1995 Volkswagen Eurovan Camper Van Camper 3-door 2.5l Winnebago on 2040-cars

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Weekly Recap: Mercedes, Volkswagen spend big as import automakers invest in North America

Import automakers are on a building frenzy in North America as resurgent car sales have prompted companies to expand their manufacturing footprints to meet rising demand. That was evidenced this week when Mercedes-Benz announced plans to build a $500-million factory to produce the Sprinter commercial van, and Volkswagen confirmed a whopping $1-billion investment to expand its massive plant in Mexico. Meanwhile Jaguar Land Rover reportedly wants to build a factory in North America, but not for at least three years, and Hyundai is said to be expanding in the southern United States. The common thread in all of this expansion? Trucks, time and money. Mercedes wants to capitalize on the burgeoning work van segment in the United States and will break ground in 2016 on a 200-acre site in Charleston, SC, to build the next-generation Sprinter. The site will have a paint shop, body shop and an assembly line, and 1,300 people will be employed when production ramps up. Why do this, when Mercedes has immense van operations in Germany? It's cheaper to build in the US for the US market. Building locally allows Mercedes to avoid import taxes, forego a complex shipping process that involves partially disassembling German-built Sprinters and naturally, reduces the time it takes to deliver finished trucks to their buyers. "This plant is key to our future growth in the very dynamic North American van market," Volker Mornhinweg, head of Mercedes-Benz Vans, said in a statement. He was speaking about Mercedes and vans, but another German automotive giant, Volkswagen, had similar motives for its mammoth expansion plans in Puebla, Mexico. The added space and production capacity will allow VW to build a three-row version of the Tiguan, and provide another crossover for its US lineup that's light on SUVs. The current Tiguan has two rows. The factory will be able to churn out 500 units daily of the larger variant, and they will be sold in North and South America. It will arrive in the US in mid-2017, a spokesman told Autoblog. VW also plans to build another crossover, a midsize seven-passenger vehicle, at its growing Chattanooga, TN, site. "Localization has become key to safeguarding our competitive position on the global market, and manufacturing the Tiguan in Mexico will bring production closer to the US market," Michael Horn, CEO of Volkswagen Group of America, said in a statement.

Hyundai plans Level 4 autonomy by 2021 in a fuel-cell car

SAN FRANCISCO — Silicon Valley startup Aurora announced on Thursday partnerships with Volkswagen AG and Hyundai to develop a self-driving system within their vehicles, the latest tie-up between global automakers and Silicon Valley tech companies. Aurora was founded in 2016 by robotics expert Drew Bagnell, Chris Urmson, who came from Alphabet Inc's Google, and Sterling Anderson, who formerly worked at Tesla. For Hyundai, Aurora's technology will be incorporated into custom-developed models and tested in markets including China. Hyundai said the first model to be used in testing will be its latest generation fuel-cell vehicle, debuting at the CES technology conference in Las Vegas next week. The model name of the car, shown above, will be announced then. Under the alliance, Hyundai plans to commercialize level 4 autonomous vehicles — which can operate without human input or even human oversight under select conditions — in unidentified "pilot smart cities" by 2021. This is the first announcement on a self-driving technology partnership by the South Korean carmaker, which has traditionally shunned tie-ups in favor of developing technology in-house. The strategy has raised investor concerns that it may be left behind in the race for self-driving and electric cars. A company spokeswoman said Hyundai has "various collaborations" under way in self-driving technology and would continue to pursue cooperation. In a statement, Volkswagen said Aurora's self-driving technology can be integrated over time across the automaker's brands and in different product categories, whether self-driving pods, shuttles, delivery vans or self-driving trucks. Aurora and Volkswagen said they had been working together over the past six months to integrate Aurora's sensors, hardware and software into the German carmakers' electric vehicles to develop self-driving ride services in cities. The non-exclusive partnerships mark the first deals for the young Silicon Valley company and show how some carmakers have chosen to partner with technology companies with more experience in artificial intelligence, deep learning and robotics in order to save time and money bringing self-driving cars to market. Within the self-driving car space, Waymo — formerly Google's autonomous program headed by Urmson — is offering something similar. The tech company has been working with Fiat Chrysler since 2016 to outfit its Chrysler Pacifica minivans with autonomous technology.

2015 Volkswagen GTI: Clicking, beeping, and trying to stay cool [w/video]

My first car didn't have air conditioning. Well, that's not entirely true. The car had A/C, it just didn't work. Nevertheless, I survived summer after summer of sweating behind the wheel – par for the course in a 15-year-old Mitsubishi with 235,000 miles on the odometer. But it's another thing entirely when that same experience happens in a 2015 Volkswagen GTI after just 7,000 miles of use. That's how Autoblog kicked off summer with the long-term GTI: sweating in plaid seats. The car went to Suburban Volkswagen in Troy, MI, where the technicians told me the air-con just needed a recharge (despite asking them to inspect it further). They recharged it, the air blew cold, and 48 hours later, the A/C stopped working again. (Surprise!) The problem was a leak in the compressor/condenser line, so a new one was installed, the system was charged, and now it's fixed. For real this time. Unfortunately, that second-coming happened during a road trip with editor-in-chief Mike Austin at the helm. His logbook comments are, as you'd expect, appropriately salty. "Everybody loves the GTI, right? Not quite. I drove to Toronto for a weekend. On the way home, the A/C quit working. This wasn't too much of a problem until we hit the border control line to re-enter the United States. I always pick the slow line, somehow. Thusly baked in the heat, with outside temperatures above 80, the GTI didn't cool back down for the rest of the trip. Then I learned we already fixed the A/C once." "Of course, any car on that day with a surprise A/C failure would earn my ire," Austin notes. "It just seems a little more irritating on a new car. Otherwise, yeah, this is a great car." A great car, indeed. Everyone loves spending time with the GTI. It's got plenty of power, it's quiet, it's comfortable, and it eats up highway miles. We've got just over 10,000 miles on the odometer as of this writing, and as summer carries on, many editors have requested extended periods of seat time in the GTI for weekend getaways and longer road trips. But it's still not perfect. Following the A/C fiasco, there's another, more curious problem plaguing the GTI. Every time the car starts, a weird, varied-tempo, loud clicking is heard from the dash. We think it's coming from the direction of the glovebox, and it's not the same click patten every time. Sometimes it's one or two knocks, sometimes it's several. See what I mean in the video below. Weird, right? Another trip to Suburban Volkswagen offered no help.