Chevrolet Electric Silverado A ZERO Production

Chevrolet’s Silverado electric pickup will be built at the Factory Zero assembly plant in Detroit-Hamtramck, Michigan, along with GMC’s Hummer EV SUV which will also be produced there, General Motors president Mark Reuss said today.

Read more
Jaguar Going All Electric By 2025, Cancels Electric XJ Sedan

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced that it plans to have transitioned the Jaguar side of the business entirely to electric vehicles by 2025. Meanwhile, the more profitable Land Rover brand will be receiving its very first EV sometime in 2024. The plan is backed by a £2.5 billion (roughly $3.5 billion USD) investment.

As usual, take these promises with a grain of salt. Practically every manufacturer has underdelivered when it comes to electrification and features existing under the catch-all mobility tag. Jaguar’s current battery-electric vehicle, the I-Pace, hasn’t exactly been a smash hit and its construction is actually contracted out to Magna Steyr in Graz, Austria. Jag also recently abandoned the new XJ model, which has been in development for years. Ironically, the car was supposed to become the brand’s first all-electric sedan.

Read more
Audi Boss Paints Gloomy Picture for Small Automobiles

While Europe often appears as a safe haven for punchy subcompacts, the reality is that the continent’s biggest sellers happen to be reasonably sized automobiles equipped with a tepid engine option. The Volkswagen Golf, Toyota Corolla, and Škoda Octavia (especially if you happen to travel through any former satellite states of the Soviet Union) are absolutely everywhere. Europe also has a strong taste for many of the compact crossovers that are popular here in North America, giving subcompacts an increasingly small share of the overall market. And it’s projected to get smaller (globally) under the existing European regulations.

Pint-sized economy vehicles aren’t exactly profit leaders for automakers and their margins are only going to become slimmer. The EU is now reaching a point where building them won’t make sense, as tailpipe regulations will eventually force some amount of electrification. This will jack up their price to a point where the kind of people that might have been considering them will probably shop used. But don’t take our word for it; Audi CEO Markus Duesmann recently said this is probably what will kill the A1.

Read more
GM Unveils New Logo, We're Perplexed

It’s new logo week! First, Kia, now GM.

And we’re batting two for two on the perplexion scale.

Read more
Sell Off? Volkswagen Group Rethinks Its Position on Supercars

Volkswagen Group, the largest automotive manufacturer in the world, is reexamining its relationship with high-performance subsidiaries as it continues pouring money into electrification. Burned by a diesel emissions scandal of its own making half a decade ago, VW leadership now views electric cars as the only path forward — especially in regard to its more mainstream brands. While they aren’t getting identical treatments, VW, Audi, Seat, and Skoda are all presumed to be adding EVs to their production lines over the next few years.

Porsche’s long-term strategy also seems heavily dependent on battery power, but the road ahead is much less clear for ultra-premium brands like Lamborghini and Bugatti. With volumes and lineups order of magnitudes smaller than the core brands, Volkswagen would be incurring a gigantic expense to develop upper-echelon performance EVs that might not appeal to their existing fans. The same goes for upscale motorcycle brand Ducati as the two-wheeled world has become divided on electric and gas-powered bikes. Volkswagen’s management board and directors have decided the situation calls for an all-hands meeting in November to decide what should be done and how to remain financially prudent in a period of economic strife.

Read more
Green Dreams: Unifor Releases New Economic Strategy for Canada

Unifor hopes to sway the Canadian government toward an automotive strategy centered around the adoption and manufacturing of electric vehicles and a totally revised economic system. On Wednesday, the union released its “Road Map for a Fair, Inclusive and Resilient Economic Recovery” while announcing that corporations have failed everyone.

It’s all part the #BuildBackBetter campaign, which sees the coronavirus pandemic that made 2020 a collective — yet strangely isolating — hell for all of us as a unique opportunity to rebuild society under the banner of economic justice. “Unifor’s plan is designed to build a more strategic and self-reliant economy that can both withstand and prevent future crises,” Unifor National President Jerry Dias said in the initial announcement.

