The national Canadian and provincial Ontario governments have agreed to sell 30 million shares in General Motors that they received in exchange for their contributions to the 2009 bailout of the automaker. According to Bloomberg, the shares are worth about $1.1 US billion, and were purchased by the Bank of America and the Royal Bank of Canada as a block.

The transaction will be completed early next week. The sale reduces the Canadian governments’ stake in GM by 21%, down to 110 million shares. Canada and Ontario had been, since the bailout, the third largest stockholder in General Motors, behind the UAW and the U.S. Treasury, and after the sale will own about 8% of the company’s shares.

“As we said from the start, our investment in GM was always meant to be temporary as we worked to maximize the return to Canadian taxpayers,” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said in a statement. “The government of Canada is committed to exiting from ownership of GM as quickly as feasible, while maximizing the return for Canadian taxpayers, as we demonstrated today.”

The banks purchased the shares at a discount from Tuesday’s closing price, $37 a share, up 28% from the start of 2013.

Illustration by Thilophilus Chin

Opel Chairman Karl-Thomas Neumann told reporters gathered at the Frankfurt Motor Show that General Motors is considering selling the Opel Adam subcompact in the United States as a Buick. “We are looking at it,” Neumann told Automotive News. “Nothing is decided. But it’s an example of some of the Opel product being used elsewhere in the world.”

Opel and Buick already share some product. The Opel Insignia is sold as the Buick Regal and the small Opel Mokka crossover is marketed as the Buick Encore. The Encore has been selling at about double the rate that GM expected, proving that GM’s near-luxury brand Buick can sell small cars. Read More >

As mentioned in Ronnie Schreiber’s recent TTAC review of the 2013 Land Rover LR4, that model was due for some freshening, which now has been announced at the Frankfurt Motor Show.

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With Jaguar, Infiiniti and other manufacturers eyeing the booming segment of entry level luxury crossovers, Bentley is creating a new segment at the other end of the luxury spectrum. Bentley has greenlit for production a $250,000 premium crossover utility vehicle that will be based on a Volkswagen Group platform shared with the next generation Audi Q7 and a proposed CUV from Lamborghini, shown as the Urus concept.

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The number 42 Dodge Charger was running well. Although it had qualified in 9th position with a top speed of only 177 miles per hour, during the race it was clocked as high as 188 miles per hour and its driver, an amateur racer who made his living singing cowboy ballads at the Grand Ole Opry, was really mixing it up with the professional drivers. The Winston 500 was a big deal and, as one of the premier NASCAR races, there as a lot at stake. Talladega was one of those legendary places that captured the imagination and the attention of every race fan in the nation was focused on the event. For older, more experienced drivers a good performance meant job security while for the new guys, like Darrell Waltrip who was making his first ever Sprint Cup start in the race, a good performance could mark a man out from his peers and maybe garner the attention of one of the big teams. Given the expense, the effort, and the experience that it took to even field a car in the race, how was it that a country and western singer in a car paid for mostly out of his own pocket could be running so well? The answer is simple, he was cheating. Read More >

Mercedes-Benz more or less created the four-door luxury coupe segment with the CLS, a large car with all the amenities but a sleeker, sportier roofline. Now, it appears that the German automaker is bringing the CL coupes back into the S-Class fold, introducing the new two door Concept S-Class Coupe based on the S platform. It shares the same 449 HP twin turbo V8 as the recently introduced S-Class sedan as well as the S-Class’ well received interior, but in a body shape that has softer, more elongated lines than the sedan along with wraparound taillights and dramatic front end styling similar to that seen on the Concept Style Coupe show car. That nose, though, will likely not make it to production.

Thanks to our friends over at Autospies, you can get a better look at the Lexus LF-NX crossover concept, officially introduced today at the Frankfurt Motor Show. One might say that the LF-NX is a polarizing design, that is, if there was anyone who said that they liked it. The response since studio photos were released last week has been pretty much unanimously negative. Judge for yourself.

You can see the complete gallery at Autospies. Read More >

Self-reported times on the Burgerkingring have long been the accepted currency of keyboard-racing morons, which has led to an increasingly bizarre series of manufacturer-sponsored “assaults” on the track. Real racers know how worthless the times are, but real self-funded racers only come in two categories: broke-ass dudes running a Neon ACR (yo!) and zillionaires racing Daytona Prototype. The two groups combined buy supercars at approximately the rate of two teenagers in Dubai — and teenagers in Dubai do care about Ring times.

Thus, we see that Porsche is now reporting a 6:57 for its hybrid supercar. This breaks the six-minute mark for self-reported times of factory-prepared “production” cars, ending a very long time where the fastest times were in the sevens. To see how it was done, click the jump.

