Hey! Did you know that I, your favorite writer on this or any other forum, with the possible exception of Penthouse Forum, am the proud owner of a Honda Accord EX-L V6 manual transmission coupe? Maybe you didn’t know! But now you know! So in the future there will be no excuse for you not knowing, with the exception of “utter apathy,” which would be a legitimate excuse, should you need one.

Let me give you the name of somebody who didn’t need to be reminded about my Accord ownership; my local Honda dealer. Not the guys who walljobbed me, but the good dealer. The one that actually puts new oil in the car when you pay for an oil change. I like this dealer. Were I to purchase another Honda, I would purchase it from them. Perhaps they know this, because they’ve just sent me an email with a GRRRREAT DEAL! on a new 2017 Accord Coupe. $16,000 and change — and this ain’t just any old Accord coupe, it’s an EX-L V6 manual, just like my current car.

There’s just one little catch.
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After securing hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from General Motors and a new lease on life for the Oshawa assembly plant, Canadian Detroit Three autoworkers union Unifor is sharpening its bargaining pens to tackle Fiat Chrysler.

Today, the union identified the automaker as the company next in line to hammer out a contract deal with. After the GM deal, FCA will need to promise something big, and that could mean a commitment to an aging plant filed with aging models. (Read More…)

General Motors is searching for savings under every RenCen couch cushion as it ramps up a profit-boosting cost-cutting effort.

The automaker has already chopped plenty of what it sees as fat, and is so confident in its streamlining abilities that it now claims it could weather a major plunge in sales. Even, say, a 40-percent dropoff.

For a company that knows all about sales plunges — recent ones, too — this is pretty confident talk. It has to be, as GM wants you — yes, you! — to invest. (Read More…)

After its two-year-long bid to gain a sales foothold in Michigan hit a brick wall, Tesla has filed a lawsuit against the state.

The suit, filed in a U.S. District Court in Michigan, targets governor Rick Snyder and other top officials, Reuters reports. (Read More…)

The unveiling of the Jeep Cherokee and Renegade prompted many unplanned chiropractor visits after their, erm, interesting proportions elicited neck-snapping double takes.

As the final months of Compass and Patriot production sell like discount cigarettes on a WW2 airbase, Jeep likely felt pressure to keep styling on the safe side when it came time to craft a replacement.

Well, after seeing leaked images of the model, we can report back with a quote from Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man: “Yes, it’s safe, it’s very safe, it’s so safe you wouldn’t believe it.” (Read More…)

The dwindling supply of new vehicles offering a row-your-own driving experience spurs fewer tears than before, but the three-pedal setup isn’t dead yet.

In fact, offering a manual transmission is still worthy of boasting about through official channels. As it rolls out the 2017 A4, Audi wants you to know there’ll be an option to ditch the PRNDL pattern on all-wheel-drive models, allowing spirited motorists the increasingly rare opportunity to take full control of their gear changes.

Oh, and those other guys? Yeah, they don’t offer one. Audi made sure to remind us of that. (Read More…)

Right up there with I wish they’d make a manual diesel wagon in brown, it’s among the most played-out tropes on the Internet.

There just aren’t any bad cars anymore.

This is generally followed by some recollection of a Saturn of the early ’90s that had a faulty engine, or perhaps some Brezhnev-era Soviet masterpiece. Blah blah blah nostalgia blah blah A Christmas Story blah blah. Enough.

There are plenty of bad cars out there, but the majority of people haven’t driven enough of them to know it. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I have. And I’m here to break the bad news to you: some cars suck. Maybe even the one in your very driveway.

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With so many class action lawsuits leveled against Fiat Chrysler Automobiles over their troublesome Monostable shift lever, coordinating all of them has become a problem.

According to The National Law Journal, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multi­district Litigation will meet on September 29 to figure out how to juggle all of the lawsuits. Just in the past week, FCA has been hit with two more suits from people claiming they were injured while trying to stop their vehicles from rolling away. (Read More…)

Within months of the Honda HR-V arriving in North America, it seemed as though the Honda Fit was dead to rights.

Last summer, U.S. sales of the Honda Fit tumbled 35 percent as the starting point of a second-half in which Fit sales would plunge 54 percent.

The cause was obvious, or so it seemed. Consumers don’t want subcompact cars, consumers want subcompact crossovers.

With the subcompact crossover, the Honda HR-V, lining up alongside the subcompact car, the Honda Fit, inside Honda showrooms, consumers were driving away in HR-Vs 80 percent of the time.

Fast forward one year: it seems as though Honda has remedied the situation. Not only are U.S. sales of the Fit rising rapidly, the Honda HR-V continues to strengthen its share of the American subcompact crossover market.

How’d they do it? Don’t tell a certain presidential candidate, but it’s all because of Honda’s Japanese-Mexican arrangement. (Read More…)

As low gas prices persist and electric vehicles fail to find the widespread traction once predicted by the Obama White House, automakers have supercharged their fight against the country’s lofty 2025 fuel economy target.

Fuel prices and the popularity of trucks and SUVs means the federal 54.5 mile per gallon target isn’t reasonable, automakers say. Continuing down the same road and pretending the landscape hasn’t changed? That’s a recipe for disaster, according to industry groups. (Read More…)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has authored a series of books he labels Incerto, that Amazon tells us is “an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand.” The best known work in the series is “The Black Swan,” which teaches that highly improbable things happen frequently. His most recent work is “Antifragile,” which explains how successful systems deal with the random disorder of reality.

A recent essay by Taleb on Medium talks about how a small minority* of just 3 or 4 percent of a greater population can force accommodations by the majority. Taleb uses a broad range of examples — business, cultural, political, religious and culinary — to make the point that if a minority is large enough and intransigent enough in its needs or wants, that what it wants in specific doesn’t really matter to the majority, that minority’s wishes will prevail.

What does this have to do with cars? How many customers really want an illuminated vanity mirror in their sun visor?

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Trucks are coming back to Oshawa — kinda.

According to The Globe and Mail, a $400-million investment will fund upgrades necessary for Oshawa to perform final assembly of General Motors pickups using bodies manufactured in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and shipped to Canada.

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Having been a player in the small car category since its 2001 reboot, Mini now seeks to take on the burgeoning premium sporty compact segment with this, the new John Cooper Works Clubman.

With sales of the Mini brand reaching only nine-tenths of its 2013 high in the U.S. last year, will this model bait new customers into the brand’s retina-searing showrooms?

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It’s long past time to put the bike (myth) away.

Outside of certain urban centers, Millennials are cuckoo for cars. Jobs and families and lifestyles, you see. As more members of the youngest car buying cohort show up at dealers looking to sign on the dotted line, their method of payment is evolving, too. (Read More…)

British supercar maker and racecar developer McLaren Technology Group has refuted a report claiming it is talks with tech giant Apple ahead of a possible takeover.

A McLaren spokesperson has told Street Insider that the earlier report, published in the Financial Times, is incorrect. (Read More…)