Word: subcompacts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hyundai (rhymes with Sunday) will offer U.S. buyers a front-wheel-drive subcompact and a rear-wheel-powered compact, both made in its modern factory on an 86-acre site in the port city of Ulsan. This year the plant's production capacity will be increased from 150,000 to 300,000 vehicles a year in anticipation of U.S. sales. Just what the subcompact will look like is known only to Hyundai officials, who have code named it the X car. It will be unveiled in March and is expected to sell for as little as $5,000. That would...
...warmup for its American offensive, Hyundai last year introduced its Pony subcompact into Canada, anticipating sales of no more than 5,000 cars in the first year. Thanks largely to its attractive base price of just $4,600 (in U.S. dollars), Pony sales topped 25,000, or 11% of the Canadian import market...
...most ambitious of the efforts was started three weeks ago by General Motors. The giant automaker launched Saturn Corp., a separate company apart from the main GM structure, to produce a new subcompact car, starting in 1987. General Motors Chairman Roger Smith said that he wanted the new subsidiary to be free of the mother company's entrenched procedures. Saturn will have its own engineering and design staffs and its own contract with the United Auto Workers. It is to be a test track for new ways of making, selling and servicing cars. Saturn will, in effect, be an entrepreneurial...
...Columbia University before becoming Renault's U.S. marketing director in 1959. Hanon spent his 26-year career at Renault earning a reputation as a visionary car executive. The architect of Renault's move into the U.S. market, he took part in the development of the successful R-5 subcompact (Le Car) in the 1970s. The company now owns 46% of American Motors and 41% of Mack Trucks. Both have become profitable bright spots in the company's panorama of gloom. AMC made an estimated $15 million last year, after years of losses, while Mack has been in the black since...
...Hanon could not escape blame for a number of recent strategic errors. Renault's new Super-5 turned out to be too expensive ($4,095) for a two-door subcompact and looked too much like the old R-5. Early sales have run about 25% below projections. Conversely, demand for the new top-of-the-line R-25 has far outstripped production levels. Concedes a French government official: "In the all-out war that the auto industry has become, such errors are fatal...