Royal Ford's Notebook:

Honda's unfortunate recall; Porsche's terminal decline?; Brazil's car carnival; Hello, Tata

Honda's hiccup

Sometimes, the best laid plans ... wish I had thought of that.

But in that category: Honda’s massive recall of various 2001, 2002, and 2003 Accords, Civics, and Acura TL sedans.

What was the intent? Make Honda the safest car on the road.

The unfortunate outcome: a gargantuan recall at a time when auto manufacturers are scrambling to offer as standard fare safety equipment that could save your life.

I credit Honda, along with Hyundai and Kia, with dragging the rest of a reluctant world into offering free multiple airbags, ABS, and traction and stability control.

So it is with some regret that I have to point out the recall of well-intentioned safety equipment.

It seems that the airbags in some of these models from these years have an airbag inflator that is too powerful: so powerful that its air pressure can send metal fragments through a driver’s airbag and kill (in only one instance) or injure the occupant.

Check it out here.

Time for Porsche to call 911?

Full story to follow once I figure out who owns and runs the once prestigious company as Volkswagen (The People’s Car) prepares to step on the neck of Porsche (the Rich People’s Car). Did U.S. management screw the pooch, or did German arrogance and greed do the deed?

Film at 11.

Car carnival in Brazil

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here.

A Wall Street Journal missive from Sao Paulo says that, "A rebound by the Brazilian auto industry this year has been so swift and so widespread that automakers are now planning new hires and expanded output.’’

This ain’t Detroit, baby.

But why?

Brazil has used tax breaks, loosened loan requirements and better payoff rates.

All well and good. But here is what caught my eye, and it could well be a global lesson: Brazil has virtually no home-grown auto industry. Its auto industry is an amalgam of multinational manufacturers who have put down roots here — Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen , Fiat, Renault.

That’s four languages for starters that you’d need to do business here.

 Tata does not always mean good-bye

Welcoming news from Tata Motors Ltd., which has just landed $289 million in private backing, eliminating the need for the India-based company to go before the ghosts of the British Empire asking for money.

An odd pas de deux since India is now building two fabulous autos from the wheeled history of its once dominant colonizer: Jaguar and Land Rover.

And if Tata wants to do no more than spice up the nomenclature of an already fabulous tactile lineup of autos, can the Jaguar XKR Bazil high performance coupe, the dexterous Land Rover Chakra Phool, or the Jaguar XJ Garam Masala luxury sedan be long in the waiting? 

GM’s biggest beast — the Hummer

Talk about downsizing.

GM’s biggest beast has hummed its final tune under the bankrupt company’s ownership. Once the arch-symbol of American super-sizing, environmental carelessness, and insatiable thirst for fossil fuels, the Hummer brand is nearly sold.

GM is not saying with whom it has reached a tentative agreement (according to news reports Tuesday, GM had reached a preliminary agreement with a company in China), but any company buying the brand had best be ready to concentrate on the ever-shrinking, but still viable niche market for this hungry growler. A hot product for GM for a while, it turned out to be one of the many "distractions’" that arose from GM offering too much product while not paying attention to what was once its core: selling cars to Americans.

The symbolism here is great as companies from what was once America’s industrial heartland, where they grew cars like Napa Valley grows grapes — Detroit and Ohio, likely the two states hit hardest by GM’s bankruptcy — are cutting their crops, leaving some fields permanently fallow.

Instead of big maples, towering pines, vast fields of tall and whispering corn, America’s Big Three are on the prowl for a smaller crop: the small cars they let wither on the vine while trimming the bountiful profits of SUV and truck sales.

"Let the Koreans have the small car market,’’ a top GM executive told me during the heyday of huge vehicles, huge profits.

And how’s that worked out?

Plays well in Seoul and Tokyo, if not in Peoria.

But what’s interesting down on the industrial farm is that the three American manufacturers are taking a trident’s prong approach to bringing small cars to American roads.

GM — vague as it so often has been, as it sent white smoke messages from its tangled innards in the gleaming towers on the Detroit River — says it will stay right at home, thank you, shedding its European Opel division, and developing a small car right here on American soil.

In a new ad already launched, the announcer intones, “There was a time when our cost structure could compete worldwide. Not anymore.”

And then he makes a promise that the U.S. government, now the saddled owner of most of GM, surely must hope is fulfilled: “This is not about going out of business. This is about getting down to business,” he says, backed by images of America’s own triad: an American flag, sports, and a moon landing. Made me hunger for a slice of apple pie.

But what of Chrysler, also a government protectorate?

They are betting on a deal with Fiat that will let them build small American cars on Fiat platforms. And I can think of a good example: Fiat makes a spiffy little two-door hatchback called the Abarth 500.

Blunt of nose, sloped of butt, but with a nice greenhouse of glass for visibility, it cranks 135 horsepower and 152 pounds-feet of torque from a turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Turbos mean power and gas savings. That translates into a top speed of 128 miles per hour should you get on a club track (or go racing in the right division), ensconced in wraparound sports seats and reading the turbo-boost gauge. A model called the Esseesse (the sound the passenger makes at top speed?) cranks out 160 horsepower. Younger buyers like smaller, zippier cars. Other than perhaps a Jeep, or a Viper none of them can afford, I’m hard-pressed to conjure a Chrysler product to bring young buyers into the fold.

And then there is Ford, perhaps best suited to jump on the small car train.

