Elephant Auto Insurance
Elephant Auto Insurance is new in town, and its unusual approach to office life is making it stand out.
“Everyone is encouraged to participate in building our company and our culture,” said Elephant President and CEO Andrew Rose.
The company employs 60 people at its offices in western Henrico County.
“As a team, we actively solicit ideas from employees in every part of our organization. We want people to bring new ideas to solve problems, take on projects and be cultural leaders in our company.”
To establish an environment in which employees feel the company cares about them, Elephant gives 3,000 pounds sterling ($4,552.32) worth of stock in its parent company, Admiral Group plc, to employees, Rose said.
“The little things make a difference,” he said. “Like posting our to-the-minute sales information and tracking our sales goals on a whiteboard for everyone to see. Not everything we post is a metric, however. . . . Currently on our displays are pictures of our newest employees, a volcano — a few people got trapped in the U.K. [United Kingdom] because of the ash — and a new sandwich that got a lot of attention in the office.”
The company has encouraged teamwork to paint a mural in the office, and employees are working on a music video.
“When we moved into our office, one of the things we did was to set up the kids room, the game room and the Wii room. We wanted employees to feel welcome in their space,” Rose said.
“Our employees own our culture,” he said. “We want feedback — and lots of it. We constantly ask for feedback.”
Rose said one reason the company’s British parent picked the Richmond area was because the region has a pool of good candidates to hire.
“We are a bit zany, so we try to expose candidates to this culture,” Rose said.
In hiring, “we have been known to fire on people with Nerf guns, ask about your thoughts regarding zombies and speak to them in French. . . . We are looking for people who are passionate, open-minded and willing to try something new.”
Rose said Elephant’s executives see no conflict between profitable growth and a relaxed and friendly corporate culture.
“When people like what they do, they do it better,” he said. — David Ress
Kissing Frogs … The Auto Bailout Monty
Truth seekers the nation over, therefore, are indebted to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who in recent days uncovered what he called a government-enabled “TARP money shuffle.” It relates to General Motors, which on April 21 paid the balance of its $6.7 billion loan under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
G.M. trumpeted its escape from the program as evidence that it had turned the corner in its operations. “G.M. is able to repay the taxpayers in full, with interest, ahead of schedule, because more customers are buying vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu and Buick LaCrosse,” boasted Edward E. Whitacre Jr., its chief executive.
[snip]
Taxpayers are naturally eager for news about bailout repayments. But what neither G.M. nor the Treasury disclosed was that the company simply used other funds held by the Treasury to pay off its original loan.
[snip]
Mr. Grassley heard back from the Treasury last Tuesday. Herbert M. Allison Jr., assistant secretary for financial stability, confirmed that the money G.M. used to repay its bailout loan had come from a taxpayer-financed escrow account held for the automaker at the Treasury.
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978211653
Spring buyers market prevails in auto showrooms
NEW YORK — If you’re looking for a new car, the good news is it’s a buyer’s market. The better news is it could stay that way for a while.
Automakers have ratcheted up sales promotions this spring, spurred by Toyota, which is trying to goose sales after millions of safety recalls. That’s touched off a fight for consumers’ wallets that analysts say could continue through the summer. Among automakers, no one wants to be the first to blink and take away the deals.
At the beginning of March, Toyota rolled out a slate of customer incentives. The deals — which included zero-percent financing for most recalled models, discounted leases and free maintenance — sent Toyota’s March sales soaring more than 40 percent.
Not long after, rival Honda Motor Co. followed with cheap leases covering most of its lineup. General Motors Co. also rolled out low-cost financing across several models, as did Chrysler Group LLC and others. Most manufacturers, including Toyota, continued their promotions into April, although some eased incentives slightly.
“The troubles of Toyota caused a chain reaction in the industry,” says Jesse Toprak, vice president of industry trends and analysis at the car pricing website TrueCar.com.
Automakers deny that their incentive programs are in response to Toyota. But the deals have been benefiting car buyers like Desiree House, who in April traded in her 2001 Ford Explorer for a 2010 Toyota Prius. She got financing at an interest rate of 2.9 percent over 60 months. The car came loaded with options, including a solar charger on the roof. House negotiated the price down to $30,600 from around $32,000.
House, a systems analyst who lives outside Scranton, Pa., says the low interest rate was an “added bonus,” but she ultimately settled on a Prius because of its fuel economy. She shrugged off the fact that the Prius had been recalled.
To be sure, incentive spending by car companies is down significantly from this time last year, when the recession pushed down vehicle demand to historic lows and automakers were desperate for sales. This March, manufacturers spent $2,951 per vehicle, down $600 from the same month a year earlier, according to market research firm J.D. Power & Associates. This April, the firm expects that figure to come in at $2,800 per vehicle, a slight drop from March.
Still, incentive levels are not likely to fall much more, says J.D. Power analyst Thomas King.
And even if incentives were more generous a year ago, the frozen credit markets made it tougher to get financing then. That locked many buyers out of the market. Automakers focused their incentives on cash-back offers.
Credit is now thawing, helping propel sales because dealers can offer cheaper financing. In March, consumers bought a record number of new cars and trucks using zero-percent financing, according to the auto research website Edmunds.com. Among new Toyotas, 71 percent were bought at a zero-percent interest rate. Overall, sales of new cars and trucks climbed 24 percent in March.
