1987 Buick Regal on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Opel Insignia OPC Sports Tourer shows its fresh face ahead of Frankfurt debut

Drive down the Autobahn and there's any number of vehicles likely to pass you, and most of them are produced locally. But if you're wondering how that Opel left you in its dust, look closely (and quickly) enough and you might make out the letters OPC on the back.
They stand for Opel Performance Center (the German counterpart to Vauxhall's VXR line) and they adorn performance versions of the Corsa, Astra and Insignia. The latter is undergoing a bit of a refresh and is expected to debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show in a couple of weeks, but you don't have to wait that long as our intrepid spy photographers have caught it in the flesh outside an Opel facility in Germany.
Spied here completely undisguised in Sports Tourer (read: wagon) form, the Insignia has had a few nips and tucks performed, but we'll be more intrigued to see what it's got under the hood. The current model packs a 2.8-liter twin-turbo V6 driving 325 horsepower to all four wheels, but rumors suggest that the OPC (yeah you know me!) could have as much as 400 hp up its sleeve. That would make this one heck of a sleeper - especially in wagon form - and only make us pine for a more potent version of its twin Buick Regal to roam our highways, too.

GM expanding Lansing Lambda CUV plant

Considering that crossovers are a rapidly growing portion of the US auto market, it's not surprising to hear that General Motors is preparing to build even more of them. The company is investing $63 million to expand its Lansing Delta Township Assembly plant that builds Lambda platform CUVs like the Chevrolet Traverse, GMC Acadia and Buick Enclave.
According to GM, the expansion will add roughly 263,000 extra square feet of space to the plant. Of that, 181,000 square feet will be for an updated body shop with cutting-edge robots. There will also be 54,000 square feet of additional room in the paint shop and 28,000 square feet of more area for general assembly.
GM isn't saying as much, but there is the possibility that this extra space could allow for additional models produced at the factory. Cadillac reportedly dropped plans to build a three-row SUV on the Lambda platform earlier this year, however, dealers for the luxury brand were recently pitched the possibility of adding large and small CUVs, an ATS convertible or a sedan below the ATS.

Mark Reuss: GM can't afford product 'misses,' has 'thought about' CT6 V-Series

Mark Reuss is a busy man. He oversees General Motors' global product portfolio, an all-encompassing task for a company that sold more than 9.9 million cars and trucks last year. When GM launches a well-received product, like the road-going rocket ship that is the Chevrolet Corvette Z06 – he gets credit. When the company stumbles with the slow-selling Chevy Malibu or grapples with fallout from the decade-old Saturn Ion and its flawed ignition switch, he gets blamed. GM owners, the press and sometimes the federal government, demand answers. Bob Lutz famously held the job before Reuss. So did Mary Barra, who's now GM's chief executive. There's a New GM, but the lineage is connected to a long history. When he's not thinking product, Reuss, an executive vice president, also runs the purchasing and supply chain for the company, which is still one of the largest industrial empires in the world. We caught up with Reuss on the floor of the New York Auto Show, where GM had just rolled out two crucial new products: the 2016 Cadillac CT6 and the 2016 Chevrolet Malibu. Speaking with a small group of reporters, Reuss delved into a variety of subjects, including the new Malibu, Cadillac's future (he thinks the ATS-V is going to "flame the M3 and M4"), and other topics. On fixing the Malibu: "We can't miss. We can't have those kinds of misses [like the previous generation] on our cars and crossovers and trucks. We can't do that. If we do that, we give a reason for someone to go buy something else. It's that simple. "On a car like the Malibu we have a chance to really fix all of that, which we have, and then lead. Then you've got a real opportunity there. So that's what we've really been focused on here – to fix those things." He later added: "We need that car here to transform Chevrolet desperately because it's the heart of the market. And when you think of Chevrolet, people will come back and think about what we did with the [new] Malibu and the Cruze... It's hugely important to us." On Cadillac: "If we go out and try and out-German the Germans, it's probably not going to work. We've got an opportunity here generationally where there's a lot of people younger than me that have parents that drove BMWs and Mercedes, and I think there's an opportunity there for those people to drive something different than what their parents did, and I think that's always been an opportunity in the auto industry if you look at the history of it.