, Italy’s largest automaker and the company in control of , has announced that it is suspending sales to amidst a wave of global sanctions against the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear efforts. The automaker says this includes passenger cars, trucks and buses under its Iveco brand.
The automaker said it will honor a limited number of binding contracts but would stop exporting any cars or parts to Iran immediately. Fiat also said that its business in Iran was “totally immaterial in a quantitative and qualitative sense.” In other words, the move won’t have any real impact on the company’s bottom line, apparently.
Fiat joins , PSA and as automakers no longer doing business in Iran. No American automakers sell vehicles in Iran. Read the complete statement from Fiat , along with a response from United Against Nuclear Iran.
Every year at every auto show we see concept cars that envision replacing the rearview mirrors with digital cameras. They’re usually the exterior mirrors and not the central one above the windshield, but whatever the case, and however much sense they seem to make, government regulations prevent them from being put into production. But has found another use for the idea: its racing cars.
The latest R18 Le Mans prototype features, among other more considerable advancements, an AMOLED screen in the closed cockpit that’s hooked up to a video camera, housed in carbon fiber and protruding ever so slightly from the tail fin. The system allows the drivers – who are put under enormous strain over the course of an endurance race – to clearly see the traffic coming up behind (or that they’ve just passed), which is apparently of great benefit considering that these mid-engined, closed-cockpit LMPs have no room for a rear window through which a conventional mirror would peer.
While they were at it, Audi moved the gear indicator, some warning lights and the tire slip gauge to the high-mounted central display. The side mirrors are still there on the outside, so the system doesn’t eliminate that drag (for now), but it operates independent of the sight-limiting vibrations that can occur at the high speeds an LMP can reach, and of the weather conditions that can cause reduced visibility from spray in the wet.
Though it may take some time, if Audi wins on Sunday, it could end up selling this technology in its road cars on Monday.
In pretty much any racing series you go to, the cars tend to progress in an evolutionary, not revolutionary fashion. This year’s crop of Formula One cars, for example, may have those ungainly stepped noses, but they otherwise look pretty much the same as last year’s cars, which looked mostly the same as the cars the year before and the year before that, and so on and so forth. The same could be generally said of Indy, Le Mans prototypes…even stock cars. The DeltaWing project, however, is another story altogether.
Designed and developed by an alliance of some of the biggest names in racing and recently backed by , the DeltaWing represents a comprehensive rethink of what form a race car can and should take. The idea was originally fielded as a proposal for the new IndyCar chassis, but that series’ organizers went once again for something much more conventional. So the brain trust behind the project adapted it for endurance racing and are taking it to Le Mans this year.
But surely they didn’t put all that work into it just to race it once – outside the classifications as a demonstration only – did they? Not if Don Panoz has anything to say about it. One of the partners in the DeltaWing project and the father of the racing car manufacturer that bears his name, Panoz hopes to find a way to race the DeltaWing in the American Le Mans Series which he essentially founded.
A way to equalize its performance with either the LMP1 or LMP2 classes would need to be found with the IMSA and the FIA, but considering how it was adapted from an IndyCar proposal to a Le Mans racer, the platform seems pretty flexible. But Panoz doesn’t want to race just one. Sure, a solitary entry in the full ALMS calendar would be a great start, but Panoz reportedly envisions assembling a quantity of DeltaWings at his factory in Georgia that has over the years built cars for Indy, Champ Cars, Superleague Formula and of course Le Mans and the American Le Mans Series.
Just how many remains to be seen, but with powerhouses like Panoz, Nissan, Highcroft, Chip Ganassi and Dan Gurney on board, we would be very surprised if the DeltaWing ran just the once.
The 70s were a definitive decade for music and movies. Fashion and cars, not so much. The 80s corrected one of those oversights, an era of ethereal supercars like the 959, game-changing exotics like the Testarossa, and, best of all, everday cannons that offered mortals a generous portion of lairy thrills, such as Chris Harris’ 1986 e28 .
