Those of you who are not stupid well-connected enough to have a bunch of autojournos in your Twitter and Facebook friend lists are missing out on all the, er, coverage coming from the “Midwestern NAMBLA pump n’ dump for morbidly obese auto journalists” track event going on today. Let me give you the precis. It turns out all these cars are ZOMG AEWSUM and track records are falling left and right as America’s finest drivers deliver Vic Elfordian levels of all-weather punishment upon them. No word on whether the Midwestern journo who cracked up a MINI at Autobahn and followed it up by driving off the first corner at MAMA’s event a few years back has caused his usual mayhem.
Expect this event to provide many tales of “pushing it to the limit” in the soul-crushing months to come. In the meantime, however, we’ve found an activity which is well-suited to the banzai buffet beasts out there: manned crash testing.
In conclusion of today’s Volkswagen-heavy fare, a peek into the future of Volkswagen’s most boring, but nonetheless highly successful car: The Passat.
Germany’s Auto Bild thinks it knows what the 8th generation Passat will look like when it hits the showrooms sometime in 2014. While their renderings most likely don’t reveal the exact likeness of the future Passat, Auto Bild’s Passat companion story probably has more than a few grains of truth. (Read More…)
SB Medien may call the forthcoming FT-86 a “Celica replacement,” but in this first video of the latest near-production prototype, the budget rear-drive coupe nearly runs into a Supra which apparently belongs to the development team. The Supra shows up once more in the video’s ‘ring testing footage (about 1:55 in), suggesting again that it’s somehow involved in the testing or benchmarking process. How and why? Your speculation is as good as mine…
After reapingthehurricane by forcing “Tier One” workers at GM’s Orion Assembly plant into the UAW’s “Tier Two” last year, essentially giving workers a 50% pay cut, GM has been working with the UAW ever since to mitigate that decision. Now, Bloomberg reports that the UAW’s GM negotiator is targeting the $14/hour Tier One wages for growth in upcoming negotiations, arguing that the lower pay rate is “not a middle class wage.” But, he adds
The union doesn’t expect to reach $28 an hour this year for new workers, and it doesn’t intend to make GM uncompetitive
We’ll have to wait and see what that means, but any effort on the part of GM and the UAW to reduce the gap between Tier One and Tier Two wages will help relieve the inevitable shop-floor tensions that such inequity creates.
Gallup has just released a new poll asking Americans to rate their likelihood of making certain lifestyle changes based on different hypothetical gas prices. The result: 57 percent refuse to consider buying an “electric car that you could only drive for a limited number of miles at one time” no matter how high gas prices go. Only moving or changing jobs encountered more resistance. Clearly betting the farm on pure EVs is going to face some challenges…
Surf on over to hyundaiusa.com and ford.com, and the two momentum-blessed automakers will greet you in a remarkably similar fashion: with a lineup of 40 MPG Highway-rated vehicles. Of course, Hyundai would, in its inimitable “asterisk-wrangling” style, point out that Ford’s 40 MPG requires more footnotes than a David Foster Wallace book. But then Ford might shoot back that Hyundai leaves out any reference to City or Highway ratings in its lineup, leaving consumers to play “hunt the legal disclaimer” itself. And as Autoobserver recently noted, highway ratings make for good ad fodder, but combined EPA ratings are much more helpful to consumers.
Come June, Toyota “plans to bring domestic auto production back to as much as 90 percent of targets set before the March earthquake hit, thanks to faster-than-expected improvements in parts supplies,” The Nikkei [sub] writes today. At the annual results conference in Tokyo, Akio Toyoda had said Toyota Toyoda would be on its way back to normal beginning in June, with hopefully 70 percent of production reinstated in summer. This was already a two month improvement over previous plans. Two weeks later, the outlook seems to be even better. If The Nikkei heard correctly. (Read More…)
Yesterday, Volkswagen finally inaugurated its new plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee and ended the 23 year hiatus since its New Stanton, Pennsylvania factory was closed in 1988. At the Chattanooga plant, more than 2,000 employees will be able to produce up to 150,000 vehicles per year. (Read More…)
Justices of the Washington State Supreme Court on Tuesday openly questioned whether it was proper for a city and a photo enforcement contractor to thwart the initiative process on the issue of traffic cameras. The question has become increasingly relevant as activists in the cities of Longview and Monroe on Monday turned in signatures they believe will be sufficient to call for a vote on banning red light cameras and speed cameras. Less than a week ago, a Chelan County Superior Court judge ruled that activists in the city of Wenatchee were forbidden from attempting to bring the question of cameras to the voters (view ruling).
