sales Archives - Swadeology

Saab Snippets – Time, Koenigsegg And Double Dipping

Time

It’s well past December 31, which is the time we all expected a decision from Mahindra as to whether or not they were going to invest in the ghost of Saab.

NEVS’s money was expected to run out by then and Mahindra were going to provide two tranches of funds IF the deal was going to go ahead – $5mil for January and $5mil for Febraury – to keep the ghost afloat in ‘reorganisation’ (bankruptcy protection) until the deal is finalised.

NEVS got a financial lifeline by selling tooling for spare parts to Orio, which explains why there was no urgency around the end of the year. The price paid in the deal wasn’t mentioned in the press release so the amount of time they’ve bought is unknown. It wouldn’t be too long, however.

When will Mahindra make a decision? It’d be nice to know.

——

Koenigsegg V4

My mate Tompa has been speaking with Christian Von Koenigsegg about engines. Specifically, the potential for cutting a Koenigsegg V8 in half and using the resulting V4 in a passenger vehicle.

You can read the article here, at a site I hadn’t seen before called Saab Tala.

The good news is that Christian believes it’s entirely possible. And considering that Christian knows more about cars and engineering than anyone else I’ve met, I’ll take that as given. In fact, not only is it possible, but Christian estimates that a half-Koenigsegg V4 could reliably produce plenty of power.

Quote from Christian:

If [you’re] looking at a 2 litre engine with 4 cylinders with a slightly smaller turbo to get a fantastic response, we are talking about 450 hp and 500 Nm on Unleaded 95 octane.

Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it?

There’s no bad news in this story, but the $64,000 questions remain unanswered – how much would it cost? And would that cost gel with the market(s) Mahindra would pursue with Saab if they got control of the company? Are they looking to take on the Audis and BMW’s of the world?

They’d better be. Because the engine won’t be cheap and consequently, the car won’t be cheap, either.

I don’t agree with Saabtala’s point of view about the BMW/Mini 1.6 engine being a mistake. I think it would have been a great engine for Saab, as it has been for Mini. The salient point is this: That BMW/Mini engine was considered to be a very expensive choice and it’s an engine that was used across several brands and made in the hundreds of thousands of units. How much, then, for a purpose-designed V4 from one of the most expensive carmakers in the world that’d be made in the tens of thousands?

Quality has its price. Your level of comfort with that price depends on the market you’re chasing.

It’s an interesting story and I know Tompa’s going to chase it a little more. I’m keen to see what he comes up with, if only from an engineering point of view. You can build whatever Saab you like if you’ve got the money, but you’ve got to be able to sell it to someone. That’ll be the hard part – whatever path they choose.

Side note: Tompa first met Christian when I asked via SU for someone in Sweden to provide a convertible Saab for Tompa’s wedding a few years ago. Christian was the only person to respond to the request, so Tom and Carola got to drive Halldora von Koenigsegg’s car on their wedding day. Result! 🙂

——

Double Dip

I remember the early days of Spyker’s ownership of Saab, with Victor Muller saying that the biggest threat to Saab’s future was a double-dip recession.

It’s interesting to ponder, then, what might have been if Spyker had access to finance and stuck it out until 2015.

Why?

Well, 2014 saw Western Europe record it’s first rise in new vehicle sales since 2009. And they’re forecast to grow in 2015, too. From Just Auto:

The US market also saw sales rise in 2014, but then the US market has been rising for a while. The US market’s recent low was also in 2009 with just 10.4 million vehicles sold. There were 16.5 million vehicles sold in 2014 and the last time the US market was that big was in 2006.

I wonder what would have happened, then, if there were no ban on Vladimir Antonov’s money (and no Antonov charges in Lithuania) and no supplier backlash in March 2011. What if all the new vehicle launches went ahead according to schedule and Saab kept making cars through 2011 and beyond? Would Saab have sold enough with the 9-4x, the new 9-5 and whatever would have happened with the 9-3 between then and now?

Such a prolonged slump was the economic situation that Victor feared the most in those early days. I wonder if ‘we’ could have survived it to prosper in 2015 and beyond?

Thursday Snippets – Jokes, GM, Datsun and Sales

I work in an audit office. Suffice to say, jokes aren’t our strong point. I heard a couple of good ones on TV last night and thought I’d better record them for posterity. I’m sure they could be useful in the future.

A sweet young girl, around 8 years old, walks into a pet shop. She walks up to counter and asks the owner “Please sir, I’d like to buy a bunny rabbit.”

The shopkeeper looks over the counter to the girl, smiles and asks “Would you like a white rabbit or a brown rabbit, young lady?”

The girl thinks for a moment, then says “I really don’t think my python will give a $#%!”

and #2

You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.

——

And that leads me nicely to Cadillac, the GM luxury division that’s had its plans to build a truly luxurious car based on the Ciel concept car, cancelled.

Autoextremist, Peter De Lorenzo, is always happy to sink the boots in when it comes to GM’s upper management. The monotony of it all gets quite boring, to be honest. But he’s right on the money here.

He quotes former GM head Alfred P Sloan – The business of business is business.

Well, kinda. When you’re in the business of selling an emotive product, the business involves building something that truly moves the emotional needle. Cars done in half-measures don’t do that and companies like Alfa Romeo, Saab, Peugeot, Citroen and countless others over the last few decades have learned that the hard way.

