Powerful Taurus symbolizes Ford's resurgence

Conventional wisdom congratulates Ford for forgoing last year's feast of federal bailouts, as if Ford's absence from that table of taxpayers' money signaled extraordinary competence and virtue in a time of corporate recklessness and greed.

The truth is less heroic, which is that Ford was well on its way to ruin long before General Motors and Chrysler traveled that road.

But unlike its Detroit brethren, Ford was urgent and straightforward in admitting that it had lost its way and that it needed a fast turnaround in pursuit of a prosperous "Way Forward," which was the corporate name of its self-initiated recovery program.

It was a teachable moment missed by GM and Chrysler. Put simply: When you're lost, don't stay lost for long. Admit that you don't know where you're going, or what you're doing. Seek help, which is what Ford did in 2006 in choosing former Boeing executive Alan Mulally as its president and chief executive.

Mulally did not waste time or sentiment. He did away with Ford's costly, underperforming darlings: Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover. He scrapped assembly and supplier plants that were manufacturing more debt than quality products. He streamlined corporate management, and he overturned one of Ford management's worst decisions: the 2006 scrapping of the Taurus car brand.

Mulally brought back the Taurus name in the 2008 model year, arguing that the only thing wrong with the car was what had gone wrong with the company. Ford had forgotten that it was in the car business. Cars, as a result, went by the boards in favor of what Ford management construed as more lucrative trucks. The Taurus, originally introduced in 1986 to consumer and critical acclaim, did not fail. Instead, Mulally argued, Ford management had failed the Taurus.

He said the company and the Taurus brand needed the same thing: better cars, much better cars. And he delivered.

The proof is in a variety of new Ford automobiles: the Fusion Hybrid, the reworked Ford Focus, the Lincoln MKZ, the new Fiesta and this column's subject car, the 2010 Taurus SHO (Super High Output).

When introduced in 1989, the Taurus SHO, equipped with a 3-liter, 220-horsepower Yamaha V-6 engine, quickly became a favorite among married men with children. It was a car suitable for a holiday trip to Grandma's house and a weekend on local racing circuits. That it was priced a tad below $20,000 was a bonus, affording high-performance driving on a shoestring budget.

The 2010 Taurus SHO follows much the same formula as the original - with 365 horsepower and 350 foot-pounds of torque in a twin-turbocharged V-6 engine - in a car that otherwise has all of the character and accommodations of a big family sedan.

But though it is measurably more affordable than its foreign high-performance rivals, the new Taurus SHO is by no means cheap. Pricing now starts at $37,770 on a car that requires premium unleaded fuel for "best performance."

The new Taurus SHO also differs from the old in that the new is full-size and leans more toward luxury, as opposed to the mid-size measurement and middling appointments of the old. The changes can be disconcerting to people who grew up with up with the old Taurus. My assistant was taken aback by the size of the new Taurus and the complexity of its instrument panel, saying, "Too big with too many buttons."

But if you can get past those things, as I did the moment I keyed the ignition, you'll find lots to love. Fit, finish and overall comfort easily are among the best in the business. Overall performance - in acceleration and handling - rivals that of more expensive cars, including Audi, BMW and Lexus.

Delivering 17 miles per gallon in the city and 25 mpg on the highway won't impress motorists who measure automotive value by how far they can drive on a gallon of fuel. But for those of us who remain easily seduced by horsepower and torque, it's a pretty neat trick, accomplished in this case by Ford's 3.5-liter "EcoBoost" V-6, which uses a combination of direct fuel injection and larger volumes of forced air to create maximum power without a commensurate increase in fuel consumption.

Rob Bell cannot wait to face new challenge

Rob Bell cannot wait to face new challenge

Dec 27 2009 by Zoe Burn, Sunday Sun

SPORTSCAR sensation Rob Bell will switch from a Ferrari to an Aston Martin next season.

The two-time Le Mans Series (LMS) GT2 Champion will remain with the JMW Motorsport squad for 2010, after team chiefs inked a deal to become the official development outfit for the GT2 Aston Martin.

And although the rest of the line-up is still to be finalised, it was revealed last week that Bell is staying with the team to spearhead its attack on next year’s championship.

JMW Motorsport, runners-up in their debut Le Mans Series GT2 season last year, have signed a two-year year deal to compete with the Vantage GT2 in the Le Mans Series and at the Le Mans 24 Hours as Aston Martin Racing’s official global GT2 Development Partner.

And Morpeth-born Bell admits he can’t wait to get behind the wheel for the first time.

“I am so excited about this new challenge, the only way I can describe it is I feel rejuvenated,” he said.

“As a driver, the opportunity not only to race the Aston Martin Vantage GT2 but to play such an integral part in the development of the car fires me up.”

