It appears that MINI’s challenge to Porsche won’t play out at the racetrack. The following letter [via MotorAuthority] is Porsche USA’s Detlev Von Platen’s response to MINI’s Jim McDowell.

Dear Jim,

Imagine our surprise to discover our former employee, now the head of Mini, has challenged us to a head-to-head race. As you surely know, Porsche has a long history of racing success, with more than 28,000 wins over the last 60 years. In our early days, we pitted ourselves against the giants, so we’ve been in your shoes.

But as you also know, Porsche doesn’t race for fame, stunts or publicity. We race to challenge ourselves; we race to push sports car technology; we race to translate every win on the track to our cars on the road. If you need a reminder of our intent, please take a look at this short video: http://tinyurl.com/37xdjqx

We’d ask that whether you’re talking to a dealer, reviewing dealer advertising, or speaking with friends and family, that you communicate our brand as Chevrolet moving forward. When you look at the most recognized brands throughout the world, such as Coke or Apple for instance, one of the things they all focus on is the consistency of their branding. Why is this consistency so important? The more consistent a brand becomes, the more prominent and recognizable it is with the consumer.

From a GM memo, signed by Alan Batey, vice president for Chevrolet sales and service, and Jim Campbell, Chevrolet’s vice president for marketing [via NY Times]. Chevrolet spokesfolks confirm the decision to abandon “Chevy,” saying the move comes from Chevrolet’s new ad agency of record, Goodby Silverstein. Chevrolet employees are reportedly already using a “Chevy Can,” similar to a “Cuss Can,” in which employees must deposit a quarter every time they say “Chevy” instead of “Chevrolet.” They’re serious about this thing.

Well, it was no fluke. Wieden + Kennedy can sell the crap out of the Challenger. It’s just too bad that every time people see a Caliber, Avenger, Journey or Caravan, they say “Dude, I’d rather be abducted by terrorists than that thing.” Especially if they’ve taken the time to read what “those consumer review sites” think about them.

Meet the Renault Vel Satis, erstwhile flagship of the Renault range. Dreamed up in the go-go ’90s for “non-conformist” customers who sought to “distance themselves from the traditional saloon,” the Vel Satis ended up being something of a whipping boy for styling critics. And why not? In retrospect, it’s hard to deny that the thing looks a bit like the love child of a Nissan Versa and a Cadillac DTS. And yes, it is the only car on earth that can make Nicolas Sarkozy look attractive by comparison. In fact, the most apt critique of the Vel Satis’s styling was probably Stephen Bayley’s assesment that it wasn’t quite ugly enough.

Wait, Steve Jobs is signing up for an EV at the rollout of the new iPhone? Is the zen master of Silicon Valley a Volt guy or a Leaf lover?

GM has announced pricing on its next small thing, the Cobalt-replacing Cruze compact, and the new price of entry is $16,995. That’s about a $2,000 premium over the base Cobalt (which starts at $14,990), a price hike that is justified by Chevy’s high expectations for the Cruze. As Chevy’s Jim Campbell puts it

For the price of a compact car, Cruze offers the styling, safety features, roominess, amenities, and refinement of a much more expensive car.

Base prices for the Cruze’s main competitors are $16,200 for a Corolla, $16,415 for a Civic, $16,095 for a Mazda3, $16,170 for a Sentra, $17,040 for a Focus, $178,485 for a Jetta, $14,865 for an Elantra, and $14,390 for a Forte (including typical destination fees).

The first Kia Soul hamster ad was good, but this latest one takes the same humor and message and blows the lid off the concept. Between this and the recent Challenger ad, 2010 is shaping up to be a good year for car advertising.

Speaking of car ads, never in my life would I have expected to see the grim reaper in a car ad. Especially not in the death seat. Especially not in a Mercedes ad. The boys from Sindelfingen never were known for their daredevil approach to advertising. Even at Volkswagen, which used to take more risk in their campaigns (

“Herr Schmitt! How often do we have to tell you: No negative advertising!!!!” It’s amazing that the Mercedes-Benz Brake Assistant System (BAS) ad [available after the jump] saw the light of day. Personally, I like it. Honestly, I’m envious of an agency that has gotten this ad through countless committees. Coming up with a good ad is easy. The hard part is having it approved.

