On today’s show… U.S. prosecutors get a Volkswagen engineer to turn against the company, Nissan targets Hispanic car buyers in the U.S. and India surpasses Brazil and Mexico in new car sales. All that and more coming right up on Autoline Daily.
This is Autoline Daily for September 12th, 2016.
VW ENGINEER TAKES PLEA DEAL
On Friday one of Volkswagen’s engineers based in the U.S. pleaded guilty in court to conspire to defraud the U.S. government, to commit wire fraud and to violate the Clean Air Act. He could have faced 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. But that’s not going to happen because he entered into a plea deal. In other words, he’s going to tell prosecutors everything he knows about how VW did this cheating and who was involved. German privacy laws have enabled VW to refuse to send personnel information about employees to U.S. prosecutors. But with an insider telling them who was involved, that could open the door to a string of indictments against VW executives in Germany.
TESLA UPDATES AUTOPILOT
Speaking of legal entrapment, Elon Musk says a new over-the-air update to Tesla’s Autopilot could have prevented the fatality with that accident in Florida in May. The updated system will warn drivers to put their hands back on the steering wheel after a minute in most highway situations. It will also have an improved radar system. Ironically, even though this update will make the Autopilot system safer, it will undoubtedly be used against Tesla in court. Lawyers will likely argue that Tesla could have installed the warning system sooner, and the fact that it admitted the change could have prevented that fatality will be presented as an admission of guilt.
BRAZIL CONTINUES DOWNWARD SPIRAL
Just a few years ago the Brazilian car market was sparkling. Sales hit 3.5 million light vehicles. But with today’s political and economic crisis, both Mexico and India have passed Brazil in new car sales. So far this year sales in Brazil hit 1.3 million vehicles. That’s down nearly 23% from last year. Meanwhile Mexico is nearly at 1.4 million, up a strong 18%. And India is bigger than both of them at 2.2 million vehil, up almost 8%.
ZipCar says as more people share cars, we need less cars. More on that after this.
OPEL GETS NEW SMALL CROSSOVER
The small crossover segment is booming. That’s why automakers are racing to jump into it. And now Opel is the latest, with the new KARL ROCKS. We’ll learn more at the Paris auto show at the end of the month. But it sure looks like the Opel version of the Chevrolet Trax.
NISSAN REVEALS NEW ROGUE & SENTRA
With an eye to increasing its 21 percent of the growing Hispanic auto market, Nissan chose the normally tranquil Miami Auto Show last weekend to premiere three new vehicles. With North American Chairman Jose Munoz doing the honors Friday night at a South Beach garage, hundreds of reporters were introduced to the 2017 Rogue as well as its Hybrid cousin. This refreshed crossover — approaching nearly 300,000 in sales and challenging Altima as the automaker’s number one seller — receives new exterior styling, interior upgrades as well as new safety and convenience features. Meanwhile at Saturday’s show, Nissan unveiled the 2017 Sentra SR Turbo. Equipped with the Juke’s 1.6-liter turbocharged engine, the brand hopes to expand the reach of its third-best selling car.
ZIPCAR PULLS CARS OFF THE ROAD
We knew car-sharing would have an impact on car ownership, but maybe not this big. According to Zipcar, which now has over a million members worldwide, it has pulled over 413,000 vehicles off the road. A third of Zipcar’s members say they would have had to buy their own vehicle if Zipcar didn’t exist, while 10% of those people say they got rid of their car altogether. With 258 million vehicles in the U.S. alone, this is a drop in the bucket. But carsharing and ridesharing are still in their early days. Zipcar only operates in about 500 cities. So, as these services expand, we could see a lot more cars come off the road.
Coming up next, why the Hudson Hornet absolutely dominated the early days of NASCAR.
THE FABULOUS HUDSON HORNET
In the early days of NASCAR, the Hudson Hornet completely dominated. We were lucky enough to have one of those race cars, a 1952 model, in the studio for last week’s Autoline After Hours. We were joined by Ed Souers, an expert about the Hornet and in the following clip he explains why the car was so dominant.
(Clip from AAH #346 can only be viewed in the video version of today’s show.)
To learn more about the history of the Hornet in NASCAR, you can watch that entire show right now on autoline.tv or you can find it on our YouTube channel.
But that wraps up today’s show, thanks for watching and please join us again tomorrow.
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Comments (19)
September 12th, 2016 at 12:34 pm
Hi John, every time I step down into my 1936 Cord unitised body car, I wonder how Hudson claimed they were first.