But as with any big promotion, buyers become less receptive to incentives as time goes on. In April, automakers are unlikely to enjoy the big boost in sales that incentives bought them the prior month, analysts say.
“We’re not seeing a lot of traffic (in April) as we did at the beginning of March,” says Edmunds senior analyst Jessica Caldwell.
That leaves Toyota in a tough position. If it lets incentives run out, it runs the risk of losing sales. If it extends them again, it might be even harder to take them away later.
Truecar’s Toprak predicts that Toyota will have no choice but to keep the discounts flowing until its 2011 lineup arrives in the fall.
That would be just fine with Tom Santospago, general manager at Lee Toyota in Topsham, Me. Santospago says incentives have been a huge help, giving his March sales a hefty boost and keeping them at a similar level into April.
Santospago is only slightly worried about the long-term impact of the incentives, saying they could hurt used-car values. For now, they’re bringing in lots of customers.
“We barely even hear about anything being recalled.”
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jokPLriua_cK3m0pVoKT5jqrqwqQD9FERPPG0
Auto Body Workers, Insurers Bump Heads Over Aftermarket Car Parts
Repairing crashed cars with generic bumpers could be dangerous for drivers because the bumpers are made cheaply, which could cause air bags to fail, according to groups of auto-body workers in Connecticut, New York, California and nationally.
A recent test revives a longstanding argument between auto-body workers and insurers over which parts to use when fixing vehicles. Insurers say tests by the auto industry are ploys to get work and to reduce competition, forcing people to buy expensive car parts, which will drive up auto insurance rates.
The newest version of the argument references a test that is admittedly not scientific and didn’t involve actual crash-testing, but rather a guy with a saw.
The guy is Toby Chess of Los Angeles, national director and education committee member of the Society of Collision Repair Specialists of Prosser, Wash. Chess is not an engineer or physicist, but he did work closely with an icon in the auto-body world who owned the “biggest, baddest body shop in the Hawaiian islands.”
Chess has long believed that so-called aftermarket bumper parts used to fix crashed vehicles are inferior to parts made by car makers such as Honda or Ford.
He challenged the integrity of parts intended to absorb a collision, which are underneath a car’s plastic bumper: bumper-reinforcement beams, radiator-core supports, bumper brackets and bumper-energy absorbers.
Chess eyeballed the difference between original and aftermarket parts, and he tried to compare the ease of sawing through both.
“I have a part there that cuts with a regular saw. … If it was ultra-high-strength steel, it wouldn’t have cut,” he said.
Chess argues that weaker steel — which can be cut with a saw — won’t hold up in a crash as well as steel in Original Equipment Manufacturer, or OEM, parts.
Car makers have teams of engineers who design auto-frame parts. The idea is that the car will absorb a crash in a particular way and trigger the air bag to deploy. But what happens if a part of the frame — like the steel-bumper reinforcement — is repaired using a generic aftermarket part rather than one made by the car maker?
“Nobody knows because nobody has ever brought this to anyone’s attention,” Chess said.
His findings were enough to sound alarms within the auto-body world, which would benefit from a government recall because presumably they would be replacing the aftermarket parts. National auto-body organizations, as well as groups in Connecticut and New York, are asking for a recall. The Collision Repair Association of California references Chess’ demonstrations in a Feb. 2 letter to California’s insurance commissioner asking for a recall of aftermarket bumper-reinforcement parts.
On Feb. 1, the national Certified Auto Parts Association joined the cause. The association, which is in the business of certifying car parts, announced “a major new CAPA certification standard to address widespread concern about the quality and safety of bumper parts.”
Meanwhile, Chess’ findings are being ignored by the federal government; a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration official would not comment on them. And insurers say there’s nothing wrong with buying generic substitute parts that apparently perform just as well as those made by GM, Honda or any other car maker.
“I’m unaware of any data from any federal agency, or from the insurance industry, that shows that the use of these parts compromises safety,” said Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute
“I’ve not really heard of a case where an individual was killed or injured because their car had been repaired, so long as the repair was done appropriately, with an aftermarket part.”
Hartwig says the auto-body workers are repeating a failed attempt to get more work.
This is far from the first time aftermarket car parts have been criticized publicly as being unsafe, or, at least, of less value than a original manufactured part.
Unsafe car parts can be investigated for safety defects by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation. If the office determines a safety problem, it can order a recall. The federal administration wouldn’t comment on whether it is looking into safety concerns about bumper parts.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety studied bumpers in 2000 and 2005. The institute found no safety concerns with the cosmetic exterior of bumpers. But the institute has not studied the structural parts beneath bumpers, which are directly linked to setting off air bags during a crash.
http://www.courant.com/business/custom/consumer/hc-hc-bumpers-0502.artmay02,0,2397510.story
Brazil auto industry to invest $11.2 bn by 2012
/EFE) The Brazilian automotive industry will invest $11.2 billion during the three-year period between 2010 and 2012, an amount that tops the $8.1 billion of the three preceding years, local media said.
The new president of Brazil’s National Automotive Vehicles Association, or Anfavea, Cledorvino Bellini, said Saturday in a statement on the Internet portal Valor Online that the amount ‘means that business owners believe in this country and in its automotive industry’.
How the funds will be invested will be decided by each company, since some will give priority to developing new products and others to increasing production, which currently stands at some 4.3 million vehicles.
Bellini said that consumption in developing countries, which is growing at a greater rate than the world average, will allow the Brazilian automotive industry to expand production to penetrate those markets.
