With their Washington overlords breathing down their necks, GM executives are pushing Opel for a definitive agreement to close Opel’s Bochum plant. According to the Wall Street Journal, GM “would like to be able to announce the plan before or along with its third-quarter earnings, which are expected to be disclosed Oct. 31.”
Keep smoking. (Read More…)
A massage parlour and a car wash outlet in the Sunway Mentari suburb of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, engaged in a flourishing joint venture until it was disrupted by police last week. After nine car washes, customers received a free detailing – but not of the car. (Read More…)
Remember the awesome C30 Polestar concept that packed all-wheel drive and 405-horsepower into the C30 packaging? Yeah, that’s not happening. But we do get a consolation prize.
GM’s China boss Kevin Wale will retire his job on October 31, GM says. His will be replaced by Bob Socia, GM’s VP of Global Purchasing and Supply Chain. (Read More…)
Ford is set to promote Mark Fields, head of Ford’s operations in the Americas, to the newly created post of COO, paving the way for him to succeed Alan Mulally as CEO.
Honda has developed a new, simple, gasoline-electric hybrid system which “will set a new standard for fuel efficiency and recapture the success of the CVCC engine 40 years ago,” writes Reuters. (Read More…)
The car industry is slowly getting healthy again (except in Europe.) Worldwide sales are up 6.8 percent so far, and it looks like 81 million units could be sold worldwide this year, as data by LMC Automotive show. This has the Worldwatch Institute up in arms. Basically, it wants us to buy fewer cars and drive them less. (Read More…)
In the now-infamous article on the Scion FR-S and the relentless hype campaign leading up to its launch, I invoked the Chevrolet Camaro as an example of how a new car can be praised as the Second Coming of Christ during its debut, only to have cooler heads prevailed down the line, when the novelty wears off and its flaws become apparent.
Thanks to reader and contributor Jeff Jablansky, I was able to dig up perhaps the most egregious example of this phenomenon.
Today, we’re trying something new. Alex is doing his review in video-only format. Let us know how you like it.
Four years ago, I bit the bullet and bought a Traqmate for my race car. I continue to believe that the Traqmate is the best tool out there for the club racer on a budget. The predictive lap timer feature alone is an amazingly powerful tool that allows you to make multiple changes in the way you drive a single lap and see the results in real time.
Unfortunately for me, my Traqmate is wired into that race car pretty securely. Is it possible to get similar data for a lot less money — say, for seventy or eighty bucks instead of the $999 Traqmate charges for the basic in-car system?
You can tell immediately that it is a concept: It has suicide doors. Nissan will show the fuel-cell propelled TeRRA SUV concept at the 2012 Paris Motor Show that opens on September 27. (Read More…)
In the last article, we explored what influences a suspension to ‘feel sporty’ vs. actually deliver better performance. A great car rewards us with a sublime driving experience while many (most?) let us down in a various ways. As part of that article, I dove into fairly technical terms without much introduction, so I’m taking a step back to do an overview and define a few terms. Then, I’ll get into the real meat of Suspension Truth and why we’re on The Truth About Cars – more seat-of-the-pants impressions tied to juicy technical details and real-world test data like shock dyno graphs, 3-axis accelerometer results – even raw shock velocity measurements from our Aim EVO system! From here we’ll be able to give metrics for different vehicles and see what we like and what we’d like to improve.
Let people go to Chengdu to satisfy prurient desires. I went to Chengdu to visit the Sanhe Classic Car Museum. I found a car that was really for the chosen few, a fantastic Hongqi CA773 Parade Car. The parade car was based on the CA773 sedan which was made from 1969 until 1976. This particular parade car was made in 1974. (Read More…)
Wolfsburg is working hard on making the (new) Beetle’s image a bit manlier. It hopes to get support for this endeavor from two R-Line packages that are based on the top “Sport” version: an exterior package and an interior package. (Read More…)
I find more Porsche 928s, Alfa Romeo Alfettas, Buick Reattas, and Datsun 810s than I do first-gen Hyundai Excels during my travels in high-turnover self-service wrecking yards, in spite of the 1985-89 Excel selling in tremendous quantities in the United States. You saw these things everywhere on the street until about 1992, at which point the import sections of American junkyards became choked with low-mile Excels that crapped out in not-worth-fixing fashion. I believe the first-gen Excel was the worst motor vehicle you could buy new in the United States in the 1980s, and maybe for the entire fourth quarter of the 20th Century. Yes, even worse than the Yugo. (Read More…)
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