My first car was a Mercedes. It wasn’t mine. I was 8 and was not allowed to own a car, let alone drive it. It also wasn’t a car, not in the technical sense. It was a Unimog. This is its story  … (Read More…)

The Mercedes-Benz S500 of Team Opulence—We Has It ended today’s session as the lap leader. This massive dreadnaught took the win on laps at last year’s Capitol Offense, but has cooked its brakes in race after race since that time. (Read More…)

A chicken could become as unreachable as caviar in many poor countries, warns a study of the OECD and the United Nations. Chicken is projected to rise in price by 30 percent in the next ten years – inflation adjusted. Other staple foods such as corn, sugar or cooking oil are seen rising in price by twenty percent. Why? On one side of the ledger is higher demand, mainly from China and India. On the other side: „Increasingly, the crop doesn’t end up in the pot, but as fuel in the tanks of cars,“ says the German magazine Der Spiegel. (Read More…)

Foreign suppliers could produce the final nail in the coffin of struggling Saab, the head of a European supplier association fears. “I think that the patience has more or less run out,” Lars Holmqvist, CEO of CLEPA, the European Association of Automotive Suppliers, said to Swedish news agency TT [via The Local]

Foreign suppliers “probably have less feeling for Saab than many Swedish companies which have grown up with Saab in a different way. Many also have a personal connection to Saab because they might have driven one at some point in their life. But the foreign suppliers are tougher,” Holmqvist, himself a Swede, told TT. (Read More…)

We haven’t visited Europe since the UK Royal Wedding, so this weekend we are off to troubled Greece. Car sales are in free fall there since the 2008 financial crisis, and it makes for a fascinating market. Please wear at helmet at all times.

If you have already visited one of the many stunning Greek islands and have already counted all the cars there, that’s ok, there are 154 more countries to visit in my blog, and I can tell you it is άριστη (awesome)…

After a high of 290,000 units in 2000, the Greek car market has been on a long-term downtrend during the last decade, giving us a very volatile models ranking: in the last 10 years. There’s only one car that managed to stay on top of Greece’s best-seller for three consecutive years: The unflappable Toyota Corolla.

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One of the cars the organizers of the 24 Hours of LeMons have always wanted to see careening around a road course is a proper General Motors donk. Until today, only the crypto-donked Big Ghetto Skank Tank came close. Now Unununium Medal winner Speedycop has raised the bar again, with this 1979 Pontiac Bonneville coupe rollin’ on 22s. Oh yeah, and 99 other cars showed up to the race at Summit Point Raceway in West Virginia. (Read More…)

Yesterday, The Nikkei was all worked up about a takeover of Russia’s largest automaker AvtoVaz by the Renault-Nissan Alliance. The Nikkei became so excited that it forgot simple logic. More on that here. The Nikkei had it on not so good authority that Nissan would soon buy 25 percent of the Russians, and together with Renault’s 25 percent and change, Japan and France would finally achieve what had been tried before: Rule Russia. We had our doubts.

Do you hear the big hissing sound? That’s the lukewarm air coming out of the story. (Read More…)

The Volkswagen Group is hitting on all available cylinders, and there are many: For the first time in recorded Volkswagen history, VW delivered more than 3 million units in the first five months, 3.37 million, to be exact. Compared to the same period last year, that is an increase of +14.6 percent.  These gains are steady and continous. In May, VW sold 708,900 units worldwide, up 17.4 percent compared to May 2010.

