As July’s By The Numbers showed us, American buyers are quick to forget the pain of having to fill up a full-size pickup or SUV when gas prices are in the $4-per-gallon range. Without the guiding hand of Uncle Sam pushing the car-buying public towards smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, consumers are all about being large and [...]
Bill Ford made the sacrifice, now he’s earned the reward. After living sans salary from Ford for five years, Bill is due to receive $4 million in cash and up to $12 million in stock options. That doesn’t cover the entire five years, but rather the last two – it’s what he would have made from [...]
The post-bankruptcy Chrysler Group is continuing its financial recovery even as the overall economy continues to sputter along. In the April–June quarter, the automaker posted an overall operating profit of $183 million and added $474 million to its cash coffers. After factoring in all the non-operational expenses (everything besides building and selling cars and trucks), the [...]
Back in August of 1997, Toyota launched its Coaster Hybrid EV minibus, the company’s first hybrid vehicle. Though the Coaster Hybrid is not a common name, it was the vehicle that started the hybrid revolution at Toyota. The Japanese automaker has now announced that cumulative sales of its hybrids have now topped the one-million mark in [...]
If there’s ever going to be a green-car cage match, we can guarantee that one of the fighters will be Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, who apparently can’t pass up the chance to take on any competitor. His latest target? The lithium-ion battery pack in the Nissan Leaf, about which Musk had some critical things to say [...]
