In a Shocking Turn, Volkswagen Bestows R-Line Trim on 2019 Arteon

Don’t cut yourself cleaning up that juice glass you just dropped.

Yes, it’s true, the company that enjoys carving out slightly sportier iterations of existing models that aren’t actually any faster than stock is at it again. Volkswagen, which brought you screamers like the R-Line Jetta, Tiguan, and Atlas, plans to work the same magic on the brand’s upcoming flagship.

The 2019 Arteon, appearing later this year with a single powerplant and front- or all-wheel-drive, will take on the role of “brand shaper,” says VW’s North American region CEO Hinrich Woebcken, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune from the automaker’s across-the-board product strategy. So, what does R-Line bring to the swoopy CC’s replacement?

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2019 Mercedes-Benz C-Class Coupe and Cabriolet: Real, Actual Two-doors Gain Power and Content

Mercedes-Benz’s C-Class line maintains a steady stream of customers by being attainably aspirational. A dignified, confident car, the C-Class doesn’t feel the need to be something it’s not. Watch a realtor pull up in one, and a feeling of quiet assurance falls over the would-be home buyer — certainly, not the same feeling you’d get after seeing them pull up in a CLA.

In a bid to maintain this respectful relationship, Mercedes-Benz has a host of changes in store for the refreshed 2019 C-Class sedan. These niceties are now bound for the coupe and convertible variants, too.

Isn’t it nice to talk about an honest-to-goodness sedan, coupe, and convertible, each carrying the same model name?

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Spot the Changes: 2019 Ford Fusion Gains Newish Face, Plug-in Version Now Takes the Long(er) Way Home

Squint harder. Yes, there are changes afoot in the 2019 Ford Fusion’s visage, though you’ll be forgiven if you can’t spot them from across the Lowe’s parking lot.

The automaker released images and information for the lightly refreshed model on Tuesday, ahead of its official debut at the upcoming New York Auto Show. Besides styling tweaks designed to keep things young and pert, all 2019 Fusion trim levels boast one of Ford’s new Co-Pilot 360 suite of driver assist features — even the lowly S model. For green car aficionados, the Blue Oval added an extra helping of electrons to the plug-in hybrid Energi model. Expect to burn ever so slightly fewer gallons of gas in a given year.

For now, Ford isn’t saying what others have: that this might be the last Fusion we ever see.

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2019 Kia K900 Piles on the Luxury, but Will Buyers Pile on the K900?

Everyone’s favourite full-size, rear-drive Kia sedan returns with all-new clothing for 2019, and the Korean brand has seen fit to show us the car’s exterior before its debut at this month’s New York Auto Show. That’s good, as we’re not likely to invest much time in it at the show. Sorry, Kia.

Stubbornly refusing to vacate the full-size luxury field, Kia’s new K900 — sold as the prestigious K9 in the automaker’s home market — looks to bump up refinement in areas drivers found lacking. Given that the K900 is widely expected to borrow the Genesis G90’s platform and powertrains, ride quality and muscle shouldn’t be an issue.

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Lincoln Officially Dusts Off the Aviator Name, Prepares for a Future That's Short on Tradition, Big on Cargo

Given the direction Lincoln is headed, it’s unlikely we’ll see a return of the Town Car name anytime soon. The Town Coupe, on the other hand, seems ripe for a resurrection (as a sporty four-door SUV, of course).

Speculation aside, model names are back at Lincoln Motor Company, and the first of a series of all-new utility models will bear a short-lived moniker that disappeared after 2005: Aviator. The original Aviator, resembling a Navigator washed in too-warm water, served as the brand’s second SUV from 2003 to 2005. A 2004 concept vehicle of the same name heralded the design of the 2007 MKX.

What does the new Aviator mean for the brand? Sales, hopefully, as the brand’s suddenly flagging fortunes would leave any automaker rattled.

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2020 Ford Bronco Gains Hybrid Variant, Smaller Off-road Sibling

Ford wants to be seen as a nimble, responsive automaker, quick to adapt to changing market trends, so today the automaker dumped a pile of product information on our heads.

Some of the vehicles Ford confirmed today were already known, like the upcoming Shelby GT500 super Stang, Ford Explorer ST, and hybrid versions of the Mustang and F-150. What we didn’t know until today was that the reborn Bronco, due out in 2020, will receive an electrified powertrain. Nor were we aware that it won’t arrive alone.

