A trip to Key West, Florida will confirm it. There is a market out there for flashy convertibles with high style and little need for performance. The number of rental-grade pony car convertibles in the southernmost point of Florida is nearly enough to make one decide to rent a white Camry sedan just to be different. Certainly Ford and Chevy don’t expect normal customers to buy a base convertible. Or do they? Read more…
Low Tech Meets Low Compromise in the Battle for Fuel Efficiency
It’s not as if Chevrolet has never attempted this before. Take a mainstream small car, make some powertrain tweaks and attempt to turn the vehicle into a hyper-mileage car that passes as conventional transportation. As General Motors’ entry-priced brand, Chevrolet has a long history–not all of it memorable–at marketing highly efficient vehicles. Some notable–scratch that, tragic–examples include the Chevette diesel, the GEO Metro XFi, and the Cobalt XFE. None of these vehicles set the sales charts on fire (a scant 324 diesel Chevettes were sold in 1986), so does Chevrolet’s latest hyper-miler, the Cruze ECO, have any chance at succes? Read more…
For a couple of decades now, journalists have attempted to claim that each new Subaru is the car that will make Subaru mainstream. The 2011 Legacy is no different, as Subaru’s flagship sedan continues to grow in size and stature. But have no fear Subie loyalists! The flat four-cylinder engine remains, as does the availability of a manual transmission. Read more…
Muddy is an appropriate word to describe Land Rover’s LR4. Just as the British brand’s name invokes images of 4×4 vehicles traversing damp and muddy English terrain, it also recalls a muddy history of vehicular nomenclature. The LR-what? For those who care to keep track the LR4 is the replacement for the LR3 which was the replacement for the Discovery. We greatly miss the Discovery name mainly because we can no longer make Land Rover marketers cringe whenever we affectionately call it the “Disco.” However, we weren’t missing the Discovery’s tired old bones after spending a week in the high-tech leather-lined confines of the best value Land Rover in today’s showrooms. Read more…
By now the vast majority of die hard auto enthusiasts have either stayed up late to catch the midnight showing, or ventured to the theatre at a normal hour to watch Disney Pixar’s Cars 2. Children or no children, we have made viewing this movie a priority. After the delightful tale of Lightning McQueen, Mater, and the gang from Radiator Springs in the 2006 Cars movie, auto enthusiasts were begging for more. Cars 2 proves to take the franchise in a very different direction as our beloved automobiles venture away from Route 66 to exotic locations around the globe. Read more…
Watch as Gernand takes a rally car out on the track for a couple of hot laps. Well, sort of. When we say “hot” we mean the mercury in the thermometer was pegged, and when we say “rally”, well, he drove a Subaru Legacy 2.5GT. So really, he took a family sedan out for a rather sedate spin. We’re blaming the boost gauge for our delusions of rally grandeur! Read more…
Nissan Manages to Offer up an Unconventionally Styled Conventional Crossover
A few years back I found myself earning a living after answering a job posting at a local car rental agency with the unglamorous description of ‘Lot Attendant’. As the lowly lot attendant I found myself vacuuming and washing battered and abused rental cars, completing vehicle inspections of those poor cars, towing them to and from remote locations using a tired F-150 of indeterminate vintage with an auto dolly and shuttling customers to and from dealerships while their cars were in service. It was the dealership customers that seemed to be the most interesting, as they often shared a story of their once-loved purchase. The most amazing stories reliably came from our Nissan Murano customers. It seemed that this early entry in the crossover craze was also one of the first larger vehicles to offer a continuously variable transmission (CVT) in the US. So problematic was the transmission that one customer posted a “for sale” sign of his Murano in our office hoping to offload the vehicle onto one of our customers dulled by a sense of mediocrity after turning in their rental Chevy Classic. On more than one occasion I witnessed a problematic Murano in the service department with entire engine and transmission removed as the mechanics searched for a solution. It should come as no surprise, then, that I wasn’t expecting much when an all-wheel-drive 2011 Murano SL showed up in the Automotive Trends garage. Would this vehicle’s unloved CVT and bizarre styling draw further criticism, or, like the Mazda CX-7 we drove last year, surprise by exceeding expectations? Read more…
Design Editor Gernand takes a ride in the 2011 Nissan Murano to discuss that while the design is bold and compelling, the vehicle itself rides down the middle of the road.
Over the past fifteen years or so, automakers seem to have struggled to develop compelling forward thinking concept cars. Those concepts that were not retro in nature seem to be simply too bizarre to be attractive, or are overly obvious predictions of production models that are just around the corner. We should celebrate, then, the Chevrolet Mi-ray Concept. Read more…
Audi’s Entry Level Hatchback Struggles to Earn its Premium Price
Americans don’t like hatchbacks. Automotive journalists do. These are automotive truths that are as universally understood as the need for frequent oil changes, regular tire rotations and the belief that the Pontiac Aztek fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Possibly just as well understood is that Americans definitely don’t want to pay a premium for said hatchback while automotive journalists seem to embrace the idea. Why then is Audi still offering the A3 to North American consumers? Read more…
