2019 Honda Insight
First drive impressions of the 2019 Honda Insight hybrid come in a few days, but in the meantime, here’s some photos
Carmakers
My 2008 Interview With Elon Musk
2008 Tesla Roadster Validation Prototype
It’s coming up on 10 years since I first interviewed Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX. At the time he was still chairman of the board, not yet having ditched his third CEO in a year. This interview was originally published on AutoblogGreen in June 2008 when I was a writer there. Musk contacted me after I wrote a story questioning his involvement in the development of the Roadster following a Fox News story where he was referred to as the company founder. We had a nearly hour-long conversation and I interspersed that transcript with some responses from Martin Eberhard that I had solicited by email.
As I re-read this, I noted the words I wrote in the final paragraph of the epilogue and realized that sadly, little of what I wrote has come to pass.
Having met several members of the Tesla team when I visited there in January to drive the Roadster, it’s clear to me that they have tremendous skills and expertise and they are recruiting more people with those qualities. Hopefully, the management team now in place at Tesla has the strength of character to take the knowledge of the engineers and apply the necessary review process to design decisions going forward. That is an absolute must in order to get cars built right, on time and on budget. Certainly the work of the TEAM at Tesla Motors has lit a fire under many other manufacturers to accelerate their own electric car projects.
I’m republishing it here for posterity. Given Musk’s recent tirades against the media, I wanted to have this in more than one place.
2018 Alfa Romeo Stelvio – The Preferred Italian For Winter Driving
2018 Alfa Romeo Stelvio ti Lusso AWD
Ever since Fiat Chrysler reintroduced Alfa Romeo to America a few years back, each successive model has become more practical and usable. The tiny 4C is a brilliant little carbon-fiber roadster, but best considered a toy. The Giulia is a gorgeous midsize sports sedan that’s available with a twin-turbocharged V6 that sounds like it came straight out of a mid-1980s Ferrari F1 car. But as much as I adored the Giulia Quadrifoglio, it’s pricey and as discussed previously it’s too low to the ground to deal with a major snow storm. But Alfa has us covered there as well with its first-ever utility vehicle, the Stelvio which I drove the week before the big storm.
Read the rest of the review here
Throwback: Interview With Chrysler’s Lou Rhodes and Doug Quigley
Authors note: Back in 2009 when I was still the technical editor of the now defunct GreenFuelsForecast.com, I sat down for lunch with Lou Rhodes and Doug Quigley of Chrysler. At the time, Lou was president of the company’s ENVI divison and Doug was executive engineer for EVs. Over the prior 18 months, ENVI had shown off two sets of electrified concepts and was still hoping to get at least one into production. At the time of this conversation, Chrysler was struggling to survive and barely a month later, the company would go through bankruptcy reorganization before emerging as part of Fiat. While none of the concepts at the time, made it to production, lessons from the project were fed into the Fiat 500e and in 2017 a plug-in hybrid Chrysler minivan finally arrived as the Pacifica.
(Auburn Hills, MI, March 27, 2009) Over the last two years numerous automakers including Nissan, Renault, Mitsubishi and General Motors have garnered attention for efforts to develop commercially viable electric drive vehicles. More recently Chrysler has also publicly jumped into the fray with the creation of its ENVI division, unveiling of several prototypes and the announcement that at least one of those vehicles would go into production in 2010.
Lou Rhodes, President of ENVI and Doug Quigley, Executive engineer spoke with Green Fuels Forecast about Chrysler’s plans for electrification. When ENVI was publicly announced in September 2007, many saw it as a knee-jerk reaction to all the hype that General Motors was getting for the Chevrolet Volt. In fact, the work of ENVI began quietly in late 2005 when the Chrysler Group was still firmly ensconced within DaimlerChrysler. (more…)
Toyota Prius Prime Gets The Plug-in Hybrid Right, Now About That Design
2017 Toyota Prius Prime
Ok, let’s immediately deal with the elephant in the room. The Toyota Prius Prime is not an attractive vehicle. In fact, to my eyes, it’s quite homely. Now that we have that out of the way, I’ll leave the aesthetic judgements to your own tastes and move on to how Toyota’s sophomore effort at a plug-in version of its icon works. While the first-generation Prius PHV was a bit of a swing and a miss, the functionality this time is in most respects a home run.
