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Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy

CHRYSLER CONSIDERS GETTING BACK INTO BIG RIGS One of the more intriguing tidbits that dribbled out of Chrysler's grueling 8-hour press conference on Wednesday is that the company is considering getting back into the heavy truck business. They're not talking about heavy duty pick-ups, they're talking about 18-wheelers. Up until the early 1970's Dodge sold heavy trucks, including semi-tractors. In fact, Dodge trucks were famous the world over. But like GM and Ford, the Chrysler Corporation decided to get out of that business at a time when ... Read more →

Autoline Detroit LIVE with special guest Tom Stephens, GM VC of Global Product Development John Neff

Join John McElroy and his journalist colleagues for an all-new LIVE webcast discussion with Tom Stephens, GM Vice Chairman of Global Product Development. First, you'll get to see a LIVE taping of ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy John McElroy

TOYOTA'S HYBRIDS COULD BE BANNED FROM THE AMERICAN MARKET In a shocking development Toyota faces a lawsuit filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission that seeks to ban the import of all ...

Autoline After Hours with John McElroy, Jason Vines, and Peter DeLorenzo Chris Paukert

In this week's episode of Autoline After Hours, John McElroy, newly minted Christian publishing mogul Jason Vines and Peter "The Autoextremist" DeLorenzo gather for another unusually frank discussion ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy John McElroy

BOOM TIMES COMING IN THE USED CAR MARKET The future looks so bright for the used car market that I'm almost tempted to try and get into that business myself. Even though car dealers are going ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 6 months ago on Autoblog

PLENTY OF LIFE LEFT IN THE PISTON ENGINE There are all kinds of ways to boost the fuel efficiency of a vehicle. Hybrids are becoming more and more popular. Clean diesels seemed poised to make major inroads in the market. And even though they're a ways down the road, hydrogen fuel cells sure look ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 7 months ago on Autoblog

IT'S A FUEL PROBLEM, NOT A FUEL ECONOMY PROBLEM Every single day, the United States ships $600,000,000 out of the country. That's what it costs us to pay for the oil we buy from other countries at $50 a barrel. It is the single biggest cause of our massive trade deficit. The U.S. uses roughly 20 ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 8 months ago on Autoblog

BREAKTHROUGH AUDIO SYSTEM, ALL THANKS TO SOFTWARE I just experienced one of the most amazing sound systems that that I ever heard in a car. What makes it so amazing is that it doesn't use a power booster, or equalizer, or better speakers, or anything like that. Instead, it's all done with ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy - 2010 Chevy Camaro Edition! 8 months ago on Autoblog

2010 CHEVY CAMARO: DRIVING IMPRESSIONS I'm sure there are a lot of Autobloggers out there who know the specifications of the new Camaro far better than I do. But numbers on paper don't mean much until you experience them through the seat of your pants. So here are my driving impressions of the new ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 8 months ago on Autoblog

BIG THREE SITTING ON $10 BILLION GOLDMINE There's no question that the Detroit-based auto industry needs a lot of help. There's a 100-year history of how it got into the problems it's in, and some of those problems are beyond management's control. But there is one area where General Motors, Ford ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 9 months ago on Autoblog

THE AMAZINGLY STUPID DETROIT CITY COUNCIL Nobody reading this blog needs to be told how much trouble Detroit is in. Whether it's the Detroit Three, the city of Detroit, or the greater Detroit area, the story's the same: we're in trouble! One of the very few events that provides positive media ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 9 months ago on Autoblog

HYBRID BATTERIES SURPASS ALL EXPECTATIONS When Toyota's Prius first hit Japanese showrooms in 1997, I was highly skeptical that hybrids would catch on. Not only was the technology really expensive, I thought the nickel-metal hydride batteries would prove to be the Achilles Heel in the system. ...

Autoline Daily LIVE webcast with Ford Chief Economist Ellen Hughes-Cromwick 9 months ago on Autoblog

Today at 12:00PM EST, John McElroy of Autoline Daily is hosting a special live webcast with guest Ford Motor Co. Chief Economist Ellen Hughes-Cromwick. She and John will be discussing her forecast for the American economy and outlook on the automotive market. We've embedded the live webcast after ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 10 months ago on Autoblog

Big Problems with California's CO2 Standard Earlier this week President Obama instructed the EPA to determine whether it should grant California a waiver to set its own CO2 standards for cars. It's a hugely controversial issue, and one that's fraught with major problems for the auto industry. First ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 11 months ago on Autoblog

DETROIT AND OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE In all this debate about whether we should provide the Big Three with a bridge loan, not enough attention has been devoted to their impact on our national defense. I'd hate to see this country ever get involved in a total global war again, but I especially shudder ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 12 months ago on Autoblog

FORD REPORT: DIESEL VS. HCCI VS. STRATIFIED CHARGE To hear Ford's CTO tell it, all these painful layoffs and budget cuts going on at the company can actually be beneficial. "It gets you really focused on what's really necessary," says Gerhard Schmidt, the Chief Technology Officer at Ford. Ford now ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

Why I Still Support Those Boneheads at the Big Three What a week it was. Or maybe I should say, I can't believe how weak it was. The CEOs of the Big Three and the president of the UAW showed up in Washington last Tuesday to plead their case for a bailout. But by Thursday they had managed to turn ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

