An order guide for the 2022 Ford Bronco confirms that the Sasquatch off-road package will be available with a manual transmission.
Ford had already indicated it would listen to consumer demand and give three-pedal fans the option of rowing their own, but now it’s official.
Remember that scene in the famed 1968 shoot-em-up Bullitt where Lieutenant Bullitt, after surviving a harrowing car chase up and down the streets of San Francisco, a chase that ended in the fiery deaths of some black-suited bad guys in a Dodge, went and picked up his Saint Bernards from the dog groomer and then […]
Welcome to Rare Rides Icons, a spinoff of Rare Rides where we take a more in-depth look at those particularly interesting cars throughout history. Today’s large and luxurious Icon is the first time we present a Daimler in this series. The DS420 was the flagship of the brand; a car for heads of state. And in fact over 50 years after its introduction, it’s still in use as an official state limousine in several nations.
In early 1973, the new GM T Platform was introduced to the world as the Brazilian-market Chevrolet Chevette, followed soon after by the Opel Kadett C in Europe. The Isuzu Bellett Gemini appeared in Japan in 1974, and it wasn’t long before these cheap, rear-wheel-drive subcompacts were being sold in every corner of the GM Empire. North America got the Chevette starting in the 1976 model year, and sales continued here all the way through 1987. American Chevette sales peaked here in the late 1970s, so the examples from the middle 1980s have been tough to find in junkyards. Here’s one of those cars, a thoroughly battered ’84 in a San Francisco Bay Area yard. (Read More…)
With every mainstream automaker on the planet seeking to pad their bottom line with tasty SUV profits, the number of jacked-up wagons on offer is truly dizzying. Most of them are car-based, of course, including several in Toyota’s own wheelhouse – witness the mystifying Corolla Cross introduced this year.
This makes the 4Runner something of a glorious throwback. Perched on its toes and looking out into traffic with a lantern jaw, this SUV may be old as the hills but is enjoying some of its most robust sales to date.
When Toyota announced that the Land Cruiser wouldn’t be coming back to the United States, off-road people shrugged and got back into their clapped-out 4Runners. Despite being incredibly capable wherever pavement is in short supply and having a pedigree that rivals Jeep’s Wrangler, the Land Cruiser is a prohibitively expensive vehicle. Toyota’s penchant for overbuilding vehicles merged with the model’s luxurious bent, resulting in a product that retailed at $87,030 before adding a single option, and sales volumes reflected this.
It was just too rich for most Americans and sales suffered as a result. But Lexus has confirmed the Cruiser-based LX will be returning and recently teased the new model’s next-generation online. While the manufacturer hasn’t confirmed that the 2022 Lexus LX 600 will be a rebadged version of Toyota’s off-road emperor, literally every generation of the LX series has been. (Read More…)
Dating is hard, but ride-sharing company Lyft is trying to make it a little easier.
It will now allow you to pay for your Tinder date’s ride.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has officially announced that his company would be moving house this week. Currently nestled upon the bosom of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, CA, the automaker has expressed its intent to establish a new base of operations in Austin, TX. While this situation has been a long time coming, it’s not quite the prompt walkout that everyone was predicting 17 months ago.
At the start of the pandemic, Musk found himself at odds with local officials pushing strict COVID lockdowns. The CEO had wanted to keep the all-important Fremont facility up and running at the start of 2020, suggesting workers could simply choose to stay home without there being any negative repercussions (or pay). Told again to shut down, Tesla sued Alameda County on the grounds that its orders were unconstitutional and violated a return-to-work mandate recently issued by Governor Gavin Newson. Before long, Elon Musk was openly confessing he was fed up with the state of California and would be relocating the business. (Read More…)
Twitter is amazing sometimes. One of the best parts about it is that occasionally a great piece of journalism — a feature story or investigative report — finds its way into your timeline.
Sometimes, though, you get the flip side. Sometimes, you come across an opinion/hot take so bad you feel like you, should you have a platform, eviscerate it.
Most of us have synced our phones to a vehicle to play music, unwittingly funneling personal information to the manufacturer in the process. But only an elite few have used their mobile device to digitally summon an automobile out of a garage or remotely tell it to pre-condition interior temperatures to the desired specification. However, that’s likely going to be the future and Apple would very much like to be leading the charge.
The tech giant is reportedly developing a way to better integrate smartphones with cars by accessing systems that are currently unavailable to CarPlay. Apple’s new program, internally known as IronHeart, seeks to collaborate with automakers so that its phones can network with vehicles in new and interesting ways. It’s effectively CarPlay 2.0 and sounds as though it would be giving the company access to just about every item drivers might interface with on a daily basis. (Read More…)
The Eighties were the decade that saw the dawn of the hot hatchback. Today’s little red hatchback is really very hot, because it’s entirely a Ferrari 308 underneath.
All-electric pickup trucks are easily one of the strangest new vehicle segments of the day. Designed to appeal to a demographic of American motorists that normally wouldn’t give EVs a second glance, they’ve probably managed to get more tech nerds interested in pickups than anything else. Leathery dudes who have labored outdoors their entire lives remain dubious that fuel-deprived products will make ideal working vehicles. But there are outliers and their younger (or wealthier) counterparts seem much more willing to entertain the marketing push behind the sudden onslaught of bedded electrics. And one wonders where these trucks are supposed to belong.
On Thursday, General Motors announced that the Chevrolet Silverado EV will be making its official debut at CES 2022 — a venue that has become synonymous with highfalutin electrics both real and imagined. With traditional automotive trade shows being canceled left-and-right over pandemic fears, the event formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show may have been Chevy’s best option. But it also opens up questions about what kind of customer is being targeted by the manufacturer. (Read More…)
What if organizers put on a top-shelf car event, exhibiting some of the most significant race cars ever, had two days of sparse crowds and the final day getting effectively rained out, and came away with a feeling of great success? Well, that’s exactly what happened at the inaugural American Speed Festival at the M1 Concourse facility in Pontiac, Michigan just north of Detroit, just held Sept. 30 through Oct. 2, 2021. The ASF is an attempt by M1 Concourse, a garage condo and performance track “country club for car enthusiasts”, to craft an American flavored take on England’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. The festival is scheduled to be an annual event, and for the first iteration of the show organizers brought in scores of some of the most historically significant race cars in American racing history to do demonstration runs on the track at speed, if not in anger.
How significant? (Read More…)
Despite the Mustang Mach-E clearly receiving the brunt of Ford’s marketing efforts, the manufacturer is still trying to retain customers who prefer the real one original. We’re inclined the believe that a traditional American sports coupe offering 310 horsepower out of the box for under $30,000 is probably reason enough to keep the Mustang on your radar. But Ford has debatably sweetened the pot with a couple of factory appearance packages designed to give the car more character.
For 2022, the Mustang will offer a new Stealth Edition option for well-equipped EcoBoost models and an updated version of the classic California Special for the GT. (Read More…)
Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday. That’s been something of a mantra for car companies over the last hundred-odd years, and success in motorsports is considered a worthy enough goal for major automakers the world over to invest tens of millions – heck, hundreds of millions of dollars – to compete, if not to win. But, is it real? Does “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” hold water?
I think the answer is obvious – because, if winning races actually sold cars, Lancia would be the best-selling car brand on Earth.
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