Some say reviewing cars is an unglamorous dead-end job, and the only benefits are free gas and canapés. That impression is up for review on hearing that Nissan hired the senior auto reviewer for Consumer Reports magazine. (Read More…)

A Florida cop was fired and arrested after brutalizing a woman in front of his own dash cam. A routine review of dash cam video revealed that he brutally slammed a woman into her car. (Read More…)

The silly season continues unabated. A video of a wind-powered car, invented by a Chinese farmer suddenly goes demi-viral. “When the blue hornet hits 40 miles an hour, a turbine on its nose kicks in and starts to generate electricity,” it says in the video. “It’s pollution-free horsepower.” (Read More…)

It’s a little less than 40 years ago that a newly minted copywriter called Bertel Schmitt wrote his first ads for a newly minted car called Volkswagen Golf. As chronicled in the Autobiography of BS, the car became an involuntary star. At its launch, everybody at Volkswagen was convinced it would be a dud.

29 million cars later, the Golf is one of the world’s most sold cars, and by large Volkswagen’s most important.  In a few weeks, Volkswagen will launch its all—new seventh generation of the Golf,  the emm-kay seven in blogger parlance. This is a make-or-break launch. If something would go wrong with this launch, it would be doubly bad for Volkswagen. The new Golf also is the first Volkswagen that is based on VW’s new modular MQB architecture. (Read More…)

The already fragile egos of HPDE drivers are about to take another hit. Shelley, the autonomous Audi TT-S developed by Stanford, has tried her first lapping day, and the results were promising.

(Read More…)

Writing this series has made me start paying more attention to types of vehicles I’ve long overlooked. Say, the early Nissan 300ZX, or the Mazda-based Mercury Capri. Then we’ve got the beat-up work trucks that still roam the streets in large numbers but are finally dying out, e.g. the Dodge D-100 and the late-60s GM C-series. Today, it’s the turn of Ford’s workhorse from the darkest days of the Malaise Era. (Read More…)

Congratulations!!! And my condolences.

You have just bought yourself a vehicle that may be worth more dead than alive.

Did you follow my car buying advice? Of course not! You wanted cheap to the extreme and now you got it. Bald tires. Doors that may be lovably ‘scrunched’ just a little bit thanks to those pesky inanimate objects. But hey, at least the ashtray still works.

Now you just have to figure out what to do with it?

(Read More…)

It’s not quite the bursting bubble that had been prognosticated by many through the last decade, but there is no doubt that “the world’s largest auto market sputters in a slowing economy,” as Reuters writes.

“Be careful what you wish for” is not the Chinese proverb it often is made up to be, but it applies: The red menace of Chinese car exports, longer predicted than the bursting bubble and likewise for long a chimera, finally appears to get going. The sputtering Chinese home market provides the push to find better fortunes abroad, but General Motors broke the dam that held Chinese exports back. (Read More…)

Jonathan writes:

Sajeev,

I live in Chicago (actually a northern suburb) and own two cars: 05 Scion xB and an 03 Accord (4 cyl Auto). Due to logistics, day care, scheduling, and the like, both cars are used every day for the 1.5 mile drive to different train stations. And as you can imagine, we have some mighty frigid days here in the Windy City, and getting into a frozen car is not a whole lot of fun.

So I was thinking about installing an after-market remote starter in one or both of the cars. My questions are: Is this EVER a good idea? And if so, which types/brands should I look for and what professional installation gotcha’s should I beware of? And will the installation possibly reduce the future reliability of my car’s electrical/starter systems with the installation of such a device.

Thank you,

Jonatha

Sajeev answers:

(Read More…)

I bought my first Corvette primarily because of its headlights. Spy photos of the 2005 model had just hit the press, revealing that Chevrolet was dumping the Vette’s hidden headlamps, the heart of the car’s sleek look for 41 years. Corvette purists howled in protest. Convinced that the automotive world as we knew it was coming to an end, I immediately ordered a 2004 Spiral Gray 6-Speed Coupe. (Read More…)

A while ago I gave you the Top 100 best-selling models around the globe over the first Quarter of 2012. And you liked it. A lot. I know because you told me. As you know progress never stops, which is why this time I give you… the Top 150 best-sellers worldwide for June 2012.

Update: You can now also check out the Top 120 best-selling models worldwide over the first 6 months 2012 here.

Yes you have read correctly.

Who in his right mind would have ventured such an epic exploration of the varied car tastes in the entire world?

Your favorite car sales nerd, me.

If you had enough of all this worldwide grandiloquence, that’s ok because you can visit 168 countries and territories in my blog, one by one, to figure out which models sell best in each of them. Another crazy thing I do…

Back to the world.

And the nagging question comes back again: has the Focus beaten the Corolla yet?

(Read More…)

I wouldn’t normally put up two YouTube vids in a day, much less in a week, but this one is blowing up like the proverbial crack in the Eighties. So… how would you have avoided this incident? And can you count all the different things the driver is doing wrong?

(Read More…)

Bailing out a European carmaker in need is sure to attract the attention and ire of a few EU Commissars. Once people are in the street, money can legally flow. (Read More…)

BYD’s F3 received worldwide acclaim for being a Corolla ripoff. When the new F3 was announced at the Beijing Auto Show, Carnewschina wrote: “The new F3 is design-wise slightly better than the old BYD F3 which was a copy of the old Toyota Corolla, the new F3 is a copy of the new Corolla but slightly less obvious. For BYD, we call that a huge improvement!” Come on, Carnewschina, the new BYD F3 has something the Corolla does not have: A remote control. Not a remote control for doors. You can drive the car remotely like a toy. (Read More…)

This is a great video, and it showcases just how quickly things happen in a racing Porsche… including bad things.

(Read More…)