That’s because they already build a wonderful Ford Focus in Europe. Built it here once, dropped it. Why oh why? But it’s coming back, crossing the seas for home.

Then there’s the Fiesta, smaller yet. I haven’t driven it in Europe, but it’s a good seller there and you can be sure — knowing what I know about European tastes and demand for quality and reliability — that this will not be the Fiesta that, in the U.S., should have been called the Siesta.

And even one step further than this (detailed Ford story coming soon) is a Ford work/delivery van called the Transit, already nearly a million strong in other parts of the world and built in Turkey, that is so suited to a myriad of tasks performed by tradespeople, craftspeople, and delivery companies. Why so suited: It carries a lot of cargo, can easily replace the 20-foot box trucks that many of these folks use but are larger than they need, and, importantly, you can park it easily in the thickest of cities.

Did it in Manhattan myself on a delivery route. But as I said, more to come.

Chrysler's marriage in bankruptcy

Call it what you will: trousseau, tocher, or the more familiar term, dowry, and Chrysler-the-bride-to-be might be in more tangible trouble in another day, another time.

Chrysler has agreed to a marriage with Fiat of Italy that President Barack Obama said yesterday gives the company a "new lease on life."

And yet Chrysler is coming to the marriage in bankruptcy, filing for Chapter 11 to let a judge figure out who gets what of the billions Chrysler owes to creditors. In certain countries, in certain times, a bride showing up with no dowry could mean the end of a marriage, and psychological and physical torment at the hands of her in-laws.

But Obama assured all yesterday that going the Chapter 11 route is needed to convince potential future customers — and current owners of Chrysler products — that the company, by merging with Fiat, is on the right path.

"The hard path is the right path,’’ the president declared.

It was a different — though not necessarily expected outcome from just 24 hours before — when it appeared that the acquiescence of the four banks holding the bulk of Chrysler’s debt to take a $2 billion payoff would help save the company.

And yet other creditors that hold about 30 percent of the debt, notably hedge funds, would not agree to what The Associated Press reported was a $2.25 billion cash payout.

The hedge-funders — wealthy investors — are the Texas Hold 'Em poker players of today’s financial markets, dealing outside normal rules of regulation and playing such games as selling short, leveraging, arbitrage, and derivatives.

And boy, don’t they hate to lose.

Their bet in this case: that a bankruptcy judge will give them more than the $2.25 billion offered.

Wonder how many of them drive a Chrysler?

Big moves on autos

He had been in command only a few weeks when he told the struggling American auto industry that it had better shape up or the government would let loose the lines and let it ship out.

"We will not let our auto industry simply vanish,’’ President Barrack Obama said. But neither would he let its leaders hide in the fog while spending taxpayer money.  "We cannot make the survival of our auto industry dependent on an unending flow of dollars.’’

He was rejecting restructuring plans put forth after the companies had received their first infusion of federal money provided by the Bush Administration last December.

Rick Wagoner, GM CEO and chairman: Outta here. Chrysler: Arrange a marriage with Fiat so you can build small cars.

The streamlining continues and, while painful with job losses and plant closings, an industry depended upon not just by the U.S., but globally, the outcome is critical. General Motors (a huge player in the world market) is cutting jobs, plants, dealerships, and even its beloved Pontiac line. Chrysler is in a tight courtship with Fiat of Italy in a move that could provide transcontinental benefits. Ford, meanwhile, seems to have streamlined on its own, has not asked for federal aid, and appears poised to pounce once the economy rebounds.

Obama appears unafraid to put the pedal to the metal.

Moose crash testing

In the world of test-driving autos, there can be moments of danger, particularly on racetracks or high, unprotected, twisting mountain roads, and offroad courses such as Moab, Utah, where some mistakes are clearly not survivable.

Ice in the Yukon, heat and dangerous roads in the Mexican Baja, the turn at Daytona International Speedway that you cannot whistle past without remembering that Dale Earnhardt and his 3 Car met their ends there.

There are moments of sheer awe over the landscapes through which we are often sent — Death Valley and the Mojave Desert, the beautiful climb to the Nurburgring in Germany, the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific Coast Highway.

And there are sometimes lingering bouts of boredom, as in driving across F###*** Nebraska — as in "When are we going to be out of F###*** Nebraska?"

But there are often moments of great humor, sometimes after the fact.

As I finished a column on Saab filing for bankruptcy — full of both ominous portent and promise — I was reminded of a story I once did from Stockholm.

In Sweden, where moose abound, both Volvo and Saab put their vehicles through what they call "moose crash testing." They do this because, when a car hits a moose at full height, the legs snap on impact with the front of the car, but often more than half a ton of what's left comes crashing through the windshield and often can peel back a portion of roof. Drivers die, cars are filled with a mess you don't want me to describe.

So the tests, tires strung on a cable at windshield level, vehicles slammed into them, are to determine the integrity of the protective frame around the windscreen.

In a column about my Volvo testing, I mentioned moose crash testing for what was then a New England readership — where we have plenty of moose, where people are killed every year, and where both Volvo and Saab got their first and best purchases on American soil.

I figured folks would want to know. And yet, one woman in Cambridge, Mass., (go figure) wrote to admonish me for promoting the "killing of these innocent creatures" just to protect humans.

Somehow, she thought they were slamming Volvos into living moose.

I responded, in print, that I sure as hell was happy that I had not mentioned the testing they do on child safety seats. Suffer the poor children.

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