Around the world, Volkswagen’s  January-May sales were as follows: (Read More…)

At today’s annual stockholders meeting in Toyota City, Toyota wrapped up most of the SUA and recall troubles that had plagued the company last year. Says The Nikkei [sub]: “When asked about the fallout from the recall of millions of vehicles over the past couple of years amid quality concerns, executive vice president Shinichi Sasaki thanked the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for clearing Toyota of some of the most serious allegations about defects in its vehicles.“

However, there is one man Toyota still holds a grudge against: (Read More…)

Well, we’ve accidentally developed something a of a Chevy theme this morning, what with the Cobalt and 2013 Malibu… and now this, the Colorado Rally Concept, a first look at the next generation of GM compact pickups. Though the concept’s 2.8 liter turbodiesel engine is unlikely to make it to the US, Pickuptrucks.com reports

According to manufacturing documents we’ve obtained, the Colorado’s start of regular production is slated for Oct. 3, 2011, in Thailand and Jan. 16, 2012, in Brazil, where it will likely be sold as the S-10.

According to our sources, the code names for the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon versions for North America are 31XC and 31XG. Start of U.S. manufacturing is scheduled for around July 2014, though production of the current Colorado and Canyon are expected to end by 2012 at the plant in Shreveport, La.

Aimed directly at the global pickup segment defined by Toyota’s HiLux and Ford’s Global Ranger, the Colorado looks to be larger than the typical compact pickup and represents a fundamentally different strategy than Chrysler’s planned minivan-based “lifestyle pickup.” And don’t look now, but tough midsized trucks like this could be as much a replacement for current full-size buyers as gas prices and CAFE standards rise, as they could be true entry-level compacts. But then, we’ll need to see how much this global vehicle is modified for the US market before we really know what we’re getting here.

Remember the million mile Accord? How about the other million mile Accord? What about the 1.3 million mile Town Car? Or, most amazingly, the half-million-mile Fiat?

Honda has a new million-mile contender coming up, and this time they are using Facebook to get their fanbase involved. With this arrival of a third well-publicized long distance voyager, however, is Honda unwittingly bringing attention to a very inconvenient truth?

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Cracks continued to in the ethanol industry’s once-impregnable political vanguard, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the Senate has voted to roll back the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC) as well as import tariffs on foreign-produced ethanol. This rollback of multi-billion-dollar ethanol credits failed earlier in the week, when the Detroit News reports automakers came out in opposition of a bill that would have required that 95% of all cars built in the US be capable of running 85% ethanol by 2017. The Senate did fail to pass a repeal of a government ethanol blending mandate that underpins the VEETC, however, and funding is moving forward for ethanol blending pumps. Still, the Senate’s repeal of VEETC alone means taxpayers could save over $5b per year on subsidies, and as one expert puts it

“Looks like we’re going to be relying on the biofuels mandates to make sure blenders use biofuels, rather than bribing them to use it with $6 billion,” [Bruce Babcock, professor of economics and the director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University] said.

In fact, Babcock thinks killing the subsidy could help ethanol because it would come out from the stigma of being a subsidized industry. And removing the subsidy may strengthen support for the mandate, and the tariff on imports.

Over to you, House of Representatives…

Europeans are either tired of their old cars, or the effects of the cash for clunkers largesse are finally getting digested, or both. Whatever the reason, new passenger car registrations increased by 7.1 percent in the EU in May, as data released by the European Auto Manufacturers Association ACEA shows. (Read More…)

The front end of the forthcoming 2013 Malibu is cleanly handsome in a somewhat bland, international style… but that booty could only come from America! We haven’t seen much of the Malibu outside of still shots, and this video (hunted down by our man in Korea, Walter Foreman) is almost as jarring as seeing a car in person for the first time. In fact, it’s beginning to seem like the Malibu, with its very different front and rear-end treatments and what appears to be a featureless wasteland in between, is going to be difficult to properly appreciate until we see it in person.

Some families consider arguments to be ‘discussions’. Mine was definitely among them. As the youngest of four brothers it was a hassle for me to even get a word in at the dinner table. Everyone had an opinion… and damn it, they were all wrong! Especially when it came to cars.

My Dad wanted to replace his 1987 Lincoln Continental which back then had reached the ‘100k trade-in’ point. I told him that the car had plenty of life left. But the more I talked, the more I realized that no form of reason would ever penetrate his viewpoint.

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