Fiat Chrysler Automobiles will give you up to $1,500 to find weaknesses in its vehicles’ security, but cybersecurity experts want the automaker to pony up more dough.
After the company announced its industry-first “bug bounty” program on July 13, many professional hackers say FCA’s reward isn’t enough to attract real talent in the search for software breaches, Forbes reports. Read More >
Through the first-half of 2016, passenger car sales volume is down 8 percent in the United States.
It’s not quite that bad in the subcompact car category, but sharp declines from the Chevrolet Sonic, Ford Fiesta, Honda Fit, Toyota Prius C, Toyota Yaris, plus the disappearance of the Mazda2 pushed subcompact car volume down 6 percent.
Yet U.S. sales of the Nissan Versa are on the rise.
Not only are Nissan Versa sales on the rise, the Versa is consistently America’s top-selling subcompact car.
Not only are Versa sales rising now, Versa sales have been on the rise for the last seven years. Read More >
Tesla’s Autopilot system is many things to many people — an automated folk devil to safety and consumer advocates, or a nice thing to have on a long drive (according to Jack Baruth) — but it isn’t the cause of a July 1 rollover crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The automaker’s CEO took to Twitter yesterday to claim that the Model X driven by a Michigan man wasn’t even in Autopilot mode at the time of the crash. Elon Musk said that data uploaded from the vehicle shows that Autopilot wasn’t activated, and added that the “crash would not have occurred if it was on.”
Tesla then released those digital logs to the media. Read More >
While it’s true that TTAC’s managing editor spent last week in an $11,595 2016 Chevrolet Spark, auto writers living on the east coast of Canada are rather more accustomed to receiving highly optioned cars from the press fleet.
There was the 2016 Mazda CX-9 Platinum priced, in Mazda USA speak, at $45,215. A couple of weeks before, the new Honda Civic Coupe arrived in Touring trim — not Si, not Type R — at a U.S. market price of $26,960. Toyota Highlander? Make it a Limited Hybrid at $51,445.
So what a pleasure it was to see a 2017 Mercedes-Benz C-Class Coupe pull into my driveway and see no AMG badges, the basic 2.0-liter turbo/all-wheel-drive combo, and only $7,540 in options. A mere scintilla of options. Scarcely a soupçon of selections from the lengthy list of Mercedes-Benz choices.
Thus, with shockwaves reverberating around GCBC Towers, a 2017 Mercedes-Benz C-Class Coupe arrived as a successor to our 2016 Lexus RC tester, a direct C-Class Coupe competitor, with $6,000 of savings in hand.
Yes, as-tested, the Benz was $6,000 less than its Lexus rival. And yes, the Benz is the better car. Read More >
Automakers are turning up the wick on drive-sharing investments and slowly transitioning from car manufacturing to providing mobility. That’s likely a good bet, too, considering a recent report from McKinsey Global Institute.
The report, titled “Poorer than their parents? A new perspective on income inequality,” is a stark reminder that the economic situation isn’t as good as it was 10 years ago, let alone compared to the highs of the postwar West.
For starters, 65 or 70 percent of households in the advanced nations studied were “in income segments whose incomes in 2014 were flat or down compared with 2005,” states the report. The United States is one of the countries pulling up that average with 80-percent of households in income segments either flat or falling.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is flinging cash at its Midwestern assembly plants as part of its world-conquering plan to boost Jeep production.
Yesterday, the automaker announced $1.05 billion in funding to retool its Belvidere, Illinois and Toledo, Ohio production facilities, and issued a kill date for one of its least popular products. Read More >
A study of self-reported aggressive driving behavior finds that your neighbor, brother, wife and child are angry and violent behind the wheel. But not you.
The statistics found in the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety’s report are alarming, and, without stating it explicitly, advocate for more yoga. According to the study, almost 80 percent of U.S. drivers displayed at least one incident of “significant” aggression, anger or road rage during the past year. Read More >
There are upsides to autonomous driving, but Volvo drivers are still made of flesh, with blood pumping though their veins.
Unlike that hazy group of people who lose their minds with excitement at the thought of always being a passenger in their own car, the Swedish automaker isn’t about to take away the act of driving from its customers. Read More >
General Motors had hoped to put the issue behind it, but a judge’s ruling just opened the automaker up to billions in damages over its faulty ignition switch scandal.
Yesterday, the U.S. Appeals Court of Manhattan ruled that lawsuits filed against the automaker for accidents that happened before the company’s 2009 bankruptcy sale were still valid. The decision overruled an earlier court decision that protected GM from such suits. Read More >
Getting a good price for a used Tesla is now solely up to its owner, after the automaker discontinued a program that allows three-year-old vehicles to be bought back for 50 percent of the purchase price.
Tesla dumped the program on July 1, Reuters reports, allowing the company earmarked for the program for other purposes. The program was created to assure would-be owners of a basic resale value after the Model S entered the marketplace. Read More >
California’s Air Resources Board wants nothing to do with Volkswagen’s proposed fix for its 3.0-liter VW, Audi and Porsche TDI models equipped with emissions-cheating defeat devices.
The regulator rejected the automaker’s plan yesterday, and later issued a release calling it “incomplete and deficient in a number of areas.” For Volkswagen, CARB’s rejection is a major setback to its goal of settling the rest of its diesel emissions scandal fallout without another expensive buyback program. Read More >
General Motors executives are breathing a sigh of relief after the automaker reached a deal with a supplier that threatened to shut down GM’s entire U.S. assembly operation.
The automaker hammered out an agreement with the bankrupt Clark-Cutler-McDermott Company, a supplier of trim and acoustic insulation that GM had been propping up financially since March, the Wall Street Journal reports. Read More >
The recent introduction of a thoroughly re-engineered Toyota Tacoma is propelling sales of the segment’s top seller to all-time highs. After an elongated hiatus, there are new options from General Motors, and they’re selling more frequently than GM anticipated. Just last month, Honda began selling an all new, second-generation Ridgeline, a pickup at the opposite end of the spectrum from the rough and tumble Frontier. That Ridgeline, we told you yesterday, is selling like it’s 2008.
Moreover, demand for small/midsize pickup trucks is roughly 30-percent smaller than it was a decade ago.
At Nissan, there are plenty of factors, internal and external, working against the Frontier. The current-generation pickup is more than a decade old. Yet Nissan USA is on track to sell more Frontiers in 2016 than at any point since the current truck debuted on the Titan’s F-Alpha platform in January 2004 at Detroit’s North American International Auto Show. Read More >
The 500 Ford GT supercars that will reach customers in 2017 and 2018 sold for more than $400,000, but the privilege of working on them comes at a premium, too.
Any dealer looking to become an authorized Ford GT service center will need to spend at least $30,000 to upgrade their operations, according to a document obtained by All Ford Mustangs. Read More >
As U.S. customers await the unannounced Santa Cruz-like sort-of ute they’ve been promised for some time, Australia is getting traction from Hyundai on a genuine midsize pickup.
Following much lobbying from down under, Hyundai Australia’s chief operating officer Scott Grant told Car Advice that company brass in South Korea are slowly coming into agreement on the need for a bona fide pickup, but fans will have to be patient. Read More >
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