#AskTheBestAndBrightest

24/7 Wall Street seems to believe that Hyundai’s junior brand could go away in the next year and a half, as it named Kia to its “Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2011” list. This despite the fact that Kia’s first-half sales were up 15 percent over the first half of 2009, and Kia’s rolling 12-month sales are over 22 percent higher than its performance in the previous 12 months. So, why does 24/7 Wall Street see Kia disappearing?

Kia Motors Corporation is one of the two car brands of Hyundai of South Korea. It has always been a marginal brand. Its stable mate, Hyundai USA, has a reputation for high quality cars like the Sonata and Genesis. Kia sells “low rent” cars and SUV nameplates like the Sorento and Rio. As GM and Ford have already discovered, it is expensive to maintain multiple brands and storied car names, including Pontiac, Saturn, and Mercury, are disappearing. Most Kia cars sell for $14,000 to $25,000. Hyundai has several cars in the same price range. Hyundai’s Sonata has quickly become one of the best-selling cars in America, and its Genesis flagship model competes with mid-sized BMWs and Mercedes. The parent company will take a page from several other global car companies and dump its weakest brand.

What did the hippie say to the horse? Woooaahh. What the figurative hippie said to the car is an entirely more ambiguous matter…

Just yesterday, I noted in my write-up on Mazda’s June sales performance that

with a Nagare-saddled Mazda5 replacement waiting in the wings, Mazda isn’t even well positioned to defend the segment it helped define in the US market, just as GM finally starts taking it seriously

Well, today Mazda announced to Automotive News [sub] that it would be targeting 30k annual sales of the Mazda5’s “Nagare-saddled” replacement. Last year’s 18,488 units was the second-best sales year on record for the 5, as sales fell from 2008’s all-time high of 22,021. In short, Mazda’s compact CUV has always been at least 8k units away from its new Mazda5 sales goal. On the other hand, Mazda never properly marketed the 5, and both GM and Ford are moving into the segment with the GMC Granite and Ford C-Max. Will Detroit’s move into this otherwise-ignored segment (currently contested by only the 5 and the Kia Rondo) bring buyers in, or force already-marginalized players like Mazda out? The fate of the 5 seems to hang on the answer to that one question.

To be perfectly honest, I wrote about half a post on GM’s decision to give Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga a new Corvette after he was robbed of a perfect game by a bad call, before deciding not to run it. Why? Well, the story is classic Detroit: Galarraga’s victimhood is exactly the image GM would like to associate itself with (remember, everything was going fine before the credit markets collapsed), and The General owed the Tigers anyway because of owner Mike Ilitch’s decision to not charge GM for ad space on the stadium’s fountain when it was in bankruptcy (Ilitch added free Ford and Chrysler ads in the interest of fairness). In short, there was plenty of room for some trademark TTAC cynicism… and yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to twist the knife.

With the autoblogosphere abuzz over Peter Cheney’s “unintended acceleration event,” Jill McIntosh has made a fascinating connection between one auto-journo’s son’s voyage of manual transmission discovery, and a former Ontario Attorney General’s killing of a cyclist back in September. Linking to a Toronto Star report on the trial of Michael Bryant, who killed cyclist Darcy Allan Shephard, McIntosh notes a strange similarity between that fatal incident and Cheney Junior’s garage door tango:

According to a statement read in court, reprinted in the Toronto Star today: Bryant hits the brakes. His vehicle stalls. Bryant tries to start his car, but it stalls again, lurching forward … Bryant tries to start the car again. He’s concentrating on the Saab’s sensitive clutch with his head down. He succeeds at restarting the engine and the Saab accelerates into Sheppard, who lands on the hood.

Obviously, two incidents do not a crisis make, but this is hardly the only evidence suggesting that manual gear-swapping is fast becoming a lost art. But do we really want to further stigmatize manual transmissions by mandating special licenses for manual-equipped cars, as McIntosh suggests?

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?