In 1986, a 3,100-pound, 286-horsepower luxury sedan straight from the factory that could also handle was as rare as a goose with lips. Sure, there was a more powerful AMG but it didn’t want to get into a lengthy conversation about handling, and there was the AMG Hammer, but that was a terrifically expensive tuner special. The M5 weighed the same as the 1986 and had 225-section rear tires just like the ‘Vette, but the M5 had 36 more horsepower. And it had four, leather-covered seats. And it could corner.
All of which has to do with why Drive’s Chris Harris spends eight minutes explaining, and showing, why he loves his personal M5 so much. to learn about the sedan that compels him to say “it’s the best money I’ve ever spent on a car.”
Picking up a used luxury car is a great way to save some coin. Letting the previous owner take the fall on depreciation is a smart move, but it’s worth remembering that high-end autos carry with them high-end maintenance and repair costs. Using Edmunds.com data, 24/7 Wall Street has compiled what it says are the 10 most expensive vehicles to own, and the list is populated by some not-so-surprising names. and soak up the lion’s share of the offenders, though other manufactures make a showing as well. Perhaps not surprisingly, the takes top honors as the most expensive of them all with a “true cost of ownership” of $245,469. That’s in addition to the gullwing supercar’s $210,875 MSRP.
The calculations not only factor in deprecation, but also things like fuel, maintenance and insurance costs.
All told, Mercedes-Benz models takes four of the 10 spots on the list. That’s twice as many as BMW, and the rest are split between makes like , and . If that last one seems a bit out of place, keep in mind Nissan makes the mighty (and mighty complex) . Check out our gallery below for a full list of the biggest offenders.
has already tipped its hand, revealing that it will introduce five new models over the next 15 months. Those five models include the , , , and . Of those, we’ve already spent some time with the Altima, and its improved performance, upscale interior and slightly larger dimensions once again had us wondering if there was still a need in Nissan’s portfolio for the pricier .
Apparently, there is. Despite the Max sharing the Altima’s basic platform and powertrains for some time now, Nissan says its most expensive sedan is viewed differently by consumers. Officials we spoke with at the Altima’s launch in Tennessee this week noted that the company sold about 59,000 examples last year, of which some 51,000 went to actual retail customers. For those keeping track of such things, Nissan says that actually makes Maxima America’s top retailing non-luxury V6 sedan, Number One in a catch-all segment that includes everything from the to the , , and (not to mention six-cylinder versions of cars like the , and ). The current Maxima has been on sale since 2008 and received a very minor facelift for 2012.
According to J.D. Power and its Power Information Network data, those purchases transacted at around $30,000, well above the Altima’s $24,000 sales sweet spot.
Add all this up, and you get a solid business case for the next-gen Maxima, on which work has just kicked off in earnest now that the company’s decks have been cleared of the Altima. Officials declined to nail down a timeframe for us, but given what we know about Nissan’s product cadence over the next 12 months or so, we suspect the eighth-generation Maxima will arrive for 2015. Given the current car’s quiet sales success, we don’t expect the next Maxima to radically change the formula, so exorcise any thoughts you have about a shift to rear- or all-wheel-drive architecture. The original Maxima arrived in 1980 as a RWD sedan but made the shift to FWD in 1984 and hasn’t looked back since.
According to the 2012 U.S. Automotive Industry Survey and Confidence Index by Booz & Co., alternative vehicle powertrains may take up as much as 10 percent of the total market by 2020, but only if the federal government continues to support development.
Without a helping hand from Uncle Sam, only 30 percent of the researchers, executives and consumers who participated in the survey believe alternative-fuel machines will be able to carve out that small slice of the market. Specifically, federal tax incentives for potential buyers could help push the technology forward in the future.
According to Wards Auto, further development faces a double hurdle. First, additional urban planning is required to demonstrate plug-in hybrids and EVs will be viable options for buyers, but at the same time, government agencies also need to see fuel cell and battery costs come down before being willing to pony up for chargers or incentives.
Even so, 70 percent of those surveyed said they were more confident about future hybrid demand than they were in 2011. Take a look at the full survey results .
The numbers haven’t been definitively crunched, but it is expected that the estimated 32,310 traffic fatalities in 2011 were the lowest on record in the 62 years that records have been kept. Yet the good news about the total number of fatalities masks regrettable news for traffic safety authorities: automobile fatalities are down, but motorcycle fatalities are up.
