If you have been to India, you will certainly know that big is often considered better. When it comes to cars, the same philosophy holds true. That’s the reason why the Renault Duster took the market by storm when it was launched last month. After China, the Indian car market is said to have the most potential. Naturally car makers are rushing to India, launching all they could to satisfy the growing need of personal transport. But what happens if you want something more than whats on offer?
China’s most popular color
Forget the ATS. Now you can show that you are fiscally prudent and still project the Cadillac look. All you need is a ticket to China and $6,700 in pocket money. This will buy you the Guizhou Hangtian Chenggong (never mind) GHT6400. Says Carnewschina (buy Tycho a beer as a thank you for finding this Asian beauty): Read More >
The most successful brands in our industry don’t have much meaning to them.
Toyota, Chevrolet, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, all of these are names that wouldn’t evoke much of any imagery had their manufacturers never existed.
Mercury and Saturn are popular planets that make you think of space and the futuristic pursuit of those faraway places. Acura should be quite accurate and precise. Rams are tough. Infiniti pays homage to the outer limits of capability and performance.
Yet all of these names experienced failure, or ultimately failed, due to the key essential ingredient within any brand’s reputation.
Product.
Roger Pion, the man who rolled his monster tractor over seven police cars, was brought into court in Vermont yesterday. According to New England Cable News, the man is “accused of being a one-man wrecking crew. “ Apparently, that’s a criminal offense in Vermont. Read More >
Forget Mao suits: “Chinese youngsters know Justin Bieber, hamburgers and Middle East warfare,” reports the culturally clued-in Carnewschina. “They also know this thing called ‘Bikini Car Wash’, many Chinese websites are full with big-breasted American babes bikini washing big engined American cars.”
A car wash in Shanghai made it reality. Except, well, the babes are Chinese. Read More >
Nissan unveiled is 2013 Pathfinder in suburban Detroit and in downtown Manhattan’s Meatpacking District (just two blocks away from the PATH train, get it?) The fashionably rugged, but far from off-roadish locales were carefully chosen: Read More >
When GM bought seven percent of the moribund PSA Peugeot Citroen five months ago, the happy couple praised monstrous synergies and annual cost savings of $2 billion a year coming from the – ahem – tie-up. Hope springs eternal, but currently, the value of this dubious investment is deflating faster than a popped balloon. Even GM is realizing it and tells the Treasury that it may have to write down that investment if things don’t get better soon.
The ever so vigilant Reuters actually went to the trouble of reading the complete 10-Q GM filed with the SEC in connection with GM’s recent quarterly report. In that filing, GM says: Read More >
Devotees of the Manchester United soccer club call for a boycott of the products made by the club’s sponsors. This famously includes Chevrolet. Last Monday, GM signed a seven year contract with Manchester United. A day before, GM’s Chief Marketing Executive Joel Ewanick, the architect of the deal, was fired. Manchester United supporters are opposed to their club going public on Wall Street. To put pressure on the Glazer family to ditch the plan, they ask the public to stay clear of the products of the club’s sponsors. Read More >
In the eternal quest to adhere to “sustainability”, Lamborghini will apparently be fitting the Aventador with a start-stop system and cylinder deactivation. Am I the only one that finds the recent trend of eco-friendly supercars ridiculous?
The email was pleasant enough.
I had finally become a world famous ‘blogger’ according to the lady whose job was shucking an unloved SUV to anyone who would care to write about it.
“Sure!”, I thought. “Why the hell not! Where else would the term ‘SUV Sally’ have so much acceptance?”
Mazda recently began production of the upcoming Mazda6 mid-size car, and a promotional photograph, seen above, reveals the look of the station wagon variant.
With California’s Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate looming it is only a matter of time till we see an EV from each of the major players in the California market. Nissan has the Leaf, BMW has the Active E, GM has the Volt and Honda electrified a Fit and Ford has electrified everything that isn’t nailed down. That brings us to the elephant in the room: Toyota. To give us some insight into Toyota’s CARB (California Air Resources Board) compliance plans and to see the fruits of the unlikely Toyota/Tesla marriage, Toyota flew us to sunny Southern California to sample the 2013 RAV4 EV.
An angry farmer in Vermont wiped out most of the fleet of the Orleans County Sheriffs’s Department by rolling his tractor over the cruisers. Without wheels, the deputies had to liberate one of their cars from a service station before they could go into high speed pursuit of the man who left the scene in red farm tractor, the Daily Mail reports. Read More >
Whenever we talk about middling sales and dwindling market shares of certain carmakers, moles pop out of the holes, check their talking points, and shout: “Volume is soooo lame. Awesome profits is where it’s at!” Point taken. Read More >
When the Fastbike crew did some tire testing at Continental’s “Contidrome” test track, along came a car magazine with an Audi TT RS plus. They wanted: a race. They got: slaughtered. Is the old truth about cornering speeds changing?
I have done a lot of motorbike magazine work over the years. Every so often, someone dusts off a very old idea: “What is faster, car or motorbike?” This is a boring question, because even since Newton, the answer always was: The motorbike has a better power-to-weight ratio, so it will out-accelerate the car on the straights. The car will gain in the corners through higher speeds and it can brake later, because the limiting factor in braking a sports bike is geometry: Your maximum deceleration happens with the back wheel barely touching the ground. After that, you lose braking power because you are flipping over. The same is true for acceleration btw (you flip over in the other direction), but since nearly all cars are fat and slow compared to a sports bike, this limit doesn’t matter much. So the outcomes of these tests depended solely on the track. Sometimes, the track favors the bike, sometimes it likes the car. Motorcyclists who know their physics like to infuriate other sports bike riders by passing them in the bends with a Civic when they have to use it for their shopping. And car guys hate it when they have to slow down on the Nordschleife in a twisty bit for a bike which then shoots ahead on the straight just to block the next corner by seeming to park there. Such was the accepted truth. Until a few months ago. Read More >
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