The core team, which took JMW Motorsport to fourth at Le Mans in 2009, remains with Tim Sugden as team manager and Steve ‘Doc’ Bunkhall as technical director, ably backed by Davey Nicholas, Duncan Ritchie and Ian Jones.

And the team will retain their strong partnership with Dunlop, which has renewed its long-term commitment to the team as development partners in the GT2 programme.

The JMW Motorsport Aston Martin Vantage GT2 will feature in Dunlop’s 2010 Le Mans Livery Design Competition.

An intensive testing programme begins in early January ahead of the opening Le Mans Series race on April 11, the 8 Hours of Le Castellet event in France.

Jim McWhirter, JMW Team Principal added: “This is a very exciting development for our team and reflects the efforts invested over the past seasons.

“This may be a new car for JMW, but the same desire, commitment and perseverance is still there and we are confident we shall be in the mix from the start.

“Dunlop have been an integral part of our success and it is extremely rewarding that they are joining forces with JMW and Aston Martin Racing in this challenging new adventure.”

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Alan Mulally: The driving force of Motor City

With his bright smile, open face and lick of light brown hair, Alan Mulally looks like an overgrown boy scout. If Richie Cunningham of Happy Days had never met the Fonz and gone straight into business, he might have turned out like Mulally. “Gee, Dominic, that’s a kinda neat way to ask that question,” he chirps at one point during our interview.

Don’t be fooled. Mulally may look and sound preppie, but he is a killer preppie. He starts his day at 5.15am, is “relentless”, according to associates, and has let people go for chatting at the back during his weekly management meetings. He is nice, very nice, but it’s a nice I wouldn’t want to get the wrong side of. Mulally’s driven nature helped to save Ford — it was the only one of the big three Detroit carmakers not to go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this year — and has won him the crown of Sunday Times Business Person of the Year.

The 64-year-old, an aeronautical engineer by training, is too smart to claim Ford, the world’s fourth-biggest car group, is safe just yet. It made a $1 billion profit in the third quarter of the year, a towering achievement in a cut-throat industry struggling with a recession-driven slump in sales. “None of us is really out of the woods,” he said. “But we have a good fundamental business that will get stronger as the economy starts to grow.”

Ford avoided the great Detroit car crash of 2009, but now has to fight rivals that were kept alive with government money. Isn’t Mulally riled that both his Detroit rivals were bailed out by the taxpayer?

“No, I’m not. The advantages of not going through bankruptcy far outweigh the advantages of going through it. These guys [GM and Chrysler] are going to have to slow down their investment in new products, and customers care about products.

“They were failed enterprises. Just think about everyone that got wiped out in Chapter 11 — the shareholders and the bondholders. In there are the same banks that we borrow money from today and, because we honoured our commitments, we couldn’t have a better relationship with them.”

To understand the nature of Mulally’s achievement, you have to go back three years to his appointment. Ford was floundering, on its way to a $12.6 billion loss for the year. Its bonds were reduced to junk status by credit-rating agencies, and most analysts and commentators thought it would be the first of Detroit’s big three to fail. It was caught in the jaws of a vice; aggressive low-cost competition from Japanese and other Asian carmakers on one side and on the other the ever-mounting costs of generous pension and healthcare plans set up in the days when carmaking in America was a licence to print money.

For a group known for dash and vision throughout its 106-year history — the perfection of mass production, founder Henry Ford’s plan to put the world on wheels — it seemed paralysed by its burdens. Bill Ford Jr, a scion of the founding and still-controlling family, had been made chief executive as well as chairman, the first family member in a generation to hold the top executive job.

Under the previous boss, Jac Nasser, Ford had gone on a spending spree, adding to its stable of international brands. With the fat profits made from selling pick-ups and light trucks to affluent American customers in 1990s, Ford built up a portfolio that included Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin, Volvo and Mazda. But then American profits dried up, and Ford was sinking. Bill Ford was smart enough to realise he needed help, and went looking for it.

Mulally was an unlikely appointment. He was a Boeing man through and through, having worked at the planemaker for 38 years. His big achievement was as the chief architect of the Boeing 777, the first of the big twin-engined airliners that have come to dominate long-haul routes. He was made boss of Boeing’s commercial aircraft division in 1998, but later missed out on the chief executive’s job.

Recruiting an outsider was a bold stroke for Ford. The accepted wisdom in Detroit was that you had to be a “car guy” to run one of the big three and, at Ford, that you had to come up through the rigours of the company system. Mulally had neither distinction.

It didn’t take him long to start shaking things up. The profusion of marques — and a profusion of management fiefdoms — were his first targets.

“I did a lot of due diligence before I arrived, and I clarified that after I got here,” said Mulally. “Ford had moved from the blue oval to being a house of brands. And we had really strong operations round the world, Ford in Europe, China, Australia — but they all operated autonomously. So here was the world’s 17th largest company, and it was operating as a group of regional outfits with no global scale, even though it was competing against the best global companies.”

