Apr30
A handful of lawmakers are accusing General Motors of misleading the public by continuing to claim as part of its advertising blitz that the auto giant has repaid its government loans "in full." General Motors has been running ads on all the major networks claiming the company repaid its $6.7 billion U.S. government loan "with interest five years ahead of the original schedule." General Motors Company CEO Ed Whitacre can be seen in the ad walking through an auto plant as he touts the...
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Automakers expect to see a double-digit increase in April U.S. auto sales over the same period a year ago when the recession roiled the industry. U.S. auto sales are likely to rise more than 20 percent for a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 11.4 million units in April, according to a Thomson Reuters poll of 12 economists. That would mark a gain from 9.5 million in April 2009, according to the Automotive News data center. But the annualized sales rate is expected to come in well...
Hyundai is working on a brand new generation of its Elantra sedan that’s due to go on sale later this year as a 2011 model, but we can already get a look at the new car thanks to the unveiling of its South Korean cousin, the Avante, at the 2010 Busan Auto Show this week.With sportier and even more elegant lines than its predecessor, the new Elantra features a design shared with the 2011 Hyundai Sonata and dominated by a coupe-like profile with tapered back headlights
Apr29
Sixteen days after the Lexus GX 460 landed on Consumer Reports "Do Not Buy" list and Toyota issued a stop-sale on the luxury 'ute, Lexus has developed a fix for the stability control issue discovered by CR and has begun rolling out the fix. In a statement issued by Mark Templin, the Lexus Group Vice President and General Manager says that the automaker's engineers were able to recognize and develop a remedy for the stability control system which CR deemed unsafe during its "Throttle...
General Motors Co., which repaid $4.7 billion in U.S. loans last week, properly used escrowed cash for the payment, a Treasury Department official said in responding to complaints from a Republican senator. GM used the escrowed funds created with government loans and overseen by the Treasury after determining the cash wasn't needed for “extraordinary” expenses, Herbert Allison, Treasury's assistant secretary for financial stability, said in a letter to Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa...
Apr28
BMW AG has overtaken Toyota Motor Corp. as the world's most valuable automotive brand, an annual ranking of the world's top brands showed. Ford Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG improved their brand value, according to BrandZ Top 100, a survey compiled by the market research company Millward Brown. Peter Walshe, Millward Brown global brand director, said he believes Toyota will bounce back after the automaker's massive recall campaign started to hit its brand value toward the end of 2009...
Performance sports car maker Porsche AG's <PSHG_p.DE> sterling reputation for quality took a severe dent on Tuesday, when it recalled every Panamera it built only months after the model line was launched to much fanfare. The announcement comes on the heels of a quality scandal at Toyota <7203.T> and serves as a bitter pill for Michael Macht, who headed up production before being named the brand's chief executive late in July. The Panamera grand tourer was supposed to catapult...
You know the honeymoon’s over when you give your wife money for dinner and ask for the change. Love doctors have spent countless hours calculating the honeymoon stage somewhere between seven years and 24 hours. What’s the honeymoon period on a car? LeaseTrader.com polled roughly 2,500 men and women and received some humorous feedback. LeaseTrader.com, the company that helps people trade their car Lease Specials to someone else, set up the survey to ask men and women how long they...
Toyota Motor Corp. will announce a recall of 2003 Toyota Sequoia sport-utility vehicles Wednesday over issues with the electronic stability-control system, according to a person briefed on the plans. Last week, Toyota recalled 9,400 2010 Lexus GX 460 SUVs for a problem with their electronic stability-control system after Consumer Reports magazine called the vehicles unsafe, saying they posed the potential of flipping over in certain sharp turns. The National Highway Traffic Safety...
If you thought you'd previously seen it all, well, you're wrong. Case in point: David Morales Colón, a 22-year-old Puerto Rican man who was shot to death last Thursday, and whose wake is now making headlines here in the United States mainland. How come? Well, suffice it to say that the funeral directors at Marin Funeral Home in San Juan's Hato Rey neighborhood have a flair for the unorthodox. For example, in 2008, they embalmed another young shooting victim and displayed his body...