Sunday, May 31, 2015

Chart Of The Day: 19 Months Of Midsize Pickup Truck Market Share In America

USA midsize truck market share chart October 2013 April 2015

Midsize pickups have increased their share of the overall pickup truck category by around four percentage points since GM launched the second-generation Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon.

Compared with a period when the twins weren't on sale, the volume sent the direction of midsize pickups jumped 50% over the first four months of 2015. That gain of 39,000 units wasn't simply down to the GM twins, either, as the class-leading Toyota Tacoma is growing faster than the overall pickup truck category.

Yet, at the same time as the small/midsize pickup truck market boomed back from obscurity into an oft-discussed vehicle category, U.S. sales of full-size trucks were on the upswing as well. The 6% increase generated by the Ford F-Series, Chevrolet Silverado, Ram P/U, GMC Sierra, Toyota Tundra, and Nissan Titan translates to more than 36,000 extra sales, year-over-year.

As a result, pickup trucks produced 14.3% of the new vehicle sales in the U.S. over the first one-third of 2015, up from 13.6% during the same period one year ago.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.

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Nair, Pardo Drop Hints of Ford GT LeMans, New Shelby Cobra at Auto Moto Film Fest

Stereo0042_B

After some success in connection with the Pebble Beach car festivities, the producers of the Auto Moto Film Festival decided to bring the show to Detroit's Fillmore auditorium for the weekend of the Chevrolet Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix. I hope to have something about the festival and the outstanding movies and personalities therein up on TTAC sometime later, but there was actually some automotive news generated at the event.

Well, sorta.

Ford Motor Company's head of product development coyly avoided denying company plans to campaign the new Ford GT at the 24 hour LeMans race next year. The designer of the previous Ford GT, an homage to the LeMans conquering Ford GT40, also acknowledged he's been working on a successor to another iconic 1960s sports car.

 

Ford GT designer Camilo Pardo photographic his personal Ford GT

Ford GT designer Camilo Pardo photographing his personal Ford GT

One of the films in the festival is a short titled Fuel Injected about Ford GT designer Camilo Pardo. Pardo's studio is just down Woodward from the Fillmore and in front of the theater he had parked his personal '05 GT he drives regularly around his neighborhood in downtown Detroit. It wasn't the only cool car there. Magnus Walker of air-cooled Porsche fame, who was the subject of another of the festival's films, brought one of his very cool race inspired 911s. Though Ford Motor Company was not one of the event's official sponsors, they brought one of the new GTs to join in the automotive celebration, the same gray example that was on display at the Chicago and New York auto shows.

IMG_0290

Chaperoning the new Ford GT was Raj Nair, head of product development for the Dearborn-based automaker, who joined Pardo in taking some questions after Fuel Injected was screened. Nair, who was involved in the development of the 2005 GT, compared that car to the new one. He opened by saying 1966 was a very important year for Ford, mentioning it was the year Ford swept the podium with the GT40 at LeMans, "Kicking Ferrari's ass." His remarks mostly centered on the new GT's technical direction, specifically mentioning it's Formula One derived pushrod suspension, the car's aerodynamically shaped styling, its carbon fiber construction and its race developed (in Daytona Prototype) twin turbo V6 engine. What he said about Ferrari in introducing those features piqued my interest about Ford's full plans for the new GT.

Stereo0051_B

After the Q&A was over, I privately asked Nair if his remarks about 1966 and LeMans meant that the car would be competing there next year. He replied, "Right now we're focusing on the production car." I complimented him on the deflection and he said he's had some practice with that question. I then pointed out, "Yes, but I noticed that you didn't say no." Nair just smiled broadly.

IMG_0316

For his part, Camilo Pardo said before Carroll Shelby died, the two of them were working on a new car. That was in response to the MC asking him about his next car project, which the MC alluded to being some kind of a secret.

Pardo is a bit of a rockstar in the car business and his studio has hosted some of Detroit's most legendary parties. He may have had something to drink by the time of the Q&A, and he danced around the issue before saying Shelby approached him about doing one more car.