Greater centralisation was the order of the day — and a sell-off of some of the most famous names in the car industry. Aston Martin went to the Kuwaitis. Jaguar Land Rover to the Indians (Tata Motors paid £1.35 billion, which looked cheap until sales of luxury cars fell off a cliff in the autumn of last year). Volvo is heading for China. Last week Ford said it had reached an outline deal to the sell the Swedish carmaker to Geely, a Chinese carmaker, with the handover expected to take place in the second quarter of next year.

It was an abrupt about-face. Ford’s original plan in buying the different brands was to spread risk, and, through companies like Jaguar and Volvo, get access to the kind of high-margin sales to which it could never aspire. It looked a sound strategy, certainly sound enough for the good and the great on the Ford board to back it for years. It did not, however, stand up to the kind of basic, ground-up scrutiny that Mulally loves.

“I start out looking at the world, looking at the business environment, our situation, then developing a plan to deal with it. I was asked to come here to fix Ford, and clearly doing the same thing we had been doing was not going to work.”

Mulally identified another, slightly less tangible flaw, a contentment with being average. “It was almost as though they [Ford management] had consciously decided to be competitive, rather than the best.”

The fruit of the centralisation plan will be seen at the Detroit Motor Show, which starts in a fortnight. There, Ford will show off its new small cars for America, which are derived from its European products. In some cases, such as the best-selling Focus, American customers will get new models a year before they are released in Europe — even though they were designed here.

The final part of the initial turnround plan was financial. Sensing that Ford was running out of cash, and that access to cash might be the big decider in the looming downturn, Mulally and then financial chief Don Le Clair made the big call to mortgage every asset the company had, including the Ford brand, to raise $23.5 billion. When debt seemed to be Detroit’s biggest enemy, it was a bold move.

“I knew the world was going to slow down, and access to credit was going to get tougher, but we needed a certain amount of money to transform the company,” said Mulally. “I just knew we had to borrow as much as we could. I went to the banks myself — there were 500 of them — and presented our plan. In hindsight, what we raised gave us enough of a cushion not only to survive the recession but accelerate the investment in new products.”

At Boeing, Mulally’s chief tool of management was a weekly review meeting, involving all the key people, at which all problems were thrashed out. He has brought this process to Ford. Every Thursday in the Thunderbird Room at Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, executives from round the world gather, in person and by video conference, to give updates on how they are doing. It’s dense stuff. In two and half hours the team covers 300 slides. “We are looking for any deviation from the plan,” said Mulally.

He likes everyone to concentrate, and will not tolerate whispered conversations while the main business of the meeting is elsewhere. “The worst thing is that you are not looking at the same chart, you are not listening to the same person, so you miss the opportunity to come together. We have even removed a couple of people who couldn’t accept those behaviours. It can be like poison to the organisation.”

Debt is a possible cloud on Mulally’s horizon — because Ford didn’t go into Chapter 11, an American corporate insolvency process that allows companies’ debts to be wiped out — it now has much more debt, £27 billion, than GM or Chrysler. It is doing all it can to take the pressure off, raising more than $1 billion in new equity, and $3 billion in fresh loans and starting talks with lenders about pushing back the maturity of its existing borrowings.

The company has plenty of uses for the money. Like all carmakers, Ford is grappling with the thorny question of what might replace petrol as a fuel. Mulally said he was happy with the progress being made. “The technology road map looks like this — you improve the internal combustion engine, you make them compatible with biofuels, and the next thing is the move through hybrids towards electrification. We will have all-electric vehicles next year. You really can’t choose between the technologies because you don’t know which ones are going to evolve. A lot depends on governments — they are going to have make the choices on infrastructure to support the new technologies.”

If he were a British executive, Mulally would be thinking about retirement. Things are different in America, where the heads of big companies can go on for a very long time. He said he had no plans to take a back seat. “I have never had so much fun. One thing is for sure, having done planes and cars, I’m not doing trains.”

Stalwarts who gave motor boss a run for his money

THIS may not have been a vintage year for business — recession and public anger over executive pay saw to that — but we have never had so much reader interest in who should be the Sunday Times Business Person of the Year.

Many readers emailed us to say what they thought of our shortlist of 10, and who of that elite group should carry the laurels.

Mulally had numerous supporters, including, interestingly enough, quite a few of his employees. John Varley, chief executive of Barclays, and Kate Swann, boss of WH Smith, were highly praised, with Robert Walker, Swann’s chairman, making sure he added his name to the list of her devotees.

Fittingly for someone who works in the fashion business, Angela Ahrendts, boss of Burberry, inspired some gushing tributes. “She is an inspiration ... a beacon for the Burberry brand and has steered the company through the most turbulent time,” said one.

