Hutton Reports

As a premium brand, Audi positions itself away from the mainstream and apart from its parent, the Volkswagen Group. That has never been more important than it is today. The emissions scandal that has engulfed Volkswagen hit UK registrations in November, down 20% while Audi sales fell just 4%. This, despite its best-selling models, the A3 and A4, using the ...

Aston Martin punches way above its weight. You are seeing it everywhere right now as James Bond’s car of choice in the latest film Spectre. This time, the hero, whose on-screen association with Aston goes back to the 1960s, even has a bespoke car: the DB10. Money can’t buy a DB10 (pictured) but Aston made 10 of them for the ...

Mitsubishi, a company that went into the doldrums at the end of the last decade, is celebrating its third successive year as the fastest-growing marque in the UK. The year to date SMMT figures show how the brand’s car registrations have grown 60% year-on-year, which has brought substantial profits to the importer Mitsubishi Motors UK (owned by Mitsubishi Corporation, a ...

What are dealers to make of Honda? Three years ago, I pondered the question in this column and quoted the chief executive Takanubo Ito who had just announced a plan for a range of new models. Honda had cut back on investment at the time of the financial crisis and starved its dealers of new products. The future cars would ...

The Vauxhall Viva is a resolutely ordinary car. That’s not a criticism but simply a statement of its intent: a practical conveyance that is cheap to buy and run. It is what used to be known as a “district nurse’s car” exemplified by the Morris Minor, Austin A30, and the original Viva, which appeared in 1963. There was sound logic ...

Why has Ford created Vignale as a kind of premium sub-brand?  Two reasons. For the sales network, it sees an opportunity to sell cars above and beyond its existing models and to raise standards of customer handling through up-graded FordStores. And for Ford, a generalist manufacturer that has the premium brands eating its lunch, it brings a new contender into ...

It seems that scarcely a day goes by without some news of investment, recruitment, or new product activity at Jaguar Land Rover. The company, owned by Tata of India, is rightly billed as a great British success story, although the figures show that Land Rover has the lion’s share of the business and makes the money. Now Jaguar has to ...

Springtime in Berlin and the management board of the Volkswagen Group detailed its results for the past year and its hopes and ambitions for 2015. Martin Winterkorn, chairman and chief executive, was confident, despite various economic and political headwinds. The group, which now encompasses 12 brands, including Ducati motorcycles and Scania and MAN trucks, made a record profit of €12.7bn ...

Over the last five years the Hyundai Group has been the fastest mover in the global motor industry. In 2014 Hyundai and Kia made more than 8 million vehicles, consolidating the Korean group’s position as number four in the world league, nearly 2 million ahead of Ford, which it overtook in 2009. This result is all the more significant because ...

In 1999, Nissan was down and very nearly out. The number two Japanese car manufacturer was saved from collapse by an alliance with Renault and Carlos Ghosn, the hard man that the French put in to turn it round. Today, Nissan is looking good, with sales rising in Europe and the US, and it can claim to be Britain’s largest ...