Maserati of North America is recalling over 1,000 of its newest luxury sedans to repair fuel lines that pose an engine fire risk. It’s not exactly what you’d want to hear when discussing your fresh, six-figure status symbol, but the automaker appears to be addressing the problem right out of the gate. According to the manufacturer, the vehicles haven’t even been delivered to the customers yet.

The affected vehicles include Maserati’s 2018 Ghibli and Quattroporte sedans. Both models suffer from a potentially weepy fuel line in the engine compartment that could leak gasoline exactly where you don’t want it. As customers have yet to take delivery, the units will have to be repaired prior to being picked up.  Read More >

To celebrate the launch of a brand new model, the people at Jaguar massaged one of their longest-lived models into a special edition.

It’s the XJR you’ve never heard of.

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Founder of the debt-laden technology firm LeEco has shirked orders from Chinese authorities to return to the country before the end of 2017, saying he needed to stay within the United States to fundraise for Faraday Future. Last week, the Beijing branch of the China Securities Regulatory Commission issued a notice ordering Jia Yueting to return to China to face the staggering debt attached to his various businesses and protect investors’ rights.

However, he claims he’s making too much headway with efforts to keep electric vehicle startup Faraday Future from sinking deeper into the toilet to head back to China. Instead, he has requested that his brother, Jia Yuemin, meet the regulator face-to-face last Friday to provide a report in response to the notice.  Read More >

Many years of competing in demolition derbies taught me many things, such as the value of not looking over my shoulder while reversing into someone at a high rate of speed and the importance of a good neck brace. I also learned that while one can substitute other liquids for transmission fluid, braking systems don’t play well with any pollutant that’s not designed to be in there.

Alfa Romeo has also discovered this fact, and is now recalling a total of 307 Giulia sedans and Stelvio crossovers from the 2018 model year for potentially contaminated brake fluid.

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So dawns a new year, ripe with promise and expectation. Millions of babies will draw their first breath in 2018, and those babies’ parents, aunts, uncles, or grandparents will drive off in 16 million or so new vehicles over the course of the coming year. In the U.S., of course.

Unfortunately, to keep the automotive herd healthy, the weakest will have to die. And in 2018, some vehicle nameplates will discover their lifespan has a definitive end point. Read More >

Even though headlights have evolved from uniform circles illuminating the roadway in largely the same way to diverse units that look and function very differently, their overall performance has improved immensely. Nobody is going to jump from a 1955 DeSoto to a 2018 Dodge and think “Wow, these headlamps are just terrible.”

However, the International Institute for Highway Safety has been on a two-year mission to make modern headlights look bad and there are two possible explanations as to why. Either the IIHS genuinely believes the current offerings from manufacturers are unsafe, or it’s trying to promote competition within the industry to produce a better bulb. The truth, as usual, is likely somewhere in the middle.  Read More >

The odds are still stacked against such a purchase, but next year stands to become the greatest year yet for vehicles not entirely powered by internal combustion.

In its look at industry trends for 2018, Edmunds reveals a number of no-brainers: the passenger car segment continues its sad decline, luxury SUVs remain a massive growth market, and the amount of new car buyers choosing to lease remains static at 30 percent.

One segment, however, stands to hit the accelerator next year. Green vehicles — covering the hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electric vehicle segments — will break out of the micro-niche category and catapult firmly into the “niche, but approaching mainstream” realm.  Read More >

Maybe it’s the Hoth-like climate and the urge to do anything in one’s power to warm it up, but Canada has so far taken a laid-back approach to the fires plaguing older Smart Fortwo models. A big part of the problem is that no one’s telling the country’s transportation regulator about them.

The models bursting into flames in the Great White North are of the same vintage as those which sparked an investigation by the United States’ National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. However, Transport Canada has yet to open a defect investigation of its own. Read More >

Volkswagen Group said on Thursday that it would be petitioning Germany’s constitutional court to overturn the appointment of a special auditor to investigate the actions of its management during its diesel emissions scandal. Appointed last November, the auditor’s goal is to establish whether or not VW’s top brass withheld information about the manipulation of vehicle emissions as they related to testing.

Even thought the automaker has said it wanted to improve transparency shortly after the scandal kicked off in September of 2015, Volkswagen wants the work of the auditor suspended prior to the constitutional-court hearing against it. This begs the question: Does VW still have something to hide or is it so fed up with the litigation surrounding “dieselgate” that it’ll do just about anything to keep officials from dredging up the past?  Read More >

We drove the new 2018 Nissan Leaf in California earlier this month, finding it to be an effective foil to the Prius Primes and Chevy Bolts of the world. With far more mainstream styling than its predecessor, the Leaf stands a good chance of hooking customers who would have never considered the old model.

Now, we’ve learned the company will bring a Leaf GT concept to the Tokyo Auto Salon in early January, a Japanese event most easily described as a fantastic mashup of CES and SEMA.

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Yesterday I talked about the worst kind of subprime lenders and how they misused the courts to collect their profits. There was a broad spectrum of reader response, including a few people who felt compelled to discuss the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and therefore won the presidency. (To which I can only respond: that’s like awarding the Super Bowl win to the team with the most rushing yards.)

Here’s what we didn’t discuss: our own experiences with subprime loans and/or bad car deals. I suspect that there are some members of the B&B who have never so much as walked by a subprime lender; I also suspect that there are plenty of readers who are currently in a subprime situation right now but don’t want to admit it.

So for today, let’s consider two topics: a) What’s the worst car deal you ever made? and b) did you ever use a subprime source? I’ll start, of course.

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Mike writes:

Ok Sajeev, I got one for you.

I own a 2009 Nissan Xterra 4wd X model.  It has nearly 100k miles on the clock.  In the past week, whenever I start the vehicle, I hear a chattering noise coming from the passenger side dashboard.  The noise persists as long as the passenger air bag light is lit; when that light goes off, the chattering stops.  So I took the truck to my local Nissan dealer, whom I trust, and I was told that the problem is the passenger side blender door of the HVAC system – apparently there are gears in this assembly which are not moving freely or properly. 

The cost to repair is estimated at about $600 because of the necessity to remove the whole dashboard.  The dealer’s service people told me to do nothing until the HVAC system fails to function properly, and it is currently functioning properly except for the above described noise.  My question: how is a bad blender door mechanism linked to an airbag light?  Can airbags chatter on vehicle startup?

Thank you as always for your excellent advice. Read More >

Two weeks ago, an image of a supercharger embossed with the iconic Shelby snake made its way onto the internet, followed by another claiming to depict the biggest set of rotors ever affixed to a factory Mustang.

The GT500 rumor mill went ballistic.

Now, we have official — albeit inadvertent — acknowledgment from Ford that a new Shelby GT500 is incoming, courtesy of the company’s OEM service portal, which revealed wiring diagrams and a slew of service procedures which incidentally confirm several details about the upcoming Über Mustang.

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What has three cylinders, a removable roof, and is technically illegal to own in the United States? Why, it’s the Smart Roadster, of course.

Come have a look at all the illegal plastic you can get for twenty grand.

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Ford has been fine-tuning the Lincoln brand for a while now and improving the cars is only half the story. A luxury nameplate needs more than a lineup of quality autos, it needs prestige. Since taking on Matthew McConaughey as its official spokesmodel, Lincoln has witnessed an uptick in sales — growing by 1.6 percent year over year through November 2017 in the United States.

How much of that can be attributed directly to the Oscar-winning actor is up for debate. But you don’t mess with the formula when you start making headway, so Lincoln has decided to press onward with another weird add with him in the driver’s seat of the 2018 Navigator.  Read More >