Two years after Lotus presented a grandiose, multi-car lineup at the 2010 Paris Auto Show, the company will not be participating in this years festivities at the Porte De Versailles.
Find News by Subject:
Category: News Blog
Newly elected French socialist President Francois Hollande told GM’s partner PSA Peugeot Citroen to renegotiate a plan to lay off 8,000 workers. However, Hollande admitted he could not halt Peugeot. Hollande promised government money to “encourage consumers to purchase French-made, environmentally friendly cars,” Reuters reports. Soon he will admit he cannot do that either. The “French made” part is sure to get his government in trouble with the EU. Read More >
Opel’s stand-in boss Stephen Girsky demands changes from his workforce. “Our successful revitalization demands from all of us that we accept to do business differently than before, and that we do it quickly,” Girsky wrote in an email to staff, cited by Germany’s BILD Zeitung. How different, remains unsaid. Workers and unions expect a fight and gear up for one. Opel is running out of money. Bankruptcy rears its head. Read More >
If you’re shopping for a compact American crossover, Chevy’s Equinox is likely on your list. If however you’re looking to rent a small crossover, the Chevrolet Captiva Sport is probably what you’ll get for $29.95 a day from Hertz. While you’re bound to see them on the streets, you can’t buy them new unless you’re a fleet customer. That’s because the Captiva is designed to do two things: keep fleet sales of GM’s other CUVs low and continue to amortize the cost of Americanizing the Opel Antara. Yep, that’s right, under the bow tie, the Captiva Sport is none-other than the 2008-2010 Saturn VUE, aka the Opel Antata, Holden Captiva and Dawewoo Winstorm MaXX. We spent a week in a Hertz rental to find out if Chevy’s rental soft-roader should be on your used CUV shopping list.
Tim Cain, our not-quite-in-house sales whiz, has cooked up a ranking of the top 260 best sellers year-to-date for 2012. I won’t spoil any surprises, but the Suzuki Forenza lost. And Honda might be the big winner.
No, this isn’t a self-aggrandizing post celebrating my own birthday, but a tribute to the man who started it all for me (literally, and with respect to cars); my father.
Also suffering from the European contagion is Ford. The blue oval’s western European are down 10 percent in the first half of 2012, Reuters says. June sales are down a hefty 16.1 percent. Read More >
After putting Opel CEO Stracke abruptly out to pasture, one would think that his (allegedly interim) successor Steve Girsky has a new plan to rescue Opel and to spare GM shareholders further losses. Not so. The new man will keep the old plan. “GM fully supports the current plan to strengthen Opel and improve its operational competitiveness,” a spokesman for Opel told Reuters. Read More >
Here we go again…Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is asking NHTSA to re-open the investigation into the Toyota unintended acceleration case.
“It’s nice to be liked,” my future third wife Liz Phair sings, “but it’s better by far to get paid.” When your humble author began a vigorous program of auto-media meta-criticism under the guidance of the august Robert Farago a few years ago, I expected to be hated by my peers, and I was. I expected to be shunned by the industry PR people, and I was. I even feared I might be the subject of underhanded personal attacks designed to cost me my job, my home, and my ability to feed my son, and I wasn’t disappointed in that, either. The only thing I didn’t expect was to be emulated.
Now we have the nice folks at FORTUNE doing their own meta-critical review-the-reviewers, complete with double helpings of cynicism and supposition. Their target: The new Chevrolet Malibu ECO. They credit TTAC’s own Michael Karesh with being “an early sign that consensus was building” on the car. And the verdict?
Are we all Moose Test experts by now? Presumably so. TTAC has covered Moosegate from the perspective of a skeptical American and an indignant German so far, and now there’s more (moose) fat to chew.
Yesterday, I sent this email to Rabe Mattias at Teknikens Varld:
Thank you for contacting us to provide the full details on your test.
Can you offer an opinion or theory as to why the Grand Cherokee
repeatedly displayed the wheels-up behavior during your testing but
did not display the same behavior during Chrysler’s observations?
Thank you!
We didn’t get a response. Here’s what we did get:
The Suzuki Grand Vitara was the second worst-selling small SUV in America last month, with 419 sold. The only competitor that fared worse was the now-dead Mazda Tribute, which sold 1 unit (ostensibly a remainder car).
The 335d may not have done so well in the United States, but BMW seems undeterred, and is set to launch yet another oil-burning 3er shortly.
On the LFA’s in-house test track. Each car gets tested for some 50 miles
In this week-long report, we followed the Lexus LFA from raw fiber to body, paint, and assembly. In this final chapter, we take it on the test track in Motomachi.
Each and every LFA that rolls off the line is checked like no other car. 7,000 items of the LFA, all previously checked, counter-signed, eternalized in evidence sheets, are checked again. Each check again is eternalized in evidence sheets. When I said it takes 8 days to make an LFA, I lied. It takes 8 days to make one, and then it takes a full additional week to check it. Read More >
Somewhere between Brigadoon and Bora Bora
Life has been good. Well, let’s just call it a nicer shade of OK with a few interesting surprises along the way.
You get out of your morning cobwebs, and walk up to your driveway knowing that the car in front of you will be your last ride ever.
Recent Comments