Hey, remember Delphi Powertrain? Once upon a time, it was part of GM, and it developed advanced concepts in — you guessed — powertrains. Since it failed to provide employment to enough grinning MBAs, however, it was shucked aside and cored-out like many other productive parts of the Artist Currently Known As Old General Motors. Turns out, however, that the venture-capitalized folks working... 

Click here to view the embedded video. With GM now dropping out of Super Bowl advertising, what’s next for the marketing bigwigs at the Ren Cen? And yes, I’ll take the Storm, thank you very much. A report in the Wall Street Journal outlines GM’s plans for Superbowl Sunday. Super Bowl advertising is effective but has become too expensive to justify the cost, GM’s global marketing... 

Allegedly, there is rampant overcapacity in Europe. Not so at BMW. “The BMW plants are busting at the seams,” writes Germany’s Handelsblatt. BMW is looking into building new factories abroad. Possible locations are Central Europe. Or rather Mexico, writes the paper. BMW already has a factory in Hungary. Hungary and Slovakia are begging BMW to build plants there. Their chances diminish by the... 

Canadian Car crooks have an affliction for Asian automobiles. According to a list of the 10 most stolen cars in Canada – 2011, published by the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), half of the cars are Japanese, with Toyotas and Hondas taking the podium. And the losers are: 2009 Toyota Venza 4-door 1999 Honda Civic SiR 2-door 2000 Honda Civic SiR 2-door 2006 Ford F350 Pickup Truck 4WD 2002 Cadillac... 

Mother’s Day last weekend got me to thinking about the first car ride I ever took: a cruise home from the hospital in my parents’ 1956 Olds 88. Thing is, that car got destroyed by a combination of Minnesota rust and Minnesota deer a few months later and I don’t remember it. My first identifiable car memory involves crawling around on the slippery blue vinyl back seat (without benefit... 

You know what’s wrong with this country nowadays? You can’t buy a light pickup truck made by a company so agricultural that a piece of farm equipment is in its very name! That all ended in 1980, when the last pickup rolled off the strike-ridden IHC assembly line. The outdoorsy Scout is still a common sight here in Colorado (on the street as well as in the junkyards), but quite a few of... 

Nobody said it would be easy to sell a rebadged American large car in America, but with the recent economic hammering that Italy and other countries have endured, the market for the Lancia Thema, a rebadged Chrysler 300, is suffering in Italy and the rest of Europe. Italy enacted a luxury tax on January 1st that will be slapped on vehicles making 252 horsepower or more. Buyers of the Thema would... 

With a new Volvo XC90 finally getting a re-design in 2014 (after 12 years on the market!), the old platform, like so many old European cars, will move on to become a Chinese market car – though Geely has grand aspirations for the venerable Swedish SUV. Volvo signed the XC90 platform over to Geely, their Chinese owners, back in March. Geely already has a “premium” brand called Emgrand,... 

Automotive News posted a picture of a Kia K9 luxury sedan wearing manufacturer plates on the road near Orange County, California. Does that mean we’re due to get the K9 any time soon? Once upon a time, my father worked for Kia Canada, and the company’s head office had a frequent rotation of Korean market cars sent over for evaluation. Some, like the Carens, made it over under a different... 

Once a year, there are people who compete for who gets fastest up a mountain. The mountain is Pike’s Peak, and the occasion is the International Hill Climb. It will happen on July 3-8, as it did every year since 1916, only interrupted by the occasional world war. This year, one of the most interesting races could take place on battery power. In a way, Pike’s Peak is made for electrics. The race...