08 Maserati Gran Turismo 25k Miles **mint And Flawless** Look!!!!! on 2040-cars

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The troubled Alfa Romeo Giulia needs serious help [UPDATE]

UPDATE: An Alfa Romeo US spokesman responded to this article with the following statement: The safety concerns expressed in the story are false. The all-new 2017 Alfa Romeo Giulia is designed and engineered to meet or exceed all federal safety regulations. The Alfa Romeo Giulia will begin production for the North American market in the late second-quarter of this year. Alfa Romeo will have a full product portfolio of premium vehicles that includes plans for (8) all-new Alfa Romeo vehicles by 2020. The product launches are prioritized by segment volumes starting this year with the Alfa Romeo Giulia production for North America starting in late Q2, followed by the Midsize-UV – the 2nd largest premium segment in North America. Even on the day you dragged them kicking and screaming and gesticulating wildly to a table full of concrete evidence, Alfa Romeo executives will never admit the Giulia program is going through a tough patch. But it is. Reports say the Giulia, on the eve of production, didn't just fail one internal crash test, but failed the front, side and rear impact tests. Alfa denies it. Automotive News published a report last week saying two suppliers had insisted the Giulia, on the eve of production, didn't just fail one internal crash test, but failed the front-, side-, and rear-impact tests. A third supplier source told us the same thing. Alfa is denying it. It was due on sale in Europe late last year and was supposed to be here in the next month or two. But it wasn't, and it won't. It was to be headlined by a twin-turbo V6 that reportedly howled its way around the Nurburgring 14 seconds faster than the BMW M3 could manage. That second part is only true if you believe it's fair to compare a full lap in a standard BMW M3 with a favorable accumulation of sector times to a development prototype Giulia with 220 pounds stripped out of it and rolling on hand-cut racing slicks. No, me neither. A Promising Start The Giulia's all-new architecture was developed in just two years by a skunkworks of young engineers headed by Fiat's engineering prince, Philippe Krief, and (bafflingly) sited inside Maserati's headquarters complex in Modena, about three hours from Alfa Romeo's own Turin HQ.

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.

Maserati's small two-seater could arrive by 2016

As a following act to the redesigned Quattroporte and the recently unveiled 2014 Maserati Ghibli, Maserati will be releasing a slew of new products in the coming years, including the next-generation GranTurismo, the all-new Levante SUV and a new 911-fighting coupe - possibly called Gran Sport. While all of this information was detailed last year in a leaked product plan document, there were no dates associated with any of the new products. Auto Express is now reporting that the new GranTurismo will be out in 2015 and the new smaller coupe is expected out in 2016.
According to the report, the new coupe will be smaller and sportier than the GranTurismo, and it will feature a mid-engine layout with a platform that isn't shared with the Alfa Romeo 4C. This product onslaught is a part of Maserati's plan to increase sales to 50,000 units globally by 2015.