The Freep’s Mark Phelan identifies yet another vanishing automotive phenomenon: the six-seater sedan. He notes

The Chevrolet Impala is the only six-person sedan you can buy. Other sedans — regardless of how big they are — have front bucket seats rather than the three-person front bench seat that was once common…

Chevrolet is weighing whether to build a six-seat version of the next Impala. Weighing against it, the car will probably be narrower than the current model. It’s based on GM’s Epsilon II global platform. It’s roomy, but probably not enough to fit three comfortably across up front.

About a quarter of Impalas sold last year were six-seaters…It probably makes sense for Chevrolet to concentrate on giving the next Impala a comfortable and attractive front seat that appeals to the other 75% of its buyers and wins some new customers.

I’m sure that front benches bring back a host of memories for TTAC’s Best and Brightest (mine is of grabbing the Hurst floor shifter in my dad’s 1966 F-100 with both hands and clunking from gear to gear on the way to the dump), and yet somehow I’m guessing that not many will agitate for its return. Like tape decks and carburetor tune-ups, the nostalgia of sitting between two other people in front seat might have a certain appeal in reminiscences, but anyone who actually transports six people regularly these days just buys a crossover. And guess what: the kids might be robbed of valuable future nostalgia (replaced by reruns of Spongebob Squarepants on the rear-seat entertainment system), but neither they nor their parents are likely to choose to go back. And so, we march onward, into an unfamiliar future…

In a nod to the aging population, Ford will make the font thicker and bolder in the interiors of its Ford Edge and Ford Explorer with the 2012 model year. “The company has plans to expand (literally) this effort into other models in the coming years,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Read More >

How many former Saturn buyers do you figure have come back to GM for their next car? What about consumers who last purchased a Pontiac? How about HUMMER? Since we’re not bound to a strict inverted pyramid around here, why don’t you think of an answer (in terms of percentage of customers retained) for each brand and then hit the jump to see how close you were.

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Lincoln, once the conveyance of presidents and Hollywood moguls, hasn’t been doing too well lately. In May, Lincoln sold just 7,399 vehicles in the U.S., about the same as Volvo, a brand that Ford had sold to the Chinese. The average buyer’s age of a Lincoln sold in 2010 edges up to the wheelchair-demographic: 62. Despite ample Panther-love doled out by TTAC, Lincoln is losing customers left and right: According to White House historians at the Wall Street Journal, every president from Calvin Coolidge through George H.W. Bush rode in a Lincoln limousine. The new prez defected to a Government Motor’s Beast.

The matter even attracted attention from Ford’s cross town rival GM. Its CEO Dan Akerson had some ungodly advice: “They are trying like hell to resurrect Lincoln. Well, I might as well tell you, you might as well sprinkle holy water. It’s over.”

Ford was faced with a tough decision: Keep it or kill it? And the decision is: Read More >

Didn’t you always have this nagging suspicion that MPG might be influencing the purchasing decision? At least a little bit? A brand-new survey says you are right! Read More >

It’s one thing for a sportscar brand like Lotus to shrug off the self-destructive iconoclasm of its most hard-core “fans,” but it’s quite another thing for its chief executive to take a piss on the entire supercar market while describing the downpour as “authentic, cloud-filtered Alpen raindrops.” To wit, the following bit of nonsense found at Autocar:

The new Lotus Esprit will offer a more “authentic” driving experience than the Ferrari 458 Italia and McLaren MP4-12C, according to CEO Dany Bahar… Bahar claims the Lotus Esprit will “have the character and emotion” that he says the McLaren lacks. He also revealed that the rolling chassis was now complete and fully running prototypes would be ready by November… Formula 1 KERS-style technology is also expected to feature on the Esprit, but Bahar said such electronic systems would be used only where they add to the driving experience and not as driver aids.

