Ferrari will be scaling back production in 2013, in an effort to help retain some of the brand’s exclusivity.
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Subaru is set to expand capacity at its Indiana plant by 100,000 units, adding the Impreza alongside the Legacy, Outback and Tribeca to help fill demand for its vehicles in the United States. Read More >
As Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi rush to prepare new entry-level product to attract a younger crowd, Jaguar Land Rover is proudly calling “bollocks” on their efforts to attract younger buyers. Although much of the growth in the “near-luxury” segment is expected to come from vehicles with a transaction price in the $30,000-$40,000 range, JLR’s sole offering in that segment is the low-volume LR2. It’s the $50,000 Evoque that’s driving sales for the brand. This interview from Automotive News with JLR’s North American CEO, Andy Goss, explains why: Read More >
As enthusiastic as I am about the actual product (when everyone was ready to crap all over Tesla based on some bad information, TTAC was one of the few publications to go to bat for the upstart auto maker), Elon Musk’s series of announcements, frequently couched in hyperbolic descriptions of their significance, are beginning to grate on me. Every week, Musk seems to descend from Mount Sinai bearing yet another set of tablets that promise to “disrupt” (to use a favorite term of Silicon Valley) the automotive landscape forever, yet end up being little more than a not-quite-a-lease program or some announcement about after-sales care.
It seems like just yesterday that your humble author was bitching up a storm about having to deal with a recalcitrant Ford EasyFill fuel filler.
That’s because it was just yesterday.
Had I waited another day to gripe about it, I would have seen that Ford’s already on the job.
The Quality job. Which is supposed to be Job #1.
Readers of TTAC’s Facebook account know that our luxury-and-performance-car-scribe Alex Dykes currently has his hands on the newest Mercedes CLS63 AMG. One of Mr. Dykes’ current concerns is the fact that the $140,000 Mercedes has no “next track” button on the steering wheel. He has a real point there: that’s one of just six buttons that my 2009 Town Car does have on its steering wheel. Of course, the first thing I did when I took delivery of the Town Car was to swap the head unit for a all-in-one Pioneer thingy. So now that button doesn’t work.
But away from the world of six-digit Benzos and the most delightful cream-color-interior Panthers, there’s a little thing called the Real World. No, not the MTV show! The other Real World! And Hooniverse has its fingers on the pulse.
When the Detroit News decided to make a click-tastic slideshow of The 50 Most Beautiful WAGS In Sports, the blogosphere responded with some WAGging of its own — mostly of tongues. Nearly everybody agreed that there was something deeply saddening and pathetic about the fact that a semi-respected Old News bastion is now using Google Image Search and one-click-per-picture tactics to puff up the numbers. Some of the strongest criticism, however, came from a most unlikely source.
Canadians registered just under 172,000 new vehicles in April, more than in any April since 2008. Through the first quarter of 2013, auto sales in Canada were down 1.9%. Imports, by which we mean non-Detroit brands, were suffering the most. Including Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, and Kia, nine Asian brands had posted year-over-year declines at the end of March.
One of the bigger stories of 2013 has so far managed to escape the news cycle. I’m not exactly sure why Nissan’s announcement of significant reductions on the MSRP of new cars hasn’t gotten more coverage, but I’m also not 100 percent sure of Nissan’s motives either.
Tesla is changing course with its lease/financing plan, with CEO Elon Musk tacitly admitting that Tesla got it wrong the first time around.
Honda is making a big bet on CVT transmissions, with a $470 million assembly plant that will crank out as many as 750,000 CVTs and employ 1,500 people.
In exchange for the loss of the third pedal, we now get two variants of the Porsche 911 Turbo. A standard car with a 3.8L 520 horsepower flat-six and a Turbo S with 560 horsepower. Rear-wheel steering is also in place, much like the GT3, while active front and rear spoilers will give d-bags twice the aerodynamics to manually deploy while stuck in traffic.
Soon after TTAC’s article on General Motors’ new model make over, the naysayers were out in force. Commenter jpolicke for example suggested selling GM stock if its future relied on engineering coming from South Korea. However, signs abound that this time around GM is finding its way. Let’s examine some of the pros and cons:
The revived Datsun may be aimed strictly at developing world customers, but that hasn’t stopped them from releasing a very web-savvy teaser as part of some obnoxious slow reveal campaign.
The latest round of bad news regarding the Australian domestic auto industry has shifted TTAC’s attention to Canada, another country burdened with some similar issues. If Australia’s own car industry is getting hammered, then how much longer does Canada have?
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