Month: May 2013

Forbes has recently (April 17, 2013) revealed the top 10 of the world’s most profitable car brands. This ranking was assigned based on sales, profits,…

This past week Washington and Lee’s Economics of the Auto Industry class, the creators of many of the posts on this blog, took a class trip up…

As Mr. J Mays emphasized today, China’s auto industry has become an extremely important market. It has already become the world’s largest auto industry and it…

Range Rover, the company famous – and infamous – for making massive, luxurious gas guzzlers is bringing a hybrid to Frankfurt. That such a company…

Jaguar North America CEO Andy Gross wants Jaguar to have the same level of prestige as brands like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and Lexus. Jaguar hopes to use its F-Type, XJR 550-hp sedan, and XKR GT to push the brand image forward. They have forecast 15.3 million US vehicle sales, and hope to see both Jaguar and Land Rover sales increase by double digits this year.

According to auto industry technologists, self-driving cars will be coming to mass production soon, but the real question is, “how soon?” A recent debate at…

As we heard at Federal Mogul part quality has improved remarkably over the past few years as regulation has forced car companies to improve the…

BMW recently tried to sue China for the copying of the X-5 but China dropped the case stating they were not the same. Recently watching an episode of top gear brought all of this to my attention and it was interesting because of different international laws various countries have such as China versus Germany or the U.S.

Who would have ever thought that a foreign company would be the world’s largest automaker (in terms of total annual sales- in 2007)? During 1970s, GM owned about 60 % of the entire U.S. automobile market, but today, it only has about 24~25% market share (about one third of what it once had.) As we talked about in the class, there have been several factors and reasons why Detroit 3 fell. One major reason we talked about is the poor management. While foreign companies worked hard to improve cars like Camry, Civic, etc GM and Ford did not “really” worked hard due to their oligopoly positions.

Amid economic turmoil in Europe, auto parts suppliers are seeing drastically reduced sales. Changes in EU regulations have also added another layer of difficulty for these suppliers.