After a steady rise in motorcyclist death rates through the first decade of the new century, in 2009 and the beginning of 2010. Observers hoped the trend would continue, but that didn’t happen when deaths ticked up slightly over the course of 2010 and stayed steady through 2011.
Causes are varied, from high gas prices leading more people to ride motorcycles to inadequate training for both riders and automobile drivers on how to ply the roads safely. A report breaking down the numbers also “noted that 29 percent of fatally injured riders in 2010 had a blood-alcohol concentration at or above the legal limit, and 35 percent of motorcycle riders involved in fatal crashes were speeding.” It didn’t, however, indicate how much of those numbers overlapped – how many of those riders were over the limit when they died.
Nor does it look like current developments will allay the trend in the near-term. Only 19 states require riders to wear helmets, Michigan just repealed its compulsory helmet law and five other states are considering such measures. Again, the overall number of fatalities is welcome news considering how many more people and cars there are on the roads now compared to 1949, but the takeaway for motorcyclists is that there is now more reason to be extra careful when you ride.
Used to be if Renault wanted to celebrate a Formula One team with special edition, it would celebrate its own. But having sold the bulk of its own team to and Genii Capital in favor of supplying engines to a greater variety of independent teams, its latest commemorative hot hatches honor the (current) king of them all: Red Bull Racing.
Just a couple of months ago, Renaultsport rolled out the , and is now following up with a similar treatment applied to the smaller Twingo (with a special edition Megane to follow). Celebrating the team’s 2011 constructors’ title and the Renault-powered car that got them there, the Twingo RS Red Bull Racing features a black and yellow livery (though we don’t know what the color scheme has to do with the team that races in dark blue with red), the otherwise optional Cup suspension, blacked-out 17-inch alloys and the RS Monitor onboard telemetry system.
Order books are opening in June across nine markets in Europe and in Japan. But even if you’re not in one of them, you can still for the full press release and scope out the images in the high-resolution image gallery above.
The Middle East is an enormously vital market for McLaren, and not just because its oil barons have the cash to buy as many MP4-12C supercars as they and every member of their family could possibly want. While the team has only won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix once and has yet to do the same at the Bahrain Grand Prix – the only two in the region (discounting Turkey), the company is part owned by Saudi businessman Mansour Ojjeh, and another part by the royal family of Bahrain.
Little wonder, then, that the upstart McLaren Automotive is setting up no fewer than six dealerships in the Middle East, the first of which has just opened its doors. To mark the occasion, McLaren took its new MP4-12C to the dunes of Abu Dhabi and around the Yas Island Marina Circuit and brought a camera crew – armed with a RED video camera and Canon’s new 1DX – along for the ride. The resulting high-resolution images and footage are worth a glance, so check ‘em out in the gallery below, the that and the press release below them both.
The has expanded its investigation into Chevrolet Cruze engine fires to two model years.
In April, NHTSA began investigating two complaints concerning fires erupting in engine compartments. Now, Reuters is reporting that the government agency has added 2012 Cruze models to the list, upping the number of total vehicles from 177,000 to 370,000.
General Motors told Reuters it has cooperated with investigators and there have been no reported injuries or accidents related to the probe.
According to a pair of complaints filed on NHTSA’s website, two Cruze sedans were on the the open road when smoke began streaming out from under the hood. A few minutes later, the cars were ravaged by fire.
“In two minutes, the car was fully engulfed and flames were 15-feet high,” one complaint said. “GM needs to find out and correct this problem before someone get [sic] seriously hurt.”
The engorged dimensions of the have been a source of enthusiasts’ ire for years now. The 3er’s growth isn’t all that shy, especially of late: the sedan is 10.6 inches longer and 8.3 inches wider than it was in 1975, or for a more modern perspective, the brand new 3 Series is 6.5 inches longer than it was in 2002. It took 27 years to gain 4.1 inches, but only 10 years to stretch another 6.5. To address the size and heft, a report in Autocar says is planning a rear-wheel-drive sedan to be “the spiritual successor to the E30-generation 3 Series four-door.”
