Dodge Dart, Chrysler Q1 sales, FR-S and BRZ versus MX-5, 2013 Nissan Altima’s Hyundai Sonata influence
Episode #279 of the is here, and this week, Chris, Dan, and Zach chat about the Dodge Dart, Chrysler’s first-quarter 2012 sales, a Scion FR-S and Subaru BRZ smackdown at Motegi with a Mazda MX-5, and the influence of the Hyundai Sonata on the 2013 Nissan Altima. Your questions and comments power the end of the ‘cast, and for those of you who hung with us live on our , thanks for taking the time. We’ve embedded our Q&A module for you to scroll through and follow along, too. Thanks for listening!
Autoblog Podcast #280:
in Q1, especially in
In the Autoblog Garage
Hosts: , ,
Runtime: 01:41:32
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If you’ve gotten used to being centered around two model lines – and – based on the same platform, get ready to broaden your horizons as the Modenese automaker does the same. Maserati has a vast array of new products in the pipeline, including a pair of new sedans and a new SUV set to be built in Detroit, plus production of the 4C sportscar for sister-company Alfa Romeo. And now reports are emerging that its long-rumored plans to take on the with a new sportscar are coming to fruition.
According to the reports from Italy fueled by comments attributed to Maserati CEO Harald J. Wester, the model could revive the GranSport – a name last used on the ultimate iteration of the 4200 GT coupe that preceded the current GranTurismo. Only this time, it would be a mid-engined V8 supercar similar in approach to the .
If that sounds suspiciously close to the , the rumors suggest that it would undercut its big brother’s price at under $200k. After all, the sister brands didn’t seem to have any trouble bringing the Maserati GranCabrio and into the same arena, or to turning the Enzo into the MC12 – pictured above – the last mid-engined supercar the Trident marque produced. Which gives us hope that this particular product of the rumormill could amount to something. And when we’re talking about mid-engined supercars from Italy, that could be a very good thing indeed.
There are plenty of reasons to steer clear of a cruise. We typically shy away from the idea of cramming ourselves onto a vessel filled to capacity with overweight American tourists, all waiting to descend on some unsuspecting port of call like a scourge of consumerist locusts. Now, we have another reason to pass on the big boats.
WFTV discovered a parking lot owner in Cocoa, Florida was taking customer vehicles out for little joy rides. The news crew promptly set up a little sting by renting a red ChevroletCorvette Convertible and installing a GPS tracker. The car wasn’t on the lot for six hours before Jay Nieves, the owner of Premier Parking Spot hopped in.
The news crew filmed Nieves thrashing the car on a dirt road, parking it at his home overnight, doing sizeable burnouts on the street, transporting lumber and leaving the car with the top down and driver’s door wide open for extended periods of time. All told, Nieves clocked 60 miles on what he thought was a customer’s car before the news crew confronted him about the situation. Nieves promptly denied everything. for the full newscast.
sales are up 37 percent through April, and has already sold nearly 50,000 units in 2012, placing the flagship model ahead of all other Pentastar vehicles, save for the .
That demand will be keeping the Jefferson North assembly plant in Detroit open through the July 4 holiday period, according to The Detroit News. Big Three plants have traditionally shut down for two weeks in July to facilitate model-year changeover, though that process will be accomplished with the lines running this year, according to the report.
Jefferson North is already running overtime including some Saturdays to keep up with demand for both the Grand Cherokee and the . Sales of the model are up seven percent this year.
Lists. Readers love ‘em, so everyone’s got one. (Heck, our show is even called .) And this is the Playboy list, packed with two-seat sports cars, muscle cars, obvious choices and even the original Beetle.
Before we get to the full 25, however, hear out our view. While you can always register your personal displeasure when, say, the MG TC (#14) or (#19) gets included, but not a single Alfa Romeo or classic Mopar muscle machine makes the cut, you should judge a list such as this based more on how it reflects the personality of the publication. Which is why “25 Greatest Rides” feels so, well, generic.
