Yesterday, we could report that the fickle Fisker that embarrassingly broke down in Consumer Reports’ driveway, received a new battery, under warranty. Now we hear that it was no breakdown. The Fisker Karma shut itself down intentionally to prevent bigger damage. Read More >
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A lover of a former Volkswagen labor leader has been charged for aiding in breach of trust over her role in a bribery scandal, Focus Magazin reports. The scandal had rocked Volkswagen, destroyed the image of the German metalworker union IG Metall, and aided in toppling the center-left government of Gerhard Schröder in 2005.
According to prosecutors in Braunschweig, a 47-year-old woman from Brazil received €250,000 euros ($327,000) under sham contracts between 2002 and 2005. It is also alleged that she billed Volkswagen for travel costs and language courses, totaling €100,000 ($130,000.) The woman was not identified, but anybody who has been close to the upper echelons of Volkswagen in those days knows that it can’t be anyone else than the buxom Brazilian Adriana Barros. Read More >
You already have the bad news about February car sales in Europe. How did individual cars fare? JATO Dynamics provides us with a list of Europe’s Top Ten in February. With two exceptions, they are all down, some are way down. One exception creates great happiness in a suburb of Detroit. Read More >
Hot on the heels of TTAC’s article on buying a used BMW, we have KBB (via AutoSpies) suggesting that some cars, like the Subaru Impreza, are actually cheaper to own if you buy them brand-new. The numbers are subject to debate but the concept is interesting…
Geely has chosen their battery technology partner for their new plug-in hybrid vehicle, and their supplier, A123 Systems Inc., may not be a familiar name to everyone, but their wares have been used by other vehicles like the Fisker Karma.
Daimler has attracted the wrath of Wikipedia. An anonymous Wikipedia editor had “corrected” a harmless entry about Daimler’s lobbying activities. The edit was caught. The IP address was traced back to “a server of Daimler AG,” writes Der Spiegel. All hell broke loose. Read More >
Ed Dowdall, a 70-year-old San Jose area resident with a rare form of dementia that causes wildly unstable cognitive functioning and hallucinations, walked into a dealer and traded in his 2008 Nissan Altima Hybrid for a Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet, which retailed for $62,000. A series of protests and complaints from Dowdall’s wife led to the dealer taking back the car and voiding the sale.
With the Toyota 86 set to go on sale in a couple of weeks (the first production models are set to leave the line on Friday), Toyota’s Japanese sales outlets will have separate spaces to sell the new sports car – and in some cases, stand alone sales facilities, similar to the Chrysler/Fiat arrangement in America.
At 7 years old, the XK isn’t a kitten anymore – but with a rumored 3 years until the next redesign, what’s a luxury marque to do? Make special editions, of course. On the surface, the XKR-S looks like a baby-boomer dressed like a teenager, or as the Brits put it: mutton dressed as lamb.
Last week in a speech at Daimler owned Freightliner truck plant, President Obama said that the new 55mpg CAFE standards will save a typical American family $8,000 a year on gasoline. That would be great news to most American drivers if it were true but the president took political science and law courses in college, not math. Or maybe his math isn’t off. Read More >
The other day, I walk (don’t ask why and what for) through Tokyo’s red-light district, known to connoisseurs as Kabukicho, and I spot some HUMMERs curbside. HUMMERs are not new to the neighborhood. In Japan, HUMMERs used to be popular with certain groups, known as the Yakuza, who also frequent Kabukicho.
However, they had H2s, not the HUMMERs I saw. Read More >
Wait a minute— this Malaise Era heap, with its solid rear axle and AMC Hornet-esque lines, this car can’t be a 510! That’s what I thought when I spotted this car at a Northern California self-service yard last month, having forgotten that Nissan’s American marketers slapped 510 badges on the 710/Violet/Stanza/200B for the ’78 and ’79 model years. This is the first time I’ve seen one of these things in at least 20 years. Read More >
Chrysler’s owner Fiat is in trouble. Fiat has a (declining) market share of 28.3 percent in its home market Italy, a market that had tanked 19 percent in February, and 18 percent in the first two months of the year. Fiat’s sales in Italy, down 20 percent in February, slowed more than the floundering market. Fiat’s southern exposure to the ailing parts of Europe is disproportional. Fiat’s top executives will now have an emergency meeting with Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Monti, Reuters reports. Possibly on the agenda: A closure of another Italian factory, and a cutback on investments in Italy. Read More >
Now, it is beginning to hurt: The European new car market crashed in February. According to data released by the European manufacturers’ association ACEA, new car sales were down 9.7 percent in February. Two months into the year, car sales in the EU are down 8.3 percent from the same period a year earlier. Read More >
Marty Nemko is the “The Bay Area’s Best Career Coach”, and a contributor to The Atlantic as well as U.S. News, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. So what makes him qualified to sound off on raising the CAFE standard to 100 MPG.
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