“This is an ambitious road map but I think ambition is what our country and its workers need right now.”

Read more
BMW I8 Now Truly Dead

Pour one out for a car you likely didn’t have a hope in hell of affording — and that’s if you even desired one in the first place. Arriving on the market as a plug-in hybrid wonder car in 2014, the scissor-doored coupe found roles in top-grossing flicks and prompted saliva production among underpaid, tech-obsessed writers.

Well, the last i8 has left the factory. How much of an impact did it make?

Read more
Editorial Rant: GM CEO Says Automaker Will Still Lead Electrification, Autonomy

After saying that it will take “years and decades” before General Motors can effectively transition into a company focused primarily on electric vehicles, plenty of outlets ( including ours) accused CEO Marry Barra of lowering expectations. She held another press conference this week to set everyone straight, letting the world know GM will perpetually be at the forefront of the green movement.

The 20 EV models planned for launch by 2023 are still coming. “We have a steady drumbeat of EVs coming out across segments to appeal to a variety of customers,” Barra explained.

She then added that internal combustion vehicles will remain a staple of GM’s lineup for the foreseeable future. Oh, and its first driverless vehicle is coming out in 2025 — instead of 2019, as originally planned. “I definitely think it will happen within the next five years. Our Cruise team is continuing to develop technology so it’s safer than a human driver. I think you’ll see it clearly within five years,” she said in a recent interview with Dave Rubinstein.

Read more
General Motors: Electrification Will Take 'Years and Decades'

Since the dawn of the new century, the automotive industry has been forced to revise electrification timelines for a cavalcade of reasons. Development programs have proven costly, the economy has taken a turn (or turns) for the worse, customers haven’t responded in great numbers, and the materials necessary for battery have been in short supply for many. Throw in the trouble some companies have had with programming such cars or ending up with electric vehicles that want for truly enviable range and you’re beginning to see the whole, problematic enchilada.

It wasn’t all that long ago that General Motors promised over 20 new all-electric models by 2023. Granted, this promise was made in 2017 — during a time when the industry couldn’t possibly have foreseen the global hardships that would befall us or known we’d have the ability to remember what was said just a few years prior. The messaging has changed, either because mainstream automakers cannot provide the kind of cars that will continue to spur EV adoption, or because they no longer hold much interest in trying.

Read more
As Brand Goes Electric, Porsche R&D Head Says Tesla Not a Direct Rival

Now that Porsche has committed to Volkswagen Group’s plan for widespread electrification and manufactured its first purpose-built EV, many are starting to make comparisons with Tesla. Like it or not, Porsche’s Taycan is probably the closest competition the Tesla Model S has.

Porsche’s R&D boss, Michael Steiner, doesn’t like the comparison, saying any direct juxtapositions are apples to oranges — even if Tesla’s recent attempts to call out Porsche’s newest model seem contrary to this.

Read more
Volkswagen Explains Its Complicated Relationship With Electricity and Fuel

Like most legacy automakers, Volkswagen is casually walking back promises of electrification. As with self-driving cars, the technology behind new-energy vehicles is taking longer to mature than the industry would like. Meanwhile, the market — skewed as it is toward larger models — has been about as cooperative as a sugared-up child come bedtime.

Despite governments around the world incentivizing the sale of EVs, they’re still but a fraction of whole.

With the pandemic undoubtedly discouraging consumers from purchasing big-ticket items, electric vehicle sales aren’t presumed to make a lot of headway in 2020, either. We recently learned that some of the promises made by Ford and General Motors in regard to electrification were overblown by corporate messaging. In truth, they both plan on remaining heavily dependent upon truck and crossover sales for several more years.

However, Volkswagen seemed to be betting everything it had on battery technology. In the wake of its 2015 diesel emission scandal, VW was one of the first companies to promise widespread electrification by suggesting it would build one million EVs by 2023 — with 70 new green models introduced by 2029. The past year has seen the automaker issue qualifying remarks that leave us feeling dubious about its end goal.