While we’re not suggesting that every one of the Playboy cars should be sporting Dagmars or have fully reclining seats like Nash models of the early ’50s, this list just seems a little light on the sex. Not that the GTO (#1) and E-Type (#4) aren’t voluptuous enough to act as stand-ins for the Playmate of the Month, but cars like the 2002 (#24) and GTO (#20), though legitimate performance cars, aren’t likely to inspire any backseat antics anytime soon.
Scroll down to read the full press release and then tell us in the comments which cars you think should get excised from the list, and what you’d replace them with.
is looking toward the future. A new Japanese ad for the company has made its way to YouTube featuring some of the most important models in the automaker’s past. From lowly bicycles and small-displacement motorcycles to the ever-sexy 1965 RA272 F1 car and perfectly proportioned S800, the ghosts of yesterday are all lined up behind the new Acura NSX Concept. The spot spends plenty of time talking about the power of dreams and determination before finally ending on the rally cry of “Let’s surpass yesterday’s Honda!” The simple spot is titled “We won’t be beaten.”
At least that’s according to the subtitles. The announcer could be reading us his grocery list for all we know. If the translation is accurate, though, it sounds like Honda is tacitly acknowledging that it needs to pull itself up by its bootstraps and get back into fighting shape. Let’s hope they figure it out. to watch the video for yourself.
We keep track of every idea that for . Of the hundreds we get after each episode airs, one is without question at the top of everyone’s list: drive 200 miles per hour.
Despite the first production car eclipsing 200 mph back in the mid-’80s, we thankfully aren’t yet jaded by the feat. Unlike back then, however, more than a handful of today’s cars can beat two bills if given enough runway.
That’s exactly where Jessi and Patrick found themselves on the day we asked them to do the deed: the runways of the near Mojave, CA. Eagle-eyed Autoblog readers will remember that this is one of the locations used by to conduct their . We should know; we’ve gone after the elusive two hundred twice now, but at this very location (check out the gallery from that experience below).
We enrolled Jessi and Patrick for a day’s worth of double-hundy attempts in vehicles like the and new . Each took their own shot at 200-mph glory, and one even discovered that reaching 200 mph is the easy part.
These days it seems like the dream of a new Esprit is getting nothing but further away, while the troubled company responsible for it applies the classic black and gold livery to everything it produces – and many things produced by others. But there was a time when the original Esprit was a mechanical wonder to behold, and the JPS livery was championed by arguably the greatest driver who ever lived.
That driver, of course, was Ayrton Senna. And to mark the 18th anniversary of his death at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, a German outfit called has created this special edition in his honor. Instead of starting with the original four-cylinder Esprit, though, Cam Shaft went with the later turbo V8 and laid over its black paint a series of gold decals evocative of the iconic livery which Senna sported on his 1985 Lotus 97T, including a reproduction of his signature on the panel in front of the door.
The German firm didn’t stop there, however. They gave the Esprit new turbos, an intercooler and cats to drive output up from 354 horsepower (stock) to 492 hp, drop the 4.9-second 0-62 time down to 4.3 seconds and increase the top speed from 282 km/h to 305. They also fitted it with a new six-speed gearbox to replace the old five-gear unit, upgraded the brakes with AP Racing four-pot calipers on 330mm cross-drilled discs and fitted it with a chassis control switch similar to a manettino.
A fitting tribute to the legendary pilot? We’d say so, and you can see for yourself in the high-res image gallery above and the press release .
may seek to reposition in the wake of slower sales, according to Automotive News. It’s been 10 years since the Japanese automaker unveiled its youth-oriented brand, and Toyota recognizes that the original target demographic has officially grown up. After concluding a nine-month review of the Scion brand, the parent company has decided to move away from quirkiness and toward more mainstream creations.
Models like the and serve more traditional buyers than the nameplate’s best-selling , though Jack Hollis, Scion vice president, says the future of the boxy five-door remains uncertain. While speaking with Autmotive News, Hollis said the company may not replace the model with a “one-for-one” interpretation of the box as buyers are less and less interested in funky exterior designs.
