#Coupe
Korea Week: Tiburon, Take Two?
When Is A Coupe Not A Coupe?
What's Wrong With This Picture: Four-Doors Recouped Edition
Review: 2011 Honda CR-Z
It’s now way past bedtime, and I’m driving the new Honda CR-Z in one of those neighborhoods you wouldn’t be making your evening stroll in. Heads turn, necks stretch, fingers point. Blacked out windows of blacked out SUVs are rolled down. Everybody on the street seems to approve Honda’s new creation, but no one knows it’s a hybrid.
What's Wrong With This Picture: Old Segment Made New Edition
Once upon a time, luxury cars were defined by giant drop-top land barges like Cadillac’s V-16 or the Bugatti Royale. Somewhere along the way, the luxury sedan-turned-convertible has fallen out of favor with the glaring exception of one of the world’s most expensive cars: the Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead. But now, having pioneered the four-door coupe and (coming soon) the five-door coupe, Mercedes-Benz’s endless search for “new” segments has it looking backwards to the good old days of massive top-down touring luxury.
Review: 2011 Cadillac CTS Coupe
What is luxury? In the American car market, that question doesn’t have an easy answer. Driver-focused performers like BMW’s 3-series sell well here, but so do feature-loaded versions of mass market sedans, like the Lexus ES. Blinged-out baroque still has its adherents, but as the Napa Valley hotel where the Cadillac CTS Coupe was launched proves, a more subtle, sophisticated version of luxury is gaining popularity as well, differentiated by the use of recycled materials and environmentally-friendly technologies. So where in this fragmented and changing category does the CTS Coupe belong?
What's Wrong With This Picture: MINI's Growing Family Edition
MINI’s new six-model lineup gets an early preview, as the Cooper, Convertible, Clubman, Countryman, Coupe and Roadster meet up outside MINI’s plant in Oxford, England. The Countryman SUV won’t arrive in the states until February 2011, with the Coupe and Roadster following by six and 12 months respectively.
What's Wrong With This Picture: Buick's Brand Integra-ty Edition
What's Wrong With This Picture: Maybach, Maybach Not Edition
Having already informed the motor press that its Maybach brand will be making a long-overdue exit from the retail market, Daimler is getting all Weekend At Bernies about the failed super-premium marque. Instead of selling the Maybach name to an upstart Chinese firm, or developing an all-new model, Daimler has decided to keep the brand on life support in a more cynical fashion than even we could have anticipated: hiring an outside firm to develop a two-door version of its 57S sedan.
Toyota Hints At Cheaper, Lighter "Baby FT-86," Is A Mid-Engine Hybrid Roadster Next?
With rumors coming in that Toyota is repositioning its planned FT-86 “Toyobaru” sports coupe to reflect higher price and higher buyer age targets, word around the enthusiast fring of the autoblogosphere has been downright apocalyptic. After all, the promised combination of a $20k base price, manual transmission and rear-wheel-drive were what launched the FT-86 to internet notoriety. But development overruns are a fact of life, and Toyota says it has no choice but to bump the FT-86’s projected price point to $23k base, $26k loaded-level. So while the FT-86 faces the bloat that comes with a more upmarket target, another sports coupe aimed at undercutting the FT-86’s prices by about $5k is already under development according to Road & Track.
Beijing Auto Show: BMW Chases The Four-Door Coupe Niche
What's Wrong With This Picture: Vista Bruiser Edition
As tipster starbird80 notes, “you see the strangest things on eBay!” But a Vista Cruiser Coupe (or is that a shooting brake)? Surely not…
Review: 2010 Hyundai Genesis Coupe 2.0T
The Genesis Coupe has all the right bits: sleek styling, relatively compact size, DOHC engines, rear-wheel-drive, $22,750 starting price. Yet the Hyundai’s sales are a fraction of those for the Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang. Why aren’t enthusiasts more enthused?
Review: 2010 Nissan Altima Coupe
Until recently, if you wanted a semi-practical sport coupe for less than $30,000, and pony cars weren’t your thing, you had to get one based on a front-drive sedan. Chevrolet offered the Monte Carlo, Honda offered the Accord Coupe, Toyota offered the Solara, and two years ago Nissan introduced an Altima Coupe. The Nissan was the sportiest of the bunch owing to a dramatically shorter wheelbase and the company’s usual emphasis of handling over ride quality. Then, for the 2010 model year, Hyundai changed the rules of the game by tossing the rear-drive Genesis Coupe into the mix. Given this new addition, the question has to be asked: why would anyone still opt for the Nissan, when the Genesis is the same price?
Scion: The Brand With No Purpose
“Scion is pretty much a North American brand, so that is why it is very natural to think more development, more design work, should be done in North America,” Yoshi Inaba, president of Toyota Motor North America tells Automotive News [sub]. In other words, fans of Scion’s first generation of JDM confections who railed against second-gen bloat are probably out of luck. Sure, model four in the Scion lineup will be the iQ minicar, which is small and weird enough to have been a member of the Scion invasion team, but after that? It’s all bloat and bigger blind spots from here on out. It’s what America wants.
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