Read more
Why Is Everyone So Surprised Detroit Isn't Prioritizing EVs?

News arose yesterday that General Motors’ and Ford Motor Company’s battle plans rely heavily on SUV and pickup sales, rather than electric vehicles. Details of the corporate strategies, first shared by Reuters, soon circulated through the media, with many outlets upset that the pair seem to have oversold the role electrification will play in their respective lineups through 2026. One wonders how they could possibly be this surprised.

Using data issued to parts suppliers from the two automakers, AutoForecast Solutions predicted North American production of SUV models from GM and Ford will outpace the assembly of traditional cars by more than eight to one in 2026. Roughly 93 percent of those models are expected to be dependent upon gasoline. Meanwhile, Reuters compared the manufacturers’ strategy against Tesla — a company that only exists for the explicit purpose of selling EVs and has never assembled a gas-powered automobile — as if all manufacturers are equal in scope and cater to the same type of customers.

Read more
Volkswagen's Making Big Promises About Electric Vehicles and the Energy Grid

Volkswagen Group’s transition toward electric vehicles has been no secret. Since getting busted with software designed to defeat emissions testing five years ago, the manufacturer has trumpeted the merits of electrification at every opportunity. Still, some continue to wonder how an EV-dominant world will work, expressing concerns that peak charging hours could stress national energy grids past the breaking point.

One proposed solution is to use the connectivity available in modern cars to take power from the grid only when surplus energy is available, while feeding electricity back into it during peak draw hours. Michael Jost, VW’s head of product strategy, said this was something the automaker has been working on.

Read more
Daimler CEO: 'Streamlining the Portfolio' Necessary for Mercedes-Benz

Still in the midst of a $1.4-billion restructuring plan that aims to cut 10 percent of its workforce, Mercedes-Benz is reconsidering what its product lineup should look like moving ahead. While most of the doomed models will be chosen due to lackluster demand (e.g. X-Class pickup) plenty will be nixed as a result of tightening emission laws. Mercedes parent Daimler issued two profit warnings in 2019 after the luxury brand was fined $960 million in an emissions-cheating settlement. Like many automakers, it was also hemorrhaging cash through its investments in electrification.

An apt analogy for the automotive industry’s stampede toward EVs would be lemmings hurling themselves off a seaside cliff — but not because of the popular misconception that the critters are intentionally committing mass suicide. When lemmings collectively off themselves, it’s the result of migratory behavior gone awry. They simply bunch up and move in a singular direction, largely unaware of the consequences.

Read more
Record Sales, Lackluster Earnings As Mercedes-Benz Shoves Cash Into Evs

Mercedes-Benz sold a record 2,385,400 passenger vehicles around the globe in 2019, topping the previous year’s tally by some 3,400 units, and subsequently brought in more money while doing it. Revenue rose 3 percent, the automaker said in its end-of-year earnings report, but that intake didn’t translate into more profit.

Far from it.

As the automaker embarks on a cost-cutting campaign aimed at freeing up cash for electric vehicle development, among other things, the German manufacturer announced its net profit dropped to $2.95 billion from $8.29 billion in 2018. As a result, shareholders can expect a paltry dividend payout.

Read more
  • Lou_BC ZR2 diesel ;)
  • Bd2 Odd that the article doesn't mention one of the biggest reasons for rising premiums (particularly in states like Louisiana and Florida) - the increase in losses by insurance/reinsurance companies due to the increase in Billion dollar extreme weather events. This also holds true for home insurance premiums.
  • EBFlex Cut Ford some slack. Tires are a new gimmick in the automotive world. It will take time to get the bugs worked out.
  • Analoggrotto Kia Telluride - Despite attracting the most successful of upper class society and thusly achieving industry defining ATPs, people continue attacking it out of jealousy and greed possibly racism too.
  • Jeff Tim--Looking forward to further articles and pictures of what's new.