The 2013 Ford Mondeo, aka our 2013 Fusion, was supposed to hit UK showrooms around this time, but the launch has been pushed back to September, so Ford can work out some quality-related bugs prior to its on-sale date. Read More >
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The Peugeot family will receive an invitation from French industry minister Arnaud Montebourg, but not for tea and cookies.
The minister “plans to summon members of the Peugeot family to explain why the car maker had continued to pay dividends even as it was facing mounting difficulties,” Reuters says. Read More >
Need some extra money? Want to work from home? Easy: Sell her to perfect strangers, by the hour. You will receive assistance in pimping her as long as she’s an OnStar-equipped Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, or Cadillac. Read More >
Clucky. The Freddie Krueger Of Modern Cuisine.
Last night I ate a little ‘Clucky’ chicken.
Normally I don’t touch the stuff. But I was hungry and seeing that the usual dinner food wasn’t filling me up, I decided to have one piece of fried chicken.
One thing I know now. If there is a hell, they serve nothing but fried chicken there.
The big winner for Renault in the first half of 2012 was their low-cost Dacia brand, while the losers were…everyone else.
Opel has a new CEO, the second in a week, and he will soon be out of a job: As expected by TTAC, GM named Thomas Sedran as interim CEO of Opel, replacing the current interim CEO Stephen Girsky, who replaced the not quite interim CEO Karl-Friedrich Stracke. Read More >
Just when you thought shares of Ford and GM can’t get any lower, major brokerage Morgan Stanley “lowered its 2012 U.S. auto sales projections by about 3 percent and cut its earnings-per-share estimates for the North American auto sector due to weaker-than-expected sales in the United States and Europe,”Reuters says.
For what it’s worth, Morgan expects U.S. auto sales to be 14.4 million this year, down from its earlier projection of 14.8 million. What is more disconcerting is Morgan’s outlook on financials of U.S. makers. Read More >
I don’t think anybody else in automotive journalism can make this claim: I’ve put in nearly 37,000 miles behind the wheel of a Bentley Continental GT, in places as disparate as New York City’s West 48th Street (home of Rudy’s Music), the rural roads of northern Kentucky, and the Climbing Esses at Virginia International Raceway. Forget a lead-follow press event or the rich-for-a-week-wannabe experience of a loaner car: every mile I spent behind the Bentley’s wheel was at my own expense.
Of course, I’m speaking literally here: I’d actually purchased the piano-black-wood-rimmed steering wheel from a Continental GT and installed it, along with a set of Bentley paddle shifters, into my 2006 VW Phaeton V8. When I finally got around to driving the real thing, I couldn’t believe how close the driving experience of the $190,000-plus Bentley was to that of the $68,000 Volkswagen. “This car,” I thought at the time, “is a Phaeton for idiots, which is really saying something.”
Five years later, the Continental GT is still a Phaeton for idiots, except now it’s an old Phaeton for idiots. Old, tired, and showing no signs of life despite a twin-turbo-V-8 heart transplant. It’s time to pull the plug on a car that never even deserved to be called a Bentley in the first place.
Sometime toward the end of my high school years, “fast fashion” shops like Zara and H&M set up shop in at the local malls, and became the place to shop. The clothing there wasn’t any better than the Gap or the Ralph Lauren remainders at Marshall’s, but if you paid for your own clothes, you would have been silly to shop anywhere else.
Shopping at those stores went beyond mere fashion considerations. If you spilled beer all over your shirt at a party, it wasn’t even worth sending it to the dry cleaners. Just throw it in the washing machine and hope it comes out. If that fails, pay $9.99 for another one. Eventually, people got wise to the fact that after three washes, the clothes tended to fall apart, but we willingly ignored the cheapness because we could look cool on a tight budget. Which is exactly why the Fiat 500 exists.
The GE Wattstation killed my Leaf! That’s the story being reported by the New York Times as well as PlugInCars.com. As the tale goes, 11 Leaf owners have had their chargers “damaged” while charging with GE’s Wattstation home charging station. The relative significance of only 11 failures aside, the Nissan Dealer in San Pablo, CA confirmed to PlugInCars.com that Nissan North America has notified dealers of a potential problem with the Leaf and the GE home charging station. TTAC contacted Hilltop Nissan and they have yet to return our calls. Rather than just parroting back the usual news reports we dug deep. We contacted GE and Nissan, consulted some professional electrical engineers and read though hundred of pages of boring SAE documents. Click past the jump to learn more about EV charging than you ever wanted to know. Read More >
When the question of whether a Death Watch should be started for Suzuki was first posed here at TTAC in April, there was a lot going on behind the scenes at the stylized “S” brand but not many facts filtering out to the public.
As of today, TTAC’s Death Watch starts for Suzuki’s North American operations. And if you haven’t been following the drama, here’s some background for you…
Brazilians are unhappy with GM. GM is cutting capacity and jobs at a Brazilian plant. This made the Brazilian government unhappy, because it had cut taxes on domestically made cars, in exchange for manufacturers maintaining the size of their workforce. It also made unions unhappy. They voiced their displeasure on Monday by going on strike, Reuters says. Read More >
Australians are unhappy with Ford. In January, Ford received more than A$34 million ($35 million) from Australian state and federal governments to guarantee local production until 2016. Today, Reuters reports that Ford will cut 440 jobs, or about 15 percent of its Australian workforce. Read More >
From the Only In China blotter: A customer who did not receive the service he expected for his Cayenne used sex to drive home his point in a photogenic way. A Chinese man threw body-painted girls into the battle with his Porsche dealership. Do not click if arty camel toes offend you. Read More >
Cars are like fruits and vegetables: They sell better fresh. Of course, even the freshest dud remains a dud. But all else being equal, those with a fresher line-up outsell those with aged product. TrueCar has put together an interesting table: What are the proportions of model year 2011 (yes, they are still on the lots), 2012, and 2013 in a brand’s sales? Read More >
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