They decided on doing a convertible. Pardo said a major reason was cost, with the greenhouse of a car being one of the more expensive parts to make. Open cars are faster to engineer and besides, convertibles also look good and people like them. They're "better" in Pardo's words.

When the MC pressed for more details, Pardo hemmed and hawed a bit before talking about how the original GT40 really wasn't well known by the general public. Ford only build about 300 GT40s and just a handful of them were built as street cars. I was a kid when they raced and I didn't see a real GT40 until I was a grandparent. Pardo then said while he was at Ford they did a concept called the GR1, based on GT mechanicals but styled as an homage to Pete Brock's stunning Shelby Daytona Coupe. Shelby American only built six Daytona Coupes. Hardly anyone outside of car enthusiasts know what they look like. Pardo then said, "But everyone knows the Cobra."

So, was Carroll Shelby working on a next generation Cobra at the time of his death?

 

2004 Ford Cobra Concept

2004 Ford Cobra Concept

It wasn't clear if this new car was worked on while Pardo was still employed at Ford, where he worked from 1985 to 2009. Carroll Shelby and Ford had restored their relationship with the production Shelby Mustangs and the '08 GR1 concept being some of the fruits of that relationship. Another Shelby related Ford concept was something actually called the Cobra, a roadster that was shown in 2004. It's design was led by Manfred Rumpel, so I doubt that's what Pardo and the MC were talking about. Pardo's current relationship with Ford is complicated. When he left Ford it was rumored  he expected to be fired, with higher ups at Ford unhappy about the attention he got over the GT, his ego and his artist's lifestyle. At the film festival, though, he said Ford graciously invited him to participate in official events concerning the GT and he was cordial with Nair.

Whatever the secret Shelby Pardo car is, I'm sure it will look great if it ever comes to fruition. I think Pardo's take on the GT40 was an improvement over the original, not an easy thing to do. Doing an homage or retro car well is hard to do. Tom Matano, who styled the original Mazda Miata after the 1960s Lotus Elan, told me how much it constrains a designer.

Another thing that constrains a designer, at least a very successful one, is the need to succeed yet again. Pardo is unquestionably proud of being part of the legacy that started with the GT40 and continues with the latest GT. At the film festival he said designing a car that's "on that shelf" as the '05 GT is, obviously makes a career for a car designer. He also said a car designer can be inspired by but can't dwell on the past. Because of the long lead time for a new design to reach production, Pardo explained, car designers are already living in the future. He joked that sometimes, while he was at Ford when he got off work at 5 p.m., he'd have to remind himself what year it really was.

Photos by Cars In Depth. More pics of the blue Ford GT here, the grey GT here, and more video here.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can get a parallax view at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don't worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

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Saturday, May 30, 2015

The Night That Danger Girl Stole A Black Challenger From The Airport

chally1

"Let me show you how this works," Danger Girl laughed, as we descended the stairs in the airport parking garage. I call her Danger Girl because

0. I keep putting her in danger, sometimes mortal;
1. She soloed in a Cessna before she turned seventeen;
2. She has certain other dangerous habits that, this being a different kind of publication than it was in days past, cannot be discussed in the full and frank fashion with which it was once my delight to oppress our more delicate readers.

She'd told me that we were renting a Camry. I was happy about this. I like renting Camrys. But as we walked towards a line of cars that clearly included Camrys, Danger Girl took a sharp right turn towards a black Challenger in what I was pretty sure was the rental return lane. "I can take any car I want," she informed me, "so I'm going to take this one." I loaded our luggage into the wide, flat, Seventies-style trunk as she fired up the Pentastar and adjusted the seat. "Off we go!" she laughed, and we drove up two levels of a circular ramp and out into the warm California night.

As we entered the freeway, something occurred to me.

"Hey… aren't you supposed to, like, tell somebody you're taking this car?"


Danger Girl's response was measured. "I… suppose… that maybe we should have passed some kind of security gate. But I do this all the time. I just take whatever car I want and then my company pays for it."

"Have you ever just driven a car out without talking to anyone?" There was a long pause.

"Maybe, possibly, not."

"Should I call the rental agency?"

"If you want." I called the rental agency. There were three options in the automated system. None of them corresponded to reporting a self-stolen car. So I pressed the third option.

