VW + Apple = iCar?

Are Apple and Volkswagen working together to create the iCar?

(Actually the name is just rumored as is all talk currently going on about this).

All that is really known is that a "Volkswagen spokesperson told German magazine Capital that an iCar may be on the way. Steve Jobs and VW Chairman Martin Winterkorn got together in California a few days ago to plan an intensive co-operation with the building of vehicles."

Rumors and more rumors say the iCar will sport Apple’s AirPort networking system plus a touch-screen iMac.

Tags: Apple, VW, iCar, Steje Jobs, Martin Winterkorn, Volkswagen, automotive, auto industry, automotive industry

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Electric car update (Part 5): GM Volt

News and rumors regarding electric cars have been increasing in these past few months, so I thought I’d do a little reading up on the most notable models being talked about.

Today we’ll cover General Motors’ much anticipated electric car, the….

GM Volt

• Launch date: 2010 (?)
• Price: Not announced, but maybe under $30,000 if production run goes as estimated. Obviously 2010 is too far off to make any certain predictions…
• Top speed: 120 mph (190 km/h)
• Autonomy: 40 miles (64 kms) between charges
• Battery life: Not announced
• Battery charge time: 6 hours
• 0-60 MPH (0-100 km/h): 8.5 seconds
• Chassis design: GM Global Design
• Technology partners: A123 (batteries)

• Company HQ: Detroit
• CEO: Rick Wagoner
• Sales estimates: They say 60,000 in the first year
• Website: http://www.gm-volt.com

The latest news

General Motors showed off a great-looking Volt concept car at the 2007 North American International Auto Show in Detroit this past January.

According to GM, the Volt will be powered by a next-generation battery pack that can be recharged by the car’s small gasoline-powered, one-liter, three-cylinder engine. This gas engine is a supplement to the electric power system; it can up the Volt’s range to 640 miles (1,000 kms).

GM says the battery pack is critical for a mass release, and that the necessary technology won’t be available until 2010-12.

Curious fact

GM pioneered electric vehicles back in 1996 with their EV1, which they later discontinued as noted in the 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?". GM says they EV1 just wasn’t ready for the market: limited range, little interior space, the small engine could barely handle hills or the A/C, and the car had no alternative power source when the battery ran low.

Insightful quote

GM Vice Chairman Robert Lutz says that 50 percent of Americans live within twenty miles of their jobs, so they could theoretically go to work and come back on a single Volt charge. “In that case, you might never burn a drop of gas in the life of the car.”

More news

• Article at MSNBC
• Photo gallery
• Article at Bloomberg

Related posts

• Electric car update (Part 1): Miles XS 500

• Electric car update (Part 2): Tesla Roadster

• Electric car update (Part 3): Phoenix Motorcars SUT

• Electric car update (Part 4): Think City

Tags: GM, GM Volt, Volt, EV1, Rick Wagoner, automotive, auto industry, automotive industry, China, Chinese auto industry, Chinese automotive industry, alternative energy, electric cars

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First Chinese plant in U.S.

It’s not a car plant, but big news none the less.

Sany Heavy Industry Co., a large Chinese construction equipment manufacturer, will build a $30 million manufacturing plant in the U.S. state of Georgia.

Construction begins in early 2008, and will take 18-24 months. The plant will initially employ 200 people, and later on they plan to add 600 more. The installation will serve as headquarters for Sany America Inc.; from there the company will address sales, service, assembly, testing, distribution, and R&D.

Sany is the biggest concrete-pumping equipment maker in China with 8,000 employees, 2006 sales of $594 million, and 50% profit growth each of the last three years. They recently confirmed another $70 million heavy equipment plant in Pune, India.

Sany makes the world’s longest reaching concrete pump, a 66 meter truck-mounted contraption, shown here.

Tags: Sany, China, construction equipment

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Service improvements: Podcast

Here’s our latest podcast where I speak with expert Peter Daniel of ADC-Automotive Dealer Consulting about the importance of the Service Advisor, and look at some key indicators to measure his or her performance.

(ADC, a consultancy with offices in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico, provides consulting and training services to auto manufactures and dealers, focusing mainly on process and profit improvement for service, parts and body shops).

The podcast runs about 15 minutes (available in English for now).

	To listen: click here once.
	To download: right-click and choose Save Target As.

Or go to the Autologica website.

Tags: auto dealer, auto dealers, car dealer, car dealers, motor vehicle dealer, motor vehicle dealers, automotive, auto industry, automotive industry, auto service, best practices, DMS, dealer management systems, auto dealer software, Autologica, Al McClymont, Peter Daniel

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Famous mistakes

We all make them…

Here are some famous mistakes, from James Dale’s book "The Obvious: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed":

• Henry Ford forgot to put a reverse gear on his first automobile.