Car companies need scale, for sure. But if they’re not chasing the bottom of the market then they also need to have a worthwhile story to tell and a product that backs that story up.

——

A quick visual scan of the automotive sales results for both Germany and the US should give you an idea as to how the North American and European markets/economies are doing.

Don’t worry about reading the numbers. Just look at the respective amounts of red vs green.

—

——

You know that a car is reaching mainstream acceptance when it’s mocked this way.

Hopefully that’s a wrap that can be removed from this Tesla Model S, and the wheels might be loaners.

Spotted at The Truth About Cars

——

There were sighs of disappointment at geeky desktops around the world this week when fans of cheap, thrashable cars found out that the model proposed to re-launch the Datsun brand was something other than the 510 or the 260Z.

In fact, it’ll be this:

Yes, you could put pretty much any automotive company’s badge on that and no-one would know the difference (which is quite possibly the biggest crime a vehicle designer for a known brand could commit, IMHO).

I guess it’s to be expected, but it’s still a little disappointing.

——

I mentioned in a previous post that we were thinking of building a new house. Complications with the land we were looking at have led the deal to fall through. Uncertainty about some employment factors means the whole idea is on hold for what I think will turn out to be quite a while.

Result – car shopping is back on the agenda!!

—

The Rather Amazing and Slightly Strange UK Car Market

If you want to listen to this post in its original (and frankly, much more entertaining) form then go to Gareth Jones On Speed and download the latest podcast. This post is unashamedly pinched from that broadcast. I found it so fascinating that I had to adapt it for the written form here.

Gareth Jones On Speed is a podcast hosted by….. Gareth Jones and featuring a couple of his mates. One of them, Richard Porter, is a writer for the Top Gear television show and Evo Magazine. In the latest episode of the podcast he shared some rather amazing little tidbits about UK car sales in April 2013.

I’d like to share a few of his points and make a few of my own.

You tend to get used to your own vehicle market and think that most other western markets are similar to yours. Here in Australia, for example, the market is totally dominated by Toyota. Asian brands make up much of the Top 10, too. Here’s our Top 10 for April:

1 – Toyota – 16,902
2 – Holden – 7,994
3 – Mazda – 7,833
4 – Hyundai – 7,315
5 – Ford – 6,828
6 – Mitsubishi – 5,456
7 – Nissan – 5,104
8 – Volkswagen – 4,584
9 – Honda – 3,168
10 – Subaru – 2,553

Additionally, here’s the US Top 10 for April. As you can see, there are some variations, but it’s reasonably similar. Domestic and Asian brands dominate.

1 – Ford – 204,969
2 – Chevrolet – 172,460
3 – Toyota – 158,069
4 – Honda – 117,100
5 – Nissan – 80,003
6 – Hyundai – 63,315
7 – Dodge – 53,413
8 – Kia – 47,556
9 – Jeep – 39,426
10 – GMC – 34,799

I won’t give you the full UK Top 10 just yet. Let’s just take the Top 3 for now.

1 – Ford – 22,178
2 – Vauxhall – 17,645
3 – Volkswagen – 16,096

So who do you think came in at #4 on the UK sales chart in April 2013?

–
–
–
–
–
Toyota?
–
–
WRONG!!!
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Hyundai?
–
–
WRONG!!!
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
OK, maybe it’d be one of those cheaper European brands. I saw a hell of a lot of Peugeots when I was last in England, so let’s go with them. Peugeot?
–
–
WRONG!!!

The #4 best selling brand in the UK in April 2013 was none other than…..

Yes – Audi was the #4 selling brand in the UK last month. I’d normally expect a company like Audi to be top three in the premium segment or something like that, but they’re only one place out of the top three for the entire UK market.

What’s even more amazing (to me) is that companies like Mercedes Benz and BMW are also listed in the Top 10. Toyota DID make the top 10, but only just. They’re actually at #10 in the sales chart, with Mercedes Benz at #7 and BMW at #5.

Toyota being outsold by Audi, BMW and Mercedes Benz???

I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s quite stunning. I’m sure it’s actually more normal than I realise in European markets, but downunder we get used to Toyota being a complete juggernaut that consumes everything in its path. German brands such as those listed are more for the well-heeled and whilst they’re not that far away from the Top 10 (Mercedes came in at #12 last month), they’re much more a minority player here. It’s nice to hear about some places where that’s not the case.

Some other brief notes from UK sales in April:

One of the notes from Richard Porter in the GJOS podcast that’s worth mentioning – at an Audi dealership he spoke to, something like 70% of their sales do NOT involve a test drive. The customer simply places the order and waits for the car.
MINI, Skoda and Citroen all sold more cars in the UK last month than Honda. Actually, even SEAT sold more cars in the UK last month than Honda.
SMART sold more than three times as many cars in April than Subaru. In fact, if Bentley had sold just one more vehicle in April, they would have drawn level with Subaru in the UK last month.
4 of the top 20 selling brands in April belong to Volkswagen Group.
There were 2 Saabs sold in the UK last month. If one more Saab had been sold, Saab would have shared last place with Proton (3 sold)

——

Make sure you check out the Gareth Jones On Speed podcast. There’s a heck of lot more about British sales in April in the latest edition, and a lot of other stuff to have a laugh at as well.

—