As you might imagine, nobody at Buick is keen for me to review their cars lately. It’s a shame, because there’s not necessarily a correlation between the quality of the cars that bear the “Buick” logo and the failure of the Buick business model in the United States (to recap, move Encore and Enclave to […]

The continent that spawned microscopic postwar bubble cars and made the “city car” segment a thing is moving ever further away from its automotive past. European buyers, perhaps influenced by their American counterparts, are beginning to realize they truly can have it all, adjusting their buying habits accordingly.

Of course, by “all,” we mean all the cargo space. (Read More…)

The second quarter of 2018 returned pleasing sales figures for General Motors, but there were no champagne corks popping over Buick’s performance. While GM’s sales rose 4.6 percent compared to Q2 2017 (and 4.2 percent year-to-date), Buick sales headed in the opposite direction — down 12 percent in the quarter, and roughly six-tenths of one percent over the first half of the year.

Swirling menacingly in the background of all of this is a threat from President Trump to levy a 25 percent tariff on all automotive imports, a move that would leave Buick especially exposed. As numbers crunched by Automotive News show, the only thing sparing the brand from an emergency overhaul, should such a scenario come to pass, is a subcompact crossover — one which may or may not be exempt from the proposed tariffs. (Read More…)

Today’s question is brought to you by kitchen-table musing and grumbling by two gearheads at the Guy household on Saturday. As it always does, the conversation turned to cars.

“Nothing’s affordable anymore!” ranted my friend, waving his arms while expressing a desire to own old Alfas and other machinery with the structural integrity of wet tissue paper.

The man may have a point. Do you think the values of certain desirable cars are inflated beyond reason?

(Read More…)

Thirteen years after the final Grand Am rolled off the assembly line, examples of Pontiac’s N-Platform-based sporty commuter remain very easy to find in American wrecking yards. For the second-generation N-based Grand Am, which debuted for the 1992 model year, the wretched Iron Duke engine went away, replaced with various pushrod 60° V6s and the Oldsmobile Quad 4 engine.

Here’s a ’94 SE Sport Coupe, complete with single-cam Quad 4 and five-speed, in a Colorado wrecking yard. (Read More…)

Art cars kind of suck. Even though BMW has managed to produce a handful of stellar examples — models enhanced by Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Alexander Calder, and Andy Warhol — plenty of the brand’s artistic liveries have been far less appealing to the layperson.

Other companies have produced art cars as well. Last year, Lexus unveiled an incredible IS sedan covered in 41,999 programmable LEDs that created a perpetually changing and utterly hypnotic visual experience. However, its most recent example left me feeling a little empty inside.

Art is subjective, I know. But, when it’s slathered all over an automobile, you want it to be expressive of the car’s personality — or at least striking in a way that becomes transformative. The LFA Lexus brought to the Total 24 Hours of Spa race this weekend does neither. Frankly, it feels one step removed from purchasing some mass produced vinyl graphics off an online retailer and sticking them wherever.  (Read More…)

With the future of Ford’s sedans looking rather bleak, Lincoln has made some changes to the MKZ for the 2019 model year. There’s nothing really wrong with the luxury sedan; it’s a solid performer (minus the recalls) and has become rather handsome since its 2017 facelift. But it’s too similar to its sibling car, the Ford Fusion, and has lacked some of the technology rival manufacturers have added as standard equipment.

This has caused the model to hover around 30,000 annual delivers in the United States for as far back as we can remember. Meanwhile, the Fusion went into 209,623 American driveways last year. However neither vehicle is on course for a record sales year. The Fusion has endured a major decline in popularity since 2015 and the MKZ might not even break 20,000 sales in the U.S. by year’s end.

Ford plans on dropping the Fusion eventually, which means the MKZ is likely to follow it into the grave. But the pair should stick around a little longer than the rest of the company’s passenger cars, so Lincoln wants to give customers something to remember it by while simultaneously streamlining its production.  (Read More…)

Despite it being the most abundant element in the world — but one of the hardest fuels to source — automakers aren’t giving up on hydrogen. That group includes Toyota, which launched the world’s best-selling hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, the Mirai, in 2015.

Early this year, the 3,000th U.S. Mirai found its way to the driveway of a California customer. Cali remains the only American jurisdiction where FCV vehicles, and refueling infrastructure, are offered (though a hydrogen shortage last week saw SoCal stations dry up).