• Albert Einstein’s parents were told he might be mentally retarded.

• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

• Napoleon finished near the bottom of his military school class.

• The Beatles were turned down for a recording contract by Decca Records.

• John Grisham’s first novel was rejected by sixteen agents and a dozen publishers.

Read it here.

Tags: mistakes

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Service improvements (Part 1): Key indicators

I recently chatted with expert Peter Daniel of ADC-Automotive Dealer Consulting about the importance of the Service Advisor, and key indicators to measure his/her performance. I’ll post the podcast later this week.

ADC, a consultancy with offices in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico, provides consulting and training services to auto manufactures and dealers, focusing mainly on process and profit improvement for service, parts and body shops.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview…

Al McClymont: Peter, how can you tell if your Service Advisor is doing a good job?

Peter Daniel: Well, that’s a good question.

There are some benchmarks that we look at on an international basis, that really show how well a shop is doing in their service sales performance, and that includes the Service Advisor as well.

Some of the things that we look at, and I think the key things that we should look at, when looking at service shop sales are

• The Hours per Repair Order for customer pay
• The Effective Labor Rate
• The Parts to Labor Ratio
• The number of repair orders that each Advisor writes
• The number of sold hours by Advisor
• The amount of parts sales

But I think with the time that we have today we can start out with one of the key indicators, a key benchmark measurement that’s called Hours per Repair Order.

Hours per Repair Order… the formula would be you take the number of hours sold on a group of repair orders that are written by the Advisor, and divide that by the number of repair orders.

So let’s say the Advisor sold 200 hours that month and he had 100 repair orders, so you take 200 hours divided by the 100 repair orders, that would give you an average 2 hours per repair order.

In other words, Hours per RO would be 2 hours on average. And that’s our target benchmark on an international level, each Advisor should average 2 hours per repair order.

Anything less than that would show that there’s a performance problem somewhere, whether it’s in the sales performance of the service advisor, but maybe it’s not though.

There are other factors that could be underlying or behind the scenes…

(to be continued…)

Tags: auto dealer, auto dealers, car dealer, car dealers, motor vehicle dealer, motor vehicle dealers, automotive, auto industry, automotive industry, auto service, best practices

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Internet scam goes full circle

You’ve heard of the email scam where Ms. Angel Huufa (or some such), in limping English, offers to cut you in on a huge pile of money that is somehow stuck in the frozen account of her ex-Sierra Leone dictator relative (or similar) , if only you could help her get it out.

What you may not know is that this particular scheme, called the "Nigerian Scam" (that was the country most cited originally), was born years before the Internet. The medium used back then? Plain old regular mail.

And in case you think no one really falls for this seemingly foolish con, a 1997 report said that losses in the U.S. alone exceeded $100 million dollars. (!!!)

Well, maybe people have caught on, or spam filters have gotten smarter, because it looks like the scammers have gone back to the regular mail format.

I just got a letter sent in my name to our office address, from Spain at a cost of 0.78 euros. See the scanned letter and envelope above and below…

Also, an interesting read about the Nigerian scam (also known as the "419 Scam") here.

Tags: Internet scams, Nigerian scam, 419 scam, fraud

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Failed IT Projects (Part 1): Airbus

I recently came across an article that mentioned the biggest three IT project failures in history, in the opinion of tech site ZDNet.

The point is that even the largest, best organized companies and institutions can find insurmountable hurdles in a software project. And sometimes the root causes are so minor that it’s hard to believe they can end up creating such a problem.

We’ll go in reverse order… here’s #3…

Failed IT Project #3:

Airbus and incompatible design software

When the Airbus A380 megajet project fell two years and $6.1 billion dollars behind schedule, the company admitted that one of the main reasons was the use of incompatible design software.

It seems that Airbus’ Toulouse assembly plant used the latest version of their design software, called CATIA, while their design center at Hamburg used an earlier 1980’s version. You can imagine how different the two versions are, and that design spec files do not flow easily between them.

Here’s a sample of the results of this software problem from Business Week:

"… when pre-assembled bundles containing hundreds of miles of cabin wiring were delivered from a German factory to the assembly line in France, workers discovered that the bundles, called harnesses, didn’t fit properly into the plane. Assembly slowed to a near-standstill, as workers tried to pull the bundles apart and re-thread them through the fuselage. Now Airbus will have to go back to the drawing board and redesign the wiring system.

It’s shaping up to be one of the costliest blunders in the history of commercial aerospace."

Of course, the 525-seat, double-decker, environmentally friendly A380 has since launched very successfully.

(Also, Airbus has one of the best websites I’ve seen in a long time.)