Scion suffered dearly during the sales downturn of 2008 and 2009. By 2011, the company’s numbers had fallen to within 25 percent of its 2006 volume. With consumer credit tightening by the day, recent college graduates have reportedly found it difficult to finance a brand-new Scion. Hollis says sales are on the mend, and the company is cautiously optimistic. In the meantime, expect to see Scion show off more mainstream marketing aimed at a wider consumer audience.
Sponsoring most events is pretty straightforward for any company: fork over the right sum of cash and you’re the new official automaker/timekeeper/jelly donut of whatever the event is. But for , its status as Official Automotive Partner of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is a bit more complicated.
Even to fork over a massive fleet with 4,000 vehicles to the organizing committee wasn’t enough for the German automaker to secure its status. BMW also had to meet the committee’s stringent emissions requirements: while the average emissions of vehicles in the UK comes in at 138 grams of CO2 per kilometer, the automaker supplying these Olympic games had to come in below 120 g/km – which BMW did at 116 g/km.
To get there, a portion of the cars BMW is supplying are electric vehicles: 160 units of the and 40 of the Mini E, with another 40 of the . The rest of the fleet is comprised of the (1,550 vehicles), (700), (17), (10) and (200 vehicles), plus another 25 R1200 RT motorcycles and 400 BMW Streetcruiser bicycles.
Wondering what they’ll be doing with all those cars? They’ll be used for everything from shuttling around the athletes, officials, medics and journalists to hauling boats out of the water. for the full details.
is trying to make a name for itself on the safety and technology front, recently and outfitting new models with a suite of safety equipment that arguably puts it among the leaders in the industry. We got a chance to sample some of this last month, but we were also allowed to “drive” a semi-autonomous test mule equipped with what Cadillac is calling “Super Cruise.”
Nominally an improvement on adaptive cruise control, Super Cruise is actually a more sophisticated system that uses a camera communicating with the car’s GPS to “see” the road ahead. It goes one step further than currently available systems, however, automatically centering the vehicle in the lane using its electric power steering system. Unlike other active lane-departure systems that use a car’s brakes to help prevent it from veering off the road, the system General Motors is developing allows for precisely setting the vehicle’s position within the lane. The test mule we sampled had steering-wheel-mounted buttons that would allow you to “nudge” the car from side to side by a foot at a time without upsetting its course. Super Cruise also communicates with the vehicle’s other active safety systems to help prevent and mitigate crashes.
Super Cruise is designed only for use on the highway, to “ease the driver’s workload.”
Super Cruise is designed only for use on the highway, to “ease the driver’s workload,” with drivers still required to steer in city traffic and for more complicated maneuvers like passing. GM officials acknowledged the difficulty in deploying a system like this, a technology that if used improperly may encourage inattentive driving. Supposedly the system will only be functional under the specific circumstances for which it is designed, much like today’s in-car entertainment systems will not play video on the front screen unless a vehicle is in Park. Currently the system is somewhat limited by external factors, like weather and the need for distinct lane markings. If visibility is low or the road doesn’t have at least one clear lane demarcation, Super Cruise won’t function. However, GM says it will improve the vision abilities of the system as it readies the technology for the marketplace.
GM says that Super Cruise could be introduced into production vehicles in just a few years, “by mid-decade.” While on the one hand, its ability to help improve the safety of our roads is laudable, we can’t help but express our frustration at the march of technology headed inevitably towards removing the physical act of driving from the motoring equation.
to watch some video of us aboard the Super Cruise-equipped test mule and read the full press release.
Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. A stolen from celebrity chef Guy Fieri has been found a year after it first went missing. In case you need refreshing, the Lambo was pilfered by a thief who literally in order to get access to the Italian Stallion.
It seems the perpetrator had a thing for stealthy operations – the vehicle turned up during an investigation that began after a motorcyclist wearing all black fired a gun into a parked car. The gunman was a 17-year-old boy, and Fieri’s car was located in a storage container in Point Richmond, California, along with the boy’s motorcycle and apparent evidence linking him to the shooting.
