#Factory

While Honda and Mazda are just getting their respective footholds in Mexico (the two automakers are opening up respective assembly plants in Mexico), Nissan has had a long presence south of the border, building cars at its Augascalientes, Mexico plant for decades.

I didn’t drive the Bugatti Veyron, but here you are reading my review. So how exactly did an automotive journalist with zero manufacturer connections, and no income (at the time) aside from menial paychecks as a drum instructor get the nerve to write a Veyron review?

“SOLD…to the gentleman by the staircase!” bellowed the auctioneer, before everyone applauded the winner of the night’s ultimate charity prize: a trip to Bugatti central for a factory tour and a full day of seat time in the Veyron. As I stood next my brother, who was still in shock from being that high bidder, I knew he’d once again give TTAC a taste of the high performance combined with the brilliantly decadent. But, over a year later, the good Dr. Mehta is still busy beating cancer into remission. And we’re running out of time before the Veyron slips into the history books.

Luckily, he was kind enough to being me along.

Hyundai and Kia are capitalizing on their strong sales momentum in the US market, as Reuters reports

South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group said on Thursday it was aiming to raise its U.S. auto sales by 18.2 percent this year to 1.06 million vehicles, up from its previous target of 1.01 million.

The announcement was made during a visit to the United States by Chung Mong-koo, chairman of the world’s fifth-biggest automotive group which includes Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors .

Hyundai and Kia’s combined US market share hit 10.1 percent as of May this year, up from 7.7 percent last year and 3.3 percent in 2001. And with the group’s sales seemingly limited only by its ability to produce cars fast enough, Reuters notes that the Korean media is rife with speculation that Hyundai could open another US factory. The company denies any such plans exist, but if its sales keep growing, more US-market production is only a matter of time.

Today, I saw a new, and so far the finest specimen of Japan’s new export products: A car factory. Remember when the Nikkei wrote about a new Toyota factory in the Miyagi Prefecture with a U-shaped assembly line where the assembly time is cut down to a third? Not only did they get it wrong. They missed the best part of the story: Budget car factories, ready for export. Of course, that’s not how it was sold to the natives.

Ohira is a little village near Sendai. Sendai is a town two Shinkansen hours north of Tokyo. The area is famous for its beef tongue, not the hottest export item. Ohira was known for exactly nothing until Toyota decided in 2007 to relocate their factory from Sagamihara, in the outskirts of Tokyo, up into the woods of Ohira.

A year later, the whole region went into shock:

A factory that can make cars fast should be the goal of every automaker. The higher the throughput, the lower the cost. Japanese companies had for long been on the leading edge of efficient and flexible production. Now, Toyota has made a big step forward, reports Reuters.

Introduced in a new factory of Toyota subsidiary Central Motor Co, the production line is shaped like the letter “U”. It allows for more than one task to take place at once on a vehicle. The engine can be installed in the front while underbody parts are added in the back. In a way, Toyota introduced multithreading to car manufacturing that had been sequential since Henry Ford.

Did we say that Japanese brands have to do something to stop the erosion of market share in China? Nissan took the advice and said today that they started construction of their second factory in China’s southern Guangdong Province. According to The Nikkei [sub], the factory will open in 2012 with an annual capacity of 240,000 vehicles.

Speaking to MarketWatch at the Detroit Auto Show, Tesla Chairman Elon Musk apparently just revealed that the Tesla Model S sedan will be released “within two and a half years.” Which is interesting considering Musk claimed that production would start in 2011 at the Model S launch last March. But then, Tesla is still trying to decide on a factory location, apparently waffling between former aeronautical manufacturing locations in Downey and Long Beach. And apparently Tesla’s mere consideration of a brownfield site in Downey has drawn protests from a group calling themselves The Raging Grannies.