A vehicle guaranteed to cause the least possible amount of harm to the planet and its finite resources, hands down, offered up something of a sneak peak on Wednesday.

Make that “vehicles,” plural. The GMC Hummer EV, a beast of an electric pickup due to roll out of General Motors’ repurposed Detroit-Hamtramck plant late next year, will have a sibling: An SUV, as it’s a body style worthy of the reborn Hummer name’s heritage and also the thing Americans WANT.

And check out that spa-sized frunk. Read More >

Following requests from Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) for a formal investigation into whether the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicle Rules proposed by the Trump administration violates the Clean Air Act (or some currently undetermined regulatory requirement that might stop it from coming to fruition), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General said it will indeed evaluate the emissions rollback.

As the ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Carper’s opposition to the fuel rollback is to be expected. With politicians unwilling to find common ground and engage in good-faith discussions that might result in some amount of compromise in service to the people, opposition tactics have devolved into partisan lawsuits and trying to halt the new rules over technicalities. Read More >

Keeping its lucrative full-size pickup lines chugging along has proved a challenge for General Motors, what with workers in Indiana and Michigan shying away from factories due to COVID-19 testing, contraction of the illness itself, or fear of it.

The problem isn’t solely the domain of big truck and SUV plants. The automaker also has a problem with its midsize pickup plant in Missouri, but a solution is underway. Read More >

It looks like the problem isn’t the damn kids. Well, not in this instance.

The problem is us keyboard jockeys; the corpulent shrimp-eaters of the world.

Clearly, our bitching and moaning hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Read More >

General Motors’ second-quarter earnings report is out, and there’s red ink to report.

Hammered by the coronavirus-related shutdown of its domestic manufacturing facilities and a corresponding sales slide, the automaker reported an $800 million loss in Q2 — a far cry from the rosy, $2.42 billion profit it saw a year earlier.

GM’s cash burn was also a five-alarm affair, but one element of the report was hardly depressing at all: the company’s Chinese sales. Read More >

Toyota announced the creation of a new holding company that will oversee its software development initiatives this week. While our default response is to gripe about the nebulous concept of “mobility companies” and the industry’s obnoxious emphasis on shifting data, we also understand that it pays to have someone on hand who knows their way around a line of code.

It wasn’t all that long go that Volkswagen was bragging about taking software seriously, only to be publicly shamed by the media when bunk programming screwed up the launch of numerous physical products. The cynical side of the brain knows this could have been avoided by ignoring unnecessary connectivity features and a potentially ill-conceived attempt to digitize the entire cabin.

We’re sympathetic to the nature of competition and the appeal “newness” has on customers. The automotive industry has seen the sea of riches amassed by tech companies harvesting data and knows which way the wind is blowing. No brand wants to be seen as technologically inferior, even if many of the newer features in modern cars aren’t really in service of anything other than marketing. Yet the “software first” mentality that has started presiding over vehicle development seems somewhat counterproductive, and Toyota may have just bought into it hook, line and sinker.

Then again, maybe it’s a great play and we’re just not seeing the big picture. So let’s dive in and see what we find. Read More >

You’re probably disinterested to learn that Ford found a cheap way to measure and record the interior dimensions of assembly plants in preparation for retooling operations. However, the manner in which the company plans to scan its Van Dyke transmission facility is an altogether different matter.

The maker of wholesome products like the F-150 and a vast array of passenger cars no longer offered to American consumers chose to temporarily adopt a pair of hell hounds secretly designed to one day enslave the human race. Read More >

Living in Europe and eager for the next generation of Mitsubishi products? You might end up waiting forever.

As part of a crash cost-cutting exercise designed to stabilize the storm-rocked company, the Japanese automaker has decided to reduce investment in under-performing markets while chopping fixed costs by one-fifth over the next two years.

In Europe, the brand could soon become a ghost. Mitsubishi has hit the stop button on any new product headed in that direction. Read More >

Based on Mitsubishi’s bleak assessment of its own future, you might have thought it would be the automaker winning this week’s award for saddest economic forecast. But Nissan refused to be outdone. Having already warned the world that 2020 would prove harrowing even before anyone heard the term “COVID-19,” the brand now predicts an operating loss of 470 billion yen ($4.5 billion USD).

Nissan likewise estimates total revenue declining by one-fifth through year’s end to 7.8 trillion yen ($74.1 billion) as its worldwide vehicle sales continue a longstanding retreat.

While it’s difficult to know what to peg these losses on, there are a few obvious suspects. Both automakers sacrificed their identities as automakers in order to spend years trying to expand globally, with a particular focus on developing countries and bland models assumed to have mainstream appeal. Nissan even re-launched the Datsun name as an affordable alternative in places like India, but it wasn’t the sales success the company envisioned.

Read More >

Via a Google search, an old press release floated up from January of 2019 that, in hindsight, foreshadows current events. You see, because of the shutdown, organizers of last year’s Consumer Electronics Show warned attendees that they might see some changes to programming.

That shutdown was the byproduct of typical partisan wrangling. Fast-forward to 2020 and all programming, everywhere, is impacted by an altogether different shutdown, one which stands to turn next year’s CES tech extravaganza into an online-only affair. Read More >

An Indian-owned British automaker is about to land a French boss.

On Tuesday, Jaguar Land Rover parent Tata Motors announced the hiring of Thierry Bolloré, former CEO of Groupe Renault, as the automaker’s new CEO, replacing the retiring Sir Ralf Speth. The new boss arrives on September 10th. Read More >

Never mind 2020. In the previous decade, Americans purchased more new cars per year than ever before. Roaring out of the recession, U.S. sales volumes ticked upwards year after year, settling above the 17 million marker and staying there for quite some time. Even last year’s haul defied expectations, landing north of that hallowed marker.

It didn’t reverse the increasingly geriatric nature of the country’s fleet, however. American automobiles, on average, have never been older, and they’re now poised to jump rapidly in age. Read More >

Listen, we don’t want to hear about that summer after high school… unless it involved a road trip requiring precise and detailed navigation!

That’s right, today we’re talking about finding one’s way through life in the most literal sense. Charting a course. These days, reaching your destination usually involves a pre-programmed route, satellite linkup, and a detached female voice ordering your every move, barking commands at every turn.

Do any of you still hang on to the old ways? Read More >

Electrify America, the organization formed as part of Volkswagen’s $2-billion penance to promote the spread of electric vehicles after the Dieselgate scandal, is touting a new EV-related icon it believes will be in service of its broader aspirations.

The company has launched an obligatory Change.org petition to get the Unicode Consortium to adopt an charging station emoji of its own design. Electrifiy America noted that the governing body rejected last year’s proposal, saying something needed to be put into place to that “represents the EV industry and the future of transportation.”

It also said it realized “the Unicode Consortium has a tough job to avoid overpopulating smartphone keyboards with endless emojis. However, we believe the Unicode solution of continuing to represent EV charging with a Gas Pump Emoji is not a forward-thinking approach.”

Read More >

GMC’s an interesting brand. Free of cars from the outset (Sprint/Cabalero notwithstanding), General Motors’ truck brand seems well positioned to turn America’s unquenchable thirst for trucks and utility vehicles into big, big bucks.

For the most part, it has, yet glaring shafts of white space remain in the brand’s lineup. Time for a little rearranging? Read More >