Category: Cars

Panorama: Lingotto Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli @ Turin

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Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli:

In a fascinating space designed by the architect Renzo Piano inside the historic industrial complex of the Lingotto in Turin, the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli permanently houses 25 masterpieces from Giovanni and Marella Agnelli private collection.
Opened on September 20th, 2002, the gallery marks the final step in the twenty-year-long restructuring process of the whole Lingotto site.
The structure that today hosts the picture gallery of the Giovanni and Marella Agnelli Foundation in the “Scrigno” (literally, jewel box or treasure chest, an extraordinary container that dominates the roof-top test track), is the result of a long historical and architectural process of development that begins at the turn of the twentieth century. After this huge conversion process, the 90 years old building maintains the architectural power and freshness of the car factory designed by Giacomo Mattè Trucco, and wends its way effortlessly to the Lingotto designed by Renzo Piano. 

A stunning place, particularly the roof top race track on the old Fiat factory.
View the full screen panorama here.

GPS Follies

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GPS Follies
“Ha, Ha, Ha, GPS, GPS!” – a senior Florentine citizen standing outside my rented car’s window, pointing at our TomTom GPS.
We followed the TomTom’s instructions from Fiesole through Florence to our evening destination: Central Bologna. However, the TomTom directed us to a dead end: impassable train tracks were straight ahead and we had no nearby alternatives.
After providing the elderly man his GPS humor, I completed a U-Turn and drove east toward an intersection. The TomTom protested, but later “recalculated” the route and we were on our way to Bologna, via the Autostrada.
We had a few more odd navigation moments, one in Lyon and another in Parma. All in all, the TomTom performed well. TomTom sells a GPS receiver that contains both North American and European maps.
** A side note. I used the maps app on my iPhone to augment the TomTom (European iPhone data plans are quite expensive for visiting Americans). Xcom Global provides a useful alternative for on-the go connectivity: unlimited use mifi devices. I highly recommend Xcom.
Jean-Louis Gassee’s recent GPS experiences inspired this note.

Social Media, Part 1: The Internet and the Auto Industry

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Ed Wallace:

Twenty-two years ago, during a slow period at a dealership where I worked, I found an old Apple II computer. It had been set up to calculate leases, but I quickly discovered that it could do all sorts of things. It wasn’t like I hadn’t used a computer before; in 1985, using my Compaq portable as a letter-writing machine had led to my biggest sales year ever in the auto industry. But only three years later, my appreciation for the coming Information Age was to change dramatically.
One of the first things I did on this old Apple machine was hook it up online. Subscribing to the original StarText news wire that the Star-Telegram was then selling, I saw from this quaint beginning that the Information Age was starting to broaden. It wasn’t long before I subscribed to CompuServe. That’s when I realized I would need not just a more powerful computer, but also one capable of showing graphics to take advantage of what was coming our way.
Shortly thereafter I had discovered that others were working on creating what would be called the Internet, connecting everybody in the world to one another.

Change is hard….

P2P car sharing

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Chris Nuttall:

Google is investing in a start-up that hopes to shake up the vehicle rental industry and change the way people view their cars.
RelayRides.com, which launches in San Francisco on Tuesday after a successful pilot programme in Boston, says it is the world’s first operational peer-to-peer car-sharing service.
The Series A round announced with Google Ventures and Valley VC firm August Capital on Tuesday is expected to help it to $5m in total funding to date.

Great idea.

The Used Car Bubble

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Earlier this year in BusinessWeek I postulated that new car sales could well end up higher than most were forecasting. I believed this only because one of the key factors that had been impacting new vehicle sales has been that the used car market was more than overheated, it was on fire. Stories were drifting in from all over about individuals actually paying more money to buy a year-old Honda Accord than they could buy a new one for. And the stories didn’t stop.
Now numerous dealers admit that even they were astonished at how much people were willing to pay for late-model used cars, when the price structure of the market put those vehicles’ prices perilously close to that of a similar vehicle new. Moreover, if one took advantage of the Zero Percent Finance offers adding luster to so many sales today, the monthly payment on the new car is often less than the used model’s.
Of course it was obvious that the used car market was going to look manic compared to historical pricing. After all, the nation has gone from selling more than 16 million new cars annually to barely over 10 million at the bottom of the market. So millions of late model trade-ins won’t hit the used car market for years. Fewer used cars available for resale in a rapidly expanding market equals climbing prices.