We had interesting insights from inside companies. Peter Dranfield, who worked at BG Group for 20 years, wrote to tell us why we should pick the gas company’s chief executive, Frank Chapman. BG had faced tough competition for gas fields in Kazakhstan, but had won through largely because of the time Chapman had spent developing relationships there.

“This is just an example of what Frank does and probably one of the reasons why he has the reputation of being low profile. He is not so keen on being seen at prestigious conferences, but wants to do the things that a chief executive should do,” said Dranfield.

The executive who ran Mulally closest was another figure close to the motor industry — Ross Brawn, pictured. After Honda pulled out of Formula One, he was left as boss of a moribund team. He led a buyout and won the championship with Jenson Button. At the end of the year he sold the company to Mercedes, making £35m.

And if that wasn’t enough, last week he revealed another twist — the comeback of a little-known driver called Michael Schumacher.

Luxury car brands drive into Bollywood movies with in-film placements

Kolkata: In 3 Idiots, two of Aamir Khan�s friends drive the length and breadth of India searching for him in a red XC90 R-Design, a variant of Volvo�s latest luxury sports utility vehicle. Bollywood may not have found its own Aston Martin DB5, a la Bond, made famous in James Bond flicks from Goldfinger to Casino Royale, but the Hindi film industry shares a long history with the Beetle, the Mercedes, the Cadillac or the good old Amby.

In-film car branding as a marketing tool began in earnest few years ago with the Tata Safari in Ram Gopal Varma�s Road. Volvo, a late entrant in the Indian car sector, makes its first appearance in Bollywood with a red SUV, priced at Rs 58 lakh. It was launched last October in India.

�We are delighted to be part of a big banner Bollywood movie,� says Paul De Voijs, MD, Volvo Auto India.

�The movie and its lead characters emanate vibrancy, energy and sportiness � exactly the qualities represented by our XC90 R-Design. The move is an ideal integration of our brand and the movie,� he adds.

Bollywood is moving places, according to brand expert Harish Bijoor. �In the early days, in-film placements were all about a brand of tea painted on a tea shop in a fight sequence, or the banner of a brand of pan masala on stage when the college event was being filmed. But now things have moved on. The price tag of products that are being placed has progressively moved up from a Rs-14 packet of branded tea to a Rs 33-lakh Mercedes Benz today,� he says.

But we are still nowhere near Bond films. Or are we? �We have not reached the Aston Martin stage as yet in such placements, but watch out soon for a Tata Nano in a film,� says Bijoor.

Analysts say one must watch out for the new Beetle as well. Volkswagen launched the Beetle in India on December 4, pricing it at Rs 20.45 lakh. Bijoor says Herbie, The Love Bug � Herbie is an anthropomorphic VW Beetle � can have an Indian avatar, �which will be good for the car and good for the film that uses it first as well�.

Amitabh Bachchan famously serenaded a yellow Beetle, christening it Rampyari, in Akela; Madhubala was in an Austin A-40 Somerset in Chalti Ka Naam Gadi, and SRK drove the Hyundai Santro in Main...

Aston Martin DBS Volante

And this brings me on to an interesting question. Can you truly score a row of perfect tens and emerge from the effort with any personality at all? I give you, by way of reference points, Steve “interesting” Davis and Michael Schumacher. I give you, too, Roger Federer. I like the look of the guy and I like his style, but can you imagine him climbing under the dinner table and tying someone’s shoelaces together? Can you imagine him drunk? In short, then, to be good, do you have to be boring? The answer, of course, is no. John McEnroe wasn’t boring. James Hunt wasn’t boring. And yes, I could imagine George Best drunk, easily.

This is because they have a gift. Sure, they worked hard to reach the top of their game, but plainly they didn’t have to exorcise every human trait in order to get there.

And that’s what’s gone wrong with the R8. It was designed by people who are not naturally given to making supercars. They had to work harder than those who are. They had to have more meetings, set up more committees, and work longer into the night to overcome their natural tendency to give it a diesel engine and two back seats.

You do not see this with a Rolls-Royce Phantom. This scores just as many perfect tens as the R8, and yet it has a soul as well. It feels like it was born good, not nurtured over a billion cups of committee-room coffee to be that way.

I’m not sure we will see such effortlessness from the new Rolls-Royce Ghost, which I fear is a BMW trying to be English — a bit like Michael Caine in The Eagle has Landed. I’m frightened it will all end badly, but I will reserve judgment until I have driven one. Or, more properly, been driven in one to the ballet.

We do see it, however, in the Mazda MX-5, the new Ford Fiesta, the BMW M3, the Range Rover TDV8 and the Ferrari 430. All of these cars do what they are supposed to do perfectly. But they have that certain something as well. They have a soul.

But the car that pulls off the trick better than all the others is the Aston Martin DBS Volante.