So, the voiceover is wrong. Chrysler Group and its brands are too badly in need of credibility to be narrating an ad this good with a voice that sounds so similar to this guy’s. Otherwise, this spot is nearly flawless. Especially in comparison to other recent Wieden + Kennedy Dodge efforts like this one. But you all have longer memories than I… so when was the last time you saw a Dodge ad that hit the nail so directly on the head?

Automotive News [sub] dug through Infiniti’s patent filings, and came up with an unexpected find: a filing that reserves the terms “Infiniti Performance Line” and “IPL” to market

the brand’s use of “high-performance motor vehicle parts,” including turbochargers and superchargers for engines, cat-back exhaust and muffler systems, shifter knobs, suspension parts, brakes, sports seats and off-road headlights.

With Susan Doherty removed to a safe distance from Chevy’s marketing efforts, the “Excellence for Everyone” tagline that emerged during her brief tenure as VP for Marketing is already on its way out. Chevy spokesman Klaus-Peter Martin tells Automotive News [sub]

It’s not something you’re going to see for much longer

Having already informed the motor press that its Maybach brand will be making a long-overdue exit from the retail market, Daimler is getting all Weekend At Bernies about the failed super-premium marque. Instead of selling the Maybach name to an upstart Chinese firm, or developing an all-new model, Daimler has decided to keep the brand on life support in a more cynical fashion than even we could have anticipated: hiring an outside firm to develop a two-door version of its 57S sedan.

Nearly a month after ditching Chevy’s longtime ad agency Campbell-Ewald in favor of Publicis, GM management is said to be eying another change in strategy for its most important brand, as new Marketing boss Joel Ewanick begins making his presence felt. Sources tell AdAge that Ewanick is considering moving creative responsibilities for the $600m Chevy account from Publicis to Omnicom Group’s Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, although GM has not yet confirmed any such move. Anonymous GM execs tell AdAge:

They told him he could have virtual carte blanche in decision-making, and he’s already exercising his power to do so. He’s surrounding himself with people he feels most comfortable with and trusts… He didn’t pick Publicis, he inherited it.

Focusing on Chevy, and not being afraid to shake things up are two very encouraging signs from Ewanick. Having inherited former Marketing boss Susan Docherty’s gestating campaign centered around the line “Excellence for Everyone” and some intensely unmemorable Publicis ads, Ewanick clearly needs to bring the thunder, and according to AdAge, all of GM’s agencies are in a tizzy over the shake-up.

Given what it’s been through over the last several decades, GM is lucky to have any hard-core fans left at all. And yet sites like GMinsidenews.com [full disclosure: GMI is owned by TTAC’s parent company, Vertical Scope] have thrived as havens of near-unadulterated GM pride, bankruptcy and bailout notwithstanding. So when true-believer sites like GMI run works subtitled GM Annual Feature “Deletions” Continue: 2011 shows that not all of Old GM’s habits are dead–yet, TTAC sits up and takes notice (as soon as we come sniffing around and find it, anyway). The piece opens:

Just the other day, we posted the product changes for every 2011 General Motors product in the United States. This has become an annual feature on GMI, as it is always interesting to see what tweaks or screw-ups GM is adding to the next model year. The main problem we find in the annual model year changeis is the practice of removing content from products. After glancing at the 2011 stuff, I was surprised to see “New GM” continuing the trend of deleting content.’

To be fair, the 2011 changes show fewer content “deletions” than previous model years; however the fact that any content is being entirely deleted from a product is almost laughable considering GM’s dire attempt to win back U.S. customers. Perhaps other OEM’s delete features as well (trust me, they do), but they also don’t have a perception problem to deal with. GM, you’re building great products now…stop deleting content off of them every year.