September 12th, 2016 at 1:26 pm
#1, Hal
I didn’t realize those Cords were unibody, and I saw two of them yesterday. I keeping learning new car stuff here, from the show, and from the comments.
September 12th, 2016 at 2:10 pm
John, about your commentary on Musk/Tesla on the AutoPilot update. While I agree lawyers may use this against the company, it is a sad state of affairs that companies have to weight the consequences of moving as quickly as possible to push out improvements. The ultimate goal is to reach autonomous driving as soon as possible to reduce accident rates that will save thousands of preventable deaths per year, yet the pioneers are potentially punished.
On the flip side, perhaps you are jumping to conclusions and that the family of the driver that was killed in the Tesla is not all lawyered-up looking for a huge settlement, and understanding their loved one was also being a pioneer/test-pilot.
September 12th, 2016 at 3:29 pm
I agree with BobD, and would add to his final sentence:…………….and at fault.
September 12th, 2016 at 4:41 pm
Hudson == First commercially viable production automobile? Perhaps?
September 12th, 2016 at 4:50 pm
About 3000 810/812 Cords were built. They were “almost” commercially viable. Cord, along with sister brands Auburn and Duesenberg were among many car companies that didn’t survive the great depression.
September 12th, 2016 at 5:11 pm
WOW! Finally after so many years, the Miami Auto show gets an introduction of a new model. For years I though this was a show put together by local dealers
September 12th, 2016 at 6:04 pm
Pedro, is Nissan big in South Florida? That could be the reason for the excitement at the Miami show.
The last I knew, they barely have an auto show in Indianapolis. I’ve gone a couple times, and it was mostly just local dealers bringing their cars.
September 12th, 2016 at 7:02 pm
And now it’s time for something completely different:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnBC5bwV5y0&ab_channel=millchannel
September 12th, 2016 at 7:04 pm
The VW engineer that cut a deal will take down some of the suits involved.YES !!!! And maybe all of them.Wouldn’t that be grand…
September 12th, 2016 at 8:24 pm
I went to the Miami show this weekend and I confess I never even noticed the Nissan intros. At the show floor they were pretty discreet. There were a couple of cars from the Detroit show, for instance the Pacifica plug in and the navigator concept with those gigantic wing doors. I went to check out the Chevy Bolt but it wasn’t even there!!! For the most part it looked like the show in Indy, which I have visited in the past, both were snoozers.
Yes Nissan is big in S FL, but so is every brand, the market is big here.
September 12th, 2016 at 8:40 pm
It looks like more and more car companies are going away from the standard automatic transmission shifters. I just saw a Ford Fusion ad showing some kind of rotary dial shifter.
September 12th, 2016 at 8:52 pm
Requiring the driver to have hands on the wheel seems to defeat the whole purpose of automated driving. Don’t we have that now? It’s called cruise control. Won’t the driver & the automation be fighting each other constantly?
September 12th, 2016 at 8:59 pm
I suspect Kokomo, IN has an exceptionally low Nissan market share. FCA is the biggest employer, with GM and Delphi still having some presence. The only “foreign brand” dealer has Toyota and Honda.
September 12th, 2016 at 11:06 pm
Interesting tidbit from Zipcar, but I wish there was more info, such as were customers replacing 2nd cars with the Zipcar service or were these primary cars? How much was being saved by replacing a car or was it more for convenience?
September 13th, 2016 at 7:55 am
It makes sense to get rid of the shifters. If you are a driver for fun and have a stick, that’s one thing, but for people to just shift to “go” and have that antiquated stick in the way just for the sake of old time’s sake, it is silly. Especially once everything gets electrified.
September 13th, 2016 at 8:20 am
As long as the “different” shufters are standardized to the point that people don’t accidently drive in front of trains, etc. I agree.
September 13th, 2016 at 9:10 am
I’m thinking that a bit of logic hardware that goes, “nobody’s in the driver’s seat, I shouldn’t be moving” would be be a simple, easy safety feature for these newfangled, hard to figure out modern shift controls.
(tongue somewhat in cheek describing shifters)
September 13th, 2016 at 1:30 pm
#18, That technology would be very simple, the passenger seat knows if someone is there or not, so the sensor could be put in the driver’s seat too. The problem though, is that one of the benefits of the autonomous world is that your car can drop you off and go park, then pick you up later; can’t do that if it disables itself.