Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

I recently inherited a Nissan Cube from my brother. When I tell people this, they have two distinct reactions. For anyone who isn’t into cars, it’s: “Your brother died?” Car people, however, usually respond with: “You have a Nissan Cube?” This is the same reaction that non-car people tend to have when I explain my brother did not die, but rather m...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

I’d be a day late and a dollar short if I cared about being professional automotive journalist. To wit, we recently discussed how the digitally rendered C7 Stingray droptop Vette’s 5-spoke wheels look like a last-minute “virtual” hackjob for a looming deadline. The nice folks at Corvetteblogger show otherwise during their...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

The Chrysler 300 is already equipped with a diesel for world markets, and there’s a possibility we may see an oil-burning 300 on our shores as well.

Speaking to Ward’s Auto, Chrysler brand CEO Saad Chebab noted that it all came down to cost.

“I think that we are in talks about the diesels because the Thema has a diesel in Europe a...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

Remember GM’s boast about how their new trucks could tow a segment best 11,5000 pounds? Turns out there’s a big ol’ asterisk that wasn’t expanded upon.

PickupTrucks.com reports that the 11,500 pound tow rating will only happen when a special package is ordered.

The maximum towing capacity for the Silverado and Sierra is...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

When an ordinary car— say, a ’94 Camry— shows up in a high-turnover self-service junkyard, most of its parts will still be present when it goes to the scrapper. However, when a seldom-seen-in-junkyards vehicle with an avid following— say, a ’71 Toyota Land Cruiser— appears on the yard, it gets eaten like a roadkill raccoon in vulture...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

Your humble author’s affection for the Pentastar-powered Chrysler minivans is relatively well-known within these electronic pages. In the interest of examining the so-called “alternatives”, however, I’ve been attempting to rent non-Chrysler minivans during my travels. A 36-hour unscheduled trip to San Francisco gave me a...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

No works council without representation. Those are the words of UAW President Bob King, in an interview with Autoline Detroit, when asked about a possible works council at VW’s Chattanooga assembly plant.

The Detroit Free Press quotes King as stating

“In the U.S., you can’t do a works council without the workers being in a...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

For anyone like myself – that is, a car fan who grew up in the 1990s and watched Japan’s sports cars disappear from the American market in one sudden swoop, news that Japan’s once mighty auto industry is being “hollowed out” might come as a shock. The cars that defined my youth – the RX-7s, Supras even the VTEC...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

It seems strange, but sufficient Chrysler Cordobas still exist to provide a sporadic flow of fresh examples to self-serve wrecking yards. In this series, we’ve seen this ’78, another ’78, this ’79, and now today’s personally luxurious blue ’80.
The downsized second-gen 1980-83 Cordobas, which were based on the...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

The multi-billion dollar endeavor of developing a new car has effectively ended the one-off specialty car that many enthusiasts still clamor for and wronglyassert is feasible in this era. Supermodel-thin margins, a saturation of brands and vehicles and an ultra-competitive global marketplace have killed the previous formula for developing a...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

The MPV segment, so popular in Europe, was basically invented by the French. The Renault Espace, the grandfather of the modern minivan, was originally supposed to be a Peugeot, until PSA deemed it too expensive and sold it to Renault. Nearly two decades later, Renault disrupted the segment again with their compact Scenic minivan, which spawned...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

Ed writes:

Hello Sajeev,

Recently my GF and I became the owners of a 1999 Buick Regal with about 225k miles on it. We weren’t in the market for a Buick, but when a limb dropped on its roof from a dead tree was combined with a higher deductible and a desire to keep the claim off our homeowners policy, the natural thing to do was buy the dented...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

Take a look at this piece of…

272,522 miles. No fooling. This 1996 Volkswagen Passat 5-speed sedan has traveled a distance nearly equal to 11 times the circumference of planet Earth.

It also visited the dealership well over 50 times during that time period as well. Which is just barely good enough for…

38th place.

Now granted that is...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

GM announced that prices of their new 1500-series trucks would remain flat, while the new 5.3L V8 is estimated to beat Ford’s F-150 Ecoboost in fuel economy and towing capacity.

Silverado and Sierra trucks with the 5.3L engine will apparently return 16/23 mpg city/highway in 2WD and 16/22 in 4WD configuration. The new trucks can also out-tow...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

Just ahead of their Q1 2013 earnings called, Tesla announced that they were profitable in the first quarter of the year, with deliveries exceeding their own targets. In addition, Tesla has also decided to discontinue the base trim of the Model S due to a lack of demand.

Tesla reported 4,750 deliveries of the Model S, up from their own estimate of...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

Want a BMW manual diesel wagon for under $10k? You can buy one right now, on Ebay (via Bring A Trailer), and if you live in Canada, you can legally register it.

One gentleman in Germany is offering a 1997 BMW 325tds wagon with a 5-speed manual for sale. The seller is offering to ship the car to Halifax, Nova Scotia, a major eastern port and a...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

You never really know what ideas will be successful in the auto industry. In the early 1990s, for example, a guy at Subaru actually said the following: “I know! Let’s raise the Legacy an inch, change its name, and paint the bottom part gold!” When you really think about it, this sounds no stupider than “Why isn’t there a version of the GMC Envoy fo...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

Buick’s been on a roll this year, their sales are up and their owner demographics are younger than they have been in recent memory. The cynic in my says that’s because half their clientele died of old age, but it has more to do with their product portfolio. Say what? Yep, it’s true, the brand I wrote off for dead last decade is...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

“YOUR CAR!!!! I LOVE YOUR CAR!!!!” She was a Slavic-faced woman in her mid-twenties, not bad for New York and positively model-grade by Midwestern standards, and she was literally hopping up and down on the streetcorner.

“It’s not a car,” I said, wedged into the Morgan’s extremely tight drivers’...

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Sunday, 19 May 2013 22:14

The best science fiction tells human stories set against a backdrop of strange worlds or futuristic cities. Because pacing and plot are more important than lengthy, accurate descriptions of the technology at work in those worlds, most sci-fi writers don’t spend a lot of time on the various machines their protagonists use. We might know that our h...

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