If you can make any sense of this blithering nonsense, or how Bahar came to it based on his impressions of a rolling chassis, you must work in marketing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Remember the million mile Accord? How about the other million mile Accord? What about the 1.3 million mile Town Car? Or, most amazingly, the half-million-mile Fiat?

Honda has a new million-mile contender coming up, and this time they are using Facebook to get their fanbase involved. With this arrival of a third well-publicized long distance voyager, however, is Honda unwittingly bringing attention to a very inconvenient truth?

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Having kept a relatively low profile since the disastrous “My Tank Is Full” series of ads, Ram is fighting to help keep Chrysler profitable with a new series of ads highlighting the Ram’s connection to “Wild West” values. And like nearly every bit of advertising approved by Chrysler Group ad boss Olivier Francois, it’s heavy on the hyper-sincere schlock, which makes the spots end up feeling like they’re selling a political candidate rather than a truck. And this just as it seemed like truck ads were slowly moving away from some of their previous cliches. Does doubling down on sincerity and the mythical Western ethos make sense as a way for Ram to catch back up on volume it’s lost over the last few years? Or should Ford’s stunning 50%-ish take rate on EcoBoost V6 engines in F-Series be pointing towards a more pragmatic, consumer-needs-oriented marketing campaign? Watch as many of the ads as you like and be sure to let us know where you see the Ram brand and its marketing effort heading.

This past weekend, a young man named Lucas Ordonez finished in second place in the reasonably-well-contested LMP2 class at LeMans. The video-gaming world has taken notice, because Mr. Ordonez entered racing as the winner of the PlayStation GT Academy a few years ago.

This proves the truth of what every basement-dwelling, sunlight-allergic gamer geek has been saying for years: being fast in a racing video game makes you fast in real racing. After all, if a kid from nowhere can step from his couch into a racing program and fulfill the lifetime dream of nearly every sports-car racer in the world, surely “Gran Turismo” is a genuine, realistic training tool, right?

Naturally, the truth of the matter is not so simple.

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If Ring times have joined skidpad numbers and 0-50 times in the trash can of marketing history, what’s next? Subaru thinks they have the answer. A mostly stock United-States-spec STI (hmm, why a US-spec car in Europe, I wonder?) broke the twenty-minute mark around the Isle of Man course to set lap records on two consecutive days.

To see the car that used to hold the record, click the jump.

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How did the company which virtually invented automotive marketing become so piss-poor at it? How did the promotion and advertising of General Motors automobiles become reduced to a series of meaningless comparisons, numbers, and statistics? We are now in the fifth decade of General Motors’ abject failure to understand why people buy imported cars. In the Seventies, GM thought it was miles per gallon, and every GM ad trumpeted the Chevette’s ability to match the Corolla or Civic gallon in fuel economy. Forget the fact that the Chevette was a genuinely horrible car which has only recently found a reason to exist (a kick-ass, single-make ice-racing series, if you must know). In the Eighties and Nineties, GM marketing flacks got a whiff of “performance” and we were deluged with claims that the Pontiac Grand Am GTXPXT-W31-442-Z34 got better lateral “g” than the BMW L7. Of course, it took a skidpad, or a glassy-smooth racetrack, for something like a J-body to even catch sight of a Bimmer’s rear bumper.

Lately, it’s been Quality, and I’m capitalizing the “Q” ironically for all you Pirsig readers. Again and again, we are told that GM matches the best brands out there for quality. Most people read these ads to say, “OMFG, that car I would never buy is almost as good as the car which has given me eight years of trouble-free service.” Customers don’t care about JD Power numbers; they care about their own experience and the experiences of people they trust. GM spat directly into the faces of those people forty years ago and they’ve been doing it ever since.

