1995 Dodge Dakota on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Ranking Dodge's Charger Hellcat with the fastest sedans in the world

"This is a car that most brands would never bring to market." - Tim Kuniskis
Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis had reason to be confident, perhaps even a bit cocky at the reveal of his brand's newest halo car, the 2015 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat. As he said simply, it's the "quickest, fastest and most powerful sedan in the world."

Fiat brand chief reassigned then resigns amid flagging sales

Jason Stoicevich was replaced as head of the Fiat brand in North America just the other day. He was immediately reassigned to another job within Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. But according to Automotive News, Stoicevich quit the new job – and the company altogether – the very next day. The development comes amidst flagging sales for the Fiat brand in America. The introduction of the awkward-looking 500L multi-purpose vehicle has been largely regarded as a sales disaster in the US. Despite having just introduced the new 500X into the growing crossover market, and an overall upward trend across FCA group sales, the Fiat brand's figures have been dropping all year. While the Italian brand's volume has fluctuated from month to month compared to last year's sales, the number of cars its dealers sells on an average day has been firmly in decline. Fiat's downward trend reflects a general tendency in the market towards larger vehicles at the expense of smaller ones. However, the powers that be in Auburn Hills evidently felt that a change of leadership was in order, so it placed Dodge chief Tim Kuniskis in charge of all the company's mass-market passenger-car brands – namely Dodge, Chrysler, and Fiat – and moved Stoicevich to running the group's fleet and small-business operations. Stoicevich remained in charge of the company's California Business Center, but it seems as though he was as dissatisfied with the switch as his superiors were with the performance of the brand over which he presided, and so he apparently elected to step down and leave the company.

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.