2013 Gold Handicap Wheelchair Accessible! Rear Entry on 2040-cars

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Ram to go on a Rampage with new small pickup?

When people look back at today's automotive industry, what do you think they'll remember us for? The emergence of hybrids? Ever more expensive and exotic supercars? The dawn of the self-driving car? All likely scenarios, but so is the blurring of lines between one bodystyle and another, giving rise to hardtop convertible coupes and crossovers of every shape and size. But one bodystyle the North American auto industry has stayed largely away from in the past couple of decades is a car nose and chassis with a pickup bed.
It's a bodystyle immortalized by the Chevrolet El Camino, but with few exceptions, we haven't seen too many of these automotive platypuses in recent years on our turf. Subaru tried with the Baja and the low-volume Honda Ridgeline soldiers along largely unchanged, but the genre's biggest adherents are still Down Under, where ute versions of the Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon live. With a few other examples scattered to the four corners of the earth, that's really about it. But if these spy shots are anything to go by, it looks like Fiat Chrysler Automobiles could be working to bring it back.
Spied undergoing testing in Michigan, what we appear to be looking at is a heavily disguised Fiat Strada being prepared - like the Fiat Ducato-based Ram ProMaster and the smaller Doblo-based ProMaster City - for Stateside duty as a Ram product. The Strada, for those unfamiliar, is a product of Fiat Automóveis in Brazil and is based on the Palio economy car. The nameplate has been around South America since 1996 and was originally designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro (long before Volkswagen monopolized his talents), and takes a more rugged approach in the form of the Strada Adventure.

Auto Mergers and Acquisitions: Suicide or salvation?

We love the Moses figure. A savior riding in from stage right with the ideas, the smarts, and the scrappiness to put things right. Alan Mullaly. Carroll Shelby. Lee Iacocca. Andrew Carnegie. Steve Jobs. Elon Musk. Bart Simpson. Sergio Marchionne does not likely view himself with Moses-like optics, but the CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles recently gave a remarkable, perhaps prophetic interview with Automotive News about his interest and the inevitability of merging with a potential automotive partner like General Motors. Marchionne has been overtly public about his notion that GM must merge with FCA. For a bit of context, GM sold 9.9 million vehicles in 2014, posting $2.8 billion in net income, while FCA sold 4.75 million units and earned $2.4 billion in net income, painting a very rosy FCA earnings-to-sales picture. But that's not the entire picture. Most people in the auto industry still remember the trainwreck that was the DaimlerChrysler "merger" written in what turned out to be sand in 1998. It proved to be a master class in how not to fuse two companies, two cultures, two continents, and two management teams. Oh, it worked for the two individuals at both helms pre-merger. They got silly rich. And the industry itself was in a misty romance at the time with mergers and acquisitions. BMW bought Rolls-Royce. Volkswagen Group bought Bentley, Bugatti, and Lamborghini, putting all three brands into their rightful place in both products and positioning. No marriages there, so no false pretense. Finally, Nissan and Renault got married in 1999. A successful marriage requires several rare elements in this atmosphere of gas fumes and power lust. But a successful marriage requires several rare elements in this atmosphere of gas fumes and power lust, the principle part being honesty. Daimler and Chrysler lied to each other. The heads of each unit, the product planners, and finance all presented their then-current and long-range forecasts to each other with less-than-forthright accuracy. Daimler was the far greater equal and no one from the Chrysler side enjoyed that. The cultures were entirely different, too, and little was done to bridge that gap. Which brings me back to the present overtures by Marchionne to GM. "There are varying degrees of hugs," Marchionne stated in the Automotive News piece. "I can hug you nicely, I can hug you tightly, I can hug you like a bear, I can really hug you." Seriously?

Dodge performance trio thrashed on Roadkill

Of all the shows that Motor Trend does, Roadkill is probably the last one we'd pick to evaluate the latest performance automobiles. That's not a slight against David Freiburger or Mike Finnegan, who host the show: they're certified gear-heads and the go-to guys when it comes to hot rods, rat rods and anything grungier than it is shiny. But as exemplary as they are of Detroit muscle, the Charger Hellcat, Challenger Hellcat and Viper are also shiny new pieces of metal. Still, since it will now be sponsoring the show, someone at Dodge apparently thought it would be a good idea to hand Freiburger and Finnegan the keys to the company's top performance models. So to ring the best out of them, they solicited help from some of their colleagues at MT, gained access to a closed-down air strip, devised as many ways as they could to destroy the tires, and proceeded to set about doing exactly that. Watch the grin-inducing mayhem unfold in the half-hour clip above. Related Video: