2019 Lexus LS 500Handout Welcome to our weekly round-up of the biggest breaking stories on Driving.ca from this past week. Get caught up and ready to get on with the weekend, because it’s hard keeping pace in a digital traffic jam.Here’s what you missed while you were away.2019’s most and least reliable brands according to Consumer Reports 2019 Mazda CX-5 Signature Al Charest / Postmedia Breaking news! Dodge has landed itself on the top ten list of Consumer Reports’ most reliable brands! That’s a first. Otherwise, the list was not so surprising, with Japan sweeping the top three (Lexus, Mazda and Toyota in that order) and Jeep, VW and Acura elbowing each other for position down at the bottom of the pile. Where does your brand land on the list this year?Anyone want to buy a $90k Corvette for $145,500 on eBay?A selfish Corvette buyer is fishing for suckers online with an ad for a build slot for a 2020 C8 Corvette. The listing is asking for $145,500 for what is, if you were to purchase it directly from the brand, a $90,000 car. Listed as ““BRAND NEW C-8 2020 CORVETTE FOR SALE ALLOCATED PAID FOR 1ST WAVE EARLY RELEASE,” the car is basically just a standard 1LT trim C8 with the free white paint, free silver wheels, $100 mirrors, US$5,000 Z51 package and less than $10,000 worth of other options. Do the math. Don’t buy the car. Honda’s CR-V gets lots of new options for 2020Honda has freshened up its popular SUV for 2020, giving shoppers even more options for trims and some new options like Remote Engine Start and heated front seats at the base level of the CR-V. The exterior gets a bit of a facelift, too, with some Civic-esque tweaks, two new colour options and 19-inch wheels. All models will run with a 1.5-litre turbo four. Pricing starts at $28,690 for the base model, which is exactly $1,000 more than last year’s. These are the strangest vehicles to ever be pulled over by policeAn electric three-wheeler homemade from balsa wood and duct tape. A couch on wheels capable of travelling over 140 km/h. A bumper car with another bumper car being pulled beside it, armstrong-style. These are a few of the most surprising vehicles to get pulled over by police. The couch got a ticket, but balsa-wood trike did not. Check out the full list here. Gone in 60 Seconds ‘Eleanor’ Mustang likely to fetch over US$1 million at auctionThe “Dream Car,” or the main ride of the 11 Mustangs used in the 2000 Nicolas Cage film Gone in 60 Seconds, is scheduled to head to auction in January 2020. And based on the sale of the last, less-of-a-star ‘Eleanor’ Mustang, which sold for US$1 million, this Shelby-inspired 1967 Ford will likely fetch more than the sum of the entire film budget of the original 1974 cut of the film. The movie car will go under the hammer at the Mecum auction in Kissimmee, Florida in January 2020. LISTEN: Toyota has led the hybrid charge for two decades, and as Toyota Canada’s Stephen Beatty tells Plugged In host Andrew McCredie, is now all-in on EVs, particularly fuel cell vehicles. The company’s vice president also has some interesting things to say about some provinces’ push to create electric vehicle sales quotas for 2030, and tells us about Toyota’s fascinating, and potentially game-changing, work with Quebec to produce green hydrogen. Plugged In is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts.Is the player not working? Click
Origin: News Roundup: Consumer Reports’ most and least reliable, Honda’s many CR-V options and police pull over the weirdest cars
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VW brand to trim as many as 4,000 jobs amid digital overhaul
A Volkswagen badge on a Golf GTI steering wheel.Nick Tragianis / Driving Volkswagen’s main car brand will let lapse as many as 4,000 general and administrative jobs while adding at least 2,000 IT positions over the next four years, avoiding layoffs at its German factories as it negotiates a major shift toward electrification and self-driving cars. The move, brokered with VW’s powerful unions, includes job guarantees through 2029, the manufacturer said Wednesday in a statement. The brand will rely on partial retirement and attrition to help reach targeted staff reductions as it culls models and focuses on new technologies that require fewer factory workers. With earlier job cuts, VW is on track with a plan announced in March to improve profit by 5.9 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) a year, the unit’s chief operating officer, Ralf Brandstaetter, said in the statement. “We are making the company fit for the digital age in a sustainable way.” The prospect of deeper cutbacks had alarmed VW’s union leaders as manufacturers wrestle with the transformation of sprawling industrial operations. App-based services like ride-sharing and car-sharing are already threatening the industry’s traditional business model of individual car ownership — a trend that may accelerate once self-driving vehicles reach critical mass — and electric cars require fewer parts and workers for assembly. The extended job guarantee is “an important signal,” VW works council chief Bernd Osterloh said in Wolfsburg, near the company’s headquarters. VW signed a broader labor pact in 2016 to cull 30,000 jobs worldwide, with Germany accounting for 23,000, to generate about 3 billion euros in annual savings. The VW car brand, which accounts for about half the group’s global deliveries, employs roughly 110,000 workers in Germany out of a global workforce of 663,000 across the Volkswagen group, the world’s largest automaker. The unit has been pushing to rein in bloated expenses to lift profitability that’s trailing rivals like PSA
Origin: VW brand to trim as many as 4,000 jobs amid digital overhaul
This is how many manual transmission cars Toyota actually sells
2020 Toyota Corolla SGraeme Fletcher / Driving When the Toyota Supra came out with an automatic-only transmission, every enthusiast on the planet cried Where’s the manual!? without thinking for a second about how hard it actually is to sell a car with a manual transmission these days. That’s especially true for Toyota; if you ask them, it’s next to impossible. In a dinner conversation with Toyota spokesperson Nancy Hubbell, CarBuzz got some exact numbers re: how many stickshifts the Japanese automaker actually moves off the lots in its various cars, so let’s take a look. Let’s start with the 86, which is Toyota’s sportiest car. Just 33 per cent of buyers opted for the manual transmission in the compact coupe, which means two-thirds of buyers still went for the six-speed automatic. The 86 is one of the most affordable sports cars you can buy today, and if 66 per cent of people buying one still go for the automatic, it paints a pretty bleak picture for the transmission as a whole. Toyota also offers a brand-new manual transmission on its redesigned Corolla hatchback; the six-speed unit makes for a fun little city car at a cheap price, but do you think that’s enough to get people to buy the three-pedal? Nope. The take rate for the manual Corolla hatch is just 15 percent. If you expand the sales to include the Corolla sedan, then the numbers drop to less than one per cent. Tacoma and Yaris buyers are also opting for the automatic 95 per cent of the time, which pushed Toyota to remove the manual as an option for the 2020 Yaris hatchback. So as usual, it’s not the problem of manufacturers not making manual transmission cars, it’s the consumer’s fault for not buying them in the first place. Although, we would argue that if more interesting cars were made with manuals, perhaps people would buy
Origin: This is how many manual transmission cars Toyota actually sells
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