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Toyota, Lexus dominate KBB's Best Resale Value Awards

Toyota and Lexus stormed the 2014 Kelley Blue Book Best Resale Value Awards, winning a combined 18 categories including best brand and best luxury brand. This marks the third year in a row that both automakers have won the Brand and Luxury Brand resale value awards. In all, Toyota won 11 categories and Lexus won seven.
Honda made a good showing, as well, winning two segments (Accord Plug-In Hybrid and Civic Si) and putting one car on the top-10 Best Resale Value list (CR-V). Chevrolet did even better, winning two segments (with the V6 Camaro and the Corvette) and placing three cars on the top-10-overall list (again, the Camaro and Corvette, plus the Silverado 1500).
The other winners came from Jeep, Dodge, Infiniti, Subaru and Audi. To give you a clearer picture of the Toyota and Lexus domination, their 18 mentions represents more than half of the 34 awards (including the top-10-overall list).

Audi Allroad Shooting Brake is a TT peep show

What you're looking at here is the almost-here third-generation Audi TT. Just compress the suspension a bit to take away its Allroad pretensions and rake its backlight to align better with the previous generation's aesthetic, and you're pretty well there. What you're looking at officially, of course, is the Audi Allroad Shooting Brake, a four-seat E-Tron hybrid showcar powered by Audi's venerable 2.0-liter TFSI four-cylinder (good for 292 horsepower) backed by a 40-kW electric motor and a secondary 85-kW motor acting upon the rear axle to provide low- and moderate-speed drive. The latter also provides through-the-road Quattro all-wheel drive when extra traction and power is called for.
All-in, Audi says the Allroad Shooting Brake's ETron powertrain is good for 408 horsepower and total system torque of 479 pound-feet, enough to haul the 3,500-pound German to 62 miles per hour in 4.6 seconds and up to a governed 155 mph. Despite that tidy performance, Audi says the Allroad Shooting Brake offers robust fuel consumption of 1.9 liters per 100k, equivalent to 124 miles per gallon, with a bladder-busting range of 510 miles.

Audi to keep hiring workers despite VW diesel scandal

Even while Volkswagen contemplates delaying or canceling projects to pay for costs related to the massive diesel emissions scandal, its stablemate Audi is hiring, according to Reuters. Audi certainly isn't immune to the diesel scandal, with around 2.1 million affected vehicles worldwide including 13,000-14,000 in the US, but the scandal so far isn't affecting staffing levels. "We are sticking with plans for strategic growth and are continuing to hire new employees as planned," Audi board member for human resources Thomas Sigi said in a German newspaper, according to Reuters. Sigi even suggested paying a "respectable" bonus to workers next year. Audi has some big projects on the horizon, too. Among them, the company intends to launch a production version of the E-Tron Quattro Concept in 2018, and for performance fans a new TT RS appears to be on the way. The new A4 should be a big contributor to global volume when its worldwide rollout is complete. Rather than allowing the diesel scandal to hurt all of its divisions, the VW Group instead wants to concentrate the fallout (and costs) on the VW brand, according to Reuters. Those expenses could be huge. Volkswagen is budgeting around $7.3 billion just to repair the 11 million emissions-cheating vehicles. Worldwide, maximum estimates put the whole mess at $87 billion. Related Video: