Cars and the automotive industry.
I haven’t missed the sale of Volvo to Geely, but it wasn’t as momentous as the rebirth of Saab. We knew the deal was coming and the rest were formalities. The company has said there will be no Geelys badged as Volvos and vice versa. It recognizes the Volvo brand is too valuable to […]
Read More… from Volvo Cars, a unit of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co.
Sam Flemming in Advertising Age mentioned the scandal that Toyota has been embroiled in inside China, before a lot of the bad press it received in the occident over “unintended acceleration”. This involved a netizen, an owner of a Toyota Highlander Sport, filming that his SUV was unable to get up a 30-degree incline, […]
Read More… from Toyota’s recent “30-degree” scandal in China
As of today, I am back with the reliable Firefox 3·0 on my desktop machine as well. Firefox 3.5 would generally crash daily, though I remember there was once a three-day period in January when it did not crash at all. (There were other days when it would crash two or three times, just to […]
Read More… from Back on Firefox 3·0: I have had enough of the daily crashes
You can’t help but wonder (without reading the court transcripts and judgement) how the sentencing of Koua Fong Lee could be so harsh. In 2006, Lee’s Toyota Camry, with his pregnant wife, daughter, brother and father on board, accelerated out of control and smashed into an Oldsmobile, killing three people in the second car back […]
Read More… from Jailed Minnesota Toyota owner may get retrial
Rumour has it that the new Saab—a small car (finally)—will resemble the ur-Saab, the 92. In fact, inside Saab, it has the codename 92. Where have I heard this one before? I know. Stefan Engeseth’s Detective Marketing, 2001 edition. And from what I understand, since in 1999 I could not read much Swedish, it […]
Read More… from Saab promises new generation of cars will have original DNA
I may be later than many in writing about this, but I only saw it in my Tweetstream today. What a welcome departure from the blood-and-gore approach of many road safety public announcements, from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership. You may also like Drivetribe will be a mecca for motorheads—Autocade readers welcome Funny how […]
I was surprised to learn that Toyota still has not issued a worldwide recall of its troublesome Prius NHW30 model, even though one had gone out in New Zealand. In layman’s terms, the brakes allegedly don’t work when you want them to. In more complex terms, the software has trouble distinguishing between different types […]
Read More… from Toyota’s troubles stem from forgetting its principles
When Fiat was in the poo, I remember heading in to Italy and the cabs were a mixture of German and French cars, with a few Italian ones. Generally, it was a reflection of the state of the local motor industry: cab drivers are, perhaps subconsciously, patriotic and quite traditional. If they reject the local […]
Read More… from Taxis signal how a local car industry is going
If I were Google, would I have entered Red China with the censored version of Google.cn, hiding things from the Chinese people for the sake of money? In February 2006, I blogged about this very issue and concluded, ‘No.’ Obeying the law is one thing. Providing the people with slanted views to prop up […]
Read More… from Google’s rethink on Red China: you can’t stop the Chinese people
Even though I am no longer blogging on Vox, I have some good news there: the cars’ group that I founded got its 100th member today. It’s actually the third time we’ve crossed 100, but on those previous occasions, it was sploggers that got us over that number. And each time I’ve had to […]