Car Chute

.

Third-generation GMSA utility has the styling to match its newfound Chevrolet identity.

It’s one of boxing lore’s most famous stories. Heavyweight legend Muhammad Ali had recently changed his name from Cassius Clay, and his opponent for a 1967 fight, Ernie Terrell, had infuriated Ali by persistently calling him by his old name.

In the brawl that followed, Ali pummelled the hapless Terrell for the perceived disrespect for 15 rounds while screaming: “What’s my name, fool? What’s my name?” The ref stopped the fight before the final bell to rescue the punch- (and ear) drunk Terrell from further punishment. But Ali had made his point: no one ever called him Cassius Clay again.

General Motors South Africa haven’t gone to similar extremes to get people used to their compact bakkie’s new name and, even now, after driving the Chevrolet Utility for a week I still catch myself referring to it as the Opel Corsa bakkie (so far no one’s pummelled me for it). The big-selling workhorse has worn a Corsa badge for such a long time that it’ll take a while before the new moniker sticks, but the new badging at least comes with distinctive new styling to clearly identify this vehicle from its predecessor.

DON’T CALL ME CUTE

Gone is the trendy cuteness of the original Corsa bakkie, and the recently-launched third generation of GM’s compact pickup arrives with a meaner and pugilistic new look that could have been inspired by Ali himself. The stylists have given the bowtie-badged bakkie an American muscle-truck facade with an oversized grille and headlamps that seem almost out of proportion with the compact body.

The Brazilian-designed, South African-built bakkie features a new platform that’s longer and wider, although the load box retains the same payload capacity as the previous Corsa at between 703 and 763 kilograms, depending on derivative. That’s a little less than the 800kg offered by the Chev Utility’s main rival, the Nissan NP200.

Flagship Chevy Ute Sport is kitted with 15-inch alloy wheels.

.

However, since we’re comparing the tale of the tape, the Chev hits back with its superior towing capacity of 1200kg compared to the Nissan’s 650kg.

We put the Chev to the workhorse test and it proved spacious

Article source: Article Source

SHANGHAI (AFP) – China’s industrial quality watchdog ordered on Friday the recall of more than 47,000 Chevrolet cars due to a faulty brake fluid reservoir.

The recall concerns Chevrolet Aveo sedans made this year, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said in a notice on its website.

The agency said the alarm system built into the brake fluid reservoir may fail to give the driver a timely warning that fluid levels are low.

General Motors (GM) said it saw record sales in China in April, despite a broader slowdown in the world’s biggest car market.

GM sold 227,217 vehicles in April, up 11.7 per cent from the same month last year, it said in a statement. GM also registered a sales record for the month of March.

For the first four months of the year, GM’s China sales rose 9.4 per cent year-on-year to 972,369 units.

China is the world’s largest auto market after overtaking the United States (US) in 2009.

Article source: Article Source

WILMINGTON, Delaware (REUTERS) – If Mr Warren Buffett can run a company in his 80s, why can’t Ford’s Mr Alan Mulally?

Top executives at Ford Motor have fielded questions for months about just when Mr Mulally, 66, plans to retire as the company’s chief executive officer (CEO). So far the No. 2 United States (US) automaker has kept his plans quiet – mostly.

‘Well, we said 2025,’ chairman Bill Ford Jr joked to reporters after the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, on Thursday. ‘Maybe 2030.’

Mr Mulally turns 85 in 2030. If he stays, he would be among a handful of corporate octogenarians like Mr Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Mr Buffett will turn 82 this year and said two years ago that he would like to work past 100.

Analysts, however, expect Mr Mulally to leave within about two years. At the meeting on Thursday, Mr Mulally simply said, ‘We have a robust succession plan for every member of the team.’

The prospect of Mr Mulally’s exit is one factor that has hurt Ford’s stock this year, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said in a research note last week. So far in 2012, Ford shares have been flat, while the SP 500 has risen about 8 per cent.

Mr Mulally took the reins at Ford in 2006, when the company was mired in a financial crisis. But the automaker rallied around the ‘One Ford’ motto, Mr Mulally’s strategy to unify Ford’s once-disconnected business units to drive down costs and build a global brand.

As a result, he is closely identified with the success of Ford, the only of Detroit’s ‘Big Three’ automakers to avoid a US government-led bankruptcy. General Motors (GM) and Chrysler both emerged from their bankruptcy restructurings in 2009.

Ford has now reached a point in its recovery that centres on boosting the profitability of its best-selling models and grooming a successor for its top executive. That is widely expected to be Mr Mark Fields, who is in charge of Ford’s operations in North and South America.

Uncertainty over Mr Mulally’s eventual retirement has not affected Ford’s top executives, Mr Bill Ford told reporters.