2017 Acura NSX – Vaporware No More
2017 Acura NSX
For a time from late in the last decade through the first half of this one, it seemed like a second generation Acura NSX would become the automotive equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever. Starting in 2003, every few years Honda would reveal a new concept that seemed to preview a new supercar but for some reason or other, the project just never came to fruition. At least not until the spring of 2016 when Honda’s newly christened Performance Manufacturing Center in Marysville, Ohio started turning out a handful of cars per day.
Read the rest of the review at Forbes
2018 Mercedes-AMG GLA45 – It’s Hot But Don’t Call It An SUV
2018 Mercedes-AMG GLA45
In 2017, do vehicle segment labels even have any meaning anymore? Back in the dark ages of the 1970s we knew what a sport utility vehicle was. It was essentially a shortened body-on-frame pickup truck with an enclosed, but often removable rear body. But then in 1984, Jeep introduced the XJ Cherokee and it all began to change. Now a utility vehicle can be whatever an automaker’s marketing department deems it to be including a high-performance compact, hot hatch like the Mercedes-AMG GLA45.
2017 Buick LaCrosse Premium AWD
It’s not unreasonable to think of Buick as the original near-luxury brand. It was the first of the many brands that Billy Durant acquired as he began building up General Motors more than a century ago. Later as Alfred Sloan organized GM’s marketing efforts and brands into a stair step from Chevrolet at the entry level to Cadillac at the pinnacle, Buick was slotted in just below the top as the “doctor’s car.” A few decades ago, a big sedan like the LaCrosse would have been the brand flagship, the model an up and coming professional would be driving on their way to eventually having a Cadillac. Today, the recently introduced third-generation LaCrosse is almost an afterthought for customers as they rush to buy crossovers like the sub-compact Encore and full-size Enclave.
Who Stands To Benefit From Tesla’s Stock Price?
As I read this Bloomberg story this morning about Elon Musk closing in on the goals required to get 5.27 million stock options granted to him in 2012, a thought occurred to me. We all know the financial system is absolutely rigged. That much is no secret.
At the current share price of Tesla stock those options are worth about $1.4 billion. Despite many on Wall St acknowledging that the value of the company has nothing to do with its current business fundamentals, they keep pushing the price up based on “future potential.”
What rarely gets talked about is that every time Tesla goes back to the markets to sell shares in order to keep the lights on, Elon himself buys up a big chunk of those shares. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that and demonstrates Musk’s own confidence in his company while also ensuring that his own substantial stake in the company (currently at more than 22 percent of outstanding shares) isn’t diluted. Again nothing wrong with any of this.
However, keep in mind that relatively little Musk’s net worth which is well over $10 billion is in cash. Like most billionaires that don’t want to give up their stakes in companies he borrows money against those investments. When he wants to buy more Tesla shares, he goes to his bankers, including Morgan Stanley for a loan. As of March 2017, Elon owes more than $624 million.
The banks that are owed money by Elon Musk have a financial incentive to maximize the value of the company and help it reach the lofty goals set by the board of directors when they granted those options in 2012. If Tesla fails to reach those goals, especially the market capitalization, Musk won’t get those shares and may not be able to pay back those loans. On top of that, many of the same banks also own a lot of Tesla shares directly, including Morgan Stanley with 3.7 million shares.
To the best of my knowledge (I’m neither a lawyer or financial expert) none of this is illegal. But it’s worth having some context when listening to any arguments pro or against the value of a company, including my own. For the record, I don’t own any stocks in any company directly aside from funds in my retirement accounts.
2017 Chevrolet Cruze Diesel – The Answer For VW TDI Refugees?
With the Volkswagen diesel buyback now in full-force here in the United States, up to half a million drivers will be looking for new cars in the coming months. A significant chunk of that group has declared that they want to keep their cars despite the emissions cheating while others including at least one friend of mine are lining up to buy the leftover unsold 2015 models now that a fix has been approved by the EPA. There is clearly still some demand for affordable diesel cars in America and Chevrolet wants a piece of it with the new 2017 Cruze diesel.
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