I enjoy your articles advising people on what cars to buy or avoid. I have a bit of a different problem.
My mother recently passed away, and I inherited her 1989 Corolla down in Florida. She bought it used down there, it has a little over 100,000 miles on it. The car is absolutely mint, as you could imagine for a Florida car. It runs great, the AC works well, and the body and paint are in excellent condition, as is the interior – it has been kept out of the sun. Even the engine is in great condition – all the anodized parts still look as new. Plus, it doesn’t even leak. It has had regular maintenance, belts, hoses and fluids changed. (Read More…)
Ford is showing its fealty to the machines putting its money where its mouth is regarding telematics systems by unveiling their new B-MAX MPV at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress, a week before the Geneva Auto Show begins.
When GM will announce 4th quarter and year-end earnings tomorrow, a lot of fingers will be pointed at Opel, and on GM CEO Dan Akerson who decided to keep the hemorrhaging unit instead of selling it off to Magna and the Russians. Bloomberg expects that tomorrow’s quarterly profit will be “GM’s lowest since it emerged from bankruptcy in 2009,” despite record sales in the U.S. and China. According to Bloomberg, (Read More…)
Europe’s second-largest automotive group PSA Peugeot Citroen is looking at red ink. PSA’s automotive operating loss excluding one-time items was 92 million euros ($121 million), after a 621 million profit the previous year, Reuters says. (Read More…)
There was a time when the Lincoln Navigator was the hottest SUV going, an epoch that coincided with the “shiny suit era” of rap music. From a peak of nearly 39,000 sold in 2003, Lincoln sold just 8018 in 2011.
Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney published an op-ed in the Detroit News calling the auto bailout “crony capitalism on a grand scale.” Boasting of his Michigan roots, Romney takes the Obama administration and the UAW to task for what he suggests is a symbiotic relationship between the two that allowed the union to get stakes in GM and Chrysler. In short, nothing new from the man who is running an election that is a referendum on Obama’s presidency.
This seems to have gone under the radar of the autoblogosphere but according to the conservative Daily Caller, (and confirmed by White House economic chief Gene Sperling) President Obama’s proposed 2013 (2012 fiscal year) federal budget will include a provision to increase the tax credit on Chevy Volts, Nissan Leafs and any other new-technology vehicles including those powered by natural gas to $10,000.The current subsidy is $7,500 per car.
The official sports car of the British underclass (that can afford to move out of the council estate) is the Ford Focus RS, a fluorescent display of 4-wheeled vulgarity. The British motoring press follow the progress of the Focus RS like we follow crappy celebrity gossip (well, they do too), and the latest such report has turned up an interesting tidbit about one of our home-grown working class heroes, the Ford Mustang.
Speaking at the Chicago Auto Show, Hyundai’s John Krafcik told Fox News that more crossovers, particularly the three-row kind, are going to be a feature of Hyundai’s product lineup in the near future. But in the land of the manual, diesel station wagon, Hyundai’s European head has some exciting plans involving turbochargers, small cars and dual-clutch gearboxes.
Based on a Speed:Sport:Life article. Several TTAC readers have pointed out in the past that the “dollar theory” of tire traction fails to account for dynamic weight loads, so consider that pointed out up front — JB
It seems like yesterday, as the man sang, but it was long ago. In April of 2008 I ordered a new Audi S5 in a rather unique color — the “Lime Green” used by Porsche in 1973 and referred to as “Lime Green” and “Viper Green”. Not “Signal Green”, mind you: that’s a different color, with more blue, and less cheer, in the mix. The car arrived in September of 2008. I drove it for two years and 38,000 miles before selling it for approximately five grand more than “regular” S5s were fetching.
The Corona was the first Toyota car to appear in large numbers on American streets, starting in the mid-to-late 1960s. By the middle of the 1980s, just about all the boxy early Coronas were gone; they rusted quickly in non-bone-dry regions and weren’t enough loved elsewhere to be kept alive. My very first car was a ’69 Corona sedan, so I had a bit of a nostalgic twinge when I spotted this ’70 hardtop coupe in a California self-serve wrecking yard. (Read More…)
Over the last few weeks, we have travelled to Germany, Czech Republic, Oman and Israel. Today we are stopping in Belarus, part of the USSR until 1990 and home to just under 10 million inhabitants.
Now if Cold War reminiscence, endless forests and Orthodoxy are not really your thing – well that’s not my business hey but I’ve got you covered: I have prepared 159 additional countries for you to visit in my blog, so don’t be shy and click away!
It took a while for Belarus to get rid of Russian influence but this year the best-selling car in the country is not Russian…
Volkswagen’s double digit growth rates came to a grinding halt in January with the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand reporting what Volkswagen euphemistically calls “robust delivery figures:” Worldwide, Volkswagen handed over a mere 600 cars more in January 2012 than the 418,600 units it had sold in January 2011, for a teensy rise of 0.1 percent. Basically, Volkswagen is treading water. Why? China. (Read More…)
The driver of this Chinese delivery van deemed the price of a cheap Chinese replacement mirror as much too high: “What, it will last only one day anyway – the next passing car will take it right off .” Therefore, a low cost field expedient was found, as Carnewschina reports.
The 
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