When I first encountered the hard-top version of this car, I was a bit disappointed. Aston Martin was maintaining that it had made an all-new car but you didn’t need an x-ray machine to see it had done no such thing. The DBS, as plain as day, was a DB9 with some sill extensions and a bit more power.

2009 Was a Clunker. Time to Cash It In.

By LAWRENCE ULRICH, The New York Times

DESPITE the bankruptcies, bailouts and plunging sales that quaked the auto industry this year, perhaps nothing sums up the misery better than this: The United States is no longer the world's top car market.

As 2009 draws to a merciful end, J. D. Power & Associates estimates that the Chinese will end up buying 12.7 million vehicles, compared with Americans' 10.4 million purchases. How much has the market contracted? Consider that in 2000 United States sales reached an all-time high of 17.4 million.

The slippage came despite an unprecedented effort to assist those who make and sell cars, including the summer cash-for-clunkers program that doled out $2.9 billion in government rebates to spur sales of 690,000 new cars -- while taking that many guzzling older models off the streets. Despite that program's temporary jolt, nearly 1,500 dealerships had shut their doors through October, making this the worst year for dealers since at least the 1950s, according to Automotive News, a trade publication.

The recession in North America, Europe and elsewhere pushed some automakers into the grave and others into consolidation or drastic downsizing. The casual consumer, who may not realize that General Motors killed off Pontiac this year, or that Jaguar and Land Rover now belong to Tata Motors of India, may need a scorecard and a spreadsheet to keep track of the players left in the game.

To that end, here is a rundown on the status of some brands and companies caught up in the shuffles, shakeups and desperate dances of the last couple of years, as automakers tried to keep a lap ahead of the Grim Reaper:

ASTON MARTIN A consortium led by a British motorsports magnate -- with the backing of Kuwaiti petrodollars -- is still running this manufacturer of luxury sports cars, acquired from Ford in late 2007. Ford had exponentially lifted Aston's worldwide sales, though the recession has taken its toll on all high-end nameplates. James Bond, at least, is back in a proper Aston, driving the stunning $270,000 DBS in his last two adventures; will Daniel Craig trade up to the even more conspicuous One-77? Aston will build just 77 examples of that $2 million, 220-m.p.h. supercar this year.

CHRYSLER GROUP This aging band of heavy-metal purveyors continued its Flame Out world tour. Ownership has passed from Germany (with Daimler) to Wall Street (Cerberus Capital Management) and now to Italy. Fiat took control of Chrysler the way people buy a Sebring -- with no money down and a nearly pharmaceutical grade of optimism.

Sergio Marchionne, Fiat's sweater-loving turnaround maestro and Chrysler's new chief executive, took over from Robert L. Nardelli, the former boss at Home Depot. Mr. Marchionne announced a five-year plan: Chrysler will sell some Fiats and Alfa Romeos in the United States; Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep models will combine American styling with Italian engineering; Ram, a name currently affixed to Dodge's muy-macho pickup -- it pulls three times its weight in company sales -- will be spun off as a separate brand.

Alfa Romeos may be rebadged as Dodges in America, and Dodges may be sold as Alfas in Europe, with Chryslers offered alongside cars from Fiat's struggling Lancia brand.

Well, that's the plan.

FIAT Starving for product, Chrysler's last, best hope is a Mediterranean salad whipped up by its new owner. Replacements for marketplace bombs like the Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Caliber will use Fiat platforms, engines and technology. The Fiat 500 minicar may arrive late next year, with perhaps the Alfa Romeo MiTo subcompact to follow. Everything has to mesh and be translated to American tastes -- quickly -- and consumers must be willing to accept Chrysler's latest cultural exchange program.

FISKER Henrik Fisker, the onetime Aston Martin designer who is now intent on turning out hybrid luxury cars, says the nation is ready for plug-in hybrids. Certainly, Mr. Fisker seems plugged into Washington: he emerged with $529 million in government loans earmarked for green cars.

After delays, Mr. Fisker now promises that his $80,000 Karma luxury sedan, to be built in Finland, will go on sale next fall. But the federal loans are being used to develop lower-cost plug-ins, including a $47,000 sedan called Project Nina. Fisker plans to start building that car at a former G.M. plant in Delaware in 2012.

FORD MOTOR Although Ford's sales have fallen this year, the decline was at least countered by a rising market share and a brighter public image. As the only Detroit car company that didn't hold out an XXL Tigers cap to be stuffed with taxpayer money, Ford won applause from free-market advocates -- and the right to make and market what it wants, free of pressure from government overseers.

Ford won more praise for its Fusion Hybrid, for its new line of powerful but fuel-efficient EcoBoost engines and for a makeover that girded its Mustang against any takeover attempt by Chevy's new Camaro.