Ford’s calling the Bronco’s smaller companion the “Off-Road Small Utility” for now, but “Mini Bronco” sounds better to our ears.

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2019 Subaru Forester Bound for New York, Needs to Keep the Sales Magic Alive

If there’s a great way to piss off Subaru buyers, the quirky Japanese brand hasn’t thought of it yet. Few automakers can boast of Subaru-like annual sales increases, and even fewer can say their customers are more likely to stick with the brand at trade-in time. Actually, only one brand can say that.

Subaru holds the distinction of actually seeing its U.S. sales rise during the recession, and from 2008 to 2017, volume rose by more than 245 percent. One of the models contributing to its success is the unassuming but remarkably capable Forester — a boxy, upright compact crossover with a tall greenhouse and an interior larger than its outside appearance would suggest.

Screwing up the next-generation Forester, which debuts later this month as a 2019 model, could hurt Subaru badly. No surprise, it looks like the automaker is choosing to play it safe.

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No Fixed Abode: They Paved the Auto Show, And Put Up An Exclusive Preview

Walking through Brooklyn, your humble author was confronted by a sign on a building that said, “We stay awesome 24/7, but we are only available in person,” followed by the company’s business hours. There are two ways to view that sort of arrant idiocy. The first is to shrug one’s shoulders and just chalk it up to the sort of cutesy, infantile, Millennial-focused marketing that has turned Brooklyn from a place where my mother was actually shot at in 1970 merely for wearing her Women’s Army Corps — but Mommy’s neither one of those, I’ve known her all these years! — Class A officer’s uniform to a sort of supervised playground for losers whose sheltered ineptitude has combined with the realities of a flaccid job market to suspend them in kindergarten gaffa until the parents run out of home equity with which to sustain them.

(That’s quite a sentence there, ain’t it? You won’t get combinations of Cheap Trick and Kate Bush jokes in Motor Trend, trust me.)

Alternately, you can be a bit more perceptive and/or distrustful about the whole matter. You might take it as a sign of a corporate culture where employees are, in fact, expected to “ stay awesome 24/7,” where everybody is judged on how infrequently they have an incorrect thought, even when they are off work. We’re rapidly approaching a day where we are never truly away from our jobs. You can be fired from your job for simply saying something that people don’t like during your private time; several years ago I had a public Facebook argument with two car-magazine writers that resulted in one of them calling my day job and making a “special request” to have me fired. (He was told to get stuffed, by the way.)

In other words, we now live in a world where corporations expect to have the kind of control over reality that was once just the nightmare imagination of George Orwell. Everything is now “curated,” which is a nice way of saying controlled. And that, in a nutshell, is why most of the “New York auto show” did not actually happen at the New York Auto Show.

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NYIAS 2017: Nissan Rogue Fast & Furious Tie-In is a Dog's Breakfast

Someone needs to tell the product planners at Nissan to stop browsing Reddit. Someone also needs to tell them that most canines have remarkably poor credit ratings, because the newest Nissan Rogue Dogue concept — revealed Tuesday ahead of the 2017 New York International Auto Show — is very clearly for the dogs.

I envy the copywriter who wrote the press release, as they likely waited a lifetime to use the words “side wall mounted poop bag dispenser” in a professional capacity. Sigh.

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Toyota Launches C-HR In April, Plans To Unveil Another Subcompact Crossover At The New York Auto Show In April

Toyota hasn’t even delivered the new 2018 C-HR to dealers and there are already plans to supplement the automaker’s subcompact crossover lineup.

In concert with the C-HR’s U.S. launch next month, April 2017 will also play host to the Toyota debut of a small crossover concept at the New York International Auto Show if all goes according to plan.

“I think we’re very well set up (with the C-HR and midsize RAV4 CUV), but we’re also kind of looking at what else could we be doing there if this continues to be a growing segment, which we anticipate it will,” Bill Fay, vice president for the Toyota division, told Wards Auto.

Toyota expects to sell 60,000 C-HRs in the United States annually, more than the Yaris, Yaris iA, and Prius C combined. For America’s third-highest-volume SUV brand, that’s apparently not enough.

Slip an extra SUV on the barbie.

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NYIAS: Contrary To The Axiom, Boring, Not Sexy, Is What Sells

The auto show press conference is a strange phenomenon. More often than not, it’s an executive from a foreign land, reading what is likely his third or fourth language from an obvious teleprompter, getting ready to introduce a car that we’ve all already seen at a “preveal” party. He’s typically using words like “social media,” “lifestyle,” and “aspirational,” all to describe a car that will likely sell less than twenty thousand units — if it even makes it to market.

