Car News Articles

The all-new 2010 Honda Accord Crosstour will feature a versatile, upscale 5-passenger interior with an innovative rear storage area, a standard 3.5-liter i-VTEC V-6 engine and available four-wheel drive when it goes on sale in November, American Honda Motor Co., Inc., announced today.

“Honda has a longstanding reputation for maximizing interior space and utility in its vehicles,” said Erik Berkman, vice president of corporate planning and logistics for American Honda Motor Co., Inc. “Like the award-winning Honda Fit, the Accord Crosstour uses a versatile design to create an interior that functions with the practicality of a larger vehicle.”

The rear storage area features an innovative 8-inch deep under-floor Hidden Removable Utility Box with a reversible lid, featuring both plush-carpeted and durable-plastic sides. Levers near the interior fender wells, conveniently accessible from the tailgate opening, allow for one-touch conversion of the seats into the floor for additional cargo space.

The interior design is intended to enhance the feeling of width and space in the passenger cabin while creating a premium and accommodating atmosphere. The inset sculpting of the instrument panel along with a wide center console increases the sense of roominess. Intuitively grouped controls for the audio, climate and available navigation system are designed to operate with solidity and precision.

The exterior styling evolves the Crossover Utility Vehicle (CUV) concept by integrating a sleek and aerodynamic shape that blends sporty, low-profile contours with versatile CUV functionality.

The Accord Crosstour will be positioned at the top of the Accord family when it goes on sale in November. Additional details will be announced later in the year. Consumer information is available at automobiles.honda.com/future-cars. Additional media information regarding all Honda products is available at www.hondanews.com.

GM will begin production of the Volt late next year, and it’s scheduled to go on sale by the end of 2010. The announcement of the Volt’s initial retail markets will shed light on how GM plans to introduce Americans to a new, unfamiliar transportation technology.

Dealers must be certified to sell and service the plug-in hybrid vehicles, and by no means will every Chevy dealer in the country have the Volt on their lots.

The only clue so far? Jack Maxton Chevrolet in Columbus, Ohio, is already taking deposits on the Volt, according to Maxton sales representative Mike Garvey.

LA Auto Show: GM to Announce Where Volt Will Be Sold Initially (Detroit Free Press)

Drive has just completed its exhaustive Car of the Year testing process in country Victoria.

Over six days last week, nine judges drove 46 cars back-to-back on the open road and the racetrack to separate the champions from the also-rans in 15 categories.

The contenders ranged from city runabouts and hybrids to workhorse utes and expensive sports cars.

It was an exhausting week, but we reckon it’s been worth it because we’ve come up with a comprehensive car buyers’ guide for every taste and budget.

All up, the assembled field in this year’s competition was worth about $3 million and covered a price range stretching from about $18,000 to close to $200,000.

Unlike some other Car of the Year awards, which pick a winner from a list of cars that are new to the market in 2009, Drive’s awards look at all cars on the market, old and new. By including the carryover champ in each category, we make sure the car that gets the gong is the best on the market, rather than the best of this year’s models.

With 15 categories, we’ve been accused by some of adopting an “everyone gets a prize” approach. In our defence, we still award an overall winner, but we also think it’s important to have a judge’s choice for each of the relevant price brackets and market segments.

How much value is it to know that the Nissan GTR is the best car on the market if you’re after a seven-seater and only have $30,000 to spend?

The overall winner is for the purists, the category winners are for the majority of people who want to know which car is best for their budgets and needs.

One of the most common questions we get asked is: how do you judge a luxury limousine against a city runabout?

That’s where our judging criteria come in.

Each car is judged by how it fulfils its stated purpose. The broad parameters include value for money, performance, safety, engine efficiency and quality.

But the criteria are weighted according to the needs of the buyers in each segment. If we’re judging sports cars, performance attracts the most attention, if it’s people-movers, then we focus more on practicality and safety.

Having said that, each car undergoes the same level of testing. That means putting the people-movers through the witches’ hats on the racetrack and testing the sports cars at low speeds on pock-marked public roads.

Why? Because the way a car handles in an emergency situation is just as important for a work ute or people mover as it is for a $200,000 sports car. And on the flip side, stockbrokers still have to drive sports cars in city traffic on patchy road surfaces. If a car’s going to rattle your fillings or put you in traction at the first sign of a pothole, you’re not really going to care how quickly it laps the Nurburgring.

We’ll announce our decision soon, but in the meantime what do you think of our process and the cars that made it on to this year’s list?

What do you think should have been there and wasn’t? What do you think shouldn’t have been there in the first place?

And finally, what’s your tip for the overall winner?

Richard Blackburn

The born-again Gullwing is barely out of the nest and there are already plans to make the Mercedes SLS faster and sexier.

A droptop SLS is definitely in the product program at the AMG hothouse that created the new supersports coupe and there are strong pointers also to an extreme Black Series model.  Both are a couple of years away but Mercedes-AMG director, Kai Marten, is not denying they will come.

“The car has a lot of possibilities, so we will have an intensive internal discussion. In the next year we will decide if there is anything or not,” Marten says.  But press him on the convertible and he comes clean.  “At the moment we haven’t decided a time schedule for the convertible. 