Reversing a long brand-acquisition spree -- Ford has given up its controlling interest in Mazda, though the companies will continue to share technology -- the company kept hacking down to its core Ford and Lincoln nameplates. It has kept Mercury around as the madwoman in the attic: alive, yes, but mostly out of sight and inexplicable. GENERAL MOTORS At the "new" taxpayer-owned G.M., executives enjoy even less job security than Notre Dame football coaches.

Three months after President Obama showed Rick Wagoner, the chairman and chief executive, the golden door, Fritz Henderson came in as chief executive, promising big changes. These changes turned out to include his own ouster eight months later. (Mr. Henderson's sizable group of defenders included his daughter, who stuck up for her dad in an all-cap Facebook tirade against Edward E. Whitacre Jr., the new G.M. chairman who took over as interim chief.)

Then the Buick GMC unit went through three leaders in a month. One of them -- Michael Richards, a Ford veteran who had been lured to G.M. by the vice chairman, Robert A. Lutz -- left after barely a week on the job.

After months of drawn-out talks, G.M. decided not to sell its European Opel division to a consortium headed by Magna, a Canadian auto parts supplier, and Sberbank of Russia. For American consumers, G.M.'s retention means Opel will continue to supply German-engineered cars and technology that will serve as the basis for Buicks (including a new Regal in 2010) and other models.

Other moves outlined in G.M.'s bankruptcy plan also fell apart. Deals to sell Saturn and Saab fizzled. A Chinese company's effort to claim Hummer has dragged on for months.

Still, G.M. got some $400 million by giving Shanghai Automotive a larger stake in their Chinese venture and a 50 percent share in G.M.'s Indian operations.

HONDA Although its sales dropped in line with the industry, Honda passed Chrysler to grab fourth place in American sales, trailing G.M., Toyota and Ford. Honda's big challenge now is to revive the Acura luxury division, which has lost ground to rivals.

HUMMER America's three-ton Quasimodo -- a monster toasted by the masses before gas prices spiked and the mobs turned hostile -- was tentatively sold by G.M. to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, though the Chinese government hasn't approved the deal. Though Hummer sales have plunged, G.M. said the deal would preserve 3,000 American jobs.

HYUNDAI-KIA South Korean's automotive juggernaut kept rolling through the global economic downturn. Hyundai's cars -- already recession-ready because they are perceived as offering good value -- got a big boost in good will from the Hyundai Assurance plan, a marketing masterstroke that let owners return their cars if they lost their jobs. (There were exceptions in the fine print.)

Hyundai raised its American market share above 4 percent this year, from 3 percent in 2008, as sales rose more than 6 percent. The Kia division did better, with sales up nearly 8 percent.

Through it all, the Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group quietly became the world's fourth-largest automaker, displacing Ford. The top three are now Toyota, G.M. and Volkswagen.

JAGUAR AND LAND ROVER Ford has finished unloading its trophy import brands that were seen as saviors in the new millennium but turned out to be money-shredders. Ford bundled up Jaguar and Land Rover and sent them packing to a new parent, Tata Motors of India, leading Tories everywhere to raise a bitter glass to their dwindling Empire.

The new owners are primping the pedigreed brands that fell into their laps. For all the criticism of Ford's stewardship, the company handed off Land Rover and especially Jaguar in their most competitive shape in decades, with modern lineups of high-design, highly desirable cars and S.U.V.'s.

Whether these hothouse brands can earn money on top of respect remains an issue: Jaguar Land Rover promptly hung a $504 million fiscal year loss around Tata's neck -- just the sort of burden that led Ford to cut its losses and cut the Brits loose.

MAHINDRA This Indian manufacturer has promised to sell hard-working, high-mileage diesel compact pickup trucks and S.U.V.'s to Americans. But the promised introduction dates continue to come and go with no trucks in sight. The arrival date has been pushed forward again, to February.

PONTIAC Just after Pontiac popped out its best car in years -- the Australian-built G8 sport sedan -- G.M. killed the brand whose onetime "We build excitement" pledge was tarnished by decades of poseur sporty cars (like the two-seat Fiero) and rebadged leftovers from other divisions. The brand that spawned the legendary GTO muscle car in the 1960s -- not to mention Burt Reynolds's Trans Am of "Smokey and the Bandit" fame -- now rules Craigslist and haunts backwater used-car lots.

PORSCHE See Volkswagen. Also, chutzpah.

SAAB G.M.'s bid to dump Saab, its dying Swedish brand, devolved into farce. An obscure pair of underfinanced sports car makers -- Koenigsegg of Sweden and Spyker of the Netherlands -- failed to close deals to take over the vastly larger Saab. Koenigsegg and Spyker together produced fewer than 100 cars worldwide this year.

China's Beijing Automotive did buy Saab's spare parts and tooling, perhaps to use aging Saab's aging model lines as a basis for home-market models. But for the rest of the world, Saab -- which began in World War II as an aircraft producer for the Royal Swedish Air Force and started exporting its offbeat cars to the United States in the mid-1950s -- appears headed to extinction.

