Three of Ford’s most senior and veteran executives are retiring, global design chief J Mays, North American manufacturing head Jim Tetreault and Martin Mulloy, who is in charge of labor relations. Mays’ replacement will be Moray Callum, design director for Ford’s North American operations. All three men had important roles in turning Ford around. Mulloy negotiated contracts with the UAW that were critical in reducing costs, while Tetreault had a big hand in reshaping Ford’s manufacturing strategy towards efficient and flexible factories. Mays has  supervised the styling the cars and trucks that have helped turned Ford’s fortunes around, implementing Ford CEO Alan Mulally’s “One Ford” directive in a visual sense. He also had an important role the shape of the Jaguar XK and XF, developed while Ford owned that brand. Read More >

When Toyota teamed with General Motors, they gave us the Vibe/Matrix twins. With Subaru, a trio of rear-driven sports cars with boxer power up front. So, what will Toyota deliver in its partnership with BMW? How about the ultimate hybrid supercar based off the bones of the Lexus LFA, for starters.

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For those of us who love the Jaguar’s F-Type’s zazz but would prefer to keep the wind out of our hair (along with the rain, sleet and snow) on a more permanent basis, Jaguar now has an option for you.

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A new gold dawn for touring cars is upon us if Subaru is to be believed. Come November, the automaker will unveil the future of the Legacy and Outback at the Tokyo Motor Show: The Levorg.

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Honda’s rear-driven products built for two tend to be motorcycles, scooters and ATVs for the most part, but every now and again the company will unveil a roadster whose name begins with an S, and ends with the number of cubic centimeters the engine provides.

Such a car is set to return soon to the showroom floor, and will make its debut at the Tokyo Motor Show in November: The Honda S660.

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BMW’s replacement for the 1-Series has been revealed in its M form courtesy of leaked photos posted to an online forum after a dealer presentation, according the lads at Autocar.

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Be afraid. Be very afraid. If the aspirations of one automotive supplier come to pass, your child’s first car will not have a steering wheel come 2025, rendering her or him nothing more than a mere passenger inside a tiny commuter pod.

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The following article is long. Some of you will decry it as fiction outside of the space this website normally reserves for stories and others of you will lament its presence on what is supposed to be an automotive news website. Maybe you are right, but the truth is that I read a lot and my mind is constantly pulling at a million disparate threads of information and tying them together in ways that make unusual patterns. Some of these things have coalesced this week into the following piece and so I have offered it to the editors to see if they think it has a place on our esteemed pages. If you are seeing it, then they have given it the green light and all I can do is ask you to indulge me.

Articles about the future used to show up in the newspapers and the magazines with surprising regularity when I was a kid. They were great reading and were almost always accompanied by large, full color illustrations by noted artists like Syd Mead that fleshed out the words out surprising detail. In virtually every case, despite much of the turmoil going on in our country in the 1970s, those articles painted a picture of a better, brighter future. Now more than a third of the way through the second decade of the 21st century, we all know that things didn’t turn out quite the way those old articles imagined but that doesn’t mean that we should stop trying to predict what is coming. I can’t help but think that a better tomorrow really is right around the corner. Read More >

The  Mégane Renaultsport that our E.I.C pro tempore liked so much is going to get a new look along with the rest of the  Mégane lineup. The idea is to harmonize the Mégane, one of Renault’s core models, with more recently introduced cars like the Clio, to strengthen brand identity. The changes include the larger grille that is used on the company’s latest models along with a new bumper, hood and elliptical headlights.

The Ford Motor Company has announced that it is looking to enhance the appeal of its Fiesta sub-compact through the power of bacon. According to the Ford Custom Graphics website, lovers of crispy pork products can order any of four different bacon themed vinyl wraps ranging a “mini-strips” package which costs a modest $78.75 all the way up to a “full bacon wrap” for $3347. The website indicates that Ford Custom Graphic vinyl products, properly installed and maintained, are covered by a three year warranty and have been tested to ensure that they can be used all year round regardless of the weather. With International Bacon Day set to take place on August 31st, the time to show the world your meat is now.

While researching the topic of the “blackout” cars of 1942, that had painted rather than plated trim due to wartime restrictions on strategic metals, I came across this promotional postcard for the 1942 DeSoto, the second American production car to feature hidden headlights, advertised as “airfoil lights” . “Boy,” I thought, “Now that’s a sleek, streamlined car, I’m surprised I don’t remember it,” well until I saw a photograph of an actual ’42 DeSoto. Read More >

When Chevrolet’s seventh son generation Corvette was introduced, many purists reacted with horror over the fact that the new car no longer has what has been traditional on Corvettes since the C2 in 1963, two round tail lights on each side. “The new ‘Vette has Camaro tail lights!” more than a few said. Though if you look at both the 2013 Camaro and the 2014 Corvette rear lamps side by side, the main similarity is that neither one of them is round. The Camaro’s are trapezoids and the Corvette’s are more parallelogram shaped. Tom Peters is in charge of design at General Motors for full size trucks and performance cars. Something that  Peters talked about on the night of the C7’s reveal and now emphasized in a video he made for Autoweek, the three dimensional shaping of the new Corvette’s tail lights, has me thinking that it wasn’t the Camaro’s back end that influenced the new ‘Vette, but rather it was the tail lights of the current Mustang. Read More >

Audi follows a trend set by other OEMs, notably GM, and opens an R&D Center in China. Located in Beijing’s fashionable 751 D-Park , the center will be busy doing product customization for the Asian market, especially when it comes to electronics and connectivity, along with components for new-energy vehicles and efficient powertrains. Read More >

At the Japanese launch of the Volkswagen Up!, VW’s design chief Walter de’ Silva told a group of assembled journalists that “overdesign”, his term for the recent spate of flamboyantly styled vehicles is now passe, and that the future belongs to clean, minimalist design.

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Well into the first decade of the new millennium, Changchun, China, was Volkswagen’s Siberia. When someone was transferred to the frigid city in Northern China, the others inevitably asked: “What did you do?”

It looks like Opel is quickly becoming GM’s Siberia, and people rather desert than going. Read More >