Devotees of the Manchester United soccer club call for a boycott of the products made by the club’s sponsors. This famously includes Chevrolet. Last Monday, GM signed a seven year contract with Manchester United. A day before, GM’s Chief Marketing Executive Joel Ewanick, the architect of the deal, was fired. Manchester United supporters are opposed to their club going public on Wall Street. To put pressure on the Glazer family to ditch the plan, they ask the public to stay clear of the products of the club’s sponsors. (Read More…)
White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer apologized to WaPo and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer for having “overshot the runway.” Pfeifer had accused Krauthammer of falsely claiming that a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had been removed from the White House and sent back to the British Embassy. In a blog post on the White House Blog (yes, the White House blogs too) Pfeiffer produced a smoking gun: A Churchill bust that was still at the White House. The trouble was there had been two busts. Now there is only one. (See, and I would have sworn Bill Clinton took all available busts when he vacated the White House.)
Mazda recently began production of the upcoming Mazda6 mid-size car, and a promotional photograph, seen above, reveals the look of the station wagon variant.
With California’s Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate looming it is only a matter of time till we see an EV from each of the major players in the California market. Nissan has the Leaf, BMW has the Active E, GM has the Volt and Honda electrified a Fit and Ford has electrified everything that isn’t […]
I have attracted the attention of our technical people to the plight of smartphone users. YOU can be instrumental in bringing TTAC to a new smartphone glory. (Read More…)
An angry farmer in Vermont wiped out most of the fleet of the Orleans County Sheriffs’s Department by rolling his tractor over the cruisers. Without wheels, the deputies had to liberate one of their cars from a service station before they could go into high speed pursuit of the man who left the scene in red farm tractor, the Daily Mail reports.(Read More…)
Looking at this picture, carefully digitally massaged by my brother, it’s a bit hard to recall why I didn’t dig the 991. What a rich, full colour, shimmering and gleaming like the dowry bangles of an upper-caste Indian bride; love among the marigolds.
Trust me, in person this thing looked like a flicked booger. Put it another way: if the canary turns this colour, get the hell out of the mineshaft. But then, that’s just my opinion – and it sets me to wondering. As we writers are wont to praise or condemn based on the emotional intangibles of a car, how much of the review was due to the hue? (Read More…)
After the Miata (introduced in the United States as a 1990 model) turned out to be an instant hit for Mazda, the marketing wizards at Ford decided to put Mercury badges on the Australian Ford Capri, a four-seat sporty convertible, and beat Mazda at its own game. Sure, the ’91-94 Capri was a Mazda under the skin (it was based on the 323), and it had front-wheel-drive, but so what? (Read More…)
Whenever we talk about middling sales and dwindling market shares of certain carmakers, moles pop out of the holes, check their talking points, and shout: “Volume is soooo lame. Awesome profits is where it’s at!” Point taken. (Read More…)
When the Fastbike crew did some tire testing at Continental’s “Contidrome” test track, along came a car magazine with an Audi TT RS plus. They wanted: a race. They got: slaughtered. Is the old truth about cornering speeds changing?
I have done a lot of motorbike magazine work over the years. Every so often, someone dusts off a very old idea: “What is faster, car or motorbike?” This is a boring question, because even since Newton, the answer always was: The motorbike has a better power-to-weight ratio, so it will out-accelerate the car on the straights. The car will gain in the corners through higher speeds and it can brake later, because the limiting factor in braking a sports bike is geometry: Your maximum deceleration happens with the back wheel barely touching the ground. After that, you lose braking power because you are flipping over. The same is true for acceleration btw (you flip over in the other direction), but since nearly all cars are fat and slow compared to a sports bike, this limit doesn’t matter much. So the outcomes of these tests depended solely on the track. Sometimes, the track favors the bike, sometimes it likes the car. Motorcyclists who know their physics like to infuriate other sports bike riders by passing them in the bends with a Civic when they have to use it for their shopping. And car guys hate it when they have to slow down on the Nordschleife in a twisty bit for a bike which then shoots ahead on the straight just to block the next corner by seeming to park there. Such was the accepted truth. Until a few months ago. (Read More…)
Toyota today published its revised production and sales plan for the calendar year 2012. The plan calls for slightly more than 10 million units produced globally by all Toyota Motor Corporation companies. If this plan is executed, Toyota will be the world’s first automaker to break the 10 million unit sound barrier. Based on its half year results, Toyota was already above plan before the plan was published. (Read More…)
Yesterday, we did one of our regular checks on the World’s Largest Automakers. Today, finally some good news for the GM camp: TTAC is up-revising its year-end projection for GM by some 300,000 units. Here is why: (Read More…)
Meet the car that people are identifying as the production version of the 918 Spyder. It’s gorgeous, really, and it has a lot of nice shout-outs to the incomparable 904 in its styling and proportions.
After the Miata (introduced in the United States as a 1990 model) turned out to be an instant hit for Mazda, the marketing wizards at Ford decided to put Mercury badges on the 
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