What was highly probable yesterday is definite: GM will shift production of the Astra compact from Germany to Ellesmere Port, England. Workers at the UK plant agreed nearly to a man and a woman (approval rate 94 percent) to a deal with GM that keeps Ellesmere Port open and that spells the near certain doom of Opel’s plant in Bochum.

Workers agreed to a four-year deal that freezes wages for two years, and that allows only moderate rises of around 3 percent for the following two years, Reuters heard from a source. The source also said: Read More >

James writes:

Hi Sajeev,

I’m a university student completing their honours degree in screen production. My project for this year is making a short drama/comedy about a young man and his car (surprise, surprise!), so I’m looking for old, tidy cars with character.

My search has come down to a yellow 1983 Volvo 244 GL 3sp auto, offered to me for $500AUD with no registration – the pictures I’ve been given shows a very straight, tidy old brick, but it could respond well to a good polish. The bad? The car has been sitting around for at least a few months (could even be closer to a year…), which causes worries. I’m told it drove quite well before it was put away and the owners in question are quite mechanically minded and love their bricks, so I’m lead to believe it will be a good car. However, if I buy this car and it doesn’t work, suddenly I’m out of money and I don’t have a car for my film. So is there anything I should be wary of and check to ensure clean health? Any brick nuts want to chime either?

For you brick nuts, it’s an ’83 244 GL with the B23 and the 3 speed automatic. It’s done 280,000 kilometres/170k miles. I’m from Australia so I’m sure someone will school me on how we got the better bricks and USDM got shafted or something along those lines!

Speedy response would be lovely before I loose my money! Read More >

Yesterday, we brought you the bad news about European auto sales in April. You are a gearhead, you don’t care about market share and percentiles, you care about cars! Here is how cars fared in Europe in April. Are you safely buckled-up? Read More >

Listening to the news from Europe, one thinks that there is chaos in the streets of Europe. Not yet. But Europeans are clearing room for chaos by buying fewer cars. 1,017,912 new passenger cars were registered in the EU, or 6.9 percent less than in the same month of 2011. Four months into the year, new registrations in the EU were 7.5 percent lower than a year earlier, the European manufacturers association ACEA reports.   Read More >

Tomorrow, Thursday morning, GM will most likely announce that the new Opel Astra will be built at the Ellesmere Port plant near Liverpool, and no longer in Germany. This ends weeks of hard-nosed gamesmanship, where one plant was played against the other. Read More >

This morning I had the honor of naming my new *grandson at his bris. That means that I’m old enough to remember when 15 inch wheels were considered large.

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Our own Michael Karesh will be testing out Nissan’s new Altima this week. This is the car that Nissan is hoping will take the Altima from its current second place slot in the mid-size segment and up to the top of the pile. In lieu of Michael’s take, there are a few factors that are worth looking at.

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Even as GM abandons Facebook advertising because of a poor ROI, Ford is going full steam ahead with Facebook spending and including more “sponsored stories” – i.e. cheesy advertorial content – as part of their “accelerated” spending. The problem is that it doesn’t work.

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Today, I happened to be at Toyota’s Tokyo headquarters in order to personally get to the bottom of numbers nobody seems to care about. There was a minor riot in the usually zen-like lobby of 1-4-18 Koraku, Bunkyo-ku.  TTAC was there to investigate … Read More >

While GM is withdrawing from Facebook advertising, over in Europe, Opel does the opposite:  Opel spent untold budget amounts to hire Orlando Higginbottom, better known as Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. The hot UK producer, remixer and DJ was hired to flog … clicks to Facebook. Read More >

Like many politicians during their recreational moments, cars can make some unique and funny noises once they experience the stresses of the open road.

Some of them are quite normal such as the ‘vroom’ of the engine. The ‘roar’ of the tire, and the ‘squeaky squeaky’ of a worn suspension over a series of bumps.

But what about the ‘clunk’ of loose steering components? Or the metallic ‘clanging’ of a brake system well past it’s maintenance time?

The majority of drivers simply like to delay the inevitable.

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Happy 28th birthday, Mark Zuckerberg. Your baby is about to go public, but GM still had to rain on your parade by pulling their advertising from Facebook because GM ad men didn’t think it was effective.

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Welcome to Two Minutes Hate, in which we, the TTAC staff, will choose some hapless writer and/or industry person and then flog that person with all the verbal viciousness we can summon up. Complaints about “negativity”, “hatefulness”, and “substandard caviar served during the press dinner” are not welcome here. This is Two Minutes Hate. Thank you — JB

Did you know that there is an “ascetic populism [added to] to the inherent machismo of the engine-revving manual transmission”? My mother, who was a Palm Beach deb prior to driving a lifetime’s worth of stick-shift MGs, Honda, Nissan trucks, and Mercurys even while suffering from advanced sarcoidosis, apparently never got the memo on that. Same for my ex-wife, who used to flog an SRT-4 around Nelson Ledges once a month or so until the vacuum hoses performed their inevitable high-boost seppuku. Come to think of it, the number of women who have daily-driven a manual-transmission must be in the hundreds of millions, particularly given the fact that many developing markets still don’t have slushbox volume models.

In today’s edition of Salon, however, David Sirota attempts to make the case that driving a stick shift is, like, totes manly. He devotes a few paragraphs to how he “can’t let go of [his] love for the stick” using language that wouldn’t be out of place in the inevitable “tween” edition of Fifty Shades Of Grey. Having convinced himself, at least, that choosing a particular transmission is just about as manly as dunking over Akeem The Dream while simultaneously using one’s toes to digitally violate Rihanna, Sirota then comes to the inevitable conclusion: stick shifts are bad, mmmkay?

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Even though the BMW 1 Series M Coupe is gone forever, performance-minded 1-Series customers must  have a high-end performance model, even if a lot of them don’t even know if the car is front-drive or rear-drive.

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Michael writes:

Love the website. Here is my conundrum:

My wife and I have two cars. A 2007 CR-V that I use mostly for a 75 mile round trip commute several days a week to San Francisco and a 2004 Infiniti FX35 with 52,000 miles. While the CR-V has a ton of utility, I am tired of driving it. It has quite a bit of road noise, the sound system sucks and frankly it’s kind of a female car. The plan is to keep the CR-V and let my wife drive it, and use it as our family car while we sell the Infiniti and I get something for that daily commute. The Infiniti was purchased from a friend and is in great condition, but I feel like it is a ticking time bomb and want to sell it now to take advantage of high used car prices. Plus the mpg is horrific, it doesn’t have satellite radio and the tires are still original and will need expensive replacing shortly. Read More >