Fieri, for his part, is happy to have his Lamborghini back:
“I would like to thank the Marin County Sheriff’s Office and the Mill Valley Police Department for their hard work and effort in the recovery of my car. I’m glad we can put this behind us, and feel better knowing that justice is being served.”
If absence truly does make the heart grow fonder, we’d be happy to have our back in one piece, too, especially considering it’s been over a year since its disappearance.
executive Dan Knott, considered an all-around great guy, took medical retirement on April 13 due to cancer, and he sadly passed away on April 29. His 24-year tenure with The Pentastar began in the role of senior engineer. By the time he took the job as head of procurement in 2009, he had helped create marquee SRT models including the , and .
Knott’s efforts to improve Chrysler’s relationships with suppliers has even . After just three years on the job, the head of the Original Equipment Supplier’s Association “more than any individual that I know of in the history of OEM/supplier relations” when it came turning around Chrysler’s dealings with suppliers.
On top of that , an Automotive News All-Star, an inductee into the Viper Club Hall of Fame, chairman of the Michigan Minority Supplier Development Council, board member on a non-profit for people with disabilities, a key player in Chrysler’s sustainability drive, and he enforced reviews of the business that the Chrysler’s Tier 1 suppliers did with women- and minority-owned businesses. He will be missed.
We know rural Midwestern folks sometimes do things a little differently than their urban cousins. If you want to get a tan in the reedy areas of The Corn Belt you don’t need a booth, you just lie down in your own yard. One thing you don’t do when bronzing, however – even in the Midwest – is lie down in the street. That is what two unlucky girls did in Economy, Pennsylvania and when they fell asleep during their sunlight session they got run over by a car.
From what we can gather, after the girls had lain down on Donald Avenue they fell asleep, and did so not far from an intersection. When a car turned onto Donald Ave from the crossroad, it ran over the girls. Turns out that car contained three cousins of one of the injured girls, with one of them, a 19-year-old male, driving.
The good news is that the girls were airlifted to the hospital and are in stable condition. The bad news is what their parents have in store for them when they’re recovered and home. on WTAE Pittsburgh for the full report.
“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on television.” So went the script for countless television commercials of yore, featuring the stars of medical dramas capitalizing on their on-air personae to shill for pills, HMOs and what-have-you. But one television doctor didn’t hesitate to jump into action when duty called – medical training be damned.
That actor is one Patrick Dempsey, who most might recognize for his role as Dr. McDreamy on the ABC medical drama Grey’s Anatomy. He’s also a consummate race car driver – arguably today’s Steve McQueen or Paul Newman – competing in such events as the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Rolex 24 at Daytona and the Baja 1000 rally raid. These seemingly disparate aspects of Dempsey’s life, however, converged when a kid flipped his in front of the actor’s house in Malibu last week.
Having rolled the three times, 17-year-old Weston Massett was trapped inside the wreckage when McDreamy came to the rescue, crowbar in hand, to get the kid out of the car, nursing him until the airlift arrived and following him to the hospital. Massett is expected to make a full recovery from the concussion and stretched optic nerve that were his only injuries to speak of. for the television report.
Edmunds has taken the time to sort through the March 2012 sales data to find which were the quickest selling models of the month. According to the site’s research, the took the top nod by sitting on dealer lots just eight days before whirring off to a new home. Manufacturers routinely use “days to turn” to evaluate consumer demand, though pesky variables like production capacity can easily tweak the number north or south. That’s likely why the took just 11 days to turn and its smaller sibling, the , took just 13. is having a hard time keeping production in pace with consumer demand.
Other stars of last month’s show include the . With an average of 14 days on dealer lots, the model finds itself tied with hardware like the and for being quick to turn. You can check out the full list of quickest-sellers by heading over to .
The Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t released its evaluation data for the just yet, but says the compact should be capable of returning some impressive fuel economy figures, particularly with an available Aero package. When equipped with the turbocharged 1.4-liter four-cylinder engine and a manual transmission, the standard Dart is good for an estimated 27 mpg city and 39 mpg highway, thanks in part to active aero shutters nestled in the grille of every model. Should buyers require a few extra miles per gallon, an optional Aero package will see the highway figure jump to 41 mpg. So far, there’s no word on city or combined fuel economy for the package, but there’s time before the trim becomes available, as it won’t be in dealerships until the third quarter of this year.
Chrysler isn’t mentioning how much the Aero package will add to the bottom line or what other tweaks consumers will get for their coin. We do know that with 160 horsepower and 184 pound-feet of torque, the Dart Aero should be considerably more engaging to drive than the . While that model is good for 42 mpg highway when equipped with a six-speed manual, it does the deed with 22 fewer horsepower and 36 fewer pound-feet of torque. for the complete Dart press release.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has taken dead aim at stamping out distracted driving and with good reason. Last year, inattentive drivers caused around 950,000 accidents. But according to a new study by the Society of Automotive Engineers, there’s another issue causing even more accidents across the country: turn signal neglect. According to their research, drivers neglect their turn signals, either by failing to turn when their signal is activated or not activating the signal at all, an astonishing 750 billion times a year. What’s more, neglecting the signals may be responsible for as many as two million accidents per year.
SAE says the solution lies in the implementation of so-called “Smart Turn Signals,” which use sensors to shut off turn signals before they become a safety hazard. What’s more, engineers can integrate a “Turn Signal Assist” feature, which uses a vehicle information display to alert the driver if they fail to use turn signals on a regular basis or don’t shut them off in a timely manner. The report says that since the system uses sensors already integrated into the stability control module, there would be no cost added to the vehicle’s bottom line.
This is our skeptical face. We’re major proponents of proper and consistent turn signal use, but we’re bigger fans of creating smarter drivers through education than we are of building smarter cars. for the full press release.
has managed an impressive turnaround since the dark days of 2009. After carpet-bombing the market with a spate of new or refreshed models, the automaker saw its retail sales jump a whopping 43 percent in 2011, helping it report in the process. Chrysler even managed to pay out profit-sharing checks for the first time . According to Richard Cox, director of the Dodge brand, that trend hasn’t slacked up in 2012. Year-to-date in the neighborhood of 40 percent.
But those gains were made largely by fluffing the pillows on old platforms. New engines, new interiors and reworked sheetmetal aside, we’ve yet to see what “the new Chrysler” can pull off with a completely fresh model. At least, that was the case.
Behold the : the first serious small-car effort from the automaker since the Neon rolled off into the sunset in 2005. As the first completely new machine from Chrysler since the automaker’s bankruptcy and subsequent takeover by , there’s plenty riding on the new compact.
While technically based on the Alfa Romeo Giulietta, American engineers have drawn and quartered the chassis while also reworking the suspension to suit domestic tastes. With eye-catching styling, an à la carte option system and a range of fuel-efficient and powerful engines, the 2013 Dart isn’t just a step forward for , it might just be a step forward for the compact class.
General Motors and Isuzu were partners for decades before parting ways in 2006. Even now, you can find the final hangover of an alliance that gave us vehicles like the and in the and smallish pickups.
The two companies may start negotiations soon for General Motors to once again take a stake in Isuzu Motors Ltd. with commercial vehicle sales in Asia and Central and South America as the goal, reports the Japanese Nikkei business daily.
GM would go in for ten percent of Isuzu, and this deal would likely spell the end for , as well as smother any capital partnership talks with . Isuzu developed the trucks, and if lashed-up with GM again, a team effort to develop, produce and distribute pickup trucks is being considered. At ten percent, General Motors would pass Mitsubishi Corporation’s 9.2-percent stake in Isuzu to become its largest single shareholder.
North American small pickup fans probably shouldn’t get excited about this, as it appears aimed mostly at markets more suited to smaller trucks. With GM’s new full-size pickups on the horizon, the General likely wants you to forget that there are any other choices for the time being.
