Reuters reports that battery maker A123 Systems is filing to bankruptcy protection in Delaware.

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The European new passenger car market accelerated its downward trend in September. According to data release by the European manufacturer body ACEA, Registrations were down 10.8 percent YoY to 1,099,264 units in the EU. Nine months into the year, the market contracted 7.6 percent to 9,368,327 units registered January through September 2012. (Read More…)

Want something cheaper than the Dacia Sandero? Maruti Suzuki will sell you a brand new car for 244,000 rupees. That’s $4,613.

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Great news everyone! The Dacia Sandero will apparently cost £5,995, or about $9,600 in its cheapest trim level, when it goes on sale in the UK tomorrow.

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Ratings firm Fitch released a memo Tuesday outlining some possible problems relating to the proposed GM-PSA merger.

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Imagine you are driving down on a well traveled interstate on a family vacation.

Everything is good in your life. Traffic is minimal. The road is a never ending horizon of the straight and narrow. Just you and your family. When all of a sudden…

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An interesting story out of Hawaii, where Dodge Charger rental cars are being targeted by thieves due to the ease of which they can be broken into – and officials are aware of the matter, with little action being taken.

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The Land Rover Defender commands fairly hefty prices on the used market, thanks to its brief tenure in our marketplace and its classic styling. But the revived Defender, set to debut in 2015, will not only come to America, but serve as the brand’s entry-level model.

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Ferraris are expensive, Porsches (usually) less so. This is something that every kid on the street knows, right? Turns out that it is, as the song says, truer than true.

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A merger between the Canadian Auto Workers union and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union passed a ratification vote Monday, which will see the two unions merge and create the largest private-sector union in Canada. The new union won’t be limited strictly to workers either.

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Some driving enthusiasts (for reasons that escape me) take their significant other’s tastes into account when buying a car for themselves. Invariably, the s.o. won’t abide a hatchback, but finds crossovers the epitome of automotive style and utility. So our whipped enthusiast wonders which compact crossover they will least regret. Oh, and it can’t cost […]

TTAC Commentator Horseflesh writes:

Hey Sajeev and Steve,

Winter is coming. Like any true Seattle suburbanite, I dread the debut of the white stuff. We’re so scared of snow up here that the local insurance company even aired commercials teasing us about it. (Read More…)

Honda stood in a seemingly unassailable position in the American marketplace, with customers willing to pay whatever it took to get a Civic or Accord… until the 1990s dawned. The asset-price bubble burst in 1991, founder Soichiro Honda died the same year, the competition had caught up to the Civic and Accord, the Legend and Integra weren’t smash hits, nobody could figure out the point of the Vigor, and Honda USA was getting sweated over decades of kickbacks and general dealership hanky-panky. Oh, and American Peugeot dealers were having an easier time moving the 404 (even as Peugeot was packing up to leave the continent) than Honda was in selling the fourth-gen Accord wagon. You never saw many of them on the street and just about all of them are gone by now, but I’ve managed to find this 344,000-mile example in a Denver self-service yard. (Read More…)

Criticism is what we do around here. We critique cars, car companies, politicians, consumers and, of course, other automotive writers and publications. Of course if you’re negative about everything, you’re a curmudgeon, not a critic. Criticism, if it is to have any value, must be fair, willing to praise as well as to demerit. TTAC has taken its share of shots against automotive websites, traditional buff books and the Detroit daily newspapers. So much so, in fact, that some of our readers have offered their own criticism that we unduly snipe at others. I don’t agree with that criticism, but it is easy and tempting to dwell on the negative and there are indeed many worthy publications and writers that deserve to be praised as much as the hacks deserve to be exposed. When I read that Aaron Severson’s masterful automotive history site, Ate Up With Motor, has won the E.P. Ingersoll Award, given by the Society of Automotive Historians, it was not really a surprise. Ate Up With Motor is the gold standard for online automotive history.

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Reports out of the Ren Cen state that departed Chief Marketing Officer Joel Ewanick’s position won’t be filled. Instead, CEO Dan Akerson will delegate those responsibilities to the global heads of Chevrolet and Cadillac.

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