Hybrids and Diamonds

By Paul Eisenstein September 16th, 2005

Email this page to your friend:

There was a lot of buzz about hybrids at last week's Frankfurt Motor Show, with manufacturers ranging from Mercedes-Benz to Daihatsu showing off more than a half-dozen different prototypes - including the Benz Bionic Car, seen here. Despite the seeming concession, European industry leaders remain highly skeptical of the technology, even as sales numbers soar back in the States.

But there's also a growing backlash in the U.S., where a number of mainstream publications have come to question bold claims long accepted as gospel. Even the enviro-friendly New York Times weighed in some weeks back with a story suggesting that in real-world usage, the Lexus RX 400h hybrid gets no better mileage than a conventional, gasoline-powered RX 330 - which also costs about $10,000 less. Mercedes-Benz staged a cross-country drive pitting the RX 400h against a European diesel-powered M-Class. By the end of the route, the German ute was averaging several miles a gallon more than the Japanese crossover.

There are plenty of positive things to say about hybrids, though motorists need to be wary of what the current technology can actually deliver. Sadly, that's something politicians seem to be ignoring. The new federal energy bill will provide hefty incentives for hybrids, rather than diesels. And in the rush to appear concerned in the wake of rising oil prices, legislators have also approved the use of HEVs in so-called diamond lanes. Several dealers report customers saying mileage really doesn't matter to them; they're much more concerned about cutting through rush-hour traffic. Ironically, it's the worst way to ensure hybrid efficiency. Remember, gas-electric technology is most effective in stop-and-go traffic, where you can recapture energy normally lost in braking and even run in purely electric mode. Hybrids are least efficient on open highways. So if a Prius with one person racing along in the high-occupancy lane is doing far less to save gas than it would stuck in traffic. Put the SUVs in the fast lane, and require hybrids to slug it out with the rest of us.

Posted in : Industry

Bangle Butts

By Paul Eisenstein September 16th, 2005

Email this page to your friend:

When the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class rolled out on the stage at Frankfurt Festhalle, I knew I'd have to get up close for a better view. Squeezing down toward the stage, I started wondering whether I'd walked into the wrong news conference, but no, there was the Mercedes Tri-Star, right below a Bangle Butt. Among enthusiasts and industry insiders, that's the less-than-flattering term used to describe the tall tails of recent products designed by BMW's head of styling, the ever-confident Chris Bangle.

According to Bangle, the high deck lid is more than a design signature, it's specifically intended to improve aerodynamics, both reducing wind resistance and improving high-speed downforce. But to put things in the most polite terms possible, the look has been highly controversial. To be less diplomatic, there are plenty of folks who think the design feature, first introduced on the 2002 745i, is, well, butt ugly. Several thousand concerned Netizens were angry enough to sign a petition pleading with BMW to oust its design director. “In the future, everyone will have a hate website," Bangle told TheCarConnection a while back. The fact is, he's still around and it appears Bangle is getting the last laugh.

This picture of the new S-Class suggests Bangle was right when he insisted the rest of the industry would eventually come his way. More and more new cars now feature aero-friendly high tails. But few so clearly resemble the look of a BMW. We doubt there'll be any royalty payments, but we'd be curious to hear what our readers think of the new Mercedes' Bangle Butt.

Posted in : Industry

Strange times at the Messe

By Paul Eisenstein September 16th, 2005

Email this page to your friend:

Good luck, Geely. You're going to need it, based on the automaker's rather odd news conference at this year's Frankfurt Motor Show. Crowded into a corner of one of the outlying halls at the Frankfurt Messe, the Chinese automaker crammed in an assortment of executives, a troupe of traditional Chinese monkey-suited actors and dancers, a couple 100 journalists -- oh, and five new cars. Repeatedly emphasizing the literal translation of Geely, which means, "good luck," the automaker's struggling international manager said a little in a lot of words. Reporters continue to compare notes to try to understand exactly why Geely was there and what, if anything, it was selling. When TheCarConnection's publisher asked the simple question, "are you coming to Europe and the U.S.?" the response was, well, shaded. The translation was indeterminate, but according to our own sources, the answer, in Chinese was, "We are young and still need to grow up. It is still too early to talk about getting married." That is, of course, good news to the wife.

At least Geely tried to do things the old-fashioned way, letting reporters actually ask some questions. There was a time when that was the primary purpose of an auto show press conference. These days, they're all about generating soundbytes and pretty pictures for the countless video crews. This approach has become universal, though it originated -- surprise -- back in the States. No company has been a more masterful ringmaster than Chrysler, which has tossed cars over the heads of its executives, smashed Jeeps through convention center windows, even posed nudes on stage in an odd attempt to recreate old master paintings. Some of the events run perfectly, even jaded print and e- journalists walking away chuckling. Then there was Frankfurt.

"I just don't know what happened. We rehearsed this thing four times and each time, it went perfectly," lamented circus master, er, media chief Jason Vines. The veteran Chrysler event master's team had put together an amusing script for the launch of the new Patriot and Compass Jeeps, hiding the SUVs in a giant crate, then lowering them to the stage, where new CEO Tom LaSorda and his senior managers would appear to pry open the box. But as LaSorda faced the crowd for the executive equivalent of abracadabra, a nervous crane operator went into action. With the audience tittering, poor Tom turned around to see the top of the box already halfway back in the air. "I guess I didn't know my own strength," he muttered in ad lib. The mangled gag actually got more laughs than it might have had it worked perfectly, to be quite honest, and within an hour or so, Vines' face wasn't quite so flushed. The bottom line was that there were still plenty of pretty pics and soundbytes of the new Jeeps, and everyone will be talking about the event for a long time. Isn't that what PR is all about?