Talk of 1 Series models being spiritual successors to 3 Series models isn’t new – part of the clamor around the was that it channeled the light flickability of the first M3s. A 1 Series sedan would serve three purposes: get a light, small, RWD model back in the lineup, give the company a clear competitor to the upcoming Audi A3 sedan and , and help BMW get closer to its sales target of two million cars in 2020.
The sedan would sit on a derivative of the platform used in the current 3 Series, and be different from the front-wheel-drive platform underpinning the forthcoming 1 Series GT. Four- and six-cylinder engines and BMWs xDrive AWD system are in the planning mix, as is an electric version. Autocar says 2015 is a potential sale date for the sedan, which would put it one year after the next-generation coupe and convertible officially bow.
You can now add diamonds to the growing list of ostentatious and extravagant finishes being applied to cars these days. Longtime tuner Gemballa has announced a new automotive finish that literally uses diamonds to create its million-dollar sparkle.
The German-based company claims its new diamond finish is the first of its kind to ever use the actual gem rather than other reflective ingredients like metal pigments, glass fragments or crystals. The trick was grinding the diamonds down to a size small enough that they could be applied like paint, which Gemballa says also helps increase the refractive qualities of its shine.
There’s no mention of price or other specifics like how many precious stones are sacrificed per gallon of twinkle juice, but you can imagine as well as we can what kind of premium it will command. With any luck, .
There are several things you might think of when comes to mind, but performance isn’t necessarily one of them. Volvo is working on that image, however, and Polestar is a big part of that.
The tuning firm and racing garage has been partnering with Gothenburg on several fronts, not the least of them being the company’s officially sanctioned touring car team whose latest racer is pictured above. Those efforts have also been seeping into the Swedish automaker’s publicly available road cars, but nothing has approached the kind of levels that AMG applies to or the M division does with vehicles.
That’s been long rumored to be in for a change, however, and the latest reports give us a sneak peek at what the two firms have in store. According to Swedish car mag Teknikens Varld, Volvo and Polestar are working on a full-scale assault on the territory held by the and , among others.
The donor vehicle would be the S60 sedan, but the question remains just what would motivate such a beast. Sources suggest the Yamaha-built V8 from the could be employed. In stock form it produces 315 horsepower, but Noble uses it in the M600 with a pair of turbochargers that boost output up to 641 hp. A nice, round 400 hp should be well within reason, then, and Polestar’s considerable capabilities.
The S60 Polestar could, however, go with modifying an engine already available in the stock S60. For its C30 concept, Polestar bolted a bigger turbo onto the 2.5-liter five for 411 hp, and recently managed to squeeze 325 hp out of the stock turbo six with just an ECU reflash. Whatever the engine, we’re told to expect a Haldex all-wheel-drive system, Öhlins suspension and Brembo brakes stuffed into 19-inch BBS alloys wearing Pirelli PZero rubber. Consider our interests piqued.
We feel there’s no shame in admitting we would have more than a little hesitation about jumping into rush-hour traffic in China, but that’s exactly what one three-year-old boy did. A grandmother in China had a scare after she turned around to find her grandson missing. The toddler had managed to hop on his toy motorcycle and head for the horizon. Unfortunately, his path took him directly into the middle of a busy intersection during rush-hour traffic.
Despite buses and cars hurling past in every direction, the child seemed unphased, and the drivers on the road managed to keep away long enough for a police officer to spirit the child to safety. No one was harmed in the incident. Check out the for yourself.
Nearly everyone in America with a car loan is making the payment on time, the is reporting.
A scant .36 percent of people with a car loan are 60 or more days behind on making their payment, according to a TransUnion report looking at the January through March quarter of auto loan payments. That means more than 99-percent of customers borrowing cash for cars are on time.
The tiny percentage, which represents a drop of about 27 percent year-over-year is the lowest since TransUnion started tracking it in 1999.
The fall in loan delinquency, however, may not be great news for banks overall. TransUnion attributes some of the on-time payments to recession weary consumers placing a priority on their car payment while foregoing payments on credit cards and underwater homes.
There’s something about the boffins over at – particularly those working at its racing headquarters in the UK. We’re not quite sure what it is. Oh, right: they’re bonkers. Absolutely off their rockers, in the best way possible. How else would you explain the decision to take an entry-level crossover and swap out its powertrain for that of a supercar?