The speeches are full of safe, non-threatening language, and normally take place in front of screens that rotate stock photos of happy multicultural families enjoying life on sunny, non-homogeneous days. The music is more Wagner than Bach, with thunderous bass and drums booming through speaker systems that even The Darkness might look at and say, “That’s a bit excessive.” And then, finally, a wall lifts and a car appears through a screen of smoke to thunderous applause from a press corps that can’t wait to rewrite the embargo materials already in their collective inbox.

So when Masahiro Moro, President and CEO of Mazda North American Operations, calmly stood next to his gorgeous new creation last week, with little fanfare or adulation, and said these words in while standing front of a black wall, accompanied only by the silence of the room, I believe he did it purposefully. Here’s what he said:

“Other companies have become quite successful by not caring if their cars are boring or not.”

Mic drop. And you know what? Moro-san is absolutely right.

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A Funeral at an Auto Show

Prior to the New York International Auto Show, Toyota distributed an upbeat press release. Come party with us, it said. “Scion is not going away quietly.”

Yet, as I walk toward Scion’s booth, a quiet unease fills a void once occupied by a loud, confident generational pulse. The typical eye-catching signs with heavily embossed, trendy hashtags are all but entirely absent upon my arrival. Massive subwoofers sit dormant inside 13 years’ worth of one-off tuner concepts. Engineered studio lighting softly highlights the vehicles on display, while simultaneously attempting to hide the vast, empty spaces between them.

Scion’s show booths are normally chock-full of tchotchkes and the beautiful people handing them out — but not today.

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NYIAS: Genesis is the Real Deal

It was the end of the first day at the New York International Auto Show, a time when most “journalists” would normally have stopped doing anything that resembled work. Yet there we all were, assembled out in the hallway of Javits Convention Center, of all places, holding our glass bottles of Voss water and waiting to see what was hiding underneath the long blanket on the right side of the stage.

It’s at this point that most of the articles you’ve already read about the Genesis New York Concept start giving you the entire historical background of Hyundai, and the Genesis models, blah blah blah. I give you more credit than that. I know that you already know that the Hyundai Genesis sedan was a legitimate contender in its segment (especially you, BTSR).

The difference now is that everybody else seems to know that not only does the Genesis brand seem to be able to survive, they’re prepared to hit some towering home runs.

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NYIAS: Fifty-Year-Old Toyota Corolla Gets New Nose

The eleventh generation Toyota Corolla has been refreshed with a new beak-like nose, and equipped with new safety features and options. Furthermore, as the Corolla is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, a special commemorative edition has been announced.

I’ll expect to see a few of these rolling across the blocks at the Barrett-Jackson auction in 2046.

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NYIAS: Sir Mixalot Called and He Likes Your New Mitsubishi Mirage G4

Mitsubishi today pulled the cover off its new Mirage G4 sedan, which adds a longer wheelbase and a trunk to the occasionally-maligned subcompact, the 2016 New York International Auto Show. As we noted with the restyled hatchback, 4 more horsepower — for a total of 78 — will hum from the Mirage G4’s 1.2-liter three-cylinder engine, and Mitsubishi will make available Android Auto and Apple CarPlay as an option.

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  • Jalop1991 The intermediate shaft and right front driveshaft may not be fully engaged due to suspected improper assembly by the supplier. Over time, partial engagement can cause damage to the intermediate shaft splines. Damaged shaft splines may result in unintended vehicle movement while in Park if the parking brake is not engagedGee, my Chrysler van automatically engages the parking brake when we put it in Park. Do you mean to tell me that the idjits at Kia, and the idjit buyers, couldn't figure out wanting this in THEIR MOST EXPENSIVE VEHICLE????
  • Dukeisduke I've been waiting to see if they were going to do something special for the 60th Anniversary. I was four years old when the Mustang was introduced. I can remember that one of our neighbors bought a '65 coupe (they were all titled as '65 models, even the '64-1/2 cars), and it's the first one I can remember seeing. In the '90s I knew an older gentleman that owned a '64-1/2 model coupe with the 260 V8.
  • SCE to AUX "...the complete Mustang model lineup to peruse"Will the fake Mustang show up, too?
  • SCE to AUX We don't need no stinking badges.
  • SCE to AUX I've never been teased by a bumper like that one before.