It was heady days at Ford’s Windsor Engine Plant in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The facility cranked out Triton V8 engines and the mighty 6.8-liter V10 for an insatiable truck and SUV market (remember the Excursion?), but its future is now in jeopardy.

Aggressive fuel economy targets and the move towards EcoBoost power and fewer cylinders in Ford engine bays have workers and their labor leaders wondering how long they can continue building the factory’s chief powerplant — the Triton V10. (Read More…)

Dan writes:

Dear Sajeev,

I’m looking for some advice on a reliable, yet affordable OBD-II scanner to look up and clear the check engine light (CEL) on my 2010 Volkswagen Golf TDI. While a dedicated Ross-Tech VCDS would be ideal, the price and future ownership of this (or any other VAG) vehicle is not.

(Read More…)

There’s nothing new here, nothing unusual at all to see.

U.S. sales at the increasingly popular Jeep brand jumped 17 percent in June 2016 as the overall market climbed just 2 percent; as SUVs and crossover sales grew 10 percent. Jeep sales have increased on a year-over-year basis in 33 consecutive months.

FCA’s need for Jeep to outperform was all the more clear in June, as Jeep attempted to follow-up an all-time record performance in May with sustained demand. Car sales across the automaker’s Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, and Fiat brands plunged 40 percent, a loss of nearly 19,000 sales.

And so the trend continues. 17.4 percent of the new vehicles sold in the United States by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in April were cars. That figure fell to 16.9 percent in May and dropped to just 14.2 percent in June.

These aren’t typos. For every 86 pickup trucks, minivans, commercial vans, SUVs, and crossovers sold at your friendly local FCA store in June 2016, there were only 14 cars sold along with them. (Read More…)

It’s a well-known fact that Islamic State fighters enjoy using hardy Toyota pickups in their pursuit of cleansing the Middle East of people even slightly different from themselves, but they’ll need to restock after last week.

Recent Allied military advances, including a huge, weeks-long push that liberated the Iraqi city of Fallujah, have ISIS on the run, and the U.S. Air Force’s best aerial hardware just caught a huge number of their vehicles making a break for it.

The results, as Defense Department video of the strike shows, wasn’t pretty — for the insurgents or their trucks. (Read More…)

If you were expecting Jeep’s upcoming Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer to be range-topping standalone models, think again.

According to Automotive News, the new additions to the lineup will simply be upscale versions of the next-generation Grand Cherokee. Consider your retro-tinged dreams squashed. (Read More…)

Numerous reports of an exhaust smell in the cabin of late-model Ford Explorers prompted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to open an investigation.

According to Reuters (via Automotive News), safety officials began looking into 2011–2015 Explorers last Friday after receiving 154 complaints of an exhaust odor. The issue, which is reported to be a factor in one crash (that didn’t result in injuries), persists in some vehicles even after they were repaired to correct the problem. (Read More…)

Edsel Ford II, great-grandson of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford, was arrested after an altercation at his Grosse Pointe Farms home last night, but no charges came out of this morning’s arraignment.

According to reports from the arraignment by the Detroit Free Press, police were called to the home by Ford’s wife, Cynthia Layne Neskow. The 67-year-old Ford, son of Henry Ford II and cousin of company chairman William Clay Ford, Jr,  spent the night in jail awaiting a misdemeanor domestic violence charge. (Read More…)

Kevin writes:

Here’s my struggle:

I’m a Saab fanatic. Fanboi. Devotee. Whatever you want to call it. It’s a total #saabobsession. I’m currently driving a 2001 9-5 sedan, a 2.3-liter car that my wife and I have owned since new. I also own a 2006 9-3 Aero convertible, and I’m the vice-president of our regional Saab owners club. I’m in deep. We do have a 2011 Ford Flex Ecoboost as the main family hauler.

My 9-5 has just 118,000 miles on it, and has been meticulously maintained. For the first ten years of its life, it was my wife’s daily driver. When we got the Flex, I inherited it from her, got an ECU tune and upgraded the suspension. It’s nothing extreme, but it’s fast enough, plenty of fun, reliable, and I don’t worry about where I leave it parked.

A couple of weeks ago, the 9-5 started leaking oil onto the driveway. I took it to my good friends at my local Saab repair shop, and they told me that a seal needs to be replaced behind the timing chain cover, maybe between the head and the block? Whatever, the important takeaway is the repair estimate: $2,400. It also needs new brakes ($600), and a new clutch is on the horizon ($1,700) as the car’s still on its original clutch and it chatters when cold. So, here I am looking at over $4,500 in repairs on my beloved 9-5. Those repairs exceed the cash value of the car, and as much as it pains me to admit it, I don’t think it’s worth sinking that kind of money into it.

