It sounds funny to say a car that costs almost $185,000 is a move downmarket, but the new McLaren 570S introduced at the recent New York Auto Show, and the detuned 540S version of the same “Sport Series” chassis (~$150K), are exactly that. The first McLarens to cost less than a quarter of a million dollars are aimed squarely at the Porsche 911. Since I’ve always been a best bang for the buck kind of a guy, whether I’m talking cars or stereo equipment, I wondered if McLaren might be interested in using their resources to bring their kind of high performance to an everyman’s sports car. So I asked Wayne Bruce, McLaren’s global director of communications, if there might be a sub-six-figure McLaren some day. (Read More…)
Over the weekend, General Motors announced the 2016 Chevrolet Volt extended-range hybrid car will have a MSRP more than a thousand dollars lower than the current price of the first-generation car. The next Volt will have a base MSRP of $33,995 (including $825 as a destination fee), which GM say is about $1,200 cheaper than the 2015 Volt. With a federal tax credit of up to $7,500 still in place, the new Volt could cost as little as $26,495 before any applicable state-level subsidies.
The Volt will not only be cheaper to buy, it should be less expensive to operate. Range when running in EV mode has been increased by 31 percent to 50 miles. When powered by gasoline it will get 41 miles per gallon on the EPA’s combined traffic cycle. In comparison, the current model is rated at 38 EV miles and 37 mpg. Another economy will be gained by the fact the combustion engine will run on 87 octane gasoline, unlike the first-gen Volt requiring premium fuel.
Now that the first Volt is going away, it’s probably appropriate to perform a postmortem. Has it been a success or a failure? (Read More…)
Due to advancements such as air bags, driving is much safer than it was when I first got my driver’s license in the early 1970s. Even then, because of seat belts and crush zones, cars were much safer than they had been in the early automotive age. The first decades of the automobile resulted in chaotic and unsafe driving conditions. Not only were the vehicles themselves dangerous to passengers and pedestrians (three quarters of early motoring related fatalities were pedestrians, often children), in the early days it was a free for all, with the first proposed traffic laws being instituted only after about a decade after the first automobiles. Author Bill Loomis is working on a book on Detroit history and in an extensive article in the Detroit News he discusses just how unsafe driving was a century ago, as well as the role that the Motor City had in making driving safer and less chaotic. Some of those innovations continue to make drivers safe, while others continue to annoy us. (Read More…)
Long distance driving is something that I enjoy doing, but most of the time, my driving is restricted to within 50 miles of where I live, just outside of Detroit. In the past few months, though, I’ve been a bit of a highway child.
I spent my birthday in December driving to Peoria to interview the farmer who owns Larry Shinoda’s personal Boss 302 prototype for a book that I’m doing for Car Tech Books on muscle car prototypes. In January and February I made a couple of trips down near Columbus to hang out and talk guitars with Jack Baruth. Speaking of guitars – also in Ohio – was a mint condition Pee Wee Les Paul that I wanted for my grandson’s future use.
Toyota loaned me a Highlander with all-wheel drive for the Chicago Auto. Lexus tossed me an IS 350 F Sport that I took to New York. The driving conditions ranged from the Super Bowl Sunday blizzard to sunny and dry coming back from NYC. The one constant condition: America’s over the road truck drivers seem to think that their time and fuel is more valuable than of people driving cars and light trucks.
If pressed, I’m pretty sure that I could come up with at least a half dozen different posts on the connection between automobiles and popular music, particularly rock ‘n roll and blues. There are songs like Terraplane Blues, Little Red Corvette and Baby You Can Drive My Car. You could probably do a series of coffee table books just on the car collections of rock stars like Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, J. Geils, Jeff Beck, Billy Gibbons and many others. “Stars & Cars” or “Cars & Guitars” has been used as a display or exhibit theme by museums devoted to both automobiles and musical instruments. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people who love both cars and guitars have managed to join those interests, at the enthusiast level, with licensing deals, and at the advanced design studio level.
Hillary Clinton has gotten at least a little bit of publicity for her presidential campaign-launching trip across America in a conversion van she’s nicknamed “Scooby”, apparently after the Scooby Doo cartoon show’s Mystery Machine. While the van has had high visibility as Clinton’s made seemingly impromptu stops – like at a Chipotle restaurant and more staged campaign events while pundits have discussed the strategy and symbolism of Mrs. Clinton’s road trip – little attention in the general media has been paid to the van itself.
