The Range Rover Sport is set to get a total redesign later this year, but pictures of the new car have leaked prior to its New York Auto Show debut. Just as we expected, it looks like a full-size Range Rover got shrunk in the wash.

Expect residual values of the current model to take a serious dive once the new car goes on sale. God forbid anybody should be seen driving the previous generation. An easy giveaway will be the sagging air suspensions, which the new owners will not be able to afford to fix, due to the exorbitant shop rates charged by JLR dealers.

A lot of folks may look at their early teenage years with fleeting moments of fondness.

Friends, birthday parties, fun and games. Not to mention a healthy variety of mischievous activities to help keep life interesting between the endless classroom lectures and local social drama.

I don’t remember 99.9% of it… which is no doubt a good thing since my life was pretty much in a counterclockwise hormone ridden tailspin by the time I hit the big 1 3.

But I do vaguely recall one unfortunate thing I never could avoid.

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PSA announced their renewed brand strategy for their Peugeot and Citroen lines, and the situation has finally been clarified after frequent back and forth reports that contradicted one another. It turns out that PSA will employ a three-tier approach that is equally confusing, with Citroen as the lowest tier with Peugeot on top. But then there’s also Citroen’s DS line, which is supposed to be upscale itself. Confused? So are we.

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No overcapacity problems at Volkswagen – at least not globally, and especially not in China. “Within the coming years, we will build at least ten more plants – seven of those in China,” Volkswagen chief Martin Winterkorn said today in Wolfsburg, with Automobilwoche taking notes. By 2016, Volkswagen will have capacity for more than four million units in China, that’s about half of VW’s current worldwide output. (Read More…)

Attentive readers of TTAC have known it since the Beijing Auto Show last year that Toyota will launch a separate brand for its “new energy” (read plug-in hybrid and EV) that are produced in China. A not quite officially announced, but de facto policy wants it that way. Now we have the brand. It’s called Ranz. (Read More…)

A fiery red car, seen in Beijing. An aggressive bumper sticker, showing the owner is very angry with Japan. Or, judging from the sticker, maybe it’s hot love? It’s all about those islands, which happen to sit on top of oil, and straight in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. What is this motherland-loving man driving? (Read More…)

Henrik Fisker has resigned from the automobile firm that bears his name, as the company’s future looks to be headed towards an inexorable buyout by a Chinese auto maker.

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Hi Sajeev!

I’m sending you the third installment in a series of linked Piston Slap queries. A while back, I hit Piston Slap with a question… what’s the best way to unload Grandma’s Buick? Now I’d like to share the story of how one large, white, wallowing ride was replaced with another vehicle, also white, but more enjoyably absurd in every measurable dimension. This new addition to the motorpool is the conclusion to my second Piston Slap query–What is the Poor Man’s TARDIS? (Read More…)

While Volkswagen is soaring high in most countries, its India innings have been far from successful. Everybody keeps talking about China and India being the next big automobile markets in the world. The truth is, China has already peaked, while India has a long way to go. For instance, Volkswagen sold 2.8 million units in China last year, while in India, they sold less than 100,000 (which is their plant capacity).

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Audi showed its A3 Sedan in concept form at the 2011 Geneva Auto Show. The real thing will be shown in Audi’s most important market, at the Shanghai Auto Show, end of April. The car will be sold in early 2014 in the United States and China, Reuters says. (Read More…)

These days, with the nanny-state enforcers of IngSoc and Agenda 21 mandating 3,000 pounds of safety gear on each new motor vehicle, it’s refreshing to hear that folks in the very early days of motoring got some good yuks out of the idea of impalement on the tiller of a curved-dash Olds. We’ve dug up this 1904 Cal Stewart recording of “Uncle Josh In An Automobile” to demonstrate. (Read More…)

The driving force behind the 12 man protest at Chrysler’s Warren, Michigan plant has gotten the boot.

The Detroit News, which broke the story, reported that protest organizer Alex Wassell was suspended without pay after nearly 20 years on the job. The protest was not sanctioned by the UAW, and led to the leaking of some documents outlining quality problems with the 2013 Ram 1500, a crucial product for Chrysler.

Since Wassell’s suspension, groups like the ACLU and Labor Notes, a union activist group, have spoken out about the firing, which Chrysler described as being due to “…engaging in activity constituting or appearing to constitute a conflict with the interest of the company.”

Meanwhile, the UAW has been curiously silent on the whole matter, which gives us an indirect example of the inherent conflict that occurs when the labor union and the corporate owners are one and the same.

  I am coming back to China after having been away for months. My trusted sidekick of many years, a lady surnamed Zhang, seeks my advice. “Bertel, we have car problems.” Uh-oh, I think, and I mentally do a review of my accounts. This smells expensive. As it turns out, the problem is bigger than […]

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: from the perspective of the manufacturer, dealers are the worst part of the business. Their consistent thirty-day-crunch mindset leads to all sorts of idiocy, including the “$500 Dance Contest” you see above.

There’s something appropriate about it, however:

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The W-Body Chevrolet Impala, so beloved by the horribly biased, anti-Detroit, anti-GM staff and readership of TTAC, will live on for one more year, as a fleet vehicle dubbed the “Impala Limited”.

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