A biweekly roundup of automotive news, good, bad and just plain weird: Tesla Model S breaks safety records, machines Call me crotchety, but the all-electric Tesla Model S is starting to get a bit annoying in how good it is. The latest record smashed? It's just been rated the safest car the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has ever tested.
Because there's no gasoline powerplant, Tesla's designers had a considerable amount of space to work with for crumple zones and didn't have to worry about how to prevent occupants from getting a lapful of hot engine. Additionally, the floor-mounted battery pack gives the car a ridiculously low centre of gravity, making it as unlikely to roll over as a dog with outriggers.
Technically speaking, a five star rating is as high as NHTSA approval gets, but the Model S - the Hermione Granger of the automotive world - actually managed an unofficial 5.4 stars. No car or truck has ever scored as highly.
As if that wasn't bad enough, while trying to test the car's crush resistance, the roof of the Model S was so strong that it actually broke the machine. Bloody overachievers. Nissan Titan gets turbo-diesel power Nissan's Titan full-sized pickup truck has a great name, sturdy looking styling, and the worst fuel economy of any vehicle outside of a Saturn V moon rocket. It's tough, but hoo-boy is it thirsty.
Now sit down and listen to this: the Titan's about to get a heart transplant of, well, Titanic scale. Coming soon, you'll be able to get the Japanese pickup with a five-litre V-8 turbodiesel engine made by Cummins.
This colossal lump will have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300 horsepower and 500 foot-pounds of torque, and is burly enough to have the Toyota Tundra trembling in its designer work boots. Yes, you can get big diesel in other trucks, but you have to go up the range into Super Duty rigs - with its new engine, the Titan will likely be the most powerful regular full-size pickup on the market.
Frankly, that's good news for Nissan fans as the Titan has had few updates in its decade-long lifespan, and looked like it might wither on the vine. With former Dodge Ram CEO Fred Diaz now in charge, seems like Nissan is getting serious about its truck division again.
Karmann Ghia celebrates its 60th anniversary Once upon a time, walking into a Volkswagen dealership meant that you were going to be driving out in a Beetle. That's all VW sold.
Six decades ago, Wilhelm Karmann contracted a Turinbased design company to make something a little less Beetle-y. Not that there was anything wrong with the People's Car, but it was a little bit too bulbous for some tastes. What was needed, Karmann decided, was a "Beetle in a sports coat."
The first prototype was revealed in 1953 and everyone was delighted, possibly because it didn't have leather elbow patches. Still, Karmann had to get the approval of VW's head to actually build the thing, and it didn't start selling to the public until 1955.
A little less than half a million Type 14s (as the humourless VW coded the Ghia) were sold, all of them under-pinned by prosaic air-cooled Beetle running gear. The factory where they once were made now produces the Boxster and Cayman, which, if you squint, still have a tiny bit of that Italian-German heritage.
Dick Van Dyke escapes burning Jaguar It was nearly a sooty end for everybody's favourite chimney sweep as Dick Van Dyke's new Jaguar XJ sedan recently caught fire on an L.A. highway and burned to a cinder faster than you can say chim-chim cheree.
The 87-year-old actor was pulled from his burning vehicle - possibly by cartoon penguins, but this is unconfirmed - and was completely unhurt. He was soon on Twitter (really?), reporting, "Used Jag for sale REAL CHEAP," which is both funny and slightly entrepreneurial.
Spontaneous combustion is hardly the sort of thing any car company wants tarnishing their name, so this isn't good news for Jaguar. Happily though, Van Dyke remains hale and hearty: perhaps good luck really does rub off when he shakes hands with you.
Toyota to shrink Scion Toyota's youth brand, Scion, is perhaps most famous currently for the FR-S, a lightweight 2+2 coupe that's all the rage. They also build some other cars too, but I'd have to go look up what they are and I can't be bothered.
The public can't be bothered buying them either - Scion's sporty coupes sell well (the front-driver tC is decent for the money), but their humble econoboxes don't. "If I want an inexpensive Toyota," people seem to ask themselves, "Why wouldn't I simply buy a Toyota?" And then they do.
Toyota seems to have finally cottoned on to this tendency, and is reducing the number of Scion dealerships in the U.S. by a third. Whether or not this marks a move to actually wind down the brand remains to be seen, but Toyota also showed off a convertible FR-S and a small, Juke-like crossover at the same time, so may simply decide to cut out the non-funky Scions.
Personally, losing Scion wouldn't cause me any distress. They should call the tC the Celica, which it is, dub the FR-S the GT-86, just as it is in overseas markets, and use both to inject some much-needed pizzazz into the Toyota lineup.
Watch this space for all the week's best and worst of automotive news, or submit your own auto oddities to brakingnews@gmail. com. Follow Brendan on Twitter at @brendan_mcaleer.
