Soon after TTAC’s article on General Motors’ new model make over, the naysayers were out in force. Commenter jpolicke for example suggested selling GM stock if its future relied on engineering coming from South Korea. However, signs abound that this time around GM is finding its way. Let’s examine some of the pros and cons:
Our tech team applied a security update that appears to munch text. They are hard at work on fixing the problem. It’s not your computer that has character flaws, it’s ours.
The revived Datsun may be aimed strictly at developing world customers, but that hasn’t stopped them from releasing a very web-savvy teaser as part of some obnoxious slow reveal campaign.
Fans of the C7 Covette may be interested to read this breakdown of the extra 90 lbs that the C7 Corvette has put on. For someone such as myself who is used to the OEMs brushing off weight gain or other uncomfortable facts with eye-roll inducing PR pap, the ‘Vette team deserves credit for this itemized breakdown of every component that added to the weight of the C7.
The latest round of bad news regarding the Australian domestic auto industry has shifted TTAC’s attention to Canada, another country burdened with some similar issues. If Australia’s own car industry is getting hammered, then how much longer does Canada have?
The Stagecoach Music Festival is a lot of things to a lot of people. Really, it’s the lifeblood of the place where they hold it, though I’m not entirely sure where that is, because I hadn’t heard of it until yesterday when Toyota released the redesigned 2014 4Runner there.
By “redesigned,” which is Toyota’s word, what I actually mean is “facelifted.” And by “facelifted,” what I actually mean is: I have absolutely no idea what’s changed. I’ve looked over the photos and it still looks identical to the old 4Runner, which is to say that it’s 5 percent brawny, hulking SUV and 95 percent brawny, hulking wheel arches. Also, there are now LEDs.
By coincidence, I got behind a 4Runner in traffic the other day. This provided me with some good reading, because all 4Runner owners are required by Toyota to have bumper stickers. Seriously. When you’re test driving one at the Toyota dealer, they say: do you have a lacrosse bumper sticker? If you reply “no,” they show you a Highlander.
Between the bumper stickers and the Stagecoach Music Festival, I was lost in thought about Toyota SUVs. And that’s when it hit me: Toyota now sells seven different sport-utility vehicles. How did this happen?
There are bad ideas, there are terrible ideas, and then there’s the transverse V-8 drivetrain. There’s just something comically pathetic about having eight cylinders sitting sideways in the front of a car. The Eldorado you see above and its predecessors didn’t suffer from that; they had the engine pointing the right way so you could open the sharply-creased hood and see a proper mechanical vista. In those cars, and in the Toronado, front-wheel-drive was a nifty engineering trick for low-speed traction and a flat floor so all three of your bitches could sit in the back of your pimpmobile without discomfort.
The transverse V-8, however, was something else. It reeked of cost-cutting, of easy assembly, of last-minute decisions to add a decent engine to a middling platform. With very few exceptions, it’s been a lousy idea. And yet there were two vehicle platforms that had not one, but two completely different V-8s installed in them. One of them, of course, was the Cadillac E/K-platform, which shouldered the load of both 4.9-liter OHV and Northstar DOHC engines in the Eldorado, Seville, and Deville/DTS. (Arguably, the E/K was similar enough to the G-body that one could add the Aurora “Shortstar” to the mix for a total of three difference V-8s.)
And the other? Make your guess and click the jump.
German autoworkers want their share of the record profits announced by German carmakers last year. IG Metall labor union demanded 5.5 percent. Employers countered with 2.3 percent. Today, workers went on strike. (Read More…)
We already thought Bloomberg might have abandoned its monthly analyst poll. We could not find one for March, and finally found one for April – after a lot of looking. It would have been a shame if the table would have gone AWOL. This month, the race was extremely tight, and most analysts – at least the ones who had the guts to make forecasts for the D3 and not just for the SAAR – came very close to the actuals. (Read More…)
The 1973-79 Civic was a very good car for its time (mostly because just about all the other subcompacts of the era were so bad and/or boring), but the second-generation Civic was the one that gave Honda its reputation for bang-for-buck performance and miraculous-for-the-price build quality that seemed unbeatable for nearly 15 years. The value of the 1980-83 Civics became so low by the late 1990s that it wasn’t worth fixing any problem that cost more than a couple hundred bucks to fix, and so nearly all of them were gone by the time the 21st century rolled around. Here’s a Civic wagon, painted in very Malaise-y beige, that managed to hang on for thirty years. More than a year has passed since the last second-gen Civic in this series. (Read More…)
In some ways my initial move across the Pacific was a lot easier than my return. I was at the end of my personal rope when I went to Japan in 1999 and, even though I was stepping into a dead end job, there was nowhere to go but up. Coming home was quite the reverse. Of course I had a job offer, but I had learned the hard way about birds in the hand versus the two in the bush and, truth is, I was scared. I had carved out a nice little life for myself in Japan. I had friends, a decent place to live and, for a change, money in my pocket. I had even purchased a car and a motorcycle, but now it was time to sell out and move on.
Year: 2003
Mileage: 212,914 miles.
Running condition: Unknown
Exterior: Saturated with dust, dirt, and blurry as hell
Would you place a bid on it for $750?
Hello TTAC! For those who wondered where I went, I’m back from my global tour with the USAF. I am back in my native West Texas, attending Texas Tech University in pursuit of a Mechanical Engineering degree. As a break from finals, I test drove the best selling car in the US, with a decidedly continental Captain Solo slant. Thus far, I have consumed two overpriced lattes and wandered around Lubbock for 45 minutes in an attempt to organize my thoughts and come towards an unbiased conclusion about the baffling Toyota Camry.
The situation in Europe is so desperate that a 5.2 percent drop of French car sales in April gave reason to rejoice. “The plunge seems to be halting after the double-digit declines of previous months,” Francois Roudier, spokesman of the French CCFA industry association, told Reuters. (Read More…)
Porsche is looking to fill 1,400 jobs in for its expanded factory in Leipzig, where the new Macan SUVlet will be built by the end of the year. A lot of these jobs will go to current Opel workers, says Germany’s Focus. (Read More…)
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