 registrations, 9) Mini – 25,582 registrations and 10) Mercedes-Benz A-Class – 22,944 registrations. +++