As far as automotive marketing goes, a truck story is always going to appeal to your emotions. More so than any passenger car, truck buyers ask more from their pickups, put them through more strenuous tasks and treat them in a very different way.
It’s fitting, then, that Australia’s Ute has a similarly heart warming story, one that we can all connect with – even if the Ute was never sold here. Read More >
A TTAC reader is an engineer with a major powertrain company, and offered his extremely detailed analysis of the ZF 9-speed. Consider this an AP level course in powertrain engineering.
Before we dive right in to the 9-speed gearbox, let’s take a quick refresher on the basics of gears. The simplest gear set consists of 2 parallel gears mounted on 2 parallel shafts. Shown in Fig.1 is a gear set with a 20 tooth drive gear on the right and a 30 tooth driven gear on the left. For this gear set the speed of the driven gear is 1.5 times lower than the drive gear, and assuming no frictional losses anywhere, the torque on the driven gear is 1.5 times higher. This gear set has a ratio of 1.5:1. This type of a gear set is usually not favorable for packaging since it requires 2 parallel shafts, and there are largest separating forces that push the 2 gears apart which means that the bearings supporting the shafts have significant radial loads on them, in addition to an axial load if the gears are helical.
While the United Auto Workers take their battle to bring their brand of organization to Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. before the National Labor Relations Board, VW’s labor leaders are regrouping in their fight to establish a works council in the U.S. plant.
Though some electric vehicles have seen their share of woes, from fires in individual cars to bankruptcies filed by manufacturers, German chemical maker BASF is going in for the long game by investing in the EV battery market.
6:30 P.M. and three more cars just pulled up to my place… on a Monday…
Have I just bought a McDonald’s franchise? Not quite. This is the start of what we call “tax season” in the used car business.
A time when tens of millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck get a nice four figure lump sum from Uncle Sam and his favorite sub-prime debt dealers.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is set to bring Alfa Romeo back into the United States market after a two-decade absence with the 4C, but only the best-performing Fiat dealerships will be selected to sell the first new Alfas when the lighweight $60,000 sports car rolls off the dock in June.
As inventories of Ford’s Fusion continue to outpace demand — the result of a second plant brought online last year to keep up with demand for the newly redesigned midsize sedan — the automaker has been raising incentives to move more Fusions out of the lot.
Challenge me, will you? Daddyblogger, mommyblogger, whatever. The B&B should consider itself empowered to call me a “daddyblogger” for the foreseeable future. The important thing is that none of us in this business take it too seriously. We’re all just writing about cars, you know? If you want respect as a journalist, do some of this stuff.
P.S. Please, everybody, don’t follow-request me. All I do is talk about my guitar collection and flirt with aging girljournos. You don’t want to read it and neither does anyone else.
Here at TTAC, we have a job that consists solely of standing behind me every day and whispering “Remember, you are pro tem.” The EIC of Autoblog, John Neff, had no such reminder, but when he “retired” he turned out to be kinda pro tem anyway. His replacement is Sharon Silke Carty, who refers to herself in her Twitter caption as someone who “balances the glamor of auto reporting with the glamor of motherhood.”
When Carscoops’ John Halas referred to her as a “mommyblogger”, however, he learned in a hurry that there are some lines you don’t cross.
Read More >
The Canada-only Nissan Micra debuts in April, with Nissan hoping to pick up overall market share in The Great White North. But Automotive News reports that one casualty of the Micra’s introduction will be the Versa Sedan – hardly a surprise when both compete at the absolute low end of the market.
Even though I skipped or slept through most of my senior year Classical Civilizations course (sorry, Ms. Rogow), one of the laminated quotes in the drafty class room always caught my eye – the quip that forms the pretentious title of this entry, which translates to “it’s difficult to not write satire”.
Mexico’s auto industry is set to ship more product north to the United States than Japan and Canada by the end of 2015, in part due to the effects the North American Free Trade Agreement has had on the country since its signing two decades ago.
Ahead of its world debut at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain prior to making the rounds at the Geneva and New York auto shows next month, Ford has unveiled its redesigned 2015 Focus.
Sometime this week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk will announce everything there is to know about the EV automaker’s Gigafactory, from location and price tag, to its heavy reliance on renewable energy sources.
Along with the Dodge Avenger, the Chrysler 200 convertible won’t be returning to showrooms alongside the upgraded 2015 model.
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