Automotive Marketing

Vast.com has launched a new web site design. I like the old logo a bit more, but this site design is clean, sleek and easy to navigate. Unless you are searching for a motorcycle. To be fair, the search was broken before the redesign. I wrote about it in October. The category structure prevents motorcycles from being returned in default search results.

I search for Buell Ulysses motorcycles for sale everyday. I fell in love with the way this bike looks when it launched, and after riding one at IronValley Harley Davidson, I am convinced this is the motorcycle for me.

Who cares

I think MyRide.com might care. This Autobytel site uses the Vast database instead of their own. AOL Autos might care now that they have dumped Autotrader and replaced them with Vast.

Here is a conversation that occurred today between Cars.com support staff and a dealership that pays them hundreds of dollars a month.

Dealer: Hi. I am calling to find out why only 28 cars are displaying on my 30 car advertising package.

Cars.com: You should ask the company that delivers your inventory to us.

Dealer: I just got off the phone with them. They send you all the vehicles that I have for sale once every day.

Cars.com: Ok, let me see how many we received from them on the last transfer.

Cars.com: Ok, it looks like they sent us 41 vehicles, 2 without any photos.

Dealer: Right, and I want to know why only 28 with no photos are showing on cars.com

Cars.com: That’s something you should ask them.

Dealer: Why? You just told me that you received 41 vehicles from them, and that all came with pictures except for two. Why are there no pictures on any of my cars?

Cars.com: You’ll have to ask them.

Dear Cars.com,
I do not lie about your company or your service, yet you will openly blame my company for your own shortcomings. Please accept any of our many invitations to discuss these persistent issues in a conference call. I will continue to equip our mutual customers with log files that verify the service that we provide to them. Unfortunately, said logs are not enough to keep you from training your support reps to blindly blame the other guy, even when these lies contradict what can be easily seen on the screen in front of them.

Ratan Tata unveiled the Nano at the Delhi Auto Expo on January 10, 2008. The Tata Nano is the $2,500 car that has been designed and built in India at the hands of more than 500 people from around the world. I was reading the english Times Online write up about the Nano and enjoyed all the comments left on the article. One of them was particularly interesting to me as it captured my opinion of this announcement almost perfectly.

“$2500 cars already exist, they are called “used cars”. Option A, new tin can with 33hp, Option B 5-8 year old real car, like a Carolla or Civic or Sentra. Which will last longer, be safer, and look better?

Maybe one positive of this car will be that it will drive used car prices down.”

~Mike S, Dallas

The idea of a car costing only $2,500 is not new. Plenty of depreciated vehicles fall into this price range, and lots of those used vehicles are not aluminum bubbles that top out at 65mph. I do disagree with Mike from Dallas that this car will drive used car prices down, and a few other ideas come to mind when I think about how the Tata Nano might impact the American market.

• it will not
• the Nano is not coming to America
• it is not allowed to come to America because of environmental and safety requirements
• the Nano is not of higher quality than $2,500 used cars in America
• driving in India is safer than driving in America†
• why do all highly efficient vehicles look like cartoon bubble cars

†Roughly 85,000 people are killed each year in India as the result of a car crash, and less than 50,000 killed similarly in America. The population of India is 3.75 times that of the US, but the number of people killed in car crashes is only about 2 times that in the US.

A new sidebar widget for bloggers has made quite a splash, enough so that I’ve added it to this website. The reviews are mixed, but stats don’t lie. The traffic this blog has received from BlogRush this week is equal to the amount of visitors I’ve gotten from my comments on ShoeMoney’s blog. Five.

I have seen more than 30 articles about BlogRush, but not 30 hits to my website for using it. Usually, the buzz is mostly just that–buzz.