SATURN After its celebrated birth and a promising childhood as an import-fighter -- followed by years of benign parental neglect -- Saturn shut its doors when G.M. failed to find a buyer.

Roger Penske, the billionaire auto magnate and racing-team legend, pulled out of a last-ditch deal to sell G.M.-built Saturns through his vast dealership chain, having failed to seal a deal to eventually import Renaults and sell them as Saturns. Mr. Penske perhaps realized that the only thing harder to sell than American Saturns would be French Saturns.

The September shutdown announcement stunned the 370 Saturn dealers -- repeatedly hailed as among the industry's best.

SMART After making a pint-size splash in 2008, its first year in America, Smart's sales plunged nearly 40 percent. Smart's failure to lure customers in a recession -- despite its novelty, low price, fuel efficiency and press exposure -- suggests that the car has more in common with a shortlived fad than with the brand-building accomplished by Mini.

SUBARU What recession? Buoyed by good timing and well-received new models -- including the Legacy, Outback and Forester -- Subaru recorded the biggest percentage sales gains in the industry, nearly 14 percent.

SUZUKI One of two companies that often seemed to be on life support in the United States -- Mitsubishi is the other -- Suzuki could breathe easier after Volkswagen took a 19 percent stake in December. The move is part of VW's bid to supplant Toyota as the world's largest automaker by 2018.

TATA The automaking arm of the vast Indian conglomerate says it will bring its celebrated Nano -- the world's cheapest car in more ways than one -- to Europe by 2011, and eventually to America as well. There are even plans to make a hybrid version. The Nano, which costs roughly $2,500 in India, surprised some critics by passing European front- and side-impact crash tests last summer.

TESLA Leaving a trail of fired chief executives, the company's co-founder, Elon Musk, is now guiding the Silicon Valley maker of the electric Tesla Roadster. And Tesla, like its plug-in rival from Southern California, Fisker, benefited from a government loan ($464 million) to be used for its next car, the Model S.

That sport sedan was designed by Franz von Holzhausen, formerly a rising star at Mazda and G.M., and is to be built in a new California factory. In theory, it will be on the road by late 2011. Tesla has pegged the Model S's price at $50,000 once a federal $7,500 rebate on electric vehicles is factored in.

TOYOTA If misery loves company, Detroit finally learned to love Toyota. The Japanese automaker lost nearly five billion dollars in its fiscal year as worldwide sales plunged. In addition, Toyota mounted its biggest recall ever, of 3.8 million cars for unintended acceleration possibly caused by pedal-snaring floor mats.

At the headquarters in Japan, Katsuaki Watanabe was replaced as president by Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company's founder, but not before being publicly run through by Shoichiro Toyoda, the company's 84-year-old honorary chairman. Before a stunned audience of 400 executives, Mr. Toyoda asked Mr. Watanabe, "How many times have you made a mistake?" and said that Toyota's addiction to big, pricey cars and trucks reminded him of, well, G.M. and Chrysler.

Volkswagen GROUP The doings this year at Volkswagen and Porsche, two companies with ties to the same founding family, may help explain why schadenfreude is a German word. Porsche's chief executive, Wendelin Wiedeking, nearly engineered a David vs. Goliath takeover of vastly larger VW; his shrewd maneuvering netted him more than $100 million in annual compensation.

Mr. Wiedeking met his match in the 72-year-old VW board chairman, Ferdinand Piëch (who is also the grandson of Porsche's founder), who refused to surrender his company or his reputation as the auto industry's top overreacher. (Mr. Piëch had added Bentley and Lamborghini to the VW empire, created the white-elephant $80,000 VW Phaeton luxury sedan and revived Bugatti.)

As the collapsing economy showed that the Porsche takeover was spun from thin air -- including $14 billion of debt that nearly sent Porsche into bankruptcy -- Mr. Piëch used his backroom skills to scuttle the deal and drive Mr. Wiedeking, his archrival, into an unplanned retirement. Now, VW is absorbing Porsche instead of the reverse.

VOLVO Even solid, safety-conscious Volvo wasn't safe from 2009's potholes. Having put the Swedish carmaker on the block, Ford turned to China for a buyer. A deal is said to be nearly final for Geely to buy Volvo for $2 billion; Ford paid $6.5 billion in 1999.

The Volvo sale would remove the last piece of Ford's Premier Automotive Group, an awkward umbrella for Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo (and, briefly, Lincoln Mercury), for which Ford built an elaborate headquarters in Irvine, Calif.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The things you want in life

Senior Editor (West Coast) Mark Vaughn

Though he would be loath to admit it, my friend and colleague Claude Brodesser-Akner is what you would call a mensch, a doer of good deeds. When he used to sit next to me here in the Crain offices in Los Angeles, I'd always hear him on the phone arranging food for the hungry, clothing the poor, comforting the afflicted, etc., etc. You can't help but feel inadequate and selfish around someone like that. Just canonize him already. Except that as a member of the Jewish faith, I don't know if he can be canonized. Somebody write in and correct me on that.