And now, finally, we have Nurburgring times. The CTS-V is supposedly the fastest sedan around the ‘Ring. Nobody seems to care. If ‘Ring times ever really meant anything to anyone beyond frothy-mouthed teenagers pounding a keyboard in skid-marked underwear, the endless controversy about Nissan’s latest GT-R has more or less killed that goose. The GT-R’s times around the ‘Ring vary by nearly forty seconds, depending on who is driving, which tires were on the thing at the time, and whether or not anybody actually checked the boost controller before the car went out. ‘Ring times are worthless, useless, forgotten. They’re as played-out as the PT Cruiser…

…so naturally GM has an HHR for us to watch.

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An Ohio judged has ruled [full ruling in PDF here] against Ford in a 2002 case alleging the automaker overcharged dealers by selling commercial trucks at unpublished prices between 1987 and 1998. According to the summary judgement, Ford’s “CPA” program violated its contract with dealers by publishing “unrealistically high” wholesale prices and using “secretive, unpublished discounts” on an uneven basis, thereby overcharging some 3,000 dealers by an average of $1,650 for each of the 474,289 medium- and heavy-duty trucks sold in the applicable time period (about $1.2b of the ruling is for unpaid interest). The story is intriguing in its illustration of the differences between consumer and dealer incentives: while consumer-end incentives can be applied on a market-by-market basis, dealer invoice prices must be evenly applied across all markets according to Ford’s contract with its dealers. The story is also of major significance considering Ford’s still-shaky financial position, with automotive gross cash exceeding total debt by a mere $1.4b. Ford will appeal the ruling, but because the damages awarded are material rather than punitive, an expert tells the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ford’s appeal could be “interesting.” Which doesn’t sound like great news to us…

GM has announced details for the 2012 Model Year Chevrolet Volt, and for the second year of production The General is already addressing the Volt’s most controversial feature: its high price. The base MSRP for the Volt will drop from $41,000 to $39,995 for the 2012 year of production, an accomplishment that GM explains

is possible in part because of a wider range of options and configurations that come with the expansion of Volt production for sale nationally.

Wider range of options and configurations? According to the Detroit News, this means navigation and a Bose speakers are no longer standard features on the base-price Volt, but that seven options configurations are now available compared to the 2011’s three. And, on the other end of the pricing equation, the Volt’s fully-loaded price has increased to $46,265 from the $44,278 that Chevy’s configurator tops out at for a loaded 2011. Keyless access with passive locking is the only new standard feature for 2012. With more choices and a slightly lower price of entry, GM is clearly trying to move the Volt away from the “novelty” image that CEO Dan Akerson referenced earlier this week, as it ramps up Volt production for 60,000 units next year. But until the Volt’s price starts dropping without simply offering a less-contented version, the road to mass sales will continue to be a tough one.

I’m not in the business of helping people Tweet better, I’m not in the business of helping people post to Facebook better. My job is to make sure we keep people safe behind the wheel. I’m not going to deny the fact that people want these things. They do. Especially the generation behind us. They’re used to being connected 24 hours a day.

A car is not a mobile device — a car is a car. We will not take a backseat while new telematics and infotainment systems are introduced. There is too much potential for distraction of drivers.

NHTSA Administrator David Strickland took the war on distraction to the enemy in a speech to an auto technology conference, reports Bloomberg. With nearly every manufacturer racing towards ever greater implementation of connectivity, communication and entertainment systems in cars, Strickland’s rhetorical line in the sand foreshadows a serious confrontation between industry and government. Either that, or this is just Ray LaHood-style hot air calculated to make it look like something’s happening.

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When Ford showed the world its new crop of compact-based cars and MPVs at January’s Detroit Auto Show, it announced that its C-Max compact MPV would be coming to the US in 7-passenger Grand C-Max form. But in a strangely prophetic turn of events (see video above), the 7-passenger model refused to show up. Now, according to Ford, the 7-passenger Grand C-Max won’t be coming to the US… instead the 5-passenger version will be sold as a dedicated hybrid model with a plug-in option. Why? Because it’s big in Europe… and because “One Ford.” Hit the jump for Ford’s explanation, and then wonder along with us: seriously, why not sell the 7-seat version too?

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