‘I don’t think there’s any anxiety on anyone’s part on timing,’ he said.

‘There’s no new news, and needless to say the board is more than happy with the way Alan

Article source: Article Source

FRANKFURT (REUTERS) – General Motors (GM) plans to build midsized cars for PSA Peugeot Citroen, while the French automaker will assemble a compact model for GM’s Opel brand as part of their new alliance, according to press reports on Thursday.

Under current plans, GM would build a replacement for the Citroen C5 midsized sedan, the Paris-based company’s Rennes factory chief Jean-Luc Perrard told regional newspaper Ouest France.

Peugeot also plans to assemble GM’s next Opel Zafira compact multi-purpose vehicle, leading to hundreds of job cuts at the company’s development centre in Ruesselsheim, German magazine Der Spiegel separately reported on Thursday, citing union sources.

Peugeot chief executive officer (CEO) Philippe Varin said in March that the core of the alliance plan would see future Peugeot midsized cars built on the United States (US) automaker’s platforms, and smaller GM models based on Peugeot vehicles.

Opel denied that the alliance with Peugeot would prompt job cuts at the Opel development unit.

‘No jobs will be lost in the Opel technical development centre, however joint projects are divvied up concretely in the end,’ chief executive officer Karl-Friedrich Stracke said in a statement.

Article source: Article Source

SHANGHAI (AFP) – United States (US) auto giant General Motors (GM) said on Monday that it saw record sales in China in April, despite a broader slowdown in the world’s biggest car market.

GM sold 227,217 vehicles in April, up 11.7 per cent from the same month last year, it said in a statement. GM also registered a sales record for the month of March.

For the first four months of the year, GM’s China sales rose 9.4 per cent year-on-year to 972,369 units.

GM China Group president Kevin Wale said sales would top a million in May, the earliest it has reached landmark figure in China.

‘It has put us on track to once again set a new sales mark for the year as a whole,’ Mr Wale said in the statement.

GM sold more than 2.5 million vehicles in China last year.

Foreign car makers such as GM have been able to ride out an overall slowdown in China’s auto market, the world’s largest since 2009, helped by name recognition and perceptions of higher quality.

China’s nationwide sales rose just 2.5 per cent to 18.51 million units in 2011, compared with an annual increase of more than 32 per cent in 2010.

The slowdown came after the government rolled back purchasing incentives and some cities imposed tighter restrictions on car numbers to ease chronic traffic congestion and pollution.

Vehicle sales in China fell 3.4 per cent year-on-year to 4.79 million units in the first three months of this year, according to an industry group.

But many of the world’s carmakers remain confident of steady growth in the Asian nation, where three out of every four new car purchases are by first-time buyers.

Article source: Article Source

This is an excerpt from Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars, published this month by Simon Schuster.

However it unfolds, this year’s U.S. presidential election is unlikely to be as close as the one America experienced in 2000. That election was decided, after months of contention and suspense, by disputed ballots and a razor-thin result in Florida.

The historic events, however, were set in motion 40 years earlier by a badly flawed automobile, the Chevrolet Corvair. In the mid-1960s the Corvair made Ralph Nader famous. It also made lawyers ubiquitous, thereby making lawsuits one of the great growth industries of the late 20th Century. And decades after its demise, in the election of 2000, the Corvair’s legacy improbably helped to put George W. Bush in the White House. The car’s story is one of genius, hubris, irony and tragedy, not to mention unforeseen long-term effects on American life and thought.

The Corvair debuted as a 1960 model as one of the first American “compact cars.” (The term was coined by American Motors Chairman George Romney, later Michigan’s governor and father of current presidential candidate Mitt Romney.) The car was “the most profoundly revolutionary car … ever offered by a major manufacturer,” wrote Sports Car Illustrated when the Corvair was launched. It was the brainchild of a brilliant and uber-confident General Motors engineer, Edward N. Cole.

(View a slideshow of the fifteen cars that changed America here or click on the photo above)

Cole grew up in a small Michigan town, where he learned to tune old automobiles fast enough to outrun any other cars in the county. He attended the General Motors Institute in Flint, Mich., alternating study with internships at GM. After graduation he helped GM’s Cadillac division win a big Army tank contract by boosting the performance and reliability of the tank’s engine.

After the war he developed an experimental rear-engine car aimed at heading off entrepreneur Preston Tucker. Dubbed the “Cadiback,” Cole’s creation could cut through the ice and snow of a Michigan winter while his neighbors – driving conventional front-engine, rear-drive cars – skidded into ditches. But when Tucker’s venture collapsed, Cadillac dropped the project.

