Quiet News Day?

Most of the car sites today, like Autocar for example, are going with the announcement of the Vauxhall Insignia Country Tourer - a four-wheel-drive family estate car.

Not particularly interesting, even for someone like me who drives a four-wheel-drive family estate car.

It's brown:

 The Telegraph have been running two non-stories since the weekend.

A pointless review of the first episode of series 20 of Top Gear.  Pointless because it is written by someone more interested in repeating the fact that he is "not the target audience" for the show and then telling us that he didn't enjoy it.  Well, what a surprise!!!  Prat.  Some of the reader comments are suitably scathing though.

Their second non-story promises us the Top 10 Long-lived cars still on sale.

Only it doesn't.

I was expecting a list of cars that haven't really changed much in many years like the Land-Rover Defender or Porsche 911 (OK the 911 has changed a lot, but it still looks the same).

But no.  What we were given were a bunch of car names that have lived on - like the Ford Fiesta.  The early Fiestas bore no relation whatsoever to the new ones.  Pointless journalism.


Meanwhile, Autoguide have got hold of the story that "Ferrari is limiting its employees to only three in-house recipients per email."

This will cause problems if Fernando Alonso wants to send an amusing jpeg of a cat to Felipe Massa and all of their mechanics.

He will probably have to send the email several times to groups of three each time.

I'm not convinced that Ferrari have really thought this through.

Holden Out For A Hero

My favourite Aussie car news site has got very excited this morning about the launch of the new Holden VF Commodore - the latest family sedan from GM's Australian Division.

Due to the geography of Australia, the family sedan is still important down there just like the Cavalier and Sierra used to be over here. This is an entirely Australian designed and built car but the question is, will it look like GM's American Chevrolet Cruze:

or GM's European Vauxhall/Opel Insignia?

Well, here's the conclusive answer:

Glad that small matter is cleared up.

The launch itself was quite interesting. Catch the video here if you want although it was mostly concerned with the impressive technological features of the new car. It was fronted by Holden's MD which may stand for Managing Director (his job) or Mike Devereaux (his name).

It is only at the very end of the launch video that you actually get to see the car but I've just shown it to you anyway.

The Americans are quite interested, AutoGuide had the story here - they are interested in the implications for a new Chevy SS.

Even before the launch, though, the Aussies were looking further ahead to the VF replacement on sale in 2017. I think they were trying to reassure Australia that there was a longer-term future for The Commodore but to quote one of the comments added below the story, "Stealing a bit of the VF's thunder. It no longer seems as important now." Oops.

Still, I wouldn't go Holden a grudge about it.

Cosmetic Surgery Gone Wrong

Couple of stories from Autocar this week about facelifts.



The first concerns the Suzuki Splash. This car is being updated from looking like this......to looking like this...Not exactly earth-shattering changes there but if anything, I prefer the older version.

Now, what does this mean for The Splash's sister car - the virtually identical Vauxhall (or Opel) Agila? Maybe they are too busy at the moment facelifting the Insignia Estate (or "Sports Tourer" to give it it's proper name). Autocar's second facelift story this week covers this with some spy-shots of the face-lifted car...My usual gripe with spy-shots is that they are completely pointless - you usually can't tell anything from them anyway.

but this!?

WHAT THE BLEEDIN' 'ELL IS THE POINT OF A SPY-SHOT OF A FACELIFT OF A DISGUISED CAR!?

What do you say, Jackie?

A Little Light Reading

This story today from Autoguide.com is about a rather clever new headlamp system being developed by GM in Europe.It is a matrix system and involves separate LED sections that are controlled individually by computer according to surrounding conditions as determined by a connected camera.

The system has the lights on full-beam for a lot of the time but is alledgedly clever enough to detect other vehicles and not dazzle anyone. I'm all in favour of anything that stops me being dazzled when I look in my rear-view mirror on a motorway at night as German cars other than Opels (ie Audis, BMWs, Mercs and Porsches) all tear along the outside lane with enough light shining forwards to host an evening football match - not that I would advocate playing football on a motorway - unless you're John Terry perhaps.

They have produced a video with some nice music that supposedly shows how it works but it didn't make a lot of sense to me:The bit at the start concerns me a bit where the man plays with the settings to give a light-show. I know that the systems would soon get hacked so that young rappers like Dazzle-Razzle and Bo-Diddly would have their pimped up Chrysler Voyagers annoying everyone in a 3 mile radius. Or should that be 8-mile? - spot the rap reference there proving that I am up with the kids.

The video then goes on to show the lights in action with a few German captions. Apparently "fern" means "distant", "abblen" is to fade out and "matrix" means "matrix".

I still didn't get most of it but it is possibly good news for this chap though:

Taiwan 't one

"I Want One!" Geddit?

No?

Oh well, never mind, I don't really want one.I couldn't buy one even if I did want one anyway - it's going on sale in its home nation - Taiwan next year - I don't think it's even available in Australia, home of this article about the said car. It's called a Luxgen5 - the Company name is Luxgen so presumably its full title is a Luxgen Luxgen5.

After the Malaysians, Koreans and Chinese, do we now have yet another Eastern nation suddenly producing cars good enough to eat into Western markets? Possibly. The article does show a modern-looking vehicle with a luxury interior and, thanks to a tie-in with HTC (maker of some very smart Smartphones) some clever infotainment tech.

With a choice of 1.8 and 2 litre turbo petrol engines, it all looks like a very good package.

The article states that, "Luxgen is the only car company in Taiwan that wholly develops its own vehicles." OK, but it does look very familiar - even down to the wheels: