What's Wrong With This Picture: Brand Management Edition

Typically, when a focused, well-branded company like BMW buys storied brands and then tries to combine them, the results are less than ideal for all involved. Thus far, BMW had actually been doing a fantastic job with its MINI and Rolls-Royce franchises, expanding into new niches while revitalizing potent brands with high-quality products. But putting the two together? It’s not clear how many buyers will line up for this Rolls-fettled MINI Goodwood (price estimated as high as £50,000), but at least the thing has good historical precedent in the Peter Sellers Mini-Rolls. And compared to some of the modern attempts to create premium city cars (hello Aston Cygnet), that makes this über-priced MINI-mashup something more than a mere cynical play for profits and C02 emission average reductions. In fact, it’s something of a tribute to BMW’s stewardship of two brands that could well have been botched over the past decade or so. Hit the jump for details on the Mini Goodwood’s posh appointments.

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What's Wrong With This Picture: If You Love Something, Let It Go Edition
“Fine. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain” -Harvey Dent, The Dark KnightWhat is it about human nat…
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What's Wrong With This Picture: Put That Top Back On Edition

I just returned from the press launch of a certain, shall we say unexpected convertible. The kind of vehicle that makes you stop and wonder what’s being put in the water at a certain product planning department. Look for a review tomorrow, but in the meantime, as a kind of innoculation, consider this Subaru STI drop-top modified for Manchester Subaru. It’s one thing to chop the top off a car that doesn’t lend itself to convertible versions, but it’s quite another to add picnic basket-handle roll bars and then top it all off with a huge rear spoiler. It’s no Transvertible, but death is still too good for this little monster.

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What's Wrong With This Picture: Taste Invaders Edition

In his recent review of the Lexus LX570, Michale Karesh noted that he

struggled to make this 5,995-pound, technology-packed, luxurious SUV make sense.

Apparently he’s not the only one. From the looks of things, the Japanese tuning house Invader Technologies is having a hard time making the LX570 make sense… at least to anyone who’s not a drug-addled, mobbed-up Russian gangster. I suppose that, by post-Mansory tuning standards anyway, the Invader L60 isn’t exactly breaking new ground… still, I’m amazed by how freshly insulted my optical nerves feel.

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Cadillac Knows What The Kids Want
Yeah, yeah, we know… wood and beige leather are out, edgy and blacked-out are in. But did anyone expect that these hot, youthful trends would give ris…
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What's Wrong With This Picture: That's Not A Gullwing, This Is A Gullwing Edition
The tuning house Gull Wing America have a huge thing for vintage Mercedes models, resulting in such bizarre creations as a re-interpreted W-121 and a retro-f…
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What's Wrong With This Picture: Leaf It To The Tuners Edition
While Brabus digs deep for ideas to keep its tuning business relevant in the EV era, Nissan has a less sophisticated approach to electric car tuning: the bod…
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The Mercedes Hot Hatch: Fantasy Meets Reality
This is the B55, a silly one-off project by workers at Mercedes’ Rastatt plant that involved shoving an old “55” AMG engine into a new B-Cl…
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What's Wrong With This Picture: Raptor Hunting Edition
Where did GMC get the idea to take a short-bed pickup, widen the track, fit some Fox shocks and generally beef it up to create a factory off-road “halo…
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Brabus Breaks New Ground In EV "Tuning"

With electric cars becoming the new big thing among car lovers with more money than sense, it’s clear that the world’s many tuning houses will try to get in on the action sooner or later… but how? Brabus has offered tuning packages for the Tesla Roadster since shortly after the EV sportscar launched, but the treatment has always been basically skin-deep: wheels, spoilers, lighting, and best of all,

several simulated engine sounds including that of a typical V8 combustion engine, a racecar engine and two futuristic soundscapes named ‘Beam’ and ‘Warp.’

Which is all well and good, but it highlights a real problem: tuners simply can’t improve the performance of EVs without replacing the batteries or reprograming the entire car. For a company like Brabus that’s used to turning crazy-fast Benzes into super-crazy-fast ‘bahn burners, this has to be a frustrating state of affairs. So what’s a tuner to do? Instead of dialing up the power, the future of EV tuning may just be in making these already-green cars even greener.

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Ask The Best And Brightest: Infiniti AMG?
Infiniti recently got into the in-house tuning game, by rolling out the Infiniti Performance Line as an answer to Lexus’s F line, Audi’s S line,…
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Quote Of The Day: Shelby Cobra And The Pursuit Of Distinctiveness Edition
It is one thing to recognize the legendary status of Mr. Shelby and the original Cobras, including the 427 S/C, and quite another to assert that purchasers a…
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Buick Regal GS: No AWD, One Second Slower Than Projected
Pity the Buick Regal GS. Since the idea of a hotted-up Opel Insignia was floated for the US market, fans imagined that Opel’s epic Insignia OPC would b…
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What's Wrong With This Picture: Stealth Fuzz Edition

You’re driving down the road at a spirited tempo when you see a big, black, tuned Taurus. No biggie, right?

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TTAC Project: The Zombie Sierra

I’m going drifting. I’m going drifting dressed in the finest English brown velour ever to roll out of Dagenham, England. I’m going drifting in what this week’s Curbside Classic should have been, a 1983 Ford Sierra. And with that, I rejoin TTAC after a long hiatus due to our wonderful country sending me to various deserts to hunt for Osama bin Laden.

I have survived, although my Hilux did not after one ill-placed Taliban rocket sent shrapnel through the radiator. I also relish returning to write for one of the finest audiences I know, the Best and Brightest.

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  • SCE to AUX The fix sounds like a bandaid. Kia's not going to address the defective shaft assemblies because it's hard and expensive - not cool.
  • Analoggrotto I am sick and tired of every little Hyundai Kia Genesis flaw being blown out of proportion. Why doesn't TTAC talk about the Tundra iForce Max problems, Toyota V35A engine problems or the Lexus 500H Hybrid problems? Here's why: education. Most of America is illiterate, as are the people who bash Hyundai Kia Genesis. Surveys conducted by credible sources have observed a high concentration of Hyundai Kia Genesis models at elite ivy league universities, you know those places where students earn degrees which earn more than $100K per year? Get with the program TTAC.
  • Analoggrotto NoooooooO!
  • Ted “the model is going to be almost 4 inches longer and 2 inches wider than its predecessor”Size matters. In this case there is 6” too much.
  • JMII Despite our past experience with Volvo my wife wants an EX30 badly. Small, upscale, minimalist EV hatch is basically her perfect vehicle.