Today, Volkswagen officially showed its new, well, “perfected” Tiguan to the press. VeeDub unabashedly calls it an “SUV with design parallels to the larger Touareg.” Unlike its larger sibling, the Tiguan can be driven guilt-free: With a 2.0 TDI engine, the SUV needs only 5.3 liters per 100 km. Which converts to a non-EPA mileage of 44.4 mpg. Not bad for a trucklet. Volkswagen humbly calls it “one of the most fuel-efficient SUVs in the world.” Gallery after the jump … (Read More…)
Over the course of TTAC’s coverage of US ethanol subsidies, I’ve often wondered why nobody made a political issue out of slaying an ever-growing waste of tax dollars ($6b this year on the “blender’s credit” alone). And with the political rhetoric about America’s debt prices rising, I’ve been wondering with more and more regularity when someone will finally take the ethanol fight to the American people, who are already voting against ethanol with their pocketbooks. But just last December, Al Gore explained why not even he, an environmentalist standard-bearer, could oppose the corn juice he knew was bad policy, saying
It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first generation ethanol. First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small… One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president.
The Iowa primary is a key early contest in the Presidential election, and because Iowans grow and refine a huge amount of corn ethanol, campaigning against ethanol subsidies in Iowa is a non-starter. At least that’s what the conventional wisdom was before today, when, with nearly nine months to go before the primary, the impossible just happened. (Read More…)
Last year it was Quaker State. ‘Extreme Durability’ synthetic oil had flopped in the markeplace. A lowering of it’s price to $1.99 a quart plus a $10 mail-in rebate solved that issue for Quaker State. Not any profit there obviously. But oil is dirt cheap to produce and the new marketing campaign promised better returns for all that paid shelf space. Now Valvoline is performing a similar stunt for their ‘VR1 Racing Oil’. Sixquartsofsyntheticforfreeafterthe $50 mail–inrebate. Just make sure you keep track of the rebate. Then you can…
Chrysler’s bailout “thank you” event today was long on praise for the redemptive power of its government bailout and short on talk of remaining challenges, but at least one important fact was acknowledged: this highly-touted “payback” was only for 85% of the money loaned to Chrysler during the bailout period. Although, to be perfectly accurate, it wasn’t exactly Chrysler who acknowledged the outstanding obligation [the firm avoids any such nuance in its release], as CEO Sergio Marchionne simply stated that
We received confirmation this morning at 10.13 am from Citigroup that Chrysler Group repaid, with interest, by wire transfer to the United States Treasury and by bank transfer to the Canadian government, every penny that had been loaned less than two years ago. [Emphasis added]
That last bit was the important part… as in, the part that was most often repeated in Chrysler’s presentation and in subsequent media reports. But it’s not the whole story…
Manal al-Sharif, one of the organizers of an online campaign encouraging Saudi women to drive en masse on June 17, was arrested on Sunday, days after she posted video of herself flouting the kingdom’s ban on female drivers on YouTube. Traces of Ms. Sharif’s campaign also started to disappear from the Web.
Following her arrest, the YouTube video of Ms. Sharif driving became inaccessible, as did a second clip, in which she outlined how women could take part in the June 17 protest. A Facebook page she set up called “Teach Me How to Drive So I Can Protect Myself,” which had more than 12,000 fans, was deleted. The Twitter account she used to spread news of the protest movement was copied and altered to make it seem as if she had called off the campaign.
As much as we tend to value cars as the ultimate tool of personal freedom, TTAC could definitely do more to cover the plight of those banned from the roads for nothing more than their gender. Though a hugely loaded and controversial issue, it is perhaps one of the most truly principled causes at the confluence of cars and culture. We wish Ms al-Sharif the very best in her struggle to attain a right we too often take for granted.
Bonus challenge for TTAC’s Best and Brightest: can you identify the car Ms al-Sharif is driving in this clip? I’ve wasted enough time today trying to figure it out…
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