Word: rabbiting
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...live there. They take a photograph of the scene, then move certain figures a micrometer, then take another picture. They do this about a 100,000 times to produce, in four or five years, a feature film like Chicken Run or Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit...
...could be that I'm no less a traditionalist than the dear eccentrics in Curse of the Were-Rabbit, determined to celebrate their vegetable festival as they've done for 500 years. Aardman is a business, and with Were-Rabbit earning only half the box office cash of Chicken Run, DreamWorks will want to protect its investment; Park and Lord will have to listen more attentively to Katzenberg. (He is unlikely, for example, to approve another Wallace and Gromit feature after the first one tanked...
...help fuel a modest turnaround. Sales in the U.S. are up 11.8% through September of this year, thanks to all-new versions of the Jetta, Passat and Golf (now going by its old name, Rabbit), and Eos has sold out since debuting last month. But analysts estimate VW will lose an additional $800 million in the region in 2006, and they aren't sanguine about 2007. Until VW can address some production and quality issues, it can forget about profitable growth. "North America is one of VW's intractable problems," says Stephen Cheetham, an analyst with Bernstein Research in London...
Another element of VW's strategy involves heading downmarket, reversing a silly foray into the luxury segment with its $68,000-plus Phaeton sedan, which flopped. The company has slashed sticker prices on the Jetta (lowered $1,400, to $16,500) and Rabbit ($1,000, to $15,000), hoping to recover profits with higher volume. And future models won't contain as many standard features, according to Hallmark. The idea is to produce cars that can compete more effectively in the midmarket. Designing cars for the local competitive landscape is precisely what the Japanese have done for decades, of course...
...really wants a comeback in America, however, it will have to reshuffle priorities. The U.S. sales team has been fighting for more Rabbits, which are selling well. But VW can't reproduce enough Rabbits to meet demand; it supplies other markets first. VW often exports new models to North America only after taking care of Europe, where it enjoys a market-leading position that it wants to protect. The Rabbit, for one, launched in Europe as the Golf two years before it came to America; the next edition will arrive first on the Continent too. "They're trying to change...