The silly season continues unabated. A video of a wind-powered car, invented by a Chinese farmer suddenly goes demi-viral. “When the blue hornet hits 40 miles an hour, a turbine on its nose kicks in and starts to generate electricity,” it says in the video. “It’s pollution-free horsepower.” Read More >
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Category: News Blog
It’s a little less than 40 years ago that a newly minted copywriter called Bertel Schmitt wrote his first ads for a newly minted car called Volkswagen Golf. As chronicled in the Autobiography of BS, the car became an involuntary star. At its launch, everybody at Volkswagen was convinced it would be a dud.
29 million cars later, the Golf is one of the world’s most sold cars, and by large Volkswagen’s most important. In a few weeks, Volkswagen will launch its all—new seventh generation of the Golf, the emm-kay seven in blogger parlance. This is a make-or-break launch. If something would go wrong with this launch, it would be doubly bad for Volkswagen. The new Golf also is the first Volkswagen that is based on VW’s new modular MQB architecture. Read More >
The already fragile egos of HPDE drivers are about to take another hit. Shelley, the autonomous Audi TT-S developed by Stanford, has tried her first lapping day, and the results were promising.
Congratulations!!! And my condolences.
You have just bought yourself a vehicle that may be worth more dead than alive.
Did you follow my car buying advice? Of course not! You wanted cheap to the extreme and now you got it. Bald tires. Doors that may be lovably ‘scrunched’ just a little bit thanks to those pesky inanimate objects. But hey, at least the ashtray still works.
Now you just have to figure out what to do with it?
It’s not quite the bursting bubble that had been prognosticated by many through the last decade, but there is no doubt that “the world’s largest auto market sputters in a slowing economy,” as Reuters writes.
“Be careful what you wish for” is not the Chinese proverb it often is made up to be, but it applies: The red menace of Chinese car exports, longer predicted than the bursting bubble and likewise for long a chimera, finally appears to get going. The sputtering Chinese home market provides the push to find better fortunes abroad, but General Motors broke the dam that held Chinese exports back. Read More >
I wouldn’t normally put up two YouTube vids in a day, much less in a week, but this one is blowing up like the proverbial crack in the Eighties. So… how would you have avoided this incident? And can you count all the different things the driver is doing wrong?
Bailing out a European carmaker in need is sure to attract the attention and ire of a few EU Commissars. Once people are in the street, money can legally flow. Read More >
BYD’s F3 received worldwide acclaim for being a Corolla ripoff. When the new F3 was announced at the Beijing Auto Show, Carnewschina wrote: “The new F3 is design-wise slightly better than the old BYD F3 which was a copy of the old Toyota Corolla, the new F3 is a copy of the new Corolla but slightly less obvious. For BYD, we call that a huge improvement!” Come on, Carnewschina, the new BYD F3 has something the Corolla does not have: A remote control. Not a remote control for doors. You can drive the car remotely like a toy. Read More >
Mazda’s new CX-5 SUV is enjoying brisk sales in Japan, and Mazda can’t keep up with the demand. Waiting times of five months or longer were common, says The Nikkei [sub], especially for the top trim lines with fuel-saving diesel engines and leather seats. Mazda would love to deliver them a little faster – but it does not have enough tires. Read More >
Car thefts are on the decline, reports The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) in its annual review of trends in car heists. While vehicle thefts have not been this low since 1967, there is a disturbing new trend: Stolen key codes.
Leading the list of the most stolen vehicles of last year is the 1994 Honda Accord: Read More >
Security experts told Reuters that car computers “are vulnerable to hacks by attackers looking to steal cars, eavesdrop on conversations, or even harm passengers by causing vehicles to crash” and that automakers have failed to protect these systems.
“You can definitely kill people,” said John Bumgarner, chief technology officer of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit told the wire service. Read More >
“It should be right at home on the roads and farms of the US,” writes the Herald Sun in Australia, “but tariffs and the strong Australian dollar could prevent the Commodore Ute following the sedan as an export.” Read More >
Toyota’s best-selling Corolla was deemed as not appropriate for the hatch-enamored Europeans. To correct this shortcoming, Toyota’s Nice-based design center came up with the Auris. It is, well, a hatched Corolla. The car is not available in trunk-fascinated America. The Auris is a Toyota mainstay in Europe. It is also available in Japan, where it adds to the army of Toyota models, sometimes also under the name Blade. Today, a new Auris was announced in Japan. Read More >
Black taxis are a menace, in China and elsewhere. The criminal taxi element and Chinese rip-off artists joined forces and created a whole fleet of fake taxis, Carnewschina reports. Read More >
What good is a twenty-minute test drive?
Well, when most sources are getting a ten minute test drive, a twenty-minute one is twice as good. The problem, of course, is that range is as critical to an electric car as tensile strength is to parachutes; it’s the difference between a safe arrival and a harrowing trip. Without a genuine understanding of the Tesla’s range, we can’t say for sure whether it’s a great car or not.
That doesn’t mean we can’t pass along what we did learn during those twenty minutes.
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