"Blah-blah Car Rental, this is LaQueesha speaking." I'm not making that up; it was her name.

"Yes, ah, I picked up a rental car from the airport and nobody asked me for any ID or had me sign anything."

"Can I get the identifying number on the car?" I read it to her.

"Sir, I'm showing that car as being in our inventory."

"Well, that's because I drove it out and nobody stopped me."

"Well, I am showing that we still have it."

"Well, I," I responded in somewhat irritated fashion, "am showing that it is driving down the 405."

"What do you want me to do about that, sir?"

"Could you, I don't know, maybe put it in your computer that it wasn't stolen? That we're bringing it back?"

"I'll have to connect you to the rental office to do that."

"Then connect me." And the phone promptly bleeped to inform me that the other party had hung up.

"I wouldn't worry about it," Danger Girl said, "it's a black Challenger, they won't be looking for it."

"Baby," I whined in response, "cops like pulling over black Challengers so much they don't even care which one it is!"

"I don't know what you're moaning about. I'm the one driving, not you."

"I'm an accomplice! Plus, this is California! They'll arrest me for stare-raping you into doing it or something!"

"This thing's pretty fast," Danger Girl noted, as the speedometer swung past '70' on the four-lane surface street. "But I can't see out of it at all."

"Then why are you going so fast?"

"In case they're looking for us." I dialed the rental car company again. And got Omar. Who also hung up on me.

"Well, I want to have a drink," Danger Girl exclaimed, "so I think we should give it to these valet people."

* * *
In the morning, we fetched the Challenger back from the valet. There were no cops waiting to bust us. Having spent half of my life in imminent expectation that either the police or the film crew from "Cheaters" would appear around the next corner, I didn't truly relax until we were away from the hotel and back on the freeway, where Danger Girl accelerated to a steady eighty-in-a-fifty-five.

"You cannot," I explained, as if to a child, "operate a stolen car with this degree of recklessness."

"Hey!" she exclaimed. "It's another Challenger just like us!" And in truth I'd seen four black rental V6 Challys that day already.

chally2

This one was being driven by a Hispanic fellow with a face tattoo. I instructed DG to stick close to him as we traveled to the parking garage where my car was stored, figuring that the LAPD, given the choice between pulling over a blonde girl in a North Face jacket or a Mexican with a face tattoo, would choose the latter, even if the license plate on the APB matched the former.

We retrieved my car without difficulty and Danger Girl had an idea. "Hey. There's an airport here, too," she said, with the same kind of wonder a child might display while playing SimCity. "Let's leave the car at the rental office." We pulled up in convoy and she drove in without me. Two young black women awaited her.

"Girls," DG chirped, "this car is from another airport. They just let me take it. I'm giving it back."

"You just took it!" responded the lot attendants, in tuneful unison. I could read their minds from a distance. This is what these blonde bitches get up to! They steal cars! And don't nobody stop them!

"I just took it!" DG responded. "Would you like it back?"

"Well," one of the attendants responded, scanning it half-heartedly, "It don't be showing up in the system."

"So," DG prompted, "it's like this never happened! Do I have to pay you anything?"

"I guess not," the taller of the two replied.

"Well then. Goodbye!"

"Goodbye!" the lot girls said, again in tuneful unison. DG hopped into the passenger seat of my car. Behind her, I could hear one attendant say to the other,

"She just took the car."

"Surely," I opined, as the three-cylinder engine roared to life behind me and we pulled away, "there will be consequences for this." And yet there were not.

THE END.

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Crapwagon Outtake: 2000 BMW M Coupe

BMW M Coupe

As should be quite clear from my previous Crapwagon ramblings, I like weird cars. My current garage, however, is quite boring, with a domestic minvan and SUV, and a rusty/immobile Miata. For the last four years, my automotive wanderlust has been mostly sated by writing for Bring A Trailer. I've been able to stave my funky automotive cravings by writing about the cars rather than inviting a call from a divorce attorney.

