The United Auto Workers’ executive board has selected Terry Dittes, current regional director on the East Coast, to become the union’s newest vice president. Dittes is tasked with overseeing the UAW’s Fiat Chrysler department, which is currently involved in an ugly federal corruption probe involving millions of dollars from a joint training center allegedly embezzled by both union and company officials.

Replacing Norwood Jewell, whose retirement became effective upon the close of 2017, Dittes is stepping in roughy six months before his first four-year term was supposed to end. While Jewell has not been formally charged with corruption, his supervisory role during the FCA-UAW scandal likely forced the early retirement.  Read More >

Christmas was in the air, but Cadillac’s last sales month brought anything but good cheer. General Motors’ luxury brand saw sales of every last one of its models fall, year-over-year, ending December as the worst-performing division in the GM fold.

Total U.S. Cadillac sales fell 28.6 percent last month, year-over-year, with 2017 volume down 8 percent compared to all 12 months of 2016 — a loss of 14,566 sales. Hardly a brand reaching its pinnacle. However, as bad as Cadillac’s numbers look, there’s a couple of unavoidable factors working against the brand. Read More >

To hear Tesla explain it, the fourth quarter of 2017 was a boffo month for the company, with record deliveries and a new product that’s really hitting its stride.

It’s true that 1,550 customers took delivery of a Model 3 in the past three months, after the previous quarter saw just 220 of the lower-priced electric sedans roll into driveways. Overall deliveries rose 9 percent from Q3, for a tally of 29,870 vehicles. It sounds good, but the company, like before, still isn’t making enough Model 3s.

As it continues working through supply and assembly line issues, Tesla has pushed back its goal for 5,000-vehicle-a-week Model 3 production for the second time. Read More >

Amarok. The worst sounds mystical, conjuring up images of hairy Ice Age beasts and the grizzled 24-year-old grandfathers who once hunted them. Amarok also refers to a midsize Volkswagen pickup that’s built in Argentina and sold overseas, a pickup the automaker now wants to trademark in the United States.

Is this the first step towards Volkswagen — or a partner — joining the midsize pickup fray in America, or simply a “just in case” exercise? Volkswagen’s not saying. However, looking at the overall midsize pickup segment, is there really a case to be made for a new player, especially when there’s already a Ford Ranger on the way? Read More >

Automakers released 2017 year-end numbers today and, despite lower or near flat year-over-year volume for most, the performance beat the expectations of most analysts.

Still, American new vehicle sales slipped a hair under 5 percent in December, dropping by 1.75 percent to a total of 17.245 million for all of 2017. This brings the parade of annual growth to a screeching halt, as the industry has posted year-over-year gains ever since the dark days of 2009.

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The automotive industry frames electric vehicles as the future of motoring, but despite a large number of plug-in options already available, the entire idea of owning an electric car is still rather futuristic. Leasing one, however, is far more contemporary.

Growing in popularity, automotive leasing hit a record high in 2016, accounting for 31 percent of all new vehicle sales in the United States. But that’s nothing when you isolate the number of electric cars. U.S. drivers now lease nearly 80 percent of battery-electric vehicles and 55 percent of all plug-in hybrids. Accounting for this trend is a consumer perception that EVs will only get better over time — which isn’t all that different from saying the current fleet isn’t all that impressive. Read More >

Certain automotive technologies are getting borderline out of hand. But nothing stops the march toward progress. Keen to show off its developmental might, Nissan plans to unveil something called “brain-to-vehicle” (B2V) technology at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show.

While the system borders on the fantastical, Nissan claims it can interpret signals from a driver’s brain to help a semi-autonomous vehicle understand how to best respond. Read More >

You’re driving down the freeway on a cloudy day when German sheetmetal catches your eye. New Audi, by the looks of it. Well, it could be new. Yeah, that’s a nice A6 up there. Or is it an A4? Hold on a second, it wasn’t as far away as you thought — that’s the new A3, which borrowed its its older siblings’ clothes.

Suffice it to say, and Ingolstadt isn’t alone in this, that design DNA runs very deep in the Audi family. To see an Audi is to recognize an Audi, but not necessarily to discern what particular Audi you’re seeing. Well, the company wants to change that. Read More >

Even though automotive trade shows are becoming more tech-focused, its still a difficult environment for a fledgling carmaker to break into. That’s one reason the Consumer Electronics Show, now just called “CES,” has hosted so many Chinese startups these last few years. One of the newest is the e-car manufacturer Byton, formerly known as Future Mobility.