We’re talking, of course, about the Juke-R, the 480-horsepower demon cockroach from hell. After , Nissan has taken the Juke-R to a decidedly different setting – an ice track near the former Winter Olympics site in Lillehammer, Norway – and set it loose.
And if that wasn’t quite enough, the Japanese automaker didn’t put it in the hands of an veteran ice racer – say, the four-time Formula One World Champion who drives for its sister company in the Andros Trophy, they gave it over to its gamer-turned-racer Lucas Ordonez who, being from Spain, had never driven on ice before. Sounds sane to us. to see the results in the brief video clip.
and Tata has reportedly stepped away from a tieup in the Indian market that saw Fiats being built in India, using engines shared with Tata and Maruti models, and being sold through Tata dealers. Neither company commented, but according to analysts, the issue was that in addition to Tata was simply too busy with its other endeavors, especially , to attend to the Fiat deal. Sales of the joint-venture vehicles have declined by more than 20 percent year-on-year.
The Fiat-Tata union isn’t binding, and talk has now centered around Fiat snuggling up with . Suzuki has a huge position in Asia, Suzuki-Maruti being India’s largest carmaker and the Japanese firm having sold more than half its cars in the Asia region, excluding Japan, over the year that ended March 31. Fiat, on the other hand, only sold three percent of its wares in Asia in 2011.
There is debate about how beneficial a Fiat-Suzuki tieup would be. Suzuki’s position is facing pressures, but some observers say the Japanese firm has all the strengths and, at most, would benefit from “a timely supply of engines,” but possibly confuse customers by adding Fiat to its distribution channel. Others think that it would be a good union, with Fiat providing “a sound name” and a technology exchange.
Such a venture would rely on Suzuki extricating itself from its with , an adventure that has probably soured Suzuki on the phrase “technology exchange” for a bit. Among the problematic issues, Suzuki has accused VW of breach-of-contract by not sharing VW technology and that were Suzuki’s reason for the deal. Suzuki and Fiat presently collaborate on the Fiat Sedici/, and when Suzuki instead of VW, the German company accused the Japanese automaker of breach-of-contract. Both over the matter; last we heard, Suzuki , while of the partnership. A VW victory would nix the kind of Suzuki deal with Fiat being speculated now.
Vanity plates can be cool, fun to decrypt, annoying or expensive, depending on your perspective. They can be a creative way to show your willingness to pay higher taxes, but take care in making your choice.
One Florida resident’s choice of “” on her vanity plate has earned her $8,000 in parking tickets. Apparently, “NO TAG” is what gets written on a citation when an illegally parked car has no plate.
Soon after installing her plate, Carol Schroeder received notice of 135 overdue parking tickets worth almost $8,000. The tickets were written for several different makes and models, and some written before her car was even manufactured.
Ha ha, funny little mistake. Right? Not to the city of Jacksonville, which says the owner of the car owes the money and the city’s collection agency agrees. Surely someone will come their senses and make the situation right.
A few years ago, a man in Huntsville, Ala. that he owed $19,000 in overdue parking fees for a city he’d only been to once. His vanity tag, “XXXXXXX” is the exact thing Birmingham, Ala. cops write on citations for cars without plates. One Birmingham official he contacted said not to worry about it because they were broke and couldn’t afford to arrest him anyway. That’s comforting. We guess.
If you’ve ever sunk a Saturday afternoon watching a Wheeler Dealers marathon on BBC America, we don’t need to tell you the show is plenty addictive. A tag team salesman and mechanic snag slightly run-down cars and SUVs, fix a few simple problems and flip them for a profit in the UK.
Now it looks as if the Discovery Channel is set to unleash an Americanized version of the show. Fast N’ Loud follows a shop as they seek out classic cars and trucks, customize them and work to sell them at a profit. It looks a bit like American Pickers met Pimp My Ride and Overhaulin in a bar bathroom and this is the fruit of their rendezvous.
We will, of course, tune in if for no other reason than the guys look to have gotten their hands on an early ’50s Coupe. That’s one of our favorites. The show premiers on Wednesday, June 6 at 10 p.m. Eastern on the Discovery Channel. for yourself.
