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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.

JLR shares backstage 'No Time to Die' Range Rover Sport SVR carnage

James Bond's latest adventures will take him to Norway and Scotland, as seen in the trailer for the upcoming "No Time to Die." Somewhere along the way, the British spy encounters a pair of Range Rover Sport SVRs, the ultimate high-performance SUV from JLR's Special Vehicle Operations division in one of the movie's centerpiece car chases. Now, the company has given us a behind-the-scenes look at its filming, and the automotive carnage that ensues. The filmmakers wanted to take a Bond action sequence off-road, and chose the Range Rover Sport SVR as the the bad guys' pursuit vehicle. Armed with a JLR product placement deal (Bond drives a new Defender in another part of the movie) the henchmen had no qualms picking one of the most expensive things on the menu. Unfortunately, that also makes is a bit hard to watch when machines that start at $115,000 are totaled as they careen through the air or roll onto their roofs. The SVRs share a 5.0-liter supercharged V8 with the Jaguar F-Type SVR and are the most powerful vehicles in the Land Rover portfolio. With 575 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque on tap, translating to a 0-60 time of 4.3 seconds, they're the perfect weapon for chasing a super-spy down a dirt road. As for Bond himself, 007 makes his escape in a decades-old yellow Toyota Land Cruiser Prado. Specifically, it's a 90-series, a smaller version built from 1996 to 2002 that was never sold in the U.S. but remains popular in other parts of the world. The most powerful engine had just 190 horsepower from a 3.4 liter V6 shared with the similar-era 4Runner. Despite the power discrepancy, Bond manages to dispatch the Range Rovers in spectacular fashion. Wait, this is a Range Rover promo, right? "All the stunts are for real, there's nothing that's CGI'ed," said Neil Layton, the film's action vehicle coordinator. "So to make the cars more dramatic on the screen, we had to turn off a lot of safety feature aids that's on there." Interestingly, another non-JLR product shows up in the video as well. The camera car is a blacked out (to minimize reflection in other cars) Ford F-150 Raptor outfitted with a massive rooftop boom. "No Time to Die" is hits the screens on October 8. Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.

Jaguar Land Rover to cut thousands of UK jobs

LONDON — Britain's biggest carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is set to cut thousands of jobs as the company faces lower demand in China and a slump in sales of diesel cars in Europe. The central English firm builds a higher proportion of its cars in Britain than any other major or medium-sized carmaker and has also spent millions of pounds preparing for Brexit, in case there are tariffs or customs checks. Britain's business minister Greg Clark said on Thursday it is clear why a no-deal Brexit would add to the problems with further costs and disruption. JLR lost 354 million pounds ($450 million) between April and September 2018 and had already cut around 1,000 roles in Britain, shut its Solihull plant for two weeks and announced a three-day week at its Castle Bromwich site. Its Chief Executive Ralf Speth warned in September that the wrong Brexit deal could cost tens of thousands of car jobs and posed a threat to production at the automaker. The Tata Motors-owned company, which employs around 40,000 people in Britain and has boosted its workforce at new plants in China and Slovakia in recent years, unveiled plans to cut costs and improve cash flows by 2.5 billion pounds last year including "reducing employment costs and employment levels." Those cuts will be "substantial" and run into the thousands, the source told Reuters. "The announcement on job losses will be substantial, affecting managerial, research, sales, design," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, not affecting production-line staff "at this stage." The company declined to comment when contacted by Reuters on Thursday. Ford also said on Thursday it will cut thousands of jobs in Europe, exit unprofitable markets and discontinue loss-making vehicle lines as part of a turnaround effort aimed at improving profit margins in the region. Brexit warnings JLR, which became Britain's biggest carmaker in 2016, had been on course to build around 1 million vehicles by the turn of the decade, reported on Thursday a 4.6 percent drop in full-year sales to just under 600,000 vehicles. Demand in China, which had once been one of its strongest countries but has since been hit by a slowdown, fell by 21.6 percent, the biggest drop of any of its markets. "The economic slowdown in China along with ongoing trade tensions is continuing to influence consumer confidence," said Jaguar Land Rover Chief Commercial Officer Felix Brautigam.