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While You Were Sleeping, your digest of events that happened outside of office hours, for June 24, 2014.
- Vancouver is considering “road pricing” to help fight congestion. Solutions could include a London style congestion charge, dynamic tolls that fluctuate based on time of day and road usage (the idea being that less popular routes would be cheaper) and more traditional tolls. The system would be the first of its kind in North America, and funding would go towards transit and a reduction in the gas tax.
- Fiat is adding an automatic to the 500 Abarth. Apparently, the lack of knowledge on how to drive a manual transmission has put an artifical cap on sales of FCA’s hot hatch.
- BMW will renew their joint-venture with Chinese auto maker Brilliance for an extra 10 years, ending in 2028. BMW is hoping to challenge Audi as the country’s biggest luxury car maker, and with a reported 25 percent of profits coming from China, BMW literally needs a strong presence in that market to ensure continued growth.
- GM is revising tow ratings downwards on their pickups to comply with new SAE standards.
- France’s domestic auto makers may be cutting jobs and shifting production out of their home country, but Toyota is hiring 520 people to build the Yaris in France.
- SEAT is launching their first crossover, the Leon X-Perience. It looks more like a tall wagon (ala Subaru Outback) than a CUV.
7 Comments on “While You Were Sleeping: June 24, 2014...”
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Congestion Tax: Since when does Vancouver, BC have a traffic problem in the downtown region? Aside from construction and some major roads into the city, I’ve never seen truly bad traffic there, even on weekdays. It’s one of few cities I’ve encountered in NA that don’t have heavy traffic in downtown (most of which, curiously-enough, are on the west coast, and all are west of the Rockies).
FIAT: Because there’s no way it could be their exceptionally-polarizing style. They have a “Smart” problem: The entire market for their car is soon to be saturated.
BMW: They just need to wait until Audi has the same perception as Mercedes in the market there. The Chinese only switched after MB attained their reputation. The major problem BMW will have is with styling – their cars are not generic-looking enough to avoid attention like the Audis.
GM: Does this affect their “toughest” claim?
France/Toyota: This mean they’ll be making about 1000 cars a year, between the legal short workdays, long vacations, and smoke breaks.
SEAT: No, this doesn’t look like a cross between a VAG wagon and a Subaru Outback at all.
Vancouver likes to be the vanguard of British California :)
The thing is that it will not just be Vancouver implementing those rules but most likely the entire GVRD/Lower Mainland.
It is good to see that the pickup makers are starting to comply. Someone needs to regulate the magic spring dust used by the domestic 2 +FCA. View it as a form of harm reduction but instead of IV drugs we are talking tow ratings.
The Abarth has always had an auto in Europe, but it didn’t fit in the reinforced US frame. My guess is that this same automatic will also show-up in the 1.4T Renegade/500x.
The heading should be changed to…
“While you were watching the World Cup”
About the Abarth auto; My wife told me about a carjacking cured by 3 teens who couldn’t start the stick shifted car when the keys were turned over at gunpoint.
Ah yes, Toyota is hiring an Extra 520 people to make the Yaris in France, one presumes.
French-made Yariseshave been exported to the US for over a year now, reported in these very pages, but forgotten as usual.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE94F0V020130516?irpc=932
Having just spent a week in Vancouver I came to the conclusion that the powers that be hate cars. So expect the most draconian of “solutions” to be implemented.