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Posts Tagged ‘automotive’

So we all know that drafting increases fuel efficiency.

Continued here:
The Road Train: taking drafting to a whole new level

Ford announced today their move to upgrade their SYNC in-car communications system into MyFord Touch.

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MyFord Touch Driver Connect Technology

Hyundai? Pretty please bring OLED screens to the automotive world. It doesn’t have to be as futuristic as the dashboard in the Blue-Will concept car, but OLEDs are just so nice.

More here: 
Hyundai goes nuts with OLED screens

In case you were wondering what the automotive community won’t be releasing next year, here’s a nice roundup of the concept cars on display over at Pebble Beach. They’re not all outlandish, although a back seat in a Lotus Elise kind of misses the point, doesn’t it

Original post:
Concept cars on parade at Pebble Beach

High Gear Media, the publisher of automotive media sites, has secured $5.5 million in Series B funding led by DAG Ventures with Accel Partners and Greylock Partners participating. The company raised $6.5 million in Series A funding in November 2007 from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

High Gear will use the funds expand its media network and acquire other media properties. High Gear owns and operates 38 auto websites including TheCarConnection.com, GreenCarReports.com, AllCarsElectric.com and
AllAboutPrius.com.

The network’s sites aggregate automotive content from around the web and syndicate content to other automotive websites and news sites such as Yahoo! Autos, The San Francisco Chronicle and Glam Media, among others.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Nothing like a telling graphic to illustrate what most have been expecting, albeit probably not in this order of magnitude. Veteran media exec Alan Mutter discovered some horrid statistics about the state of ad sales for American newspapers on trade organization NAA’s website, and published his view on the Q1 2009 numbers on his blog. They don’t look pretty.

The stats show that total newspaper ad sales dropped by an unprecedented 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, a deep plunge that represents a loss of more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue compared year-over-year. Compared to 3 years ago - 2006 was a pretty good year for American newspapers - we’re looking at a drop of more than $4.5 billion in ad sales in just three years if you only take into account the first quarter.

The sharp decline is caused by the lousy state of both digital and dead tree ad sales: the stats posted on the Newspaper Association of America website show that print sales fell by 29.7% in the first three months of this year (to $5.9 billion), while online sales dropped a record 13.4% (to $696.3 million).

Classified advertising is clearly still taking major hits. Compared to the first quarter of last year, revenue from all types of classified ads fell 42,32% to less than $1.5 billion. Considering the fact that total classifieds ad sales topped $4 billion back in 2001 and were still at almost $3.4 billion in the first quarter of 2007, that has got to hurt. The biggest losers in classifieds: Recruitment (-67.39%), Real Estate (-45.55%) and Automotive (-43.42%).

Annual ad sales for American newspapers came in at a grand total of nearly $49.5 billion in 2005 and dropped to about $37.8 billion in 2008. If the decline rate keeps accelerating the way these first quarter results suggest, we could be looking at somewhere in between $26 billion and $30 billion in total ad sales revenue for this year.

And yet somehow, I fear newspapers haven’t even seen the bottom of the barrel yet.

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Apparently Navigon is abruptly getting out of the hardware GPS game in North America, citing “the difficult economic environment” and “aggressive pricing” from competitors. Navigon CEO Egon Minar told GPS Business News, “We have decided to withdraw from the PND business in North America for the time being

See the rest here: 
Navigon soon to be navi-gone from North America

TrueCar , an information service launched at TechCrunch50 that aims to give potential new car buyers an idea of what the price tag of the vehicle they’re considering purchasing should really be reading, is officially launching its free consumer-focused website today by taking the beta label off. In essence, the service allows car buyers to check if the price for their next car is on par with the price others have paid for the same vehicle in the past, hopefully bringing some transparency to the automotive retail industry.

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TrueCar shifts into gear

TrueCar, an information service launched at TechCrunch50 that aims to give potential new car buyers an idea of what the price tag of the vehicle they’re considering purchasing should really be reading, is officially launching its free consumer-focused website today by taking the beta label off.

In essence, the service allows car buyers to check if the price for their next car is on par with the price others have paid for the same vehicle in the past, hopefully bringing some transparency to the automotive retail industry.

So how does it work? When a new car buyer visits the TrueCar website, they are asked to enter their zip code and all vehicle details down to the specific options. TrueCar then generates a complete Price Report with nifty graphs, displaying the full distribution of prices paid by other people for the exact same vehicle in a given market area. In addition, the web service calculates the actual dealer cost structure of a particular vehicle.

TrueCar claims it holds data for more than 25% of all new vehicles sold throughout the United States, which is quite impressive and a high enough percentage for comparisons to be made, although we noted in our coverage from the TC50 event that the company was going to try and hold off from launching publicly when they actually reached 50%.

And where exactly does all that data come from anyway? The company says it currently processes thousands of transactions on a daily basis, from a variety of sources across the U.S., ranging from financial institutions to vehicle registration organizations that collect and store new car transactional data, to generate its Price Reports. Using this data, TrueCar is able to tell you if you’re getting a good, a great or an over-priced deal on a new car based on actual sales data and not estimates.

For the occasion, TrueCar is taking the wraps of its blog, called The Truth, where it aims to regularly report car pricing facts and trends backed by real market data. In their latest blog post, TrueCar gives some insight in the top 10 deals on new cars at this moment:

I’d say considering a Ford is probably a good start to getting a good deal.

On a sidenote: TrueCar isn’t founder and CEO Scott Painter’s only venture: the man is also co-founder of both Pricelock and BrightHouse, and also acts as founder and CEO of Zag, which recently raised $32.4 million in venture capital. One wonders where he finds time for all this.

You can see the video of his presentation of TrueCar at TC50 right here.

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