Marcelo, Jack and Mark all wrote lovely, heartfelt New Year’s missives. What more needs to be said?
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So it’s that time of year when automotive outlets do a recap of the year that’s ending, with wistful recollections of their awesome press junkets, free loaner cars, and gifts they’ve received.
Bah. Let’s live through the windshield, shall we?
Once again, it’s on. Just like I did last year and the year before, I’ve come up with two lists, Joni-Mitchell-style. First, the “hits” that brought the clicks and comments. Last, the “misses” that were near and dear to my heart. As I did for 2013, I’ll include a few articles that I published elsewhere.
As I sit here and ponder on the year gone by, quite a few salient facts spring to mind. In fact just-auto.com has just written a little ditty that offers some numbers that confirm my observations offered to TTAC readers first. The highlight of the auto year in Brazil is no doubt, the emergence of the New Brazilian Consumer.
The final tally is in: American taxpayers lost $9.26 billion from the Bush II/Obama-led rescue of the U.S. auto industry.
Right now, one can pick up a new Ram ProMaster City for catering tacos and installing cable down Flower Shop Lane. If that’s not enough, however, Ram might soon have a few more tricks up its sleeve.
Commonplace as the Dodge Aspen was during the Middle and Late Malaise Era— you saw them on American roads in 1980 or so about as often as you’d see, say, Hyundai Accents today. The Aspen (and its Plymouth sibling, the Volaré) didn’t hold their value so well, and nearly all of them were crushed by the early 1990s. I photograph them whenever I see them, of course, but that isn’t often. In this series before today, we’ve seen this ’76 Aspen sedan, this ’76 Volaré sedan, this brown-on-beige ’77 Volaré coupe and this ’77 Volaré Premier wagon, and now we’ve got a mossy, lichen-covered Northern California Aspen wagon. (Read More…)
There is more wacky traffic enforcement news coming out of Missouri this month than any other state. Last week, the Missouri attorney general began proceedings to shut down the ability of thirteen speed-trap-infested towns to generate excessive revenue from traffic tickets. Also last week, the cities of O’Fallon, Lake Saint Louis and St. Peters filed suit against St. Charles County saying its residents illegally voted for a ban on red light cameras. The suit actually admitted that the rationale was the potential loss of revenue rather than due to any safety concerns. Even better, the former mayor of St. Peters was convicted in 2006 of accepting cash kickbacks from a red light camera company. (For a truly astounding list of government officials who have been caught taking bribes from photo enforcement companies, go here.)
The big story is that the Missouri ACLU is going after the police department in the Kansas City suburb of Grain Valley for issuing tickets to motorists who tried to warn other drivers of speed-traps by flashing their headlights or high beams. My first thought was: wow, people really still do that? (Read More…)
They call it vampire capitalism: corporate loan sharks preying on the poor and having them thrown in jail when they can’t pay interest rates often in excess of one thousand percent. The newest and most distasteful face of vampire capitalism is the title pawn provider. Although TTAC has discussed the issue in the past, I’m embarrassed to note that we’ve failed to be as aggressive as we could be in discussing the evils of the title pawn business, in part because this site was previously affiliated with a contributor who had strong ties to that industry.
Not to worry, I suppose; what we were unwilling to do, the New York Times has ably accomplished.
25 years ago, every American automaker offered at least one vehicle that fit what Kim Clark and Takahiro Fujimoto called “the American Plan”: body-on-frame construction, rear-wheel-drive, V8 power, and a roughly 120-inch wheelbase. This was in stark contrast to the increasingly popular offerings from offshore, which were the antithesis of the American Plan. Today, no […]
As the Explorer goes, so goes the Ford Police Interceptor Utility. Unfortunately for Ford, as the Taurus goes, so too goes the Police Interceptor Sedan.
Sales of civilian Explorers in the United States are up 6% through the first eleven months of 2014. Ford sold 14,949 Explorers in November, a 13% improvement. In addition to those Explorers, Ford sold 18,823 Explorer-based Police Interceptor Utilities between January and November of this year, a 47% increase compared with 2013’s first eleven months. The Police Interceptor Utility went on sale in March 2012. Its best month so far was May of this year, when 2277 were sold, a 98% jump from May 2013 and a 196% improvement compared with May 2012. (Read More…)
How much marijuana is too much before getting the wheel? No one seems to know for sure despite the overwhelming support for related impaired-driving laws.
Takata’s North American unit has brought aboard attorney Bruce Angiolillo of New York-based Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett LLP as its new general counsel effective January 1.
Above is what the final Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X will likely resemble when it hits showrooms in the coming year.
If you have any kind of tribal affiliation, you probably have the experience of spotting signs of others who might have the same affiliation. Deadheads will spot a dancing bear decal on a VW bus and car enthusiasts, no different, will note a track decal on a coworker’s bumper. That’s how I found out about Jerry Gordon’s car kippah. (Read More…)
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