All About Cars
If there is anti UK sentiment affecting car sales in Europe, then European car brands can rest easy that there won't be retaliation. The British don't have a national sense of purpose or loyalty anyway. With something like only 14% of UK car sales for locally made products - despite several car producers - confirms that. Many UK car buyers proudly buy European brands and loudly proclaim that. Which begs the question does Britain deserve a car industry? Nissan have threatened not to invest in future models in the UK. That will hurt factory profitability and Nissan. Duh. JLR would 鈥渞ealign its thinking鈥?on investment after Brexit and possible compensation to Nissan would have to be for all car makers. JLR has already moved away from Britain, with factories to be used in Austria and Slovakia for future models. JLR's investment in the UK was going to be limited in future anyway. Summary: The media circus revs up the whole situation and car makers feed it with their appalling comments. Talk privately to those who need to know but going public with inflammatory statements is pathetic. It also seems that some car makers are queuing up for tax payer handouts. I don't want any part of this nonsense. I now feel bad writing about and promoting an industry like this. Time to move on.
The all-new 2020 Land Rover Defender will offer one of the most complex lineups in the industry. The range will include three body styles (90, 110, 130), six powertrains, four accessory packs, 170 individual accessories (including a folding fabric roof for the 110), and even a Commercial model. There will be a new Defender for everyone, apparently. Something the new Defender won鈥檛 offer is a pickup version, though. Originally, Land Rover planned to launch the Defender pickup in late 2020 or early 2021 based on the upcoming Defender 130 SUV which reportedly will measure 5,100 mm (130 inches) in length. However, plans have changed since then as JLR bosses deemed a Defender pickup would be redundant. If you want to know what we鈥檒l be missing, rendering artist X-Tomi has digitally converted the recently unveiled 2020 Defender 110 SUV into a single cab pickup. Mind you, it鈥檚 not the exact type of pickup body Land Rover originally had in mind but the rendering offers us a pretty good idea of what a new Defender pickup would look like.
And these systems are the precursors of the technology that will be needed in the fully driverless vehicles expected to come to the market over the next decade, raising questions about how well they will work. Power鈥檚 study focuses specifically on the issues that owners report with their vehicles during the first 90 days of ownership. And while long-term reliability is examined in a separate study, the Initial Quality Study has traditionally offered insight into which brands will hold up best. Manufacturers and car buyers alike tend to closely follow the study which, in its early years, helped identify the rise of brands such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda. But there has been a significant shift in the results since early in the decade. Traditionally dominant Japanese marques have begun to lose momentum. At the same time, the South Korean brands once considered quality laggards have made a push to address their early issues, surging to the top of the IQS charts.
Two fire engines overtake us, after which we set up a rolling roadblock so the emergency services can park on the motorway. A message instructing drivers not to overtake is shown on a display at the rear of the Discovery; Tom takes a commanding position in the middle of the road and we bring the westbound M25 to a standstill. It doesn鈥檛 take us long to find the cause of this drama. Pulled over to the verge is a smouldering Transit van, which firefighters are dousing with water. What鈥檚 surprising is how smoothly the situation is resolved. Roughly 15 minutes after they arrived the firefighters are off, the fire having been put out and the Transit made safe. We ask if we can get a closer look at the van and are told this is possible, as long as we don鈥檛 touch anything. 鈥淏urning plastics and rubbers give off hydrofluoric acid鈥? Gary says. It鈥檚 nasty stuff.鈥?We don鈥檛 need to hear that twice.
Running the brakes hard (like we were coming out of the mountains) can cause some of the brake fluid to burn off. We stopped at the nearest gas station and topped off our brake fluid. Bingo, the light was off and we continued down the road. The next day brought us to Park City, UT to visit some of Bethany's family. Baja Peninsula. We were hit with wind gusts of over 50 mph in pouring down rain as we entered Salt Lake City. The downpour continued once we pulled in to Linda & Greg's place. Luckily for us, they had a bottle of wine cracked and dinner started. Mike & Ikes: Linda's downfall. The rain from the hurricane had made it's way to Park City and so we had some wet weather during our stay there. But we managed a bike ride down to Fat Kid Pizza for a game of corn hole. I couldn't get a bag on the board, but after Ike's pro tips I stepped it up a notch.