Posted in : Industry

At Volvo, The Cost of Safety Is Never Too High

By Marty Padgett September 16th, 2005

Email this page to your friend:

“Twenty. Fifteen. Ten. Five. BAM!” In just that amount of time, two Volvos make it to the end of their brief and final test drive. The 2.5-ton XC90 you expect to survive; with the new C70 hardtop convertible, you expect more damage than the minimal side intrusion and broken bits scattered over the indoor crash-test facility Volvo operates at its headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The safe structure designed into the C70 is an engineering marvel, but it’s surely a marvel few consumers ever will see in action. And even if they do, Volvo wants to make sure they live to tell about the experience.

Hardtop convertibles are odd ducks to begin with—halo cars meant as much to draw shoppers to showrooms as they are meant to put drivers in a sunnier state of mind. And engineering one of these semi-roadsters to be among the safest cars on the road is an almost breathtaking feat of will over common sense and cost efficiency. You may as well disregard the fact that the C70 even has a metal top, when it comes to rollover accidents: the car’s actual roof panels are almost incidental to rollover protection. Instead, pop-up rollover bars, actuated by springs and pyrotechnics, and the windshield frame are the structural elements meant to protect occupants should the car roll— a hugely rare event, one expects, since only about 8 percent of accidents are rollovers and of those, almost half are accounted for by sport-utility vehicles.

Watching the C70 be struck by a massive sport-ute renews your faith in their engineering, for sure. But it also raises some unanswerable questions about the marketing impulse that drives all the design work. All this ingenuity is applied to a vehicle that will sell at most 16,000 copies a year. A lot of expensive technology is bundled into one convertible that may only survive on accident, too. Given its multi-piece hardtop, large glass areas, deformable body structure and pop-up roll bars that are designed to smash the rear glass when the car senses an imminent rollover, a middling to major accident in the C70 almost certainly means a total writeoff of its estimated $35,000 to $40,000 sticker price.

This sort of fatalism is not strictly applicable to the C70. The Benz SLK is in the same boat when it comes to a severe accident. Most major cars built up around modules, especially aluminum-bodied ones like Audis and Jags and Acuras, are easily torqued beyond repair in medium-speed collisions. And in many of these cases the crash lessons learned aren’t easily translated to other models. While Volvo’s XC90 has bred a handful of sedans and crossovers already, the complex, expensive top mechanism on its C70 is unique to the entire Ford empire and likely will remain so.

So is it worth all this effort for one very low-volume vehicle? Volvo’s killer app is safety. Without it, they may as well be building televisions. And thus, despite Ford’s financial straits and all the other headwinds against its existence, the C70 can endure horrific crashes AND fold away its origami roof. In this case, safety is something Volvo hopes very, very few people ever experience—but everyone knows is there.—Marty Padgett

Posted in : Enthusiasts, Industry News, Reviews, Shoppers

Memories of Frankfurt

By Paul Eisenstein September 15th, 2005

Email this page to your friend:

Covering the Frankfurt Motor Show is always a daunting challenge, and I tend to try to get in shape for at least a few weeks before the flight to Germany. It's not the jet-lag. I've gotten used to that. It's the incredible stamina one needs to run from one hall to another. From the Mercedes-Benz booth near the Frankfurt Messe entrance, to the Opel stand on the other side of the train tracks, it's nearly a full kilometer. Of course, it makes those good German dinners, with their heavy cream sauces and sausages, seem a little less sinful.

Alternating with the Paris Motor Show every other year, Frankfurt is seen as one of the most important places to track automotive trends -- in terms of cars, technology and the people at the industry's helm. This year's show was a mix of news. On the product side, there was some disappointment; far fewer breakthroughs than one would typically expect. On the other hand, it's hard to ignore the likes of the new Mercedes S-Class, Jaguar XK and Volkswagen Eos hardtop/convertible. In typical fashion, the German manufacturers dominated , even adding an extra day to the media news conference schedule, so they'd be less likely to lose journalists to those other brands from France, England and, sigh, the U.S.

In terms of technology, diesels have been the big news for several years at European auto shows, and for good reason. The market is now more than half diesel, and still growing. But with fuel prices in some continental markets now pushing past $8 a U.S. gallon motorists are demanding even more help, and so the hybrid has emerged as a potentially mainstream technology. Until now, gasoline-electric powertrains have gotten little more than lip service from European makers, only the Asian imports singing its praises. This year, though, we saw a variety of prototypes from the likes of Audi, Smart and even Mercedes, which displayed two Bluetec Hybrid-equipped sedans. One was gasoline-electric, the other a diesel, which could yield the sort of mileage in the big S-Class you today get in the compact Toyota Prius. Diesel-electric systems could prove unacceptably expensive, but considering the industry's ability to drive out cost, we'd not be surprised to hear some production announcements in time for the next Frankfurt show in 2007.

As for the names and faces in Frankfurt, there were some familiar folks in new positions. Mark Fields, the photogenic head of Ford's Premier Automotive Group was on hand, days after the announcement he will head back home to run Ford's troubled core Americas unit. If you hung around the Volkswagen stand on Monday, you'd have been forgiven thinking that Elvis had entered the building. It was actually the equally photogenic Wolfgang Bernhard, the former #2 at Chrysler and disenfranchised head of Mercedes, who resurfaced as brand boss for the also-troubled Volkswagen. Bernhard's message was a mixed one: look at all our great new product, even as we struggled to fix endemic cost problems that could crush the German manufacturer.

Oh, and there was also that other familiar German face, Chancellor Schroeder, taking a last-minute walk-through before the hotly contested election this coming weekend. Maybe he was vying for votes. But considering his poor showing in the polls, he might also have been looking for what car to buy should he return to civilian life later this year.

Posted in : Industry