1969 Chevrolet Corvette Base Coupe 2-door 7.0l....427/390 Hpi on 2040-cars

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Automakers score 8 out of top 20 most-watched ads on YouTube [w/videos]

Who would have ever thought there'd be a day where people are able to skip television commercials only to go to websites to watch them later? Such is the joy of a DVR and YouTube. AdWeek tabulated the 20 most-watched ads on YouTube, and found that nine were car-related including eight coming from automakers.
Volkswagen continued its Star Wars theme with two ads in the top 20, including the highest-ranking car commercial The Bark Side spot at number three with almost 18 million views, which doesn't even have a single car in it. Some of our favorites are from Chrysler with Clint Eastwood in It's Halftime in America and House Arrest with Charlie Sheen for the Fiat 500 Abarth. Chevrolet, Honda, Audi and Toyota were the other automakers in the top 20, but we'd be remiss if we didn't at least mention one of the coolest ads on the list, the Hot Wheels corkscrew jump.
Of all the car videos, only the Fiat ad wasn't played during a Super Bowl. Check out all eight videos - in order - after the jump. Nike took the top spot with its My Time is Now ad that has been seen online more than 20 million times with Pepsi's Uncle Drew posted up in the runner-up; some of the other videos include four Old Spice commercials and an ad in which Snoop Dogg is pedaling Hot Pockets.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.

Next-gen Chevy Volt will get 1.5-liter, four-cylinder engine

As General Motors gets ready to unveil the new Chevy Volt at the Detroit Auto Show in January, it's starting to reveal a few more details about the updated plug-in hybrid. Today should be fruitful on that front, thanks to an event GM is hosting today that focuses on the new Volt, and we've just had the first bit of new: a bigger engine is coming. Since the beginning, the Volt has used a 1.4-liter, four-cylinder engine as a range extender when the battery runs dry. The second-generation model will instead get a slightly larger 1.5-liter, four-cylinder engine that will be built in Flint, MI. That's a step up from the various engines that have been a part of the 2016 Volt's rumored mills, everything from a 1.0-liter or 1.2-liter three-cylinder to a 2.0-liter turbo. The confirmation about the new 1.5-liter powerplant was found in Automotive News, where we also heard again that GM is going to start building the new Volt's electric drive unit in Detroit, moving production up from Mexico. We will have more information on the 2016 Chevy Volt later today.