There are a few cars that make me consider that tradeoff. Near the top of the list: an E36/8 Clownshoe, otherwise known as the M Coupe. Those massive flares, the short wheelbase, and the MGB GT-aping hatch make me feel all tingly. I followed a trailered, caged M Coupe last weekend for a while (I'm assuming it was headed to a trackday at Mid Ohio) and it gave me rather dirty thoughts.

This one is in Estoril Blue, my second favorite (behind Technoviolet) BMW hue of all. It has less than 60,000 miles on the odometer and is basically stock. The limited production numbers seem to be driving prices up, sadly out of reach of my meager wallet. I doubt these will reach 1M levels of insanity, but I can see $45,000 for a clean, low-mileage example like this one in about five years.

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New Models Are Major Contributors In America’s Growing Auto Industry

2015 Lexus NX200T

123,000 of the 5.4 million new vehicle sales generated in the United States over the last four months are new vehicle nameplates which weren't on sale at this time a year ago.

Between January and April, the Ford Transit, Acura TLX, Chevrolet Trax, Lexus NX, and 18 other new nameplates accounted for 2.3% of all new vehicle sales volume in the United States, way up from the 1.7% achieved by a smaller fleet of all-new nameplates during the same period one year earlier.

(This year's figure doesn't take into account the Volkswagen Golf SportWagen, as that's not so much a new nameplate as a direct successor to the Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen, which was basically a Golf wagon with another name.)

No new nameplate is selling as often as the Ford Transit, Ford's E-Series replacement. The replacement period is certainly not over, however, as the Transit generated 33,794 sales through the first one-third of 2015 alongside 18,710 copies of the E-Series.

2015 ford transit

Acura tasked its new TLX with replacing two cars, the TL and TSX. 13,834 TLX sedans were sold during the first four months of 2015 (32,961 since its launch last summer), up 34% from the combined TL/TSX figure of 10,349 sales during the same period a year ago.

Chevrolet sold 13,137 copies of the Trax subcompact crossover between January and April of this year. At this time last year, Buick sold 15,040 Encores. The arrival of the Encore's Trax twin hasn't slowed the Encore.

Lexus's NX launched as a quick hit. 12,532 copies of the NX200T and NX300h were sold in the first four months of 2015, making the NX more popular than the Mercedes-Benz GLK, BMW X3, and Lincoln MKC.

Chevrolet-Trax-has-different-various-options-for-fuel-

Another small premium crossover, the Mercedes-Benz GLA-Class, attracted 7,750 owners in the first-third of 2015. Mercedes-Benz adds those sales to the 10,896 copies of the CLA sedan sold already this year.

Indeed, small SUVs/CUVs are common on the list of new vehicles. The Lincoln MKC, Jeep Renegade, Audi Q3, Porsche Macan, BMW X4, and Land Rover Discovery Sport combined for 23,170 sales between January and April. Somewhere between those smaller utility vehicles and traditional wagons sits the Volvo V60 Cross Country, 636 of which have been sold so far this year.

Other products generating sales activity in the United States this year not around in any form at this time last year: the Mini Cooper 4-door, Lexus RC, BMW i3, Chevrolet City Express (a Nissan NV200 copy), Ram ProMaster City, Alfa Romeo 4C, Mercedes-Benz AMG GT, and Porsche 918 Spyder. Assuming their buyers wouldn't have headed elsewhere – which some surely would have – the market would be up 3% year-to-date. Instead, with these vehicles contributing, U.S. auto sales are up 5.4% in early 2015.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.

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Friday, May 29, 2015

2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost Sedan Tested: Three’s (Not Enough) Company

2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost
-We spend an awful lot of our energy analyzing and quantifying speed. Entire stories are centered around straight-line acceleration, the effects of different tires on 707-hp muscle cars at the drag strip (okay, one 707-hp muscle car), and even prodding rental cars to their top speeds—in reverse. We interrupt that programming to present a test of something decidedly not all that fast: the three-cylinder 2015 Ford Focus EcoBoost sedan. READ MORE ››

-

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2015 Ford Focus SE 1.0L EcoBoost Sedan – Instrumented Test

-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L    EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost turbocharged 1.0-liter inline-3 engine-2015 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost turbocharged 1.0-liter inline-3 engine--

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