2011 Ford Fiesta Shipments Resume After Floods, Parts Problems, And Plague of Locusts
August 27th, 2010
The eagerly awaited 2011 Ford Fiesta subcompact has had more than its share of challenges, but Ford wants you to know it has resumed shipping the little sedan and hatchback models. New ones should be showing up at your dealer within days. The latest issue was a problem in an unidentified part that caused Ford to issue a stop-shipment order until...
The principles of the gasoline engine have chugged along for a century now without much change. The last big evolutions were variable valve timing and the switch to fuel injection from carburetors. Now a flurry of innovations to boost fuel efficiency is in the pipeline. One of them comes from a startup, Transonic Combustion, which claims its...
For years small cars have been that strange compromise between price sensitivity and safety. Mainly, small cars have been inexpensive with the compromise that they aren't as safe as their larger brethren. Some manufactures have set out to change that perception and basically challenge what we have considered to be the norm in the small car market...
Have you ever noticed that car companies will put models out that have both a hatchback and sedan version? In some cases it is hard to tell why, like with the previous generation Mazda 6 where they had the sedan and the lift-back version. The two cars where almost unintelligible, which begged the question as to why they tooled up to have to...
Mitsubishi's 2012 i-MiEV has been in development and testing for some time now, so there's a lot of information to keep track of. The tiny egg-shaped electric car, with four doors and four seats, is expected to arrive in the U.S. for 2012, though it's already on sale in Japan, and just entering some European markets now. Since our 2011 Nissan Leaf...
Land speed records have long been a integral part of motor racing, but for many years electric vehicles have been viewed as slow and cumbersome. With a 0-60 mph time of less than four seconds, the 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport certainly puts the myth of slow vehicles to bed, but just how fast can an electric car go? On Tuesday this week, a team of...
We've always had a soft spot in our heart for the tiny Tata Nano, the world's least expensive car and India's equivalent of the Ford Model T that put the U.S. on wheels a century earlier. The Nano may or may not ever be sold in the United States, though Tata says a revised version will be offered here in 2012. But as full-scale production ramps up...
The global platform model is a strategy near and dear to the heart of today's Ford Motor Company. It is a theory that the company can design and market cars based on a design that will meet the criterion of multiple markets around the world, including the tough American small car market. The 2011 Ford Fiesta is one of Ford's most anticipated new...
It's been almost three weeks since we published a Tesla story. We trust that means that the Silicon Valley electric-vehicle startup is working away feverishly on the designs, engineering, production plans, and manufacturing site for its Model S four-door sports sedan, which it is still promising will arrive during 2012 (perhaps as a 2013 model)...
In another step toward making silent electric cars less so, Toyota Prius hybrids sold in Japan are to be offered with an optional system that broadcasts a "humming" noise outside the car whenever it operates solely on electricity. The system is Toyota's response to the fears of blind people that hybrids and electric vehicles pose more of a threat...