In search of a lightning bolt of rational thought.

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Peter M. De Lorenzo

In the midst of the biggest green car push in automotive history – what with Chevrolet touting its extended-range electric Volt as the greatest thing since sliced bread while crossing green swords with Nissan, which is shouting similar missives from the rooftops about its all-electric Leaf – it has become readily apparent that the vast majority of the American consumer public couldn’t be bothered. As in they couldn’t care less. That is unless someone – i.e., Washington – is throwing money at them to care.
Hybrid sales in this market are going to finish the year down again, which will mark three straight years of decline, and this includes the $4.00+ per gallon spike in the late spring-summer of 2008, when fuel economy hysteria took hold in the U.S. for four solid months. It seems that the Shiny Happy Green Sensibilities Act – or whatever you want to call the ongoing “shove-it-down-the-American-consumer-public’s-throats-and-they-will-learn-to-lilke-it” mentality that pollutes the political brainiacs/stumblebums in Washington and Northern California – is going nowhere.
As a matter of fact our illustrious leaders in Washington used a considerable chunk of money from the 2009 economic stimulus package to buy up hybrids from various auto manufacturers to prop-up hybrid vehicle sales, couching it as a noble attempt at improving the overall fuel-efficiency of the government fleet, when in fact the real reason was to not only – hopefully – jump-start American consumer thinking into accepting these vehicles as being mainstream choices, but to help the vehicle manufacturers who were battered and bullied to build the vehicles in the first place to keep the production lines going.
But alas, this is the pattern we find ourselves in as a nation at the moment. A minority of the citizenry in an absolute lather about climate change – aided and abetted by maliciously clueless politicos with an axe to grind and an agenda that has more to do with their personal ambitions than it does with such quaint ideas as “being good for the country” – dictating to the majority of the American public how it’s going to be.

Computers & Cars: MyFord Touch

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Walt Mossberg

Instead of the usual array of knobs, dials and passive screens, MyFord Touch is dominated by a giant 8-inch touch screen, with large function icons in the center and color-coded corners that you touch to switch the screen among four main functions: multisource audio entertainment, navigation, phone and climate control. There is also a “home” view, combining common functions that can be personalized.



The system also has several other elements. There are twin 4-inch screens on either side of the speedometer. The one on the left presents vehicle information, such as miles traveled, and allows you to customize some of the gauges so that, for instance, you can finally banish that tachometer you never use in favor of, say, a digital readout on gas-mileage efficiency. The one on the right replicates, in simpler form, the main functions of the center screen, so you can select and check things like audio and climate control without looking at, or touching, the main screen.



These smaller screens are controlled by five-way arrow clusters on the steering wheel, like controllers on iPods and other devices usable by touch alone. There also are some large, touch-sensitive buttons below the main center screen for things like setting volume and fan speed.

A Tale of Two Cities

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Ed Wallace

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …”

— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859


For the past 120 days I have pored over economic reports, commerce data, home sales across America, stats on inflationary trends and sales tax reports by state (when they can be found). I’ve sorted the data by date published, then prioritized it by importance to the economy, and looked for correlations positive or negative. But no matter how many times I read over the data, I can come to only one solid conclusion: We have now finished changing into a two-tiered economy.


This change didn’t start with the downturn of the past two and a half years; instead, the completion of our segregation into two financial classes is what directly caused the downturn. No longer is the belief that “there’s the 20 percent of the population that live in poverty and then there’s the rest” a comfortably distant concept.


The discomfort line now divides those who “feel afraid” that they live in poverty-like circumstances, or soon will – even if they are gainfully employed – from “the rest.” And instead of a 20/80 split, have-nots to haves, today it may well be 60/40.

A Four Wheeled Xanax….

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Dan Neil

The 2011 Nissan Leaf is the world’s first mass-market all-electric automobile, to be built in the hundreds of thousands globally/annually by Nissan beginning this winter. And may I say, thank God and Carlos Ghosn, chief executive of Nissan. Not so much a game changer as a game starter, the Leaf is a five-seat, five-door passenger EV sedan sold from California to Maine, with a nice, round 100-mile estimated range; 0-60 mph acceleration of around 10 seconds; and a top speed of 90 mph. The U.S. price is $32,780 (not counting the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs) and includes a host of value-added, segment-competitive features, such as Bluetooth, navigation, 16-inch alloy wheels. Such a car would have been science fiction five years ago.