GM’s now-infamous advertisement touting the payback of government loans “may have elasticized the reality of things,” in the words of Steve Rattner, but stretching the truth apparently pays off. Automotive News [sub] reports that a London public perception-tracking firm surveyed some 5,000 consumers, and found that The General’s image has improved since the ad started running. Of course, on YouGov’s brand image scale of 100 to negative 100, GM is up only five points to “17.” Clearly there’s still work to do.

Whenever TTAC took GM to task for branding run amok and excessive platform sharing, the example of Volkswagen has always been the key counterfactual. With seven brands available in Europe, the Volkswagen-Audi group is the continental GM, always looking for another way to repackage a pedestrian FWD platform. The only difference is that VW has actually been growing. But Wolfsburg’s brand profligacy is starting to bear some GM-style bitter fruit. Skoda has been surprisingly strong of late, actually making problems for the Volkswagen brand in certain markets. Seat, on the other hand, is not doing so well. With only one factory, at Martorell, near Barcelona, Seat has always been a slightly niche player, offering older VW designs with some Pontiac-style “emotional” styling flair and a sportier image. The problem now, as Seat CEO James Muir tells The WSJ [sub], is that

The brand really is too small for this plant

Running at only 60 percent of its 500,000 unit capacity, Seat is too small for its lone plant. As a result, VW is launching a last-ditch effort to save its dying brand.

After a solid six months of cringe-worthy Jeep ads, Chrysler is replacing ad agency Global Hue for the launch of the forthcoming 2011 Grand Cherokee. The Grand Cherokee’s launch materials will be developed by Wieden + Kennedy, which is currently the lead creative agency for the Dodge brand, and recently created the trippy “Alright, Kittens” spo t for the Grand Caravan. According to AgencySpy [via Jalopnik], GlobalHue will continue to be Jeep’s lead agency, despite offering few signs that it actually understands the brand. What do we mean by that? Hit the jump for more.

Automotive News Digital Edition [sub] reports that Mercedes-Benz is holding consumer clinics in the US, gathering input ahead of its launch of the first front-drive Mercedes models to be sold in the US. Sales of the B-Class-based front-drive models won’t being until “after 2011,” and Mercedes admits that a design freeze has not yet taken place. Still, one thing is certain: prospective customers are not being shown an MPV-like hatchback along the lines of the current B-Class that’s sold in Europe and Canada because of dealer concerns. Says MB-USA development boss Bernhard Glaser:

[Dealers] were concerned about the previous generation because it did stand out and that is kind of a whole different brand sell that you have to try and jump over. This will be seamless.

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge facing bailed-out financial and auto firms is convincing consumers to leave aside their anti-bailout prejudices and start buying their products. For GM, the first step in this process was as simple as repaying a loan and airing a “Mission Accomplished” advertisement that did everything but show Ed Whitacre landing on an aircraft carrier. For GM’s former captive finance arm, GMAC, escaping the stain of the bailout is a more prosaic matter. Having already launched an online consumer-oriented banking arm by the name of “Ally Bank,” the finance company is adopting the innocuous Ally moniker for its entire business, reports the Detroit News.

Considering the Suburban so essentially captures the tenuous line between myth and reality in American life, it’s a pity we don’t have 75 years of sales data to put some hard numbers behind the nameplate’s 75 years of history. Luckily, our data does go back to 1995, when America’s whirlwind romance with the SUV was just beginning to get serious. Given that, as Paul points out in today’s history, Suburbans didn’t become popular as family haulers until sometime in the early eighties, it’s safe to assume that 1996-2004 represents the absolute high-water mark for the nameplate’s volume. And ye gods has that volume dropped off ever since.

