A biweekly roundup of automotive news, good, bad and just plain weird: New Range Rover sheds the weight
The Olympics are over and, apart from the odd judging gaffe, it's safe to say that London put on quite the show.
With Cool Britannia forefront in everyone's minds, what better time for Land Rover to pull the sheets off their redesigned Range Rover flagship?
The new truck is sleeker, more polished, more modern, with . . . oh, never mind all the PR clap-trap, it's a Range Rover: it still looks like Buckingham Palace, just now with more LEDs in the headlights.
The big news is how much it weighs. The out-going Range is a cathedral of a truck and, as such, if you check the government weights on the inside of the door-jam, it just has a picture of a moon. Curb weight, one mid-size planetoid.
This new Range is going to be 700 pounds (let's keep things imperial) lighter than the current tank, thanks to an all-aluminum unibody
structure - this is nearly a 50 per cent weight savings over the older steel body. Lighter weight means fuel savings, better on-road manners, and less of a royal yacht driving experience.
Fret not though, the new Range Rover still has all the luxury your heart could desire, with feather-bed soft adjustable air-suspension and refined interior design.
Rear legroom is significantly improved as well, and there's a new automatic Terrain Response system that has settings ranging from Serengeti to Amazonian Jungle to Whole Foods Parking Lot.
Political attack ad takes on autonomous cars
If there's one things our cousins to the South excel at, it's the old-fashioned mud-slingin', name-callin', knock-down, drag-out political slug-fest. In the current presidential race (which feels to me to have started sometime in 2004), there's enough money being spent to convince voters that the other guy's an idiot to not just land a robot on Mars, but have a flotilla of rovers paint the entire planet blue.
However, it's in the smaller races where things get really creative. Republican Jeff Brandes has been targeted by the Committee To Protect Florida (yes, that's a real thing) for defending autonomous vehicles as being safe for Florida's roads.
While the words newfangled, gol-darned, or dad-gummed do not actually appear in the ad, certainly that's the tone of the video, which features a crotchety, quavery narrator that sounds like the grumpy old lady from Desperate Housewives. Er, a show which I only know about because my wife was watches it. Ahem.
Anyway, in the video a Prius (dang foreign cars!) blows right through a stop sign, not stopping for a pedestrian with a walker. A bold-text question flashes on the screen: "Will driverless cars REALLY stop for pedestrians?"
The whole thing comes off as ageist, and a bit of a self-parody. After all, the last octogenarian I bumped into was brewing his own biodiesel - given how tech-savvy our aging populations have become, why on earth would they be afraid of a self-driving car?
No more Maybach
Pour out a 40-ounce of Chateauneuf-du-Pape on the curb for the departed Maybach, all you well-heeled homies, the brand is officially now dead.
Buying a 2013 Maybach is now no longer an option, although you can still get a great deal on a remaining 2012 model, and by that I of course mean: a horrible deal. Mercedes-Benz actually slightly jacked up the prices on their failed attempt to break Rolls-Royce's grip on the super-luxury sedan segment.
Why didn't Maybach make it? Probably because it looked like a big S-Class Mercedes and cost as much as a private tropical island. A Rolls is a Rolls; a Maybach is just some brand dredged up from the past.
And speaking of which, MB will be replacing the 'Bach with ultra-luxury versions of their S-Class, dubbing them "Pullman" after the 1936 Mercedes-Benz Pullman. Time will tell whether this next luxury experiment will work as well as the AMG offshoot has.
Porsche working on Panamera wagon
I drove a Panamera GTS recently, and found it to be quite the big red rocketship. It's a very nice Panzerwagen to pilot, and when you're safely ensconced inside the driver's seat, you don't have to look at it in all its ghastly bulbousity, which is something of a side-benefit.
But while Porsche's porker seats four comfortably, it could use a little more cargo-carrying capacity - the hatchback trunk is not overlarge. Porsche is reportedly bringing a wagon version of the car to the upcoming Paris motor show and judging the reaction of potential customers.
OK, just stop right there. If there's one thing Porsche doesn't need, it's a bigger, heavier Panamera. I'm all for hot wagons, but this is getting ridiculous.
If you're listening Stuttgart, here's what you do. Take a Panamera Turbo S, drive it over to the largest guillotine you can find and lop four feet out of the middle of the back. Then, glue the ends back together, bolt on two doors, run a general belt-sander over everything and hey, presto, you've got a new, modern version of the Porsche 928. It'll eat Bentleys and Ferrari FFs for lunch.
Watch this space for all the best and worst of automotive news, or submit your own auto oddities to brakingnews@gmail. com.
