-For a brief few years, U.S. buyers lived in a golden age, able to buy Lotus’s ferociously lightweight Elise sports car brand-new and fully assembled. First appearing in the U.S. in 2004, the divine Elise stuck around until 2011, when Lotus had to withdraw it from our market due to noncompliant airbags. (Shown above is a 2012 model.) – It’s been dark days since 2011, though. Our nation became an Elise-less America.
– There it is, right on the EPA sticker, arguably the most important metric by which the second-generation Chevrolet Volt will be judged: The EPA-estimated distance that the car can travel on electricity alone per charge. Yes, we know the EPA sticker is a mess of numbers, disclaimers, and scale graphs, but right in the middle, highlighted in yellow, is the 2016 Volt’s electric driving range of 53 miles. By
Bob Lutz, the car world’s irascible granddad, appeared on an Automotive News roundtable with several other industry experts to discuss Sergio Marchionne’s continued pining for a merger with another major automaker. Turns out, Maximum Bob agrees with Marchionne—in today’s economic and regulatory climate, a merger between large-scale automakers makes sense. But he said it all as only Bob Lutz can. – The Automotive News video runs nearly two hours, but
-When we climbed into this plug-in hybrid at our Ann Arbor offices and set out on a 50-mile drive home at rush hour, the instrument panel showed a full battery charge and an all-electric range of 14 miles. That would be in what Porsche calls E-Power mode, the default at start-up and also selectable via a console button. This Cayenne S hadn’t been plugged in, though. The previous driver had
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– General Motors will settle with 124 families over deaths resulting from faulty ignition switches that were installed in the 2.6 million small cars recalled last year, including the Chevrolet Cobalt and HHR, Pontiac G5 and Sky, and Saturn Ion and Solstice. This marks a somber end to a yearlong review of fatality and injury claims stemming from defects the automaker hid for 13 years. – The settlement fund was set up in June 2014 weeks
– Operating the sort of test fleet we do, it is with fair regularity that we encounter the occasional cracked windshield, bent wheel rim, or chipped hood. If Michigan’s deteriorating infrastructure isn’t crumbling and subsequently being launched by other motorists at the fronts of our test cars, it’s blowing apart other folks’ tires, pieces of which are then launched at our test cars. (Our Cadillac CTS Vsport found this out the
-The trade calls it a “funeral coach” but everyone else just calls it a hearse, the last car you’ll ever ride in. Those who take that ride tend not to buy any more cars, though, so the nostalgic impulse that fuels much of the collector car scene rarely takes hold. Little wonder, then, that the Concours d’Elegance of America at Saint John’s in Plymouth, Michigan, could boast that it was
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