GM IS ON ITS LAST LEGS There is only one number that really matters in today's financial report from General Motors: how much cash it has in the kitty. And the answer is, not enough. GM is now burning through its cash reserves at a rate that will run short before Christmas. Every month GM spends ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

WHAT IF GM COLLAPSES? Anyone watching the auto industry these days is acutely aware that General Motors is hurtling towards disaster. It's burning through cash reserves at a rate that will put it in Chapter 11 sometime next year, no matter how much management says "that's not an option." It's ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

QUALITY PROBLEMS WITH QUALITY RATINGS Pity the poor car buyer who wants to be a smart consumer and reads all the quality studies before going to the showroom. How do you know what to believe? For example, Consumer Reports' Reliability Survey gives props to the Scion xD. But Strategic Vision's ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

GM-CHRYSLER, WHAT ARE THEY THINKING? The headlines say General Motors is feverishly putting a plan together to take over Chrysler. From my standpoint, only two theories can explain why this is happening. Either the billionaire boys from Cerberus have a master plan to revamp the American auto ...

John McElroy debuts Autoline Daily, and you can watch it here every day! 1 year ago on Autoblog

Today marks the debut episode of John McElroy's latest project: Autoline Daily. You may know John as host of Autoline Detroit on TV or as an Autoblog contributor with his weekly "Autoline on Autoblog" editorials. A true industry insider, John and his production company, Blue Sky Productions, have ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

I'M LOSING MY BET ON DIESELS A few years back I made a bet with a former Director of Engineering at General Motors. I bet him five bucks that Americans would fall in love with modern diesel engines and would want them in their cars. Specifically, I predicted that diesel sales in passenger cars ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

HOW TO KICK OUR (IMPORTED) OIL HABIT There's a lot of talk about making the U.S. energy independent. Or getting off oil altogether. I guess anyone who believes it can easily be done has never taken the time to count how many millions of barrels of oil we import every day. Damn do we use a lot of ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

HOW FORD WILL SAVE MERCURY When Alan Mulally came to the Ford Motor Company two years ago he finally forced the company to face reality. It wasn't going to go anywhere, he told his executive team, unless it put all its resources into resuscitating the Ford brand on a global basis. So Jaguar and ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

THE DOWN SIDE TO LITHIUM BATTERIES Uh-oh. In the pell-mell race to develop lithium-ion batteries for plug-ins, EV's and hybrids, has any automaker taken a hard look at where all that lithium is going to come from? Guess what? Not only are global lithium supplies pretty tight, prices are about to ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

SIX QUARTERS TO DOOMSDAY 2010 is shaping up to be a pivotal year in the American auto industry. From a product standpoint there will be a lot of interesting hardware in showrooms, including range-extending EVs, plug-in hybrids, clean diesels, pure electrics, and flex-fuel vehicles running on ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

TELL THE FEDS TO FREEZE THE REGS! Every day Chrysler LLC builds Euro-spec versions of the Chrysler 300 at its assembly plant in Canada, bolts a V6 diesel engine into most of them, and ships them off to Europe. That diesel 300 gets better fuel economy, over 30 mpg, than all the other vehicles in ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

THE AMAZING SHRINKING CAR MARKET As car sales continue to spiral downward, some product planners in the industry are beginning to ask the unthinkable: is the American car market going to shrink permanently? They are starting to consider the possibility that the days of selling 17 million new ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

HEY GM, BRING BACK THE EV1 A decade ago General Motors put one of the coolest cars of all time on the road, the EV1. While there were a number of hard-core EV enthusiasts who became passionately committed to the car, it never caught on with the masses. But that was then and this is now. GM should ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

HOW MANY BRANDS ARE TOO MANY? With gas prices soaring and SUV sales sinking, General Motors just put its HUMMER brand under "strategic review." That's generally the term used when a company is getting ready to dump a brand. And that begs the question, how many brands does a car company really need? ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

FORD'S AMBITIOUS MAKE-OVER It could be the most dramatic retooling effort since the early days of World War II, when Detroit earned its nick name as the Arsenal of Democracy. Word leaked out yesterday that Ford is calling its plant managers and top union leaders to the company's headquarters in ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

THE BIG THREE COLLAPSE Ooof! May sales were like a punch in the stomach, especially to the Detroit Three. It's been nearly three decades since we've seen their sales collapse so dramatically. Last month the annualized sales rate of the American market, including all automakers, fell to only 14.2 ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

CAR PRICES ARE SET TO SOAR Thanks to sky high gasoline prices, most people are reeling from the cost of driving their cars. But that was just the first jolt. Now we're going to see a big jump in the cost of buying cars, both new and used. Why am I so sure car prices are going up? Easy. All you have ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

FIRST-HAND LOOK AT FORD'S ECO-BOOST TECHNOLOGY I just spent a day at Ford's proving grounds driving a number of vehicles that use Eco-boost technology, which is the centerpiece of the company's strategy to improve fuel economy. I wish I could tell you more about my driving impressions of these ...

Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy 1 year ago on Autoblog

WHY USE BATTERIES IF FLYWHEELS WILL DO? Formula One could be on to something big. Next year all teams will be allowed to capture the energy that their cars produce under braking, and then re-use that energy at opportune moments, like passing on a straight. It's really a hybrid system, but they don't ...

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Autoblog Podcast #155: 'Twas the night before LA...

Chris, Dan, and Editor Paukert go over some LA Preview action and quietly whoop it up on the podcast.

 
 

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