Randomly Noted

Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Co., worries about traffic gridlock on a global basis.

Zhengrong Shi, chairman and chief executive of China’s Suntech Power Holdings, one of the world’s largest solar panel companies, wonders whether “perhaps there’s too much democracy” in the U.S., making it difficult for the nation to adopt a coherent and consistent industrial policy.

“There are no decisions being made,” he said. “It’s like in a company. Sometimes you hear all the voices. The CEO knows what the right decision is and sometimes they just want to bang the table and say, ‘Let’s do it.’”

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The major automakers reported their December sales today and for the 11th straight month, they saw gains. Interestingly, sales of autos were down sharply for some of the automakers while light trucks and SUVs were up sharply – perhaps yet another sign of people feeling a little more economically comfortable.

In terms of auto sales, Chrysler had 46.5% fewer sales this past December then the year before. GM was off 20.6% and Toyota was down 16.1% The decline at GM put it in fourth place in terms of number of cars sold.

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There was probably a lot of high-fiving and hand clapping when the Tesla Motors IPO was priced and closed the day $6.89 higher – a remarkable feat for an IPO these days and especially given how poorly the stock market in general performed.

So, maybe I am taking the glass half full approach, but, it seems to me the underwriters really mispriced it and left a lot of money on the table. The company itself sold 11.88 million shares. If the deal had been priced closer to where it closed rather than the original $17 price this morning, the company (a novel electric car maker) would have taken in an additional $81 million or so in proceeds. And for the selling shareholders? They would have pocketed nearly $10 million more.

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Even in a healthier IPO market than the one we are in, this one coud be a hard sell. Zipcar, a car-sharing alternative to traditional auto-rental companies, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public today.

There’s a lot to like about this feisty little company. It allows you to rent a car by the hour, not just by the day. And by keeping cars at places like colleges and corporate campuses, it makes renting easy and more approachable

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The UAW says it will try to claw back benefits it gave up when the U.S. auto industry nearly went under. Great. Just when there’s a glimmer of hope that at least two of the U.S. auto makers – Ford and GM – will survive (I’m still not sure about Chrysler), here comes the United Auto Workers with their old-thinking. The global auto industry is in such flux, the post-crisis UAW needs to be a partner, not a problem. Nissan-Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn, visiting our newsroom this week, spoke of the multi-billion-dollar bet his firm is placing on the advent of electric vehicles. I can’t tell you if electric cars will take off in a big way or experience a slow climb in popularity. What I do know is there will be more electric cars on the road in coming years, just as there are increasing numbers of hybrids. It’s also clear that the established auto makers face mounting competition from upstart rivals, including a surging Hyundai and a pack of Chinese up-and-comers. Let’s hope the latest UAW rhetoric is simply a cheap effort to excite the rank and file rather than a sign the leadership has learned little from the American industry’s near-death experience.

It’s been a bad couple of months for Toyota. First there were the massive recalls with certain models to fix gas pedals that were malfunctioning. Now we learn that a well-regarded consumer magazine is telling readers not to buy one of the company’s high-end SUVs – the first time in nearly ten years Consumer Reports has issued such a warning.

Here’s what Consumer Reports had to say: “Consumer Reports has judged the 2010 Lexus GX 460 SUV a Don’t Buy: Safety Risk because of a problem we experienced during our standard emergency-handling tests. When pushed to its limits on our track’s handling course, the rear of the GX we bought slid out until the vehicle was almost sideways before the electronic stability control system was able to regain control.”

Read the full review here.

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Chrysler is accelerating the relaunch of its big sedan, the Chrysler 300, to November from early 2011. The scoop, by colleague Jeff Bennett, underscores Chrysler’s plight: it doesn’t have enough hot new models; the launch of new Fiat-based vehicles is off in the future; and meanwhile Chrysler’s brand identity is dying on the vine. What is Chrysler? What does it stand for? Ten to 15 years ago, the answer was clear and simple: world-class sport-utility vehicles and minivans. Today? That’s a head-scratcher. How will the 300 fare this fall in what’s likely to be a still-weak economy, with consumers worried about their jobs, paychecks and a resurgence in the price of oil? Here’s my thinking: A revamped Jeep Grand Cherokee is due to hit dealer lots in May. It will do well among people with secure jobs who like riding big and high and don’t mind getting walloped at the gas station. It will command a robust price, thanks in part to a new engine with improved fuel efficiency, and it will help Chrysler regain some of its dwindling identity. The 300, however, will do only so-so at dealerships. As a result, the price will have to be relatively low, eating into Chrysler’s profit margin. But on the bright side, the 300 will buy Chrysler time while it scrambles to produce what it can only hope is an alluring line of small Fiat cars.

This week’s Steven Rattner-Paul Ingrassia on-stage chat at a Dow Jones conference was lots of fun – if you’ve been around the car industry for a while, there’s no such thing as too much automotive inside baseball and gossip. At the end of the day, however, what has stayed with me is that we really don’t know how much money got pumped into General Motors and Ford during the crisis of 2008-09. Rattner, explaining and defending his stint as President Obama’s auto czar, maintains American taxpayers would get most of their money back if GM were to IPO today. But he himself admitted this doesn’t include the billions pumped into GMAC, GM’s erstwhile financing arm. And it wouldn’t seem to include the billions poured into GM and Chrysler in the months between November 2008 and the creation of the federal auto task force in February 2009 – a period during which the government scrambled to simply stabilize the companies prior to a radical restructuring. Until someone forensically analyzes ALL of the costs of salvaging GM and Chrysler, Rattner and others will continue to portray the automotive bailouts as less costly than they really were. Check out Deal Journal’s take on this issue.

For the world’s major auto makers, life has moved on in the early months of 2010: Even battered and bruised players like Chrysler and GM are starting to make convincing cases they’ll survive and maybe even thrive. So, if you’re an investor or a car buyer – or both – what to make of the mess at Toyota? Here’s how I see it: On one hand, it’s a very good time to buy Toyota – shares and vehicles. It’s quite possible Toyota’s reputation and finances haven’t quite hit rock-bottom yet, as this week’s runaway car episode in California makes clear.  Yet,  Toyota is moving to fix its technical problems, will almost certainly get a grip on them in short order, and is now actively managing each eruption with improving public-relations aplomb. The cost of a global recall will soon be priced into Toyota shares if it hasn’t already. But I can’t help thinking people are going to stay away from Toyota for a while. It may not be wise financially; I have a feeling that people buying Toyota shares cheap now will make a pile of money in a couple of years when the auto maker makes a comeback. People will write books about Toyota’s fall and rise. Buyers of Toyota cars and trucks will enjoy deep discounts this spring. But the stumbling block for me – as a theoretical investor (I don’t actually buy buy shares) and someone who had advised her elderly mother to replace an old Toyota with a new one – is too high. I can’t get over Toyota’s stumbles – whether deliberate or inadvertent. In a world of many choices – of company shares and motor vehicles – there’s little reason to bet small or big on Toyota right now.

If you are looking for reasons to be optimistic about prospects for the American economy, and that search these days requires real effort, spend some time with the proponents and practitioners of clean technology.

For a layman, it’s a bit like going to the world’s fairs of yesteryear, filled with whizbang and excitable notions of how different technological advances, now at various stages of development, will dramatically alter our future daily lives.

From electric cars to the possible creation of synthetic organisms that would eat carbon dioxide to ‘clean coal,’ to wind and sun power and oilman T. Boone Pickens’ nationalist campaign to use U.S.-drilled natural gas in trucks to replace some imported crude oil, it was on display at The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbrara, Calif.

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