In 1953, with Chevrolet’s competitive position falling, Cole was named the

Article source: Article Source

A sign of emerging technology and a push to minimizing the environmental impact of automobiles has led to the sizable production of electric or electrified vehicles becoming a reality. Dismissed for a long time, cars using battery-backed propulsion are being inundated into a world where a well-performing counterpart (the internal combustion engine) has existed as the standard.

Aside from driving range of a battery-powered vehicle, charging time is the biggest obstacle in operating an electric car. In the normal life of today’s motorists, the trip to a nearby filling station has been regarded as a practical way of refuelling a vehicle. Taking only a few minutes to pump multiple gallon of flammable fluid into a fuel tank, the prospect of waiting several hours for a battery to recharge is, indeed, unattractive.

While most electric cars can be charged from a 120-volt outlet commonly found in households, there would be very few motorists who are willing to wait between 10 to 21 hours for charging their Chevrolet Volt or Nissan Leaf. In fact, the Tesla Roadster’s 120-volt mobile connector can take over 30 hours to fully charge the battery. Many electric car buyers are encouraged to pick one of many home charging stations such as the GE Wattstation that can greatly improve battery recharge times with 240 volts of power. With 240 volts, these power stations are capable of charging a Nissan Leaf from an empty to full battery in 7 hours from a wall unit. Found within commercial charging stations and can easily be wall-mounted to a garage. Now, as commercial charging infrastructure is furnishing in major cities, a quicker method than the 240-volt charger unit exists for delivering significant energy to an electric car in 30 minutes or less.

At the ongoing Electric Vehicle Symposium 26 at the LA Convention Center, the new reality for electrified motoring is DC fast charging units. Injecting a charge to a compatible battery with up to 500 volts, DC fast charging is being shot to the main stage for selling battery-powered cars and trucks to the public. Several major manufacturers of electric car charging stations have already or will soon commit to incorporating DC fast charging set-ups in public. Eaton, ECOtality and Schneider Electric are among the companies already preparing for what will be a fast charging future where a battery can receive major energy capacity in only 15 to 30 minutes. The only major drawback to the DC fast charging method is the battery can absorb only about 70-80 percent

Article source: Article Source

In Germany – and every other European territory – the cars that British motorists know as Vauxhalls are branded Opel; Opel was founded by Adam Opel, and GM’s German operation, Adam Opel AG, still carries his full name, so the significance of the new car’s badge will be readily recognised there. Does the name Adam signal that GM’s UK operation is due to fall to the process of Opelisation, consigning the Vauxhall brand to history? That’s unlikely – senior executives have always dismissed the idea, not least because Vauxhall typically tends to achieve a higher market share in the UK than Opel does in Germany.

So what of the car itself? It’s a new small premium runabout designed to allow GM to compete for some of the money that currently goes to the BMW Mini and Fiat 500. Previously known by the concept name Junior, Adam will be expected to give a bit of a lift to Vauxhall’s slightly humdrum image. That will be tough work, even if the new model is very good, and official photographs showing Adam in heavily disguised form give us only the vaguest notion of its looks.

Still, if it’s possible to make a success of a television channel called Dave, why not a car badged Adam? As the home of Top Gear repeats always likes to remind us, everyone knows a bloke called Dave; how many will want to get to know a car called Adam?

Article source: Article Source

May 7, 2012 7:42 pm

By John Reed

Article source: Article Source

SHANGHAI – US auto giant General Motors said Monday that it saw record sales in China in April, despite a broader slowdown in the world’s biggest car market.

GM sold 227,217 vehicles in April, up 11.7 per cent from the same month last year, it said in a statement. GM also registered a sales record for the month of March.

For the first four months of the year, GM’s China sales rose 9.4 per cent year-on-year to 972,369 units.

GM China Group president Kevin Wale said sales would top a million in May, the earliest it has reached landmark figure in China.

“It has put us on track to once again set a new sales mark for the year as a whole,” Wale said in the statement.

GM sold more than 2.5 million vehicles in China last year.

Foreign car makers such as GM have been able to ride out an overall slowdown in China’s auto market, the world’s largest since 2009, helped by name recognition and perceptions of higher quality.

China’s nationwide sales rose just 2.5 per cent to 18.51 million units in 2011, compared with an annual increase of more than 32 per cent in 2010.

The slowdown came after the government rolled back purchasing incentives and some cities imposed tighter restrictions on car numbers to ease chronic traffic congestion and pollution.

Vehicle sales in China fell 3.4 per cent year-on-year to 4.79 million units in the first three months of this year, according to an industry group.

But many of the world’s carmakers remain confident of steady growth in the Asian nation, where three out of every four new car purchases are by first-time buyers.

Follow @asiaonemotoring