Despite breaking new ground in the field of brand leverage with its Ferrari World Abu Dhabi theme park, Ferrari does seem to have lost the plot a bit in relation to its “other” business building expensive sportscars. Ferrari’s abandonment of the manual transmission might be justified by faster lap times at Fiorano, and the lightning-fast, dual-wet-clutch transmissions that replace them certainly seem to help keep the Scuderia at the bleeding edge of technology (even if they’re designed and built by Getrag). But underlying the faster times, higher speeds and “digital supercar” honorifics from the motoring press, there’s a sense that Ferrari’s progress must accommodate an ever-more ambitious business plan as much as design the world’s most capable and emotive sportscars. And it’s starting to bear some troubling fruit.

There is a major shift underway in the Chinese auto market. Cars are morphing from something exclusively owned by the rich to an everyday item. Sure, luxury cars are big in China. But the volume growth is in low cost cars. As a result, the market share of sino-foreign joint ventures is eroding. Local players, such as BYD are gaining fast. The foreigners are getting worried.

Buick has confirmed long-standing rumors that it will offer a compact (Delta II) sedan (likely a rebadge of the Opel Astra) and a subcompact (Gamma II) MPV “in the near future,” reports the Detroit News.With the Regal launching this year, these two vehicles will create a Buick lineup with twice the options of its current three-car lineup. That current lineup competes in only two vehicle segments, whereas by 2013, Buick expects to compete in 47 percent of market segments with a lineup of vehicles that will all be newer than the Regal. In other words, if you think Buick’s problem is product, GM agrees with you… and it’s revamping the brand’s entire lineup over the next three years.

Maybe I’m showing my age here, but my definition of the term “younger” clearly doesn’t match that of The LA Times (though the age of the driver pictured is not given). And it’s not just the photo editor either…

Imagine you’re an automaker which enjoys an unprecedented drivetrain technology advantage over all other manufacturers. Imagine you build a brand around that drivetrain that becomes a cultural touchstone, a symbol of your firm’s technical prowess and commitment to the environment. What do you do next? The obvious answer is to build a luxury version to help make the extra profits needed to pay for the drivetrain’s development, right? Well, Toyota did just that, piggybacking the Lexus HS250h on its strong Lexus brand and Prius technology. The only problem? It’s not working.

Personally, the lack of a blue “Mark of Excellence” was the last thing I noticed about GM’s latest advertisement. Over at GMInsidenews.com, however, they picked up on it a little quicker. GM’s trademark “chiclet” has already been removed from all of its future vehicles, and Cadillac has publicly announced that it’s distancing itself from the GM name. In fact, post-bankruptcy, everyone at GM has said that the “GM brand” should take a backseat to Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC. But will The General go as far as get rid of its little blue box altogether?

If there were a global brand that GM should have killed, it’s probably Daewoo. Outside the South Korean market, the name is so associated with cheap, crummy cars, that GM rebadges nearly all of Daewoo’s exports as Chevrolets. And even then, the “Chevwoo” brand is tainted by the fact that GM refuses to take ownership of its troubled South Korean operations, and enforce a one-badge policy in line with Chevy’s global branding. And it’s not like the Daewoo name is all that beloved in Korea either, as The General recently figured out that as many as 40 percent of all Korean Daewoo buyers were replacing their badges with Chevy bowties supplied by the aftermarket. In fact, GM was threatening to get rid of the Daewoo name altogether and replacing it with Chevrolet. But apparently because of fears of alienating Korean customers and “resistance from labor unions,” GM has decided to introduce the Chevrolet brand to Korea without killing off Daewoo. As GM’s presser puts it:

today’s announcement is about brand coexistence, not brand replacement

Sound familiar?

When it’s an Acura? Wait, that’s not right…

Who built this luxury-car concept, shown at the Beijing the Auto Show? It’s not a brand that is well-known in America, but that’s not the only reason you might be left guessing…

Back in February, we took note of Chrysler’s “principled” stand on new-product secrecy, concluding:

Let’s face it: Chrysler needs buzz, hype, awareness, some kind of excitement surrounding its future generally and its forthcoming products in specific (if only in the irritating “teaser” format) almost as much as it needs anything else. Because as things stand right now,the baseline perception of Chrysler is of a dying company with nothing to offer. In this light, Chrysler’s principled rejection of hype is far more likely to be interpreted as keeping rushed semi-refreshes under wraps so they won’t be mocked to death by the time they go on sale. If that’s not the case, Chrysler has nothing to lose and everything to gain by building consumer awareness of new products. If it is, well, the truth will out sooner or later.