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After agreeing to fork over up to $14.7 billion to U.S. owners (and the environment) in its U.S. diesel emissions scandal settlement, Volkswagen is saying Nein! to a similar buyback in Europe, because that kind of payout would just be insane.

According to Left Lane News, the embattled automaker isn’t planning any compensation to its clients on the Continent, meaning its 2.0-liter TDI models will go on well into the future, albeit in a slightly detuned form. (Read More…)

While it’s still a $200 million dollar question if Elio Motors will raise enough money to start production of its low-cost, high-mile-per-gallon tandem enclosed reverse trike, the automotive startup took a major step towards building vehicles for sale with completing the first (of 23) E series prototype. Elio will use it for testing and refinement of the final production design.

Though it looks very much like the P5, the E series trikes have fully engineered unibody construction made of stamped steel panels, unlike the previous five Elio prototypes that were scratch built with tubed space frames. The E series prototypes aren’t what the industry calls validation builds (there will be a 100 of those assembled at Elio’s Shreveport factory by the end of this year, Elio claims), but they’re very close to production designs. (Read More…)

Less than a week after it was revealed that Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving mode played a role in a deadly May crash, the automaker is planning a host of changes to its Autopilot system.

The changes, billed as the 8.0 upgrade, include a feature that allows the vehicle to exit a highway and navigate an off-ramp while in Autopilot mode, according to Autoguide. The function will be activated by the vehicle’s turn signal. (Read More…)

It’s not hard to find Detroit sedans of the early to mid 1970s in California self-service wrecking yards, and so I usually don’t photograph stuff like ’73 Olds 88s or ’76 Chrysler New Yorkers unless they’re in pretty decent condition. However, the 1970-71 Mercury Montego is special because these cars (and their Cyclone cousins) have the craziest snouts of just about any vehicle from Detroit during the second half of the 20th century, thus I felt compelled to photograph this very battered example. It also pleases me to make Lincoln-Mercury loyalist Sajeev Mehta taste his own bitter tears, so here we go! (Read More…)

We’ve reached the halfway marker. After new vehicle sales soared to record levels in calendar year 2015, the volume produced by automakers competing for market share in the United States continued to expand through the first six months of 2016.

Between January and June, the 30 most popular new vehicle nameplates in the United States generated half of all auto sales, leaving more than 250 other vehicles to fight over half the market. Many of those popular vehicles own a far greater chunk of the market than entire manufacturers. The top-selling Ford F-Series line of pickup trucks, for instance, outsells every auto brand aside from Toyota, Chevrolet, Nissan, Honda, Jeep, and Ford itself. The 30th-ranked vehicle, Subaru’s Outback, outsells whole mid-tier premium brands such as Cadillac, Infiniti, Lincoln, and Jaguar-Land Rover.

In other words, popular vehicles are very popular indeed. (Read More…)

Make America Great Again! It’s a dynamite slogan, simultaneously implying that America has fallen a little short of greatness lately and that a return to said greatness can absolutely be accomplished in short order. It’s a winner’s slogan, and it did wonders for that noted repeat winner, Ronald Reagan. By contrast, “I’m With Her,” the current slogan of choice for Mrs. Clinton, sounds like something a henpecked live-in boyfriend would tell a too-inquisitive salesperson at the Pottery Barn.

Whether or not Mr. Reagan truly made America great again is a discussion for another time. I will say, for the record, that I am on a particular side of that discussion, and the quasi-musician known as “Jello Biafra” is on the other.

What cannot be denied, however, is that the Reagan era saw the arrival of some truly great American cars. The C4 Corvette and its third-gen F-body cousin. The 225-horsepower Mustang GT. The Dodge Rampage 2.2. The list goes on and on, although you wouldn’t think that it does from the fact that I got to the Rampage 2.2 so quickly. I would also definitely include the Plymouth Turismo 2.2 in the list, although it would be after the Rampage because the Rampage had more cargo capacity.

Could a Trump presidency spur another era of great American cars? Or would Mrs. Clinton be the right choice to unleash a new generation of “superpredator” sports cars on the American public? While we wait for the American motor-voter to decide, let’s take a look at some of the current lows, and highs, in the domestic-brand arsenal of democracy.

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Jack Taylor has parked his car in the Emerald Aisle for the last time.

The man who built a rental-car company on top of a leasing business, birthed from a side office in a St. Louis Cadillac dealership, has died at the age of 94.

Enterprise Rent-a-Car grew in an unconventional way compared to its competitors, which focused mainly on airports. Mr. Taylor’s company instead leveraged home-town business with downtown locations to offer vehicles for purposes other than out-of-town travel.

(Read More…)