Of course, Carlos Ghosn did not miss this opportunity to talk about his most favorite topic: The value of the yen. As last Friday, the CEO of Renault and Nissan still does not want to hear talk of a low yen. Ghosn says the Japanese currency “is coming back to normal levels,” and as far as Ghosn is concerned, the yen still has some ways to go. Even if this freaks-out the CEO of Ford. (Read More…)
Anyone looking for an AMG R63, the rarest modern Mercedes-Benz product of all time, look no further. There’s one for sale outside of Toronto for the low price of just $33,995. Plus you get to have dinner with me if you buy it (not really, but you should give me a call if you decide to take possession of it). You can view the ad here. Paging Mr. DeMuro…
It costs a thousand dollars a day to hang out with Jose Canseco nowadays, but you can hang out with me for much less. And I’ll even throw in some laps around two of America’s most popular road courses.
Once, while I was reading prewar classic car restoration expert David Greenlees’ fine site The Old Motor, there was an article about a custom 1925 Rolls Royce Phantom with round doors, a museum piece. The article mentioned how the body was the second one fitted to that chassis as the first, a custom Hooper body, was apparently rejected by the lady who ordered it, “Mrs. Hugh Dillman of Detroit, MI.”. The name rang a bell so I looked it up on a search engine and every result on the first page said the same thing, that the Rolls had been ordered by Mrs. Dillman but for some reason she didn’t like it and never took delivery. Other than “Mrs. Hugh Dillman of Detroit, MI.”, pretty much repeated verbatim, there wasn’t much info on Mrs. D. Digging deeper I found out why her name was familiar. Hugh Dillman was Anna Dodge’s second husband. Her first hubby was Horace Dodge, who along with his brother John founded the Dodge Brothers car company. All these automotive sites were talking about Mrs. Hugh Dillman without realizing that they were missing an important fact about the lady, perhaps of more interest to car enthusiasts than the fact that she refused delivery of a custom car.
Yoko Kubota of Reuters had already written half of her story before we boarded a bus this Tokyo morning. It took us north to Nissan’s Tochigi plant, where we were promised to see the new Infiniti Q50 roll off the assembly lines. Kubota wrote that “in the financial year ended March, Infiniti sold 172,615 vehicles globally, up 12.1 percent year-on-year,” that the brand needs to grow, that the backbone of Infiniti’s volume has been the G37 Sedan, and that its successor, “with a new name Q50, will go on sale in the United States in the summer.” Today, we see how the Q50 is made.
It’s a thing in China: You don’t get the car service you expect, and instead of waiting for the J.D. Power questionnaire, you hire thugs with sledgehammers. Not to beat the dealer to pulp. No, to smash your car in front of a lot of cameras. It so recently happened to a Maserati Quattroporte. According to Carnewschina, the owner of the car (starting at 423,000 USD in China) disagreed with the dealer over a $390 repair. After a flurry of letters, the car was smashed. (Read More…)
I recently made a troubling discovery. Samsung, noted manufacturer of telephones the size of a license plate, is now producing a refrigerator with Twitter. Let me repeat that for those of you who merely skim my articles (Hi, mom!). Samsung manufacturers a refrigerator with Twitter.
Cadillac may be gunning too hard for Germany’s domain of rear-drive sports sedans, but one area where The Standard of the World won’t be gunning for them is in the volume race. GM CFO Dan Ammann told Automotive News that unlike BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi, “We’re not going to be in every single segment that they’re in”.
Carmaking is a cyclical business. In crisis times, it’s “we are all in this together.” When business improves, relations between automakers and their suppliers revert to the old arrogance, to hurry up, make more for less. It’s that time again. (Read More…)
TTAC’s favorite beige appliance, the Toyota Corolla, is due for a redesign this year, and powertrain details are starting to leak out. For TTAC readers, there’s nothing but bad news.
BMW’s CEO Norbert Reithofer lambasted EU lawmakers for attempting to “hurt European industry in competition with the United States and China,” as Reuters reports. Said Reithofer at today’s General Meeting of Shareholders in Munich: (Read More…)
Happy days are here again!
April new car sales were up 9% from April 2012; which doesn’t sound like all that much until you realize that the winning brands beat losing brands by a near 5 to 1 margin.
As for used cars sales, they are even better. Official stats for the used car market are always hit or miss. But with large dealer networks such as Sonic Automotive, Carmax, Group One, and Asbury Automotive all recording double digit used car sales growth, it’s safe to say that the overall market for late model vehicles remains healthy.
And for all that good fortune, you can thank one overwhelming force in today’s marketplace.
This site has long been distinguished in many ways by what it doesn’t cover. Our founder wouldn’t cover motorsports at all, though that policy has obviously been changed, for the better I might add. We don’t review the latest edition of Forza or other racing games and sims, and we’re not likely to run a post about the latest episode of Top Gear, in either the original British or the various colonial forms. Why talk about what everyone is talking about? Still, there’s a reason why you see ’69 Camaros at every car show. Things are popular because people like them. This video promoting Detroit’s bid to host ESPN’s 2014 X Games, produced by Detroit agency The Work Inc., featuring a Ford Fiesta ST rallycross car racing around downtown Detroit and Belle Isle, and doing donuts on the roof of Cobo Hall, has been making the rounds of the car blogs and not only is everyone raving about the video, the promo is doing it’s job. (Read More…)
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