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SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- January new vehicle sales are expected to be down a bit from January a year ago and significantly lower than December 2007 sales, according to Edmunds.com's forecast. Auto sales (retail and fleet), to be reported by manufacturers on Friday, likely will come in at 1.05 million units...

While some are seeing the ongoing writer's strike as an opportunity to catch up on reruns, the longer it goes on and the more TV ratings start to decline, you can bet your bottom dollar that the advertisers are going to seek out those places that consumers are turning to for their information and entertainment. And since newspapers are dead or dying, and a picture (or video) is worth a thousand words, you can bet that more and more car advertising will be headed to the internet for online consumption. Will a shift in advertising revenues lead to major changes in the television landscape?..

The way you make money in poker is not to try and win every pot, but to lose less when you lose, and win more when you do win. And there will come a time that you have a lay down a very good hand because of the way things have played out. The UAW's ratification of their contract with Ford was sort of like that...

Fourty-eight years ago today, President Eisenhower signed the executive order transferring Wernher von Braun and his team from the U.S. Army to the newly created NASA. While von Braun had nothing to do with introducing the Braun drip coffee maker in 1963, he did mastermind the U.S...

September sales were announced for the automakers. Total industry sales in September ran at a seasonally adjusted rate of 16.23 million units compared with 16.6 million, down 2.2% from September last year. Here's a quick recap: GM sold 337,640 vehicles in September, up 4 percent compared with a year ago. Retail deliveries totaled 255,274 vehicles up more than 7 percent; fleet sales were down 6 percent...

As Michelle Krebs reported on AutoObserver Volkswagen of America announced yesterday that they are moving their corporate headquarters from Detroit to Herndon, VA in a move that will trim the ranks and likely provide an incentive (living in VA versus Detroit) for new talent to join VW. I'm not sure that this will solve some of VW's percieved problems like reliability or lack of concern for the customer. And if the recent series of postings in the Volkswagen New Beetle Convertible discussion is any indication, VW has a fairly steep hill to climb...

In a recent story on AutoObserver, Knut Simonsson, executive director, Saab Global Sales and Marketing said that consumers will increasingly gravitate toward brands that evoke strong images of heritage or national origin as a way to satisfy their desire for more “context” for their purchases, and that GM is starting to “get it” in terms of leveraging Saab’s brand qualities. While some GM enthusiasts may be hoping for a return to past glory and being a colossus astride the automotive world, I think the days of GM being the all encompassing, everything to everyone monolith are over. It's a brave new world, and smaller, more nimble and responsive is the name of the game.  Consumers are looking for something unique in their vehicles, and are going to gravitate towards those manufacturers that can provide that for them...