He left the company a while ago, but I got an e-mail from him recently. I was being drawn into one of his schemes.

“Do you know anybody at Goodyear?” he asked.

Uh, where's this leading, Brodesser-Akner?

He had a friend, Dani Kollin, whose mom, Yona, was dying of cancer.

“She has maybe 20 good days left, and she wants a ride in the Goodyear blimp,” he said.

Brodesser-Akner does not beat around the bush. He continued.

“She's also expressed a desire to ride ‘dangerously fast' in a race car. Do you have any clout with [California Speedway president] Gillian Zucker out at Fontana? Was hoping to maybe try and get her into the pace car at the Pepsi 500 on Oct. 11th. If that's impossible, she'd be thrilled with 20 minutes on PCH in something with 12 cylinders. Any thoughts on how I can make any of that happen? And if so, can you ring me to discuss?”

I rang him. We discussed. I made phone calls.

Goodyear was the first company contacted, and the folks there jumped at the chance to do something with that big old airship of theirs. They came through with flying colors. Literally. I was later sent pictures of the entire Kollin family happily circumnavigating the Los Angeles basin in the gondola of the Goodyear blimp.

Brodesser-Akner and I discussed the stock-car ride and decided Yona might be too frail to climb in and out the window of a race car, Duke Boys-style. So we went with the 12-cylinder option. I called Lamborghini. Without hesitation, and I mean none, they set up a Murci�lago. God bless Lamborghini. A BMW 760Li V12 and an Aston Martin DBS were also lined up in short order. God bless those two fine manufacturers, too. They didn't ask any questions, didn't want any assurances of ink, they just came through as soon as they heard there was a real need, just as the people of Bedford Falls did when George Bailey needed help.

The following Tuesday, I drove the DBS up and met Yona and the Kollin family at their house. She looked pretty strong. If truth be told, she looked like a just-barely-older Mary Tyler Moore.

“Yes, I've heard that,” she said with a laugh.

She was a psychotherapist, still seeing patients even as the cancer she was fighting got worse. We got in the car, lowered the convertible top on the DBS and headed out, wandering through suburban streets.

“I do wish I wasn't dying, but I can look back and I know that I've really helped a lot of people,” she said. “And of course, I have my wonderful family. I just love them.”

So she had almost everything covered, satisfying-life-wise. The only thing missing--now that the blimp ride was done--was the supercars. Who'd have suspected this nice lady was a closet European supercar fan? You'd never have guessed it if you met her.

We cruised toward a freeway I knew that might not have too many cars on it and probably wouldn't have too much law-enforcement supervision. When we got to the on-ramp, a long, empty uphill number and the first chance to use all 12 of the DBS's magnificent cylinders, I floored it.

The conversation stopped. She closed her eyes, tilted her head back in the warm sunshine, drank in the tremendous acceleration and smiled the most contented smile I have ever seen in my life.

The DBS was doing what it was built for, howling at full howling wallop, and the three of us--Yona, me and the Aston Martin--were having a splendid time.

The freeway opened up, and I floored it again, the heck with my perfect driving record.

“How fast was that?” she asked.

“About 450 mph,” I said.

She smiled again.

We cruised a little more, going fast where conditions permitted it, really fast where conditions practically insisted on it. Then I took her back home. I called later that afternoon to see whether she wanted to go out in the BMW. She was too tired, Dani said.

But the following Friday was the Lamborghini Murci�lago, and she was ready. Again with the throttle, again with the mighty roar, again the conversation stopped, and the waves of horsepower and speed washed over her, making her forget for just a moment what she was going through. I, too, forgot a lot of things; a V12-powered Italian supercar will do that to you, no matter how old you are or how healthy. The power transports you not just down the road at unreal velocity, but to a place where everything, if only for that short moment, is wonderful.

Dani Kollin e-mailed me recently saying Yona died, surrounded by family, Dani holding her hand.

Though I didn't really know the Kollins, I was glad to have met them and to have been even remotely helpful at this trying time. I have my own perfectly wonderful family, a job that I can't believe they let me have, and even an occasional Italian supercar. I should have 30 or 40 more years to go if I don't screw it up. It makes me wonder what there is that I want to do now with what I have left. Every great mind, from John Lennon to St. Francis of Assisi, has said in one way or another, it's not about what you get for yourself, but what you have given to others that matters in the end. Maybe I'll start giving a little more.

Whatever you may celebrate at this time of year, may that spirit of giving stay with you. And may Santa park a Lamborghini Murci�lago under your tree.

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This article was last updated on: 12/23/09, 12:25 et