Automobile Retailers

The Mercedes-Benz A-Class continues to set the bar for passenger cars around the world. With more than 500,000 units produced within three and a half years, the A-Class is among the best Benz sellers and continues to show itself to be ahead of the trends. With recent additions and amendments, the A-Class is showing itself to be more youthful, environmentally compatible, and attractive than ever before.

The A-Class premiered in 1997 and has since been a trendsetter within its class, producing cars that have been innovative and fun to drive. With about 1.7 million customers so far, the A-Class features an outstanding safety rating, great reliability, and incredible flexibility.

With a new five-door sedan and a three-door coupe hitting markets in recently upgraded models, the A-Class is getting set to take yet another run at some major market share. The models feature newly designed headlamps, a redesigned front bumper, a lower air intake, and a newly designed radiator grille.

Fuel economy is also up from other models. The car will use a direct-injection diesel engine that has reduced fuel consumption by more than 8% over recent models of the same car. By fall of 2008, Mercedes will introduce the BlueEFFICIENCY package. This package will add further improvements to fuel efficiency, rolling resistance, aerodynamics, weight, and general energy management. The package is, so far, only scheduled for availability on the three-door coupe.

Also available for release in fall of 2008 will be an automatic shut-off switch that switches the engine off automatically while idling. The driver will be informed of the engine shut-off by a special display on the dash. Within fractions of a second, the engine is restarted as soon as the clutch is operated or the brake is released. To this end Mercedes-Benz uses a starter generator which is linked to the crankshaft via the drive belt, allowing the engine to start-and-stop much quicker and more comfortably than with a conventional starter.

Watch for the new A-Class to hit Mercedes-Benz retailers soon and take one out for a test drive to experience these changes for yourself.

Before Toyota knocked one out of the park with the advent of the Scion, they tried something else called Toyota Project Genesis to bring in the more youthful market of car buyers. The media considered Toyota Project Genesis to be one of the worst flops in the company’s history, but many market insiders commented that the results of the project actually served to be highly influential when it came to developing the winning market strategy that gave the Scion its boost.

Toyota Project Genesis was launched in 1999 as a task force. It was created by Yoshimi Inaba, the president of Toyota Motor Sales USA, and James Press, the COO of Toyota Motor Sales. The idea was to use the task force to heavily market three new products from Toyota.

The three new products were the Celica, the MR2 Spyder, and the Toyota Echo. The cars would actually be bundled together and the advertisements would be significantly different from other ads featured by the carmaker at the time. In America, the cars were in segments that were shrinking and youthful drivers were not attracted to those particular vehicles. Regardless of this fact, Toyota in Japan pushed for the American market to push the vehicles as “youth cars.”

This broad failure in market research and stubbornness started to be felt soon after the launch of the project. While the Echo sold well in its first year to its targeted demographic, the age of average buyers soon crept up and the market share within the youth demographic waned. The MR2 Spyder didn’t sell well at all. Only the Celica sold well at first, but sales of that vehicle trailed off by 2005 by several thousand a year.

In the end, it was said that a perfect storm of limited budgetary assets, strong internal resistance to the project, and poor market research brought down Toyota Project Genesis. The plug was pulled in 2001 and Toyota announced the introduction of the Scion, which would be targeted to the market that Project Genesis worked so hard to grab. The success of the Scion is directly attributed to Toyota’s learning experience from the failure of Project Genesis.

This week’s Pontiac vehicle that was featured in popular American culture comes straight out of the 1980s NBC lineup. I, being a boy between the ages of nine and 13, couldn’t wait until the crime fighters Michael Knight and KITT graced my television screen each week.

But even though Michael Knight did all the work, my eyes were glued to the sleek black Pontiac Trans Am as it sped through the streets, deserts and anywhere else it needed to go to catch the bad guy. If you’ve forgotten some of the fascinating things about this vehicle, here is a quick refresher course:

• KITT stands for the “Knight Industries Two Thousand,” the company that actually built the car with artificial intelligence for fighting crime.

• The voice of KITT was William Daniels, the same guy that rose to fame as Mr. Feeney in the 1990s TV series Boy Meets World. He was also in Quincy and many more shows over the years.

• This popular Trans Am had a revolutionary Molecular Bonded Shell, allowing it to resist any damage by a variety of weapons and even heavy artillery.

• NBC actually used a stock 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am for creating KITT. Engineers customized it into what it became in the TV show.

• There’s a rumor saying that GM sent the very first of that model straight from the assembly line to Universal Studios. While the show was popular, people would go to their nearest Pontiac dealer and ask for the Knight 2000. Unfortunately, this actual vehicle did not exist.

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to see the new Knight Rider this fall!