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Porsche has released the final, official data on their hybrid supercar, the 918, developed alongside of the car the the company will be racing at LeMans in 2014. The 11,000 word press release has everything you could possibly want to know about the 918, plus the new 911 Turbo as well as the rest of Porsche’s presence at the Frankfurt show, which focuses on the 50th anniversary of the 911. The 918 is powered by a 4.6 liter V8 gasoline fired ICE, dry sumped and mounted behind the cockpit, that puts out 608 hp, along with three electric motors that combined produce 286 hp, giving the driver up to 887 horsepower at his or her discretion (there is, apparently, a loss of 7 hp somewhere in full power mode). Performance is rated at 2.8 seconds for 0-100 kmh (0-62 mph) and 0-200 kmh in only 7.7 seconds. The 918 is a plug in hybrid, with a recharging time for the 7 kw/h lithium-ion battery of 4 hours on Germany’s 230 volt AC mains. Fast DC charging is said to take 25 minutes. If you want to, you can even get a speeding ticket while retaining green cred, top speed on electric power alone is 93 mph. Electric-only range, though, is limited to 10 to 20 miles per charge. Porsche is claiming 85 to 94 miles per gallon, but that probably isn’t when doing 0-62 kmh runs. Read More >

It does sounds like it should be the name of a spaceship on Star Trek but the Enterprise DSG-36 engine was made for more earthbound vessels. Enterprise Engine and Foundry dated back to the 19th century and they started building engines for stationary and marine purposes in 1917. Located near San Francisco, they were known for “their very heavily constructed four-stroke cycle diesels that had operating speeds on the lower end of the medium speed range.”  The DSG-36 is a six cylinder four cycle diesel with a 12 inch bore and a 15 inch stroke. If I remember my geometry, that works out to 1.7 liters of displacement per cylinder, over 10,000 cubic inches total. In normally aspirated form it was rated at over 600 horsepower @ 600 rpm and with a turbocharger, more than 900 hp. During World War II, Enterprises engines were in high demand by the military and some can still be found in marine service. From the landscape in the background and the patina on the engine, this particular Enterprise DSG-36 hasn’t been near water for a while. It looks like it was used to run a generator, perhaps having been purchased as war surplus. Enterprise’s reputation for heavy duty construction appears to have been well earned. According to the poster on YouTube, it hadn’t been started in 30 years and it seems to have started right up. Time to call the Blastolene boys. Read More >

Thierry Bolloré, left. Jérôme Stoll, right.

Following the departure of chief operating officer Carlos Tavares, Renault Chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn has announced that the company will be adding two new divisions to the existing finance, human resources and CEO office functions. Thierry Bolloré is being appointed Chief Competitive Officer, with responsibilities for Design-Product-Programs, Engineering-Quality-IS/IT, Purchasing, Manufacturing and Supply chain. Bolloré’s replacement as executive vice president in charge of manufacturing and supply chain will be Jose Vicente de los Mozos, reporting to Bolloré. The new position of Chief Performance Officer will be filled by Jérôme Stoll, with responsibilities for Sales & Marketing function, and coordinating Renault’s international operations, which apparently will have more autonomy. Michael van der Sande was named senior vice president for Marketing, replacing Stephen Norman, a member of Renault’s management committee, whose future appointment will be announced separately. Bolloré and Stoll will both report to Ghosn, whose published statement said, “Our objective was to take fast, transparent action by putting in place a clear and simple organization. The aim is threefold: to accelerate and expand our ongoing progress, to ensure performance at Group level and to give the regions more responsibility.”

Biographies after the jump. Read More >

Jaguar has a core competency in aluminum architecture that will be applied to their new sedan and crossover. Pictured, XJ bodies being assembled.

The mid-sized mass-market luxury car segment is defined by the BMW 3 Series. Jaguar once tried to enter that segment with the X Type, but the “mini XJ” never caught on, in part because it was derided as a badge engineered Ford Mondeo. According to Automotive News The C-X17 crossover concept revealed in Frankfurt this week is based on a new all-aluminum platform that will underpin a “range of future Jaguars”, the most important of which will be a mid-sized sedan to again take on the BMW 3 and its competitors. Jaguar has a core competency in aluminum construction and having the first all-aluminum car in the C and D segments will be a selling point for the new models. While Jaguar Land Rover’s current sales are the strongest the British car maker has had, JLR’s owners, Tata, are hoping that JLR will reach three quarters of a million units by 2020 and ultimately joining the ranks of automakers selling a million or more cars a year. To do that Jaguar needs a volume product, the most logical being a mid-sizer. With CUVs sales booming, a crossover based on the C-X17 will also help reach that volume. While differentiating between a Jaguar crossover and the Land Rover lineup will be an issue, Jaguar does say that the CUV will have some off-road capabilities. Read More >

The hot August sun beat down with real intensity, its heat baking the dun colored earth into a hard packed surface that flecked away in a fine powder that puffed skyward with every footstep I took. The area before me seemed large, but like so many things in Japan its sense of scale was distorted by the fact that, over time, I had grown accustomed to tiny plots of land and buildings crowding in upon one another so closely that they blotted out the sky. In reality the space was little more than a fraction of an acre but even so it seemed like an oasis of space in an otherwise crowded urban desert. The fact that it was packed with junk cars was just icing on the cake. Read More >

We’ll confirm it. Again. America is becoming ever more hungry for small premium brand crossovers, and that’s not simply a result of there being more $40,000 German utility vehicles from which to choose.

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It’s time to talk about Volkswagen. You know Volkswagen: they make the Jetta, which is possibly today’s most adept compact sedan at churning out lifelong Toyota customers.

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