You may have spotted a crop of recent headlines and briefly thought that Mitsubishi has designs on returning to the sports car market.
Sorry to burst that particular bubble.
However, if, like me, you spent at least a portion of the 1990s daydreaming about the 3000GT, a report from Motor1 suggests that you might have reason to dream. Well, only if the automaker listens to outsiders who have talent and enthusiasm but not an employee ID.
We’ve talked an awful lot about fuel-sipping hybrids and virtuous electric vehicles in recent days; so much so, one could forget that a great number of buyers want nothing more than to take home the biggest, most spacious SUV on the road today. Ford sells plenty of Expeditions and Lincoln Navigators, and General Motors decided the time was right for an even larger Chevrolet Suburban, GMC Yukon, and Cadillac Escalade.
Big still sells, so it’s no wonder that Fiat Chrysler wants a piece of the action. It’s frankly bizarre that the automaker went the past decade without a full-size SUV.
Well, that streak will soon end, as there’s now rolling proof of the Jeep Wagoneer’s looming return. Read More >
Forget all about that Porsche dude. The current CEO of Volkswagen Group’s sporting car brand will not become the new head of the automaker’s namesake brand. Instead, a supervisory board meeting Monday saw Herbert Diess punted, replaced by the brand’s former chief operating officer.
Come July 1st, Ralf Brandstätter will take the helm, tasked with guiding the brand through troubled water and into an electrified future. Read More >
Months ago, I was supposed to board a plane to Old Blighty to drive the new Land Rover Defender.
Given the vehicle’s heritage and importance to the brand, I was excited to see if it was a worthy successor to the famous series of SUVs that came before. I was also excited to go to England for the first time. My Austin Powers impression would be so much cooler if performed in the Old Empire (narrator voice: It would not).
Before I could even finish the paperwork for an international excursion, my flight — and everyone else’s — was canceled. As you know, the pandemic killed off new-car launches for the foreseeable future, although JLR merely “postponed” this one.
Quick, what was the final new Pontiac model introduced before the marque’s demise in 2010? The G3, a Pontiac-badged Chevy Aveo (itself a rebadged Daewoo Kalos, which makes The Final Pontiac first cousin to the Ravon Nexia R3). We remember a Pontiac model from slightly earlier in the chaos of mid-to-late-2000s GM much better: the Solstice, a mean-looking sports car that showed great promise but went down with the Pontiac ship in 2010.
I saw my first discarded Solstice last year in Colorado Springs, and now I’ve found this much cleaner one in Denver. Read More >
No, not the minivan market. We’ve covered that at length. We’re talking van vans — the slow-moving ones that used to terrorize your author as a child. (Turns out that media-driven social panic was mostly nothing, but I digress…)
Word comes to us that, as automakers recede from the commercial van segment, Nissan might be prepared to do the same. Read More >
A report last week in a German publication stated that Volkswagen Group was looking for someone new to take charge of its namesake brand. The new blood would come in the form of Porsche CEO Oliver Blume, sources said.
We’re now hearing there’s an “extraordinary” supervisory board meeting being held at VW today, and that the result could be current brand chief Herbert Diess being bounced from his role. Read More >
In the compact crossover segment, at least, the sky’s the limit when it comes to choice. And making inroads into this enormously popular crowd is plug-in hybrid power — a feature added to two major players this year: the Ford Escape and Toyota RAV4.
As efficiency numbers trickle out, Ford is claiming victory over its rival, though which of the two models ultimately boasts the most appeal will be borne out in future sales figures. Read More >
Seating, fuel economy, and traction: these are the three areas in which the 2021 Chrysler Pacifica and all-new Toyota Sienna will do battle, though neither of these vehicles is a direct match for the other.
In the shrinking minivan segment, the urge to offer everything a buyer might want has led us to this point. Orders opened for the all-wheel drive Pacifica on Friday — a product that Chrysler hopes will give would-be crossover buyers food for thought. In the Toyota corner, standard hybrid power and available AWD greets buyers for 2021. Similar beasts, but not at all identical.