While Byton sounds more like the name of a vehicle than a brand — especially since it was, two months earlier — it’s infinitely better than mashing two of the auto industry’s most-popular buzzwords together and pretending it means something. The company was also wise to get away from any moniker that might allow the public to confuse it with Faraday Future.

However, adopting the name of its singular model means Byton had to come up with something new for the vehicle scheduled to make its world debut at CES next week. Now dubbed the SIV (smart intuitive vehicle), the Chinese-brand is promising a “next generation smart device” that is “uniquely built for the coming era of truly shared, smart mobility and autonomous driving.”  Read More >

I’m old enough to remember when self-serve gasoline stations were an innovation. That was some time after filling station attendants stopped washing your windshield and checking your oil, or even giving you a free set of steak knives  or glass tumblers with a fill-up along with actually pumping your fuel. Age perhaps makes my memory imprecise, but I believe the change from full-service to self-service happened sometime after OPEC started jacking up the price of petroleum.

Since it was a way of saving a few pennies a gallon as fuel costs were increasing, self-serve was so popular that it spread across the fruited plains to the point where in many places in America today you can’t find anyone to pump your gas, let alone provide what used to be considered full service. Self-serve was embraced at the gas pump and it has pullulated to other retail establishments. I can’t remember the last time I went through a checkout lane with an actual human cashier when buying groceries, much as it annoys me to have a machine say “Thank you for shopping at Meijer.”

We now live in a self-serve world. Well, except for New Jersey and Oregon. Until now, both of those states have prohibited self-serve gasoline stations, but it looks like starting this year New Jersey will have that distinction all to itself. Read More >

Everyone who’s excited about the next-generation Ford Fusion, take one step forward.

Not so fast, guys.

A new report lends weight to rumors that Ford Motor Company isn’t all that enthused about letting its passenger cars wither on the vine while buyers look elsewhere for riper, fresher fruit. Fruit with a cargo bay, to be clear. It seems the Ford Fusion’s redesign program is now off the table, turning the model’s future into a giant question mark.

Death becomes Fusion? Read More >

For 2019, Ford will debut a new Ranger (1982-2011), followed the next year by a new Bronco (1966-1996). While there have been some camouflaged Rangers seen running around, Ford is not showing anybody what the new Bronco will look like.

Since they’re leaving it up to our imaginations, do you think they’re going to ace the new Bronco, or drop a big deuce?

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The rebooted Mini brand was launched nearly 20 years ago, an alarming reminder of the relentless march of time and my own rapidly disappearing hairline. Since its introduction, when it competed for customer cash during the retro boom, the brand has grown into a full line of cars, ranging from the original Hardtop to plug-in hybrids and the oddly lumpy Clubman.

Far from its humble roots, it is now possible to spend north of $50,000 on a Mini in 2018. How does the base model stack up at less than half that price? Let’s find out.

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While The Truth About Cars has occasionally been accused for having it in for Tesla, the honest-to-god-truth is that we just possess a severe aversion to unbridled hype. Autonomous cars have made a lot of progress in the last few years, but there’s something about the way manufacturers talk about them that makes us want to say, “Interesting, but we’ll believe it when we see it.”

Automakers love making grandiose claims and Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk may be the prince of hyperbolic statements and lofty promises. He should be commended for delivering on many of them. Still, though there have been many occasions where the other shoe dropped and it was our job to report it. We’re having to do that again, now that Tesla has missed its initial deadline to dazzle the world with an autonomous cross-country road trip.  Read More >

In 2016, Ford Motor Company’s stable of rear-drive vehicles came under scrutiny for six-speed transmissions that couldn’t decide whether to sprint or crawl. Owners reported that their 2011-2012 F-150s, Expeditions, Mustangs, and Lincoln Navigators would, suddenly and without warning, downshifting from upper ratios to first gear, ultimately forcing the automaker to recall some 153,000 of the vehicles in the United States.

It now looks like it didn’t recall enough of them. Dangerous downshifts continue, and not just in vehicles covered by the recall. Another concern is that the problem is reappearing in supposedly “fixed” vehicles. Read More >