The hardest sell
By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - 7 Comments
Carmakers are rolling out new, highly rated compact cars, but can they convince consumers to go small?
SUV sales in Canada are now up 20 per cent | GM; Mark Elias/Bloomberg/Getty Images
On a windswept airfield near Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., dozens of automotive scribes spent last week putting a new crop of 2011 vehicles through their paces as part of a consumer-oriented annual testing event. And, for the first time in years, the excitement wasn’t limited to pricey “prestige” vehicles with nameplates like Porsche, BMW and Jaguar. Instead, it was in the unassuming compact and subcompact categories—the so-called “econobox” segment that has been historically associated with puny engines, bland styling and hard plastic interiors.
After soaring gas prices and the recession exposed Detroit’s penchant for focusing on big gas guzzlers as an epic folly, the North American auto industry has been forced to get serious about the small car market and heed government demands for better fuel economy. That’s particularly the case at General Motors and Chrysler, which were bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars.
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The trucks are still big. The engines, puny.
By Jason Kirby - Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments
Ford’s newest Explorer SUV offers a glimpse of the company’s future
Chris Hondros/Getty Images
When Ford unveiled the 2011 Explorer last week, it was hard to say what was the bigger surprise—that the company hauled several tons of dirt, rocks and trees into the heart of New York City for the big reveal, or that anybody even cared. The rugged truck that kicked off the SUV craze in the 1990s has fallen on hard times amid the recession and steep pump prices. Over the last decade, sales have evaporated, tumbling a whopping 88 per cent, from 450,000 to just 52,000 last year. Yet, when the redesigned and retooled Explorer rolled down a makeshift hill outside Macy’s department store, it triggered gushing praise from analysts, investors and prospective buyers. And it was the clearest sign yet the turnaround at Ford has kicked into high gear.
In many ways, the new Explorer is an SUV in name only. It still resembles a sport utility vehicle—it’s roughly the same size as the previous Explorer, the V6 version offers more horsepower than the previous model and it can still tow a 5,000-lb. load. But everything about the way the 2011 Explorer is constructed points to it being a crossover. The vehicle’s unibody design, in which the body and frame are welded together as a single unit, shares more in common with the Ford Taurus car than with the company’s line of body-on-frame pickups. That has helped make the Explorer lighter and more fuel-efficient.
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Awaiting the Tiger tale
By Colby Cosh - Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 7:35 AM - 64 Comments
Like Scott and millions of others, I’ve been sitting here trying to imagine possible conditions under which the story of Elin Nordegren using a golf club on the rear window of an SUV to “rescue” her husband from a fender-bender could hold up in a way that will eventually have us all saying “Yeah, of course, that makes perfect sense.”
OK, best shot at it. Ready? Premise: Tiger Woods obviously doesn’t drive an ordinary SUV. C’mon, did you really think he would drive the same car you drive and every other schmuck drives? Are you kidding? Do you know how many Travis Bickles a celebrity with even one-tenth of his visibility attracts? And didn’t you see what happened to the Princess of Wales? Christ, no. Tiger obviously drives some kind of crazy military-hardened skunk-works SUV. It’s a given!
What I bet happened was, when he hit the hydrant, it tripped all the secret security features. Collision bars made from high-tech composites on the side doors, chemical sealants, alarms, fire-extinguishing gas, external flamethrowers in the wheel wells. Who knows what-all. Elin had been briefed by the manufacturer; she knew that the only way into the vehicle was through the back. It was designed that way!—that’s the access node for the first responders! “If you ever need to get out of the vehicle, ma’am, just grab a niblick and go medieval on that window.” She was just following her training! She did exactly the right…….
No, huh? Well, heck, I tried. Anybody else got anything?
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Megapundit: Conrad Black and the "feline" French
By selley - Monday, July 7, 2008 at 1:51 PM - 0 Comments
WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on the US Army deserter “refugee”; …Rex Murphy onWEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on the US Army deserter “refugee”; Rex Murphy on the Order of Canada; Conrad Black on the French; Doug Saunders on the G8; Scott Taylor on Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum; Dan Gardner on the chemical peril.
Give Elizabeth May back her carbon tax!
What Stéphane Dion risks with his Green Shift, what he stands to gain, and what the Green Party’s already lost.Lorne Gunter, writing in the Edmonton Journal, thinks Garth Turner’s remarks about “losers” in Alberta and Quebec were “a typical (if more extreme) Liberal response to complaints that Dion’s Green Shift punishes the West”—and to just about any policy of the day, for that matter. The basic strategy, in Gunter’s view, has long been to “equate Liberal policy with the national interest so that anyone who disagrees can be portrayed as an enemy of national unity and not merely an opponent of Liberal ideas.” Dion deserves credit for taking his Green Shift caravan to the West, Gunter argues, but any unfriendly faces he meets will be the result of his own party’s previous approach to governance.
Besides “exacerbat[ing] the polarization between Western and Central Canada,” the Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert sees other risks for Dion: that the carbon tax, combined with record-high oil prices, “will turn many Canadians off the fight on climate change”; that Canadians might instead be united “against a common federal enemy”; and that it “will divide the pro-Kyoto camp between advocates of a carbon tax and supporters of a different approach.” In these and other ways, Hébert argues, Dion’s approach is a replay of his advocacy for the Clarity Act—it’s more likely to win him fans in Toronto than where the policy has the most effect, and it suffers from very bad timing.
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Megapundit: Rosie DiManno vs. the U.S. Army
By selley - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 1:58 PM - 0 Comments
WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: …Rosie DiManno on female police in Afghanistan, and on American troops’WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on female police in Afghanistan, and on American troops’ enemy-making skills; Scott Taylor on Kandahar prison; Daphne Bramham on the children of the FLDS: Lawrence Martin on Liberal incivility; Thomas Walkom on Roy Romanow; Dan Gardner on pesticides and science; Greg Weston on the lost promise of openness and accountability.
Ils accusent
It’s official: the pundits have absolutely nothing good to say about federal politics. And away we go…If anyone’s going to investigate the unlikely prospect that Maxime Bernier’s left-behind documents represented a security breach, Lysiane Gagnon suggests it be the foreign affairs department, and if necessary CSIS and the RCMP. Committee hearings would be “a joke,” she writes in The Globe and Mail—a “partisan circus,” just like they’ve been at the Schreibergelder hearings. If MPs are really this desperate for something to occupy their well-paid time, she suggests they discuss military equipment, Omar Khadr and the private members bills “that many fear might eventually lead to the criminalization of abortion.”
The Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert says Stephen Harper’s “crafting [of] a bipartisan consensus on the future of the Canadian mission in Kandahar” was a rare snapshot of successful “Conservative statesmanship”—a triumph of “finesse” over his manifest preference for “brute strength.” This recollection seems a tad airbrushed to us, but she’s quite right that the government’s been pretty much crap since then, if not before. The positive contributions of Jim Prentice and David Emerson in cabinet are routinely undone by Peter Van Loan’s “overly partisan tone,” she argues, and it’s needlessly damaging the government’s reputation.
