Posted by Alex Bale
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
It hasn't been a good start to the year for car sales in 2013, as figures released by the Society Of The Irish Motor Industry show. Volkswagen sit atop the sales pile, following on from its best-selling performance last year, while Ford occupies second place in the charts with Toyota in third. Significantly though, all three of the big three have lost sales compared to last January, as much as 45% in Toyota's case. So who's doing well? In the top ten selling brands, Hyundai, Kia, Audi and BMW all posted percentage gains, while further down the chart, Peugeot, Honda and Mitsubishi are all performing better than they did this time last year. The star players though are Seat and Porsche. Seat has more than doubled its sales compared to last January while Porsche has gone from selling two cars in the first 31 days of 2012 to this year selling a whopping... eight. The overall market is down by 18.5% and industry watchers are trying to determine if this is a sign of a terrible year to come or an early indication that the new registration system is spreading sales out a bit.
Posted by Alex Bale
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Volkswagen adds Taigun but drops profit. Has the financapocalypse finally gotten its dirty fingers into VW?
This is the new Taigun, a concept compact crossover that Volkswagen has just shown at the Sao Paulo motor show in Brazil. Why there? Simply because Brazil's burgeoning economy is one of the boom markets for new cars at the moment, and VW is keen to capitalise on its already strong market position there.
We've been told in recent weeks that VW is working on a new range of crossovers and SUVs, but this is a bit smaller than we expected. Instead of being a Polo-based rival to the likes of the Nissan Juke and Mini Countryman, it's actually built on the same platform as the VW Up, and is smaller again than the Juke.
It is a big bigger than the Up mind, with a 50mm longer wheelbase and a much bigger boot.
It gets a turbocharged version of the Up's 1.0-litre 75bhp petrol engine, boosting power to 100bhp. And will it make production? Almost certainly, in spite of VW saying that it's just a concept for now, and you can expect Skoda, Seat and Audi versions too.
It't not all good news for VW though. The German car giant is due to announce third quarter earnings of around €2.3-billion this week, which sounds great, but is actually a whopping 21% down on the same period last year.
Of course, some of that can be attributed to the fact that the ever-popular Golf is on a run-out now while we await the start of sales for the new MkVII version, but there's no doubt that the European car sales crisis has finally reached the door of VW Towers.
