For one Canadian auto writer, an emissions test turned out to be a giant time-and-money-suck that should have never happened in the first place, all thanks to an unscrupulous mechanic. Is anyone surprised?
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Posts By: Derek Kreindler
Members of Generation Why will fondly remember the Volkswagen 1.8T powered Golfs and Jettas of the early 2000’s – or if they don’t, they probably knew someone who swore that the turbocharged Volkswagen mill was a gift from Our Lord and Savior Herr Schmaus himself. Yes, it was plagued with ignition issues and a rather unsophisticated character, but you could chip it, broooo (as one Golf MKIV owner so eloquently put it).
Having tracked down a copy of Car by Mary Walton, I am now eyeballs deep in the birth and gestation of the DN101 Taurus.
If it weren’t for auto bloggers, the question of a separate Hyundai luxury brand would have been dead and buried long ago. But auto bloggers, with a desperate need to generate news out of thin air, won’t let the story die. 224,000 Google results later, and we finally have a definitive answer.
The 2013 Ford Mondeo, aka our 2013 Fusion, was supposed to hit UK showrooms around this time, but the launch has been pushed back to September, so Ford can work out some quality-related bugs prior to its on-sale date. (Read More…)
The big winner for Renault in the first half of 2012 was their low-cost Dacia brand, while the losers were…everyone else.
Sometime toward the end of my high school years, “fast fashion” shops like Zara and H&M set up shop in at the local malls, and became the place to shop. The clothing there wasn’t any better than the Gap or the Ralph Lauren remainders at Marshall’s, but if you paid for your own clothes, you would have been silly to shop anywhere else.
Shopping at those stores went beyond mere fashion considerations. If you spilled beer all over your shirt at a party, it wasn’t even worth sending it to the dry cleaners. Just throw it in the washing machine and hope it comes out. If that fails, pay $9.99 for another one. Eventually, people got wise to the fact that after three washes, the clothes tended to fall apart, but we willingly ignored the cheapness because we could look cool on a tight budget. Which is exactly why the Fiat 500 exists.
While sitting through the new Pitbull-scored Fiat 500 ad, a model at :49 seconds in caught my eye – it looks a lot like the leaked photos of the 500T, which supposedly carries a version of the Abarth’s 1.4L turbo engine.
The era of V8 hegemony is over at Jaguar; the current lineup, which offers no alternatives with fewer than 8 cylinders or 5.0L of displacement, will be getting two new engine offerings – including a 4-cylinder option.
Back in November at the launch of the Lexus GS, a product planner who shall remain nameless turned the tables on me; when I started asking him questions about future products, like the possibility of a Lexus GS-F, he began to grill me about competitive product.
The establishment of a new manufacturing base in North Africa has fascinated me for the past couple months – though few others seem to really care. The leader in this movement has been Renault, which is setting up plants in Morocco and Algeria to build their popular, low-cost Dacia vehicles in factories where employees earn a fraction of what a French assembly line worker would make.
PSA doesn’t have a low-cost brand of it’s own, so jobs haven’t gone across the Strait of Gibraltar – yet. But the closing of the Aulnay plant, where a massive contingent of North African immigrants (now French citizens) work, is a compelling snapshot of the socioeconomic and racial dynamics of France that happens to intersect with the auto industry.
Two years after Lotus presented a grandiose, multi-car lineup at the 2010 Paris Auto Show, the company will not be participating in this years festivities at the Porte De Versailles.
Tim Cain, our not-quite-in-house sales whiz, has cooked up a ranking of the top 260 best sellers year-to-date for 2012. I won’t spoil any surprises, but the Suzuki Forenza lost. And Honda might be the big winner.
No, this isn’t a self-aggrandizing post celebrating my own birthday, but a tribute to the man who started it all for me (literally, and with respect to cars); my father.
Here we go again…Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is asking NHTSA to re-open the investigation into the Toyota unintended acceleration case.
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