I was at the press conference in Chicago a few years back when Lincoln announced that they had decided to jettison billions of dollars worth of brand equity and go with alphanumeric model names (well, the announcement didn’t quite go like that, but that’s a pretty close approximation of what it meant). Around that time Ford was still trying to sell luxury F-150 pickups under the Lincoln brand, first the Lincoln Blackwood and then the Mark LT, before they realized the margins were greater on Platinum F-150s. When the sedan model now known as the MKS was introduced as a concept, the press kit referred to it as the Mark S, with Mk S badging, just like Mk IIIs and Mk IVs of yore – alphanumeric badging but the model name was spoken as “Mark x”. By the time it reached production, though, the new large Lincoln was simply the MKS. I asked a Lincoln rep what happened to “Mark” and was told that customers associated the name with old fashioned land yachts, not contemporary cars. With the new Lincoln Continental concept it’s clear that Ford Motor Company’s luxury brand has decided to embrace their inner land yacht. (Read More…)
Most of the big news at the 2015 New York International Auto Show took place on the first day of the media preview, with the introduction of the Cadillac CT6, production bound Lincoln Continental and Honda Civic concepts and an all-new Chevy Malibu, as well as the Porsche 911 fighting McLaren 570S. With that in mind it’s easy to understand why the press conferences for Elio Motors and Lyons Motors were relatively sparsely attended, being held on the second press day, though the two startups faced different obstacles in getting attention. Elio’s stand at the show was with the trucks on the lower level of the Javits Center, away from most of the cars, and reporters, upstairs. Lyons Motors’ head Kevin Lyons held his press conference in the concourse on the main level, but it was easy to miss as they had no car on display, just an empty piece of carpet and a lectern. (Read More…)
In just a few years these nameplates will disappear from Cadillac showrooms
It got a little buried in the rush of news out of the New York Auto Show, but GMInsideNews reports that at the private introduction of the Cadillac CT6 last week, the night before the NYIAS media preview, Cadillac head Johan de Nysschen confirmed that the existence of the CT6 flagship will make the current XTS large sedan superfluous. That seems to have been a foregone conclusion, but somewhat surprisingly de Nysschen also said that when the time comes to replace the CTS and ATS models, not only will those nameplates die as the brand moves to the CTx nomenclature, the new cars won’t be direct replacements. De Nysschen also announced that with the exit of the XTS, Cadillac will be leaving the livery business. (Read More…)
On the floor of the 2015 New York International Auto Show, TTAC asked Cadillac head honcho, Johan De Nysschen if he had anything to say to our resident gadfly of all things Cadillac, Mr. Deadweight.
GT Academy is a Sony sponsored competition where contestants can compete, racing on the Playstation sim, for actual rides with factory Nissan teams. Jann Mardenborough won in 2011 and he’s had a successful motorsports career since, winning in both the British GT championship and in the GP3 series. Today, Mardenborough was driving a Nissan GT-R NISMO at a VLN endurance race on the Nürburgring in Germany when the car got airborne at the Flugplatz, flipped and went over the catch fencing into an area where spectators were sitting, killing one and injuring others. Mardenborough was unharmed. (Read More…)
While most car companies try to persuade broad swatches of people to buy their cars, Lotus is trying a new/old approach in promoting their new Evora 400 model, telling some folks that maybe Lotus’ fastest model is just not for them. (Read More…)
But of course! While researching this post I discovered that a previous owner of its subject is actually someone that I know, Myron Vernis. I featured his Mazda Cosmo and Toyota Sports 800 in a post on last year’s Eyes On Design show. Myron owns what has to be the world’s finest collection of oddball cars so the fact that this literally unique vehicle ended up in his hands came as no surprise. (Read More…)
Jason Fenske is a mechanical engineer with a degree from NC State. A car enthusiast, after a number of times explaining how cars worked to his girlfriend, with the encouragement of friends he set up the EngineeringExplained website to explain to the general public how cars, and other mechanical devices like turbine engines and jet-skis, work.
It was the late 1970s. Following the oil crisis in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Japanese automakers were able to go from having a foothold on the west coast to being major players in the domestic American market. In 1976, Honda introduced the first generation Accord, a revolutionary package that combined outstanding fuel economy, front wheel drive, reliability, practicality, sprightly performance and a standard equipment list that included a stereo and air conditioning. At the time, Chrysler was headed by Lee Iacocca and in a changing automotive world, for some reason Iacocca decided that what Chrysler needed was a large personal luxury car. Burton Bouwkamp, who was director of body engineering for Chrysler at the time, recalled his boss barking “Where the hell is our Cadillac/Lincoln entry?” The result was the 1981-83 Chrysler Imperial, the last V8 powered Imperial to be produced. (Read More…)
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