Related articles:

• Failed IT Project #3: Airbus and incompatible design software
• Failed IT Project #2: The UK National Health Service national e-health project

Tags: Airbus, IT projects

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How Suzuki generates market

As India’s middle class continues to grow, the local car market is going the same way at a fast clip of 15 percent a year. Total sales are expected to jump from 1.3 million in 2006 to 2.1 million in 2010.

Maruti Suzuki is the reigning king of the auto industry in India, owning an amazing 55% of the market.

Not content with their absolute dominance of the Indian car market, they’ve come up with some innovative ideas to grow the market and thus expand their reach.

Here’s what Maruti noticed:

• Many first-time buyers don’t know how to drive
• Few women in India drive
• Buying decisions are made by the entire family
• Rural areas are mainly unattended by automakers

Here’s what Maruti is doing:

Focus on first-time buyers

35 percent of sales are to first-time buyers. For many of these, a car is an enormous acquisition, so Maruti has learned to treat all customers equal, whether they are buying a high or low-end vehicle.

But here’s the more interesting strategy: Maruti sponsors 18 driving schools throughout India, and plan to expand to fifty by March 2008.

Focus on women

More than half of trainees at the driver training schools are female. So Maruti has “lady instructors” to make them more comfortable. Jagdish Khattar, managing director of Maruti Suzuki, says:

"If the wife learns to drive, it won’t take long for her to persuade the gentleman to buy a car."

Focus on family

Maruti dealerships are equipped to accommodate buyers in large groups, for example with play areas for children.

Attack rural areas

Indian carmakers mainly focus on urban areas as that is where the money is.

But rural India is home to over 800 million people, with a lower cost of living, and where there are many dual-income families with more disposable income.

Maruti has unleashed salespeople to rural India to target various niches… teachers for example. Last year they visited 30,000 schools and sold 10,000 units.

Ongoing service

There are over 6 million Maruti owners throughout India. Maruti serves them through a huge network of 400 dealerships and 2,400 service shops in 1,100 cities.

They hold free tune-up and service camps that are attended by 450,000 owners a year.

And the end result of all of this?

Maruti not only leads all carmakers in India in sales, they are also ranked #1 by JD Power in customer satisfaction with dealer service (for the past seven years).

Learned of this here.

Tags: customer satisfaction, best practices, automotive, auto industry, automotive industry, India, India auto industry, Suzuki, Maruti, Suzuki Maruti

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Electric car update (Part 4): Think City

News and rumors regarding electric cars have been increasing in these past few months, so I thought I’d do a little research on the most salient models that are being talked about.

This time around we’ll look at a very cool entry from Norway’s Think Global…

Think City

• Launch date: Fall 2007 (UK and Norway), possibly 2008 for U.S.
• Price: $35,000
• Top speed: 65 mph (105 km/h)
• Autonomy: 130 miles (210 kms) between charges
• Battery life: N/A
• Battery charge time: 6-7 hours.
• 0-60 MPH (0-100 km/h): Under 10 seconds
• Chassis: Pivco, Ford
• Technology partners: Tesla Motors (batteries)

• Company HQ: Aurskog, Norway
• Founders: Jan-Olaf Willums, Alf Bjørseth, Reidar Langmo
• CEO: Jan Olaf Willums
• Sales estimates: Their goal is to make 20,000 cars a year
• Dealer network: Cars will be sold online, built to order
• Website: http://en.think.no/

Latest news

Just received $60 million in new round of funding, on top of $25 million they already had. Counts major Norwegian business magnates among investors.

Curious facts

The company was actually born at Ford, who after five years and $150 million finally sold it off.

Think will begin production later this year. Reportedly, they need to produce 10,000 cars a year to be profitable.

Batteries will be leased for $100-200 a month, not sold. When better batteries are made available, owners can simply switch over.

Cars will be sold online built specifically to the customer’s order. Test drives will be requested by text message to a Think car-sharing franchise. The City will be Internet and Wi-Fi capable, able to communicate with both driver and fellow City owners.

Insightful quote

"By leasing the battery the consumer doesn’t take the risk over the unknowns of battery life," says Think CEO Jan-Olaf Willums. "We’re moving from a car concept to a mobility concept. People look more and more at the full cost of ownership."

Read more

• Aften Posten Norway
• CNN
• News.com
• Travel Gear Blog
• Science Museum of Minnesota

Related posts

• Electric car update (Part 1): Miles XS 500

• Electric car update (Part 2): Tesla Roadster

• Electric car update (Part 3): Phoenix Motorcars SUT

Tags: Think City, Think Global, Jan-Olaf Williams, Tesla, automotive, auto industry, automotive industry, China, Chinese auto industry, Chinese automotive industry, alternative energy, electric cars

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