Uber Technologies Inc. has kicked off a new service that provides public health officials immediate access to data on drivers and riders who may have been in contact with someone infected with COVID-19. Weirdly, the company decided against announcing the sharing of your whereabouts with the government with any fanfare. Perhaps they thought average people wouldn’t be interested, or maybe that broadcasting their own participatory role in crafting a nightmare dystopia could be bad for business.

Then again, maybe this is exactly the kind of mass surveillance we need to flatten the curve, stop the spread, or whatever slogan is currently the trendiest. Worried? Don’t be. Uber said this service will be offered free of charge, meaning you don’t even have to spend any additional money to have your information shared.

What a sweet deal!  Read More >

Sadly for Fiat Chryler’s Italian luxury brand, the buzz last week surrounded the newly unveiled Ford Bronco, not the upcoming Ghibli Hybrid.

A model and brand TTAC’s readership can’t get enough of, the Maserati Ghibli appears for 2021 with an optional 48-volt mild hybrid powertrain that mates a 2.0-liter four-cylinder with electric “e-Booster” supercharger to an eight-speed automatic. It’s the automaker’s first electrified vehicle. Read More >

Though North Americans were offered a few car-turned-truck vehicles like the Ford Ranchero and Chevrolet El Camino between the 1950s and 1980s, domestic appetites for ute-type vehicles never approached that of Australia. Down Under, interest in such vehicles persisted for over 80 years.

Let’s take a look at one of the most popular types, the Ford Falcon.

Read More >

Shortly after his high-flying escape from Japanese semi-captivity in late 2018, former Renault-Nissan Alliance boss Carlos Ghosn got catty, marveling at what became of those two automakers after they dropped him from the phone directory.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic sinking profits and sales across the globe, Ghosn is pretty sure he knows what’s really to blame for Nissan’s current misfortunes. Read More >

Despite urging buyers to venture far from the beaten path with its new Bronco, Ford knows the bulk of its customers will want to keep their tires planted firmly on blacktop, and chances are they’d like the car to handle some of the responsibilities, too.

With that in mind, Ford reached a deal with Mobileye to develop and provide a key element of the brand’s driver-assist hardware. Note that we’re not calling it semi-autonomous, and with good reason. Read More >

Joe Hinrichs, formerly Ford’s president of automotive (and a leading candidate for CEO in the event that the company’s board grew tired of Jim Hackett), has found a new gig after his ouster from the automaker he worked at for 19 years.

On Monday, Massachusetts-based WaveSense announced Hinrichs as its newest board member, joining a former General Motors chief financial officer, Chuck Stevens III, and a Continental executive in the advisory body. Read More >

Volkswagen of America used model names that didn’t match up to those of its European counterparts for much of the 1970s and 1980s. The Golf was the Rabbit through 1984 and the Passat started out as the Dasher and then became the Quantum over here. I find the occasional Dasher or Quantum during my junkyard voyages, but nearly all of the Quantums that have survived into our current century will be gasoline-burning Syncro Wagons. Diesels? After the Oldsmobile Diesel 350 debacle of the late 1970s and early 1980s, few Americans had the guts to buy a new oil-burner.

Here’s an extremely rare ’85 Quantum sedan with turbocharged diesel engine and manual transmission, finally laid to rest in a Denver self-service yard last month. Read More >

Henrik Fisker, CEO of Fisker Inc., has announced a deal reached with Volkswagen that allows him to use the German company’s MEB architecture to build the all-electric Ocean crossover. While it seems like the platform is going to turn up everywhere before long, the deal hasn’t actually been made official.

Neither Fisker nor VW feels comfortable saying the arrangement had been finalized.

But that couldn’t contain Henrik’s excitement. The Fisker Inc. founder was on social media this week proclaiming the upcoming Ocean would start at just $29,999. Mathematicians will notice this is less than $30,000 and actually pretty damn cheap for an electric crossover, especially one that’s supposed to contain so much luxury and sustainability (the latest in a long line of empty terms used by the industry). The series of 9s at the end of Fisker’s proposed pricing should have tipped you off that there might be some light shenanigans afoot.  Read More >

I have no idea whether that’s a real group or hashtag or not. Frankly, I don’t care to find out.

Unbeknownst to yours truly, yesterday happened to be National Stick Shift Day, which is an event my fair city did not mark by raising a symbolic flag over city hall (the bike lobby must be baked into that council chamber). Had I known, I’d have driven my discontinued manual sedan with extra gusto.

As you read earlier today, Honda poured cold water on the morning-after glow by announcing the scrapping of the manual-transmission Accord for 2021, not that you ever considered buying one. The stick scarcity grows. So who’s driving them these days? Who even knows how to drive one? Read More >

You may not have noticed this, but there’s a lot of people wearing masks right now. These individuals aren’t working with drywall or sanding anything, either. You can spot them shopping, walking, or crowded around these new outdoor drinking areas located downtown that force them to huddle together while you attempt to squeeze by — coughing politely to make your intentions known.

After repeatedly Googling “What’s Going On Outside?” it was eventually revealed to your author by a helpful neighbor that there’s some kind of mystery illness nobody knows anything about. They continued explaining, but I had already stopped listening. This new information had me shocked to the core.

All I could think about was how this was going to impact Lyft drivers.

Surely the company has some kind of plan to protect its workforce and make sure they’re not riddled with blood-borne parasites or whatever. Well, we seem to be in luck. On Friday, Lyft said it will distribute around 60,000 vehicle partitions to its busiest drivers as way to protect against the coronavirus while selling customized protective shields to other drivers through the remainder of the summer.  Read More >

The Rare Rides series has featured around 10 special edition cars in past, depending on how generous you are with the term.

And while every special edition presented here thus far was designed to add some padding to a manufacturer’s bottom line, today’s special edition McDonald’s van had a much more benevolent purpose.

Read More >

Honda, perhaps taking a cue from domestic manufacturers, has decided to diminish its passenger car ranks.

Reported today by Automotive News, the automaker has decided to discontinue the Honda Fit in the U.S., while also killing off the Honda Civic coupe and ending manual transmission availability in the Accord. Read More >

Sure, we joke about the Blazer and question the need for tweeners like the Trailblazer (while lamenting what both names have become), but there’s no denying that General Motors’ Chevrolet Equinox is a sales juggernaut, topping all other GM CUVs in sales by a mile. And there’s a lot of CUVs to top.

Customers seem to like what they see in the current-generation Equinox, though one option stands to disappear for 2021. We can now confirm a recent report that Chevy plans to drop the model’s optional turbocharged 2.0-liter engine. Read More >

Domestic automakers have largely rid their North American facilities of sedans, so why shouldn’t foreign manufacturers? That’s what Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler plans to do after announcing a second-quarter loss of $1.9 billion.

While the quarterly loss was less than analysts expected, financial and sales pressures brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has led the automaker to cull car production on this side of the pond. Read More >

In the Stephen King novel Pet Cemetery, a rural family discovers that burying the body of a dead pet (and later, larger mammals) in the old graveyard out back returns the deceased family member to the clan — miraculously reanimated, yet fundamentally changed.

That seems to be what Fiat Chrysler has in mind for a famously long-running nameplate. Read More >