Toyota’s CEO Akio Toyoda threw another bucket of cold water on wild fantasies of autonomous cars. Instead of developing cars that drive themselves, Toyota is thinking more of cars that assist you in driving. (Read More…)
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It’s not quite the all clear, but Japanese automakers (and their government-owned Chinese joint-venture partners) breathe a bit easier after receiving April sales numbers for China. Numbers had been down severely after last September’s anti-Japan riots. Latest “figures suggest that the firms are closer to recovering their lost sales,” says The Nikkei [sub]. (Read More…)
Yesterday, the astute Derek Kreindler added to his already excellent body of work on TTAC another installment of his “Generation Why” series in which he explored Land Rover’s resistance to the current trend of marketing lower cost vehicles to young people. In the body of the article a couple of sentences in particular jumped out at me –
Jesus Christ! Visitors of the 2013 Aberdeen Dad Vail Regatta on May 10-11 will think a red Mini convertible will drive on water.
BMW’s MINI brand sponsors the festival of university and college rowing along the along the Schuylkill River. The miraculous MINI actually is a fiberglass mold of the car mounted to a boat hull. Powered by a 6 hp outboard motor, it floats down river.
Since I’ve gotten myself started on a racing theme (see a recent entry in my “Memoirs of an Independent Repair Shop Owner” column), I figured I’d keep it going with this BB entry. (Read More…)
A quiet and unnoticed getaway is hardly a fait accompli in the auto-centric city of Los Angeles, where street-parked Italian exotics are a given, and even the peons seem to manage to procure a Mercedes-Benz C-class.
The task is made especially difficult when your getaway car is an Aston Martin DB9. But not for any of the obvious reasons.
TTAC’s forays into areas like law, politics and economics are not everyone’s cup of tea, but they do matter. The dry, dense topics like regulation and financial topics have real implications for car enthusiasts, not to mention society as a whole. One subset of that is urban planning, a discipline which can have an enormous impact on our favorite hobby.
By now, most of you who care about these things are aware that Toyota today announced an annual net profit of $9.73 billion for the fiscal that ended on March 31, more than three times of what the company made in the year before. By now you probably heard that the “weaker yen” is the reason. Not really, says Toyota, claiming that “effects of FOREX rates” added only $1.5 billion to the bottom line. There is another number you may not have heard. (Read More…)
Product placement in movies and television can be tricky. It gets hard for the viewer to suspend disbelief and get into a movie or television show when every character pulls up in a brand new model offered by a single manufacturer. I’m looking at you, producers of the 60 minute Chevrolet commercial that runs every Monday on CBS Hawaii Five- O. I’m a cop who works a lot of overtime. The newest vehicle in my family’s personal fleet is seven years old. No new cars will be gracing my driveway any time soon.
It’s especially hard to pull off if you’re talking about a high- end product like a luxury automobile. Audi appears to be pushing the envelope this summer, with supporting roles for the Audi R8 in the new Iron Man 3 already being advertised. Judging from this commercial that appears to have first hit the web on May 6, it looks like we’ll be looking for the Audi rings to be prominently displayed on 23rd century land speeders in the new Star Trek: Into Darkness movie as well. Still, it’s a funny and well done commercial that’s definitely worth a couple minutes of your time.
Hit the jump for the video that explains exactly what the hell Original Spock (Leonard Nimoy) is singing about if your knowledge of geek trivia is wanting…
Subaru is set to expand capacity at its Indiana plant by 100,000 units, adding the Impreza alongside the Legacy, Outback and Tribeca to help fill demand for its vehicles in the United States. (Read More…)
I remember when the RX rolled onto the scene in 1998. It was truly the first successful crossover as we would know it today. While everyone else was trying to produce a truck-based luxury SUV, Lexus took the Camry/ES platform, put a jelly-bean inspired box on top and jacked the ride height up to 7.7 […]
The Range Rover Sport was launched in 2005 and Land Rover has sold 4,00,000 units till date. Evolved from Land Rover’s first concept vehicle, the Range Stormer (showcased in 2004), the first generation Range Rover Sport’s production has been stopped, as the second generation model is all set to go on sale in the next couple of months. Land Rover has announced pricing for the Sport in the UK, which starts at £59,995 for the base trim and goes up to £74,995 at the top end. The second gen Range Rover Sport is all new and shares only 25% parts with the Range Rover. It uses an all aluminium PLA platform, which results in a weight saving of 420 kgs over its predecessor (when powered by the same engine). Land Rover states the new Range Rover Sport is “the fastest, most agile, most responsive Land Rover ever”. The British company claims a 30% improvement in handling over the first gen model. The new RR Sport does a lap around the Nordschleife in 8:35 minutes, which is fast for a full sized SUV.
We had a chance to drive a Range Rover Sport prototype at Jaguar Land Rover’s Gaydon test track. (Read More…)
As Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi rush to prepare new entry-level product to attract a younger crowd, Jaguar Land Rover is proudly calling “bollocks” on their efforts to attract younger buyers. Although much of the growth in the “near-luxury” segment is expected to come from vehicles with a transaction price in the $30,000-$40,000 range, JLR’s sole offering in that segment is the low-volume LR2. It’s the $50,000 Evoque that’s driving sales for the brand. This interview from Automotive News with JLR’s North American CEO, Andy Goss, explains why: (Read More…)
Forward contracts on popcorn skyrocketed at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as former TTAC Chief Editor Ed Niedermeyer drew massive fire for his recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. On Sunday, GM’s PR Chief Selim Bingo blasted Niedermeyer for “stepping through the looking glass” and for “carelessly comparing GM’s spending in China to that in the U.S.”
As enthusiastic as I am about the actual product (when everyone was ready to crap all over Tesla based on some bad information, TTAC was one of the few publications to go to bat for the upstart auto maker), Elon Musk’s series of announcements, frequently couched in hyperbolic descriptions of their significance, are beginning to grate on me. Every week, Musk seems to descend from Mount Sinai bearing yet another set of tablets that promise to “disrupt” (to use a favorite term of Silicon Valley) the automotive landscape forever, yet end up being little more than a not-quite-a-lease program or some announcement about after-sales care.
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