And apparently we’re not the only ones who think so. In fact, if the Detroit News is to be believed, literally everyone seems to think that Chrysler needs to start being more open, not only about its forthcoming products, but at every level of its business.

Chrysler won’t officially confirm it, but the Detroit Free Press cites Chrysler dealers who say that the tarnished-to-death Sebring nameplate will be replaced with the name “Nassau,” when Chrysler brings out a Fiat-facelifted version of the midsized sedan later this year. The Nassau name first entered Mopar history with the 1955 Windsor Nassau, a a two-door coupe advertised as having “the 100 million dollar look.” After a mere two model years as the Windsor Coupe nameplate, the Nassau name lay dormant for decades before returning as a 2000 styling buck for the Chrysler 300, and again as a midsized sedan/wagon concept in 2007.

TVR has never been a well-known brand in the United States, where its closest brush with fame was a cameo by a TVR Tuscan in the excrescent JohnTravolta vehicle Swordfish. In the UK, however, the TVR name is as rich in legend as Lotus or Morgan, speaking to a proud history of wild, hairy, fiberglass muscle cars with bizarre styling and even more bizarre handling characteristics. And like most blue-collar, British, backyard shed-based sportscar makers, TVR has not had an easy time of it lately. Having spent ruinous amounts developing an in-house V8 and a derivative straight-six engine under Peter Wheeler’s leadership in the 90s, the company fell on hard times and was bought in 2004 by 24 year-old Russian oligarchlet Alexander Smolensky. Despite promising to keep TVR British, Smolensky broke up the firm, kept the IP and brand rights, and reportedly moved production to Turin. Now, suddenly, Smolensky says he’s bringing TVR back, promising an appearance by an all-new Chevy LS-powered TVR at this summer’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. And yet TVR fans aren’t exactly falling all over themselves with glee… now why would that be?

Read through a few reviews of the Ford Fusion, and you’ll notice that few are able to avoid reference to the midsized sedan’s polarizing chrome grille. Though different reviewers compare the gaudy grille to different brand-name razors, the consensus seems to be that it’s more than a little over the top. Certainly no other car in the Camccord class lays on the plastichrome quite so thick, and it’s hardly the only Ford with class-leading amounts of cheesy bling. And honestly, until I saw the recent Ford ad shown above, I had no idea the Fusion could even be purchased with a body-color grille. The Blue Oval’s marketing forces are only just beginning to feature Fusions with the subtler grille in its advertising, and the difference is instantly noticeable. And with a little research, you’ll find that, having earned a special spot in the Pantheon of Detroit chrome abuse, Ford appears to be moving towards offering chrome-free fascias on more of its vehicles.

For 90 years, the ad agency Campbell-Ewald has been Chevrolet’s go-to source for all-American ad messages, including the “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” “Heartbeat of America,” “Like A Rock” and “American Revolution” campaigns. But despite a track record of household-name campaigns, trouble has been brewing between GM and C-E for months now. In December, GM announced that C-E would focus on developing Silverado pickup ads for the Winter Olympic Games, while car and crossover advertising would migrate over to the French agency Publicis. Today, AdWeek reports that Chevy is terminating its nearly century-old relationship with Campbell-Ewald, and will move its entire Chevrolet business to Publicis. So what does this mean for Chevy’s advertising?

US-market details about the long-awaited 2010 Saab 9-5 are starting to emerge, and they’re painting a bit of a frightening picture for the struggling entry-luxe brand. In order to capitalize on the desperation of Saab fans who nearly saw their beloved brand give up the ghost several times in the last year, Saab is releasing the 2010 9-5 in Aero spec only until the 2011 model year begins. Did we mention that, including destination charges, the 300 hp AWD flagship model will get you only ten bucks change for your $50k check?