Will seating decide the victor? Read More >
The redesigned Mazda 3 arrived for 2019 with upgrades in both looks and cabin refinement, elevating the sporty compact sedan and hatch to a level of class it never occupied before. Also new was optional all-wheel drive to temp those who like a little tail action in sandy corners (or just getting through the winter).
Unpredictably, the new 3 landed with a resounding thud.
Launched with too high an entry price in the U.S., the attractive model’s sales plunge was swift and jarring, forcing Mazda brass to re-think the whole effort. They’re still thinking, and it seems the latest move will bring moar power to the little KODOmobile. Read More >
When the United States began passing legislation allowing automakers to begin testing self-driving vehicles on public roads, it was framed almost entirely as a safety issue. Proponents claimed that the only way to eliminate roadway fatalities was to take the human brain out of the equation and let cars drive themselves. Having enacted a similar no-thinking policy themselves, legislators agreed — pleased to have ensured a death-free future on little more than empty corporate promises.
At the time, we were still complaining about the unreliable nature of advanced driving aids, and how such systems seem custom-made to dull your reflexes behind the wheel. There was a sense that, if everything went perfectly, maybe autonomous vehicles (AVs) could reduce accidents by previously unheard of levels. That feeling didn’t last particularly long here at TTAC and, by 2018, we started noticing we weren’t alone.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) grew increasingly critical of AVs starting a couple of years ago. On Thursday, it released a report claiming the idea of a no-crash future spurred by automation is a fantasy. Instead, the IIHS says cutting-edge technology will likely struggle to stop just a third of all accidents. Read More >
An abundance of fragrant pollen in your author’s neighborhood has led to increasing sinus distress over the past few days, but he wouldn’t trade places with the upcoming BMW M4 for a second. No, sir. Not with those flared nostrils.
Leaked to the internet via the g20.bimmerpost forum, the muscled-up sibling to the 2021 BMW 4 Series Coupe unveiled this week takes that car’s already controversial front-end treatment to new extremes, confirming what we already expected. Read More >
Bentley Motors plans to quash roughly a quarter of its workforce. Not long ago, following a profitable 2019, CEO Adrian Hallmark said that the brand was on track to have a stellar 2020.
Alas, it was not to be.
The coronavirus lockdowns left Bentley losing £88 million ($111 million USD) for each month of lost production and sales, throwing the whole year out of whack. Much like the mucus man writing the sentence you’re reading now, it would seem high-end British nameplates (despite Bentley ownership by Volkswagen Group) aren’t in the best health. Aston Martin recently announced the cutting of 500 positions, while McLaren had to axe 1,200 jobs in May. Read More >
It’s totally not a filled-with-soap myth that a clean car runs better, right? Except for off-road rigs. They run best when caked with a thick layer of sticky mud and dirt.
But even the gnarliest 4×4 can do with a good spritz now and then. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few decades, pressure washers amplify the force of water delivered through a standard garden hose. An electric motor powers a pump which accelerates the water being delivered from said garden hose and pushes it into a long wand. Pulling the wand’s trigger introduces some air and creates a path through which the – now pressurized – water can flow.
It’s never a bad idea to test your pressure washer on an inconspicuous area of the surface you plan to clean before attacking the thing with vigor. This will ensure it doesn’t harm the surface you’re washing. A good pressure washer can strip away flaking paint from a rusting car, for example. And, as always, RTFM before turning the thing on.
The days of the stately, sedate, and silent luxury provided by the Lexus LS are over.
As it’s done with virtually every vehicle in its lineup, Lexus has made an F Sport trim available. Whether this is done to combat the stereotype of Lexus as staid or to give well-heeled buyers a chance to have their cake and eat it too, or both, I don’t know. I do know that whatever spring the F Sport puts in the LS’s step, it’s still more of a luxury cruiser than an all-out flagship sports sedan. And that’s not a bad thing.
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