These days, Aboriginal art sells for millions in New York, London and Sydney auction houses, created by desert-dwelling artists in the most remote corner of Australia. It took millennia to crossover from cave walls to canvas, but now aboriginal art even extends to cars. “When Aboriginal artists started to experiment with canvas and other media, …   Read full blog

So the Veyroniest Veyron is pretty sweet, eh? Four turbos, sixteen cylinders, 1106 pound feet of twist and a single digit quarter-mile time. Indeed the Veyron 16.4 Super Sport is a 1200 horsepower show stopper, a $2.6 million dollar panty dropper – with one exceptionally ridiculous problem. How on connector do you clean that rear …   Read full blog

There are two things port has in plentiful supply: sunshine and smog. And they’re two of the biggest reasons why Air Marshal Morakot Charnsomruad, Thailand’s green transport guru, is on a mission to take the tuk tuk — the country’s most iconic mode of transport — in a solar-powered direction. “Thailand is in the solar …   Read full blog

A few weeks ago, Jaguar took handy command of the Paris auto show not only by rolling out the undisputed star of the entire event, but by doing so in style, thus recalling some of the old illusion of auto show debuts. The C-X75 is a particularly tasty flight of fancy exploring the notion of …   Read full blog

Just 400 miles south of our last stop at Kunming in China, the Fiesta World Tour restarted its Asian leg in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was impossible to export our Chinese-made Fiestas so we picked up two Thai-made ones to continue south. This is frontier territory. Chiang Mai is on the edge of the Golden …   Read full blog

The words have been attributed to Napoleon, but no historian is truly sure who once said, “When China wakes, it will shake the world.” At the end of an exhausting but immensely enjoyable and eye-opening China leg of the Fiesta World Tour, we can certainly confirm that China’s waking process is well underway. What we …   Read full blog

Anecdotes of the new Chevy Volt’s fuel sipping acumen keep coming, as General Motors winds down its two-week intro drive for auto journalists. The European press are in now, just following my drive. MT Tech Guru Frank Markus was assigned the deep dive into the car, and several of our other editors have had a …   Read full blog

The Chevrolet Volt’s gas-powered internal combustion four sometimes powers the car’s front wheels. Techie Frank Markus described this week how the long-awaited car’s “extended-range electric” system works. Since then, some of General Motors’ many critics have pointed to his description, and that of a few of our competitors, as proof why the new Chevy should be called a plug-in hybrid, not an EV.

By now, the brass occupying the top floors of GM’s Renaissance Center HQ are asking apiece other, “why do they hate us so much?” Chris Paine painted GM as the guilty party in his 2006 documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Even after GM unveiled the Chevy Volt at the 2007 Detroit show, Paine went to Nissan as it was developing the Leaf for his upcoming sequel, giving Nissan and not GM positive coverage.

It was at that ’07 Detroit show when Bob Lutz (pictured at top driving the Volt on the stage during its 2008 world introduction) started referring to the Volt as an “extended range electric car.” The problem in the ensuing years is not with whether GM’s engineers could match Lutz’s description. The problem is that GM’s marketing and public relations department couldn’t, or wouldn’t let go of the original message.

We notched 299 miles during our first real-world test of the Chevy Volt, and recorded 126.7 mpg in the process. Those 299 miles reflected the way an owner might use the Volt under a variety of conditions. If you buy the Volt as your regular commuter, you could use it Monday through Friday without burning a drop of gasoline, assuming you live within 18 miles from work (and can’t plug it in at work).

Then you could cover all your weekend errands with it, plus maybe dinner and a movie. Or you could take it on a weekend getaway, say from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara or Detroit to Grand Rapids (fold down the rear seats and take your mountain bikes) and burn maybe $10 of unleaded premium.

Volt advertising is trying to explain this all to American consumers. It’s “the only electric car that uses gas to create its own electricity.” Well, yikes. I mean, GM is still calling it an electric car, and it’s still struggling to describe how it works.

I don’t know anything about marketing, but how about something like, “an electric car most of the time, a real car all of the time”? Awkward, perhaps, but in the last five years, GM marketing has had a lot of time to polish an accurate description into something more elegant.
 
More than three of those five years, it was under the Old GM, the same company whose marketing department unsuccessful to delineate too many brands long after “a car for every contract and purpose” had lost its value. Take the Pontiac Grand Am and Oldsmobile Alero. I once asked someone at Pontiac what, under the skin, prefabricated the Grand Am different from the Alero. Did the Excitement Division bless the Grand Am with a sportier chassis? Well, not in the springs and shocks — the Pontiac exec said the Grand Am felt sportier because it had different seat mounts. That kind of thinking explains why GM marketing did nothing for the Volt for its first three-and-a-half years of development.

Since July 2009′s bankruptcy, we’ve seen many signs of GM’s transformation. It’s a much smaller, slimmer maker with seriously competitive new management at the top. Insiders say GM brass doesn’t hold meetings about holding meetings anymore, and the actual meetings are shorter. Presumably, they’re not guided by PowerPoints anymore, either. Things are getting done, and the promising future product in the works pre-bankruptcy is progressing apace.

For the last year, GM Chairman Ed Whitacre has shuffled and re-shuffled the marketing department. I don’t know whether he’s satisfied with the current marketing department, with ex-Hyundai, ex-Nissan exec Joel Ewanick (pictured at left) leading it, but in the meantime, the Volt seems to have slipped through the cracks.

By the time some engineers revealed a few months ago that the Volt’s internal combustion engine powers the front wheels under certain conditions, including speeds above 70 mph, GM marketing should have been hard at work to fix Lutz’s original message.

So it’s not a pure electric. If you can afford to sit around and not go anywhere while your pure electric recharges, don’t buy a Chevy Volt.

Since its bankruptcy, GM has had about 14 months to get the message right on its most important new car (from an image standpoint, if nothing else) in decades. It should have been honest with the question of whether there is any connection between engine and wheels. And it should have spent some time, money and imagination to develop a new, post-Lutzian description for the Chevy Volt.

Its unfortunate to do so raises a big question: Is New GM any different than Old GM?

At 7 a.m., a serpentine line forms around a hangar at Southern California’s El Toro Marine Base. Car nuts, aspiring actors, models, and nosey media types like me have gathered today to catch a glimpse of America’s version of Top Gear. 

After securing my place in line, I’m swapping favorite episode stories with fellow bystanders, some of whom have come from as far away as Canada and the easterly coast just for today’s events. Excitement builds as armed guards pace the building’s perimeter (no cameras or phones are allowed inside). “This should be good,” one giddy fan says. “Oh, I see a Panamera!”

According to a couple of bystanders, my home-printed ticket is apparently one of the hottest pieces of paper around town this week. I’ve been selected as one of the 150 audience members for the very first studio taping of Top Gear America, featuring hosts Tanner Foust, Adam Ferrara, and Rutledge Wood.

Ten minutes later, the hangar’s 20-foot-plus doors open to reveal a cavernous studio that only half an hour prior was still unfinished. The first thing that catches my eye on the elevated center stage is a quartet of cars — Aston Martin V12 Vantage, Porsche Panamera Turbo, Chevrolet Camaro SS, and a Dodge Viper ACR-X. A Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X stands alone at the pack’s rear. Gleaming Hollywood lights, gigantic Styrofoam Top Gear logos, and a bevy of plasma TVs help fill out the spacious set.

Take after take, the eclectic hosts expertly recite their lines and crack jokes — Richard Porter, Top Gear U.K.’s witty head writer, is in the studio overseeing the action, but it’s clear from the outset that the History Channel’s rendition has a distinct American flavor. 

Between shots, the “talent” (as producers call them) converses with the crowd, getting to know them and asking for impressions. The TV stars establish to be genial and genuine, and have their own unique appearance on all things automotive. 

“It’s awesome to have an automotive show like this here in the States,” Foust says to me. It’s a cut above the rest, he says, and has the creative minds and hefty budget to be a great production. 

Wood, standing next to Foust, chimes in. “It’s great to finally see it all come together. It’s a show with our cars, on our roads, done in our style. Hope you like it so far!”

The audience gets to watch a few of the episode’s shenanigans on the hanging plasma screens before they’ll air in late November. A segment with Tanner climbing a snow-packed mountain in an Evo X gets high marks. A few takes later, a video of a struggling student driver hits the screen. The catch: He’s blind. Videos continue the Top Gear-esque style with all the usual dramatic music, vignettes, and crisp, short cuts.

Since the entire first season of adventures has wrapped, I ask about the rides they’ve driven. 

“Man, that Aston is cool,” Wood says, pointing to the Barely Green example. “The main thing I don’t like is the fact that Astons look too much alike. I can’t really tell the difference between that and the DB9. The DBS, though, looks totally different. And the Panamera is butt-ugly, but once you get inside, it’s amazing.” 

“I loooved the SLS,” says Ferrara. “The doors were sweet until I smashed my fingers three times. And that sound! Sheeeesh!”

They understand there’s pressure to be as good as U.K. Top Gear hosts Clarkson, May, and Hammond. As Wood summarizes, “Clarkson and Co. are up here (he raises his hand above his head) doing their thing and we’re somewhere over here (he points sideways at a slightly lower level), doing ours. Someday, hopefully, we’ll be up there with them.

“We’re not trying to take anything away from Top Gear . I like to think of us all as chocolate cake. If someone says, ‘Have some chocolate cake,’ but then takes it away, that’s not cool. But if they say, ‘Here, have some of this delicious chocolate cake, and then have some more,’ that’s a different story. We’re just trying to add to the sweet brand.”

Safe to say, my first bite of delicious, chocolate Top Gear America block tasted pretty sweet.

The Chevrolet Volt’s gas-powered internal combustion four sometimes powers the car’s front wheels. Techie Frank Markus described this week how the long-awaited car’s “extended-range electric” system works . Since then,…