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.
South Korean LG Chem will finally begin commercial battery production at its Holland , Michigan, in July, Reuters says. The batteries will initially help power GM’s Volt.
Three years ago, at a groundbreaking ceremony for an LG Chem Battery plant in Holland, Michigan, President Obama promised that this and other pants will be “a boost to the economy in the entire region.” The plant made headlines for doing nothing. Read More >
Tesla is changing course with its lease/financing plan, with CEO Elon Musk tacitly admitting that Tesla got it wrong the first time around.
Chevy Cruze in Beijing
While GM’s head-flack Selim Bingol was swearing at Ed Niedermeyer, and that it’s not true that GM is sending its money to China, GM’s Chinese operation again outsold America. GM China sold 261,870 units in April, up 15.3%. In the U.S., GM sold 237,646 in April. In the first four months of the year, GM sold 821,707 vehicles stateside. Meanwhile in China, it sold 1,078,243. Read More >
The mantra before, during, and after the bailout was (and still is) that without the bailout, gadzillions of jobs would have vanished, the American car industry would have been wiped out, wheels would have come off the arsenal of democracy, and the sky would have fallen into Lake St. Clair. Of course, that’s nonsense. There are more than enough other carmakers in America. They would have received the sales, and added the jobs. They would have been mostly non-union jobs though.
The truth is, without the bailout, the UAW would have vanished, and with it millions of Democratic votes. Read More >
A terrorist, about to enter the RenCen
Even after Ed Niedermeyer put on coat and tie as proper attire for our Via Dolorosa to GM’s towers, GM’s Über-PR Chief Selim Bingol did not like him. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” said Bingol, frustrating my naive attempts at fence-mending. Instead of being sent to Gitmo, one of the terrorists writes frequent op-ed pieces at the Wall Street Journal, causing Bingol to go on the counter-attack. Read More >
Russians apparently love their dashboard mounted video cameras. Those cameras have provided us with eye popping as-they-happened views of car crashes, truck crashes, and even a plane crash or two. Sometimes the videos are of very close calls, others record vehicular mayhem, injuries and, sadly, fatalities. So it’s refreshing to see that someone has made a compilation of Russian dashcam videos that show human beings at their best, people stopping to help elderly and infirm pedestrians get through traffic safely or folks lending a hand to motorists and others in need of help.
My experience with Ford’s Easy-Fill capless fuel system has been universally positive. It’s one of those why’d-it-take-so-long ideas and I’m surprised it hasn’t become the industry standard. It’s also certainly reduced the number of women drivers who leave the gas station with their fuel caps dangling or missing entirely.
On Saturday, however, the 2012 Edge SEL AWD currently being driven by my son’s mother experienced a most unusual issue: the Easy-Fill mechanism stopped working. And on further examination, it turns out that this malfunction isn’t as unusual as I’d thought.
TTAC Commentator Halftruth writes:
Sajeev,
I am in the market for a new mid size truck. I have been looking at Tacomas both new and used and came across a used one at a decent price. Thing is, the owner states that “purchased new and immediately changed all fluids to synthetic from the oil to the rear diff”.
I am not crazy about this as I have heard of nightmares from folks going to redline, purple stuff etc etc for a better (shift, mpg whatever). Why dont folks leave well enough alone? What is your take on this??? Read More >
Welcome to the long awaited 2nd installment of ‘Spare Me the Details’. (For those that don’t have it bookmarked, the first can be found here) Being your local part-time auto-detailing guy, there are only a few things I am better at in life than the average person: having an immaculate stubble beard, Mario Kart 64, and cleaning car windows. And there are two things I know for sure about automobile window cleaning:
1. People love to have clean windows.
2. Most people leave streaks when they attempt to do it.
TTAC alum Justin Berkowitz, over at Car and Driver, reports that a government crackdown on tax cheats has resulted in the Italian market for Italian supercars tanking. Ferrari sales went down 50% from 2011 to 2012. Maserati’s Italian sales have dropped 80% since 2009. Lamborghini is apparently selling no more than five cars a month in all of their home country.
Autopalooza, the umbrella PR campaign for sixteen top shelf automotive events in southeast Michigan, including races, cruises and car shows, had a kick off press event this past week. As a Detroit booster, I urge you to check out the schedule of events and try to attend as many of them as you can. While I haven’t been to all of them, I’ve attended most and if you get to check any of them out, you’ll find out why car events around Detroit are special.
My mom around 1955
As mother’s day approaches I think now about my own mother on the other side of the continent and about the journey her life has been. Born in the mid 1930s and raised in poverty, she was dumped into an orphanage by her father after her mother’s sudden death from breast cancer in the late ’40s. It has never been discussed in detail, but I know that she and her younger sister were rescued by their older sister, my aunt Evelyn, herself just a recently married teenager, and raised as one of her own. At barely 18 years of age, my mother married my father, had the first of her five children and worked hard to build a home for herself and her family. The amazing part of this is that she was able to do it all without ever driving.
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.
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