But you can be sure we will not do it next year. You can expect it in one or two years,” Marten admits.  The rigid structure of the SLS coupe is a pointer to a car which will be no slower without a roof and a little more luxurious. Given the space in the basic body, it is almost certain to be have a canvas roof and not a clamshell-style coupe-convertible top.

“We have a very rigid structure also in the convertible. It’s on a very good level for other convertibles,” says Marten.  “And, of course, we prepared this version during the development phase. Therefore the changes we had to do are very little.”

He is a little more guarded on the subject of a Black Series SLS, which would follow similar top-end tweaks on the SLK, SLK and SL, but admits there is “still some potential” in both power and weight cuts for an extreme Gullwing.  “Customers should always get what they want. If you would decide to do so then, yes, there could be some changes. But at the moment we didn’t decide this.

“If we think about a special sort of model then it would be perhaps be a Performance Studio model, or perhaps not. Normally we call them Black Series editions.  “At the moment there are no plans. But there are always a lot of ideas.”

Volkswagen wants to unseat Toyota as number one by 2018. When they announced that strategy, it was widely discounted as Wolfsburg hubris, and as a goal so far out that nobody will recall nine years down the road that the goal has ever been set. Or as the saying goes in Wolfsburg: “In 2018, I’ll be retired.”

A few days ago, The Guardian reported that in the first 9 months of 2009, Volkswagen/Porsche made 4.4 million cars whereas Toyota made 4 million. Which ignited speculations that VeeDub may have reached its elusive goal 9 years early. Then the usual count of apples and oranges ensued, and after the joint ventures with minority stakes were included, Toyota nosed ahead.

Everybody calm down. Volkswagen is years away from overtaking Toyota, reports Das Autohaus. Surprise, surprise, arch rival GM is nipping at Toyota’s heels.

According to an analysis by alleged auto expert Stefan Bratzel, Toyota should close out the year with 7.49m units sold. Bratzel, who is a professor for economics in Bergisch-Gladbach, Germany, sees GM selling only 65000 units less than Toyota. 65K! With a little channel stuffing and creative accounting, GM might be number one. If Bratzel has his numbers right. Bratzel expects Volkswagen to sell 6.17m units in 2009 and to remain solidly in the #3 position. Bratzel sees Toyota and GM performing a head-to-head race for the number one spot in 2010 also.

The battlefield where most of this is fought is China. GM grows faster in China than Volkswagen, both grow much faster in China than Toyota. According to Bratzel, Toyota lost more in the USA than GM. However, data by Automotive News [sub] don’t support that claim. Automotive News says that in the first ten months of 2009, Toyota was down 26 percent in the US, while GM shed 34 percent. Today, the Nikkei [sub] reports that in October, Toyota posted its first year-on-year global sales growth in 15 months. According to the Nikkei “North American sales were essentially flat from a year earlier.” Oh yeah?

Are we confused yet? Didn’t we hear that GM had long been kicked off the #2 podium? Hasn’t Veedub been feted as #2 for most of the year? Guess we’ll have to wait for the good folks at OICA for the definitive word. Which will take a while.

French designer Romain Herment considers that nuclear fusion will allow the turning of nuclear energy into a power source for motorcycles. Not only that, but he has even come up with a concept bike meant to reveal the designer’s idea about how motorcycles based on the new technology will look like.

The “Motorbike 2050 version 2,” as it is called, is a fairly cool looking thing with plenty more interesting details needed to be unveiled. For instance, it will supposedly rely on deuterium and tritium – two inexhaustible natural elements – to make it efficient, as efficient as 1 liter of water per 100 km can be four decades from now.

While we have no knowledge of version 1, we must say that for this project the designer made sure to cover every single aspect such as power being generated by an electric engine and the whole thing weighing only 55kg, although they don’t mention much about the materials used to achieve the light weight.

Each time I see something like this, I start thinking more and more seriously about recording a Harley for when we’ll be riding on this sort of motorcycles.

VIDEO: New Subaru Forester rally car getting warmed up for Dakar

by Damon Lavrinc (RSS feed) on Nov 17th 2009 at 8:00PM

Click above to view the video after the jump

Put the words “Subaru” and “rally” together, and you’ll inevitably be flooded with visions of the Impreza WRX STI campaigning in the WRC. This isn’t one of those times.

Details are a bit on the scarce side, but what we do know is that Barattero Motorsport and YPF Elaion have teamed up (with a little help from Subaru, we’re sure) to compete in the January running of the 2010 Dakar Rally. Their chosen chariot for the epic journey? None other than the recently redesigned Subaru Forester. But it’s a Forester in name alone.

Packing a tuned 2.0-liter (JDM-spec) STI boxer four putting out 300 hp and 420 lb-ft of torque, the Elaion is a tube-framed, carbon fiber and kevlar-bodied beast that’s been outfitted with dual shocks featuring nine inches of suspension travel, vented, cross-drilled brakes sized 295mm and all the assorted kit to run in the world’s most arduous off-road race. Yoshiu Ikemachi and Gabriel Pozzo will kick off their journey in the Dakar Forester on January 1st, but before the festivities get underway they’ve released a teaser video which you can scoop out after the jump.