In the hopes of boosting the fuel’s prevalence and stimulating demand, Toyota plans to enter mass production with its second-generation Mirai, expected early in the coming decade.  (Read More…)

If you’ve ever wanted to own a hot Cadillac with a manual transmission, best get in line with those other three guys. The 2019 Cadillac ATS, which ditches its familiar four-door format for a coupe-only proposition, is both the last ATS and the last stick-shift Caddy. Soon, it, the CTS, and XTS will bite the dust as Cadillac makes room for two new sedans — vehicles scheduled to arrive in a market fully obsessed with crossovers and SUVs.

Good luck with that.

While the ATS coupe carries over seemingly unchanged for 2019, the blistering ATS-V variant sees two significant additions. One has to do with appearance; the other, price. (Read More…)

The Discovery Sport serves as an entry point to the Land Rover lineup, retailing in the U.S. for $37,795 before delivery and offering a similarly sized, cheaper alternative to its Range Rover Evoque platform mate.

Two flavors of four-cylinder power is your only option in this model, but that might not be the case for long. Land Rover apparently has big changes in store for its lowest-rung model. (Read More…)

The new acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, has jackknifed former EPA head Scott Pruitt’s decision to quit enforcing the strict sales limits imposed on glider trucks.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, they’re basically new heavy commercial trucks that use old powertrains. Advocates argue that using refurbished engines and transmissions save business owners loads of cash and promote recycling, since the internals would likely end up in a scrapyard. However, many complain that glider trucks simply exist to circumvent emissions regulations.

During President Obama’s tenure, the EPA said that if gliders were allowed through 2025, they would make up a scant five percent of the freight vehicles on the road — but would account for one third of all nitrogen oxides and particulate emissions from the heavy truck fleet. A crackdown was inevitable. (Read More…)

This week, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a statement urging people to stop jumping out of moving vehicles in order to dance. That’s the kind of folksy wisdom we appreciate from the government, but we were curious as to what spurred it.

Apparently, youths everywhere are engaging in a social media challenge where they film themselves dancing to Drake’s new song “In My Feelings” next to their automobile. Hoping to seek some clarity as to why this is happening, we hunted down the music video for the track. This revealed two important things: Drake’s portrayal of a love-fueled killing machine is totally implausible, and the song is not nearly good enough to warrant such behavior.

The new cultural phenomenon is highly reminiscent of — and no less idiotic than — “Ghost Riding,” which peaked in popularity roughly a decade ago. The only appreciable difference is that the present-day participants actually seem to be taking slightly less risk and aren’t actually required to exit a moving vehicle. Some just just decided to keep the car in motion for the hell of it.  (Read More…)

Let’s not get our hopes up too high over a rumor. Still, it’s hard not to sit up and take notice of a report claiming Ford might build a small, unibody pickup that could make its way to the North American market.

According to Automobile, sources with knowledge of Ford’s production plans say the automaker wants a new, Focus-based pickup to replace its ancient Fiesta-based Courier in foreign markets. The model might find a home on domestic soil, too. (Read More…)

In an earlier analysis of Ford’s lackluster share price, we noted that Europe and China posed a significant problem for the automaker’s bottom line. Europe, which was previously pretty good to the brand, has gradually lost its share of the market since 1994. While Ford still moves a lot of metal in the region, something’s definitely wrong.

On Wednesday, Ford announced that its European operations had endured a $73 million second-quarter loss. It’s anticipating a full-year loss in the region after earning $234 million last year. “We’re extremely dissatisfied with our performance in Europe,” said CEO Jim Hackett.

Something has to be done to avoid further setbacks. According to Jim Farley, Ford’s head of global markets, the clear remedy is concentrating on vans and crossovers because that’s where the money is. It’s a similar strategy to what’s being done in the United States, where Ford eventually aims to cull the lineup to a point where the Mustang is the only vehicle that qualifies as a traditional car. But is it the correct one, considering how we’ve arrived at this point?  (Read More…)

One of the downsides of doing this job is adapting to a new car every week. While the joy of never actually performing maintenance on your daily driver makes up for it, I struggle with basic tasks at times that should be second nature. Various cars have different locations for parking brakes, for example — […]