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Trump calls Germans 'very bad,' vows to stop their car sales in US

TAORMINA, Italy -Talks between President Trump and other leaders of the world's rich nations at the G7 summit on Friday were expected to be "robust" and "challenging" after he had lambasted NATO allies and condemned Germans as "very bad" for their trade policies. Trump's confrontational remarks in Brussels, on the eve of the two-day summit in the Mediterranean resort town of Taormina, cast a pall over a meeting at which America's partners had hoped to coax him into softening his stances on trade and climate change. According to German media reports, Trump condemned Germany as "very bad" for its trade policies in a meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, signaling he might take steps to limit sales of German cars in the United States. "The Germans are bad, very bad," he reportedly told Juncker. "Look at the millions of cars that they're selling in the USA. Horrible. We're gonna stop that." White House economic adviser Gary Cohn on Friday confirmed the reports. "He said they're very bad on trade, but he doesn't have a problem with Germany." Cohn said Trump had pointed out during the meeting that his father had German roots in order to underscore the message that he had nothing against the German people. Trump's spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump had "tremendous respect" for Germany and had only complained about unfair trade practices in the meeting. Juncker called the reports in Spiegel Online and Sueddeutsche Zeitung exaggerated. The reports translated "bad" with the German word "boese," which can also mean "evil," leading to confusion when English-language media translated the German reports back into English. "The record has to be set straight," Juncker said, noting that the translation issue had exaggerated the seriousness of what Trump had said. "It's not true that the president took an aggressive approach when it came to the German trade surplus." "He said, like others have, that (the United States) has a problem with the German surplus. So he was not aggressive at all," Juncker added. In January, Trump threatened to slap a 35 percent tax on German auto imports. "If you want to build cars in the world, then I wish you all the best. You can build cars for the United States, but for every car that comes to the USA, you will pay 35 percent tax," he said. "I would tell BMW that if you are building a factory in Mexico and plan to sell cars to the USA, without a 35 percent tax, then you can forget that." Last year, the U.S.

2015 Chinese Grand Prix shines bright sun on the dark days of racing

Yes, we tuned into the Formula One Grand Prix in Shanghai China to see a race. But we all know we really tuned in to see if Ferrari, or any other team, could make it a competitive race with Mercedes-AMG Petronas. Based on qualifying, things didn't get off the best of starts: Lewis Hamilton made it four-out-of-four at the front, leading all three Free Practice sessions and then taking pole position in his Mercedes. Nico Rosberg is making the most of his time in the simulator, getting closer to Hamilton as the months go by. This time he lined up in second, just 0.042 in arrears. Ferrari did its best to temper expectations after Malaysia. Even though Sebastian Vettel qualified in third, almost a second behind Hamilton, the Scuderia's race pace is still considered a danger. Kimi Raikkonen's final hot lap went sour in Turn 3 and dropped the Finn to sixth place on the grid. In between the Ferraris, Williams is another team desperately working to maintain its advantage, and both of its drivers capitalized on Raikkonen's misfortune. Felipe Massa took fourth, Valtteri Bottas was in fifth. Daniel Ricciardo led the Infiniti Red Bull Racing charge in seventh, ahead of Romain Grosjean in the Lotus earning a spirits-lifting eighth. The two Saubers continue to show how good the Ferrari engine is, with Felipe Nasr taking ninth position and teammate Marcus Ericsson in tenth. Yet when the lights went out, so did the racing, for the most part. At the end of the first lap, because of some excellent moves by Raikkonen on both Williams' and a terrible start by Ricciardo that dropped him to seventeenth, the order was Hamilton, Rosberg, Vettel, Raikkonen, Massa, Bottas, Grosjean, Nasr, Ericsson, and Pastor Maldonado in the Lotus rounding out the top ten. At the end of the race, the only positions that had changed were the final two: Ricciardo had a laps-long battle with Ericsson, passing, getting repassed, then passing again to take ninth for good, with Ericsson finishing tenth. Maldonado suffered the worst in a battle with Jenson Button in the McLaren, when Button misjudged the entry into Turn 1 for a pass and clouted the back of the Lotus. Button was able to finish but Maldonado had to retire. Yes, there were some decent moments in between, like Bottas getting by Massa at the start, then Raikkonen getting past Massa in the first few corners and the Finn's move on Bottas also letting Massa through.

Mercedes was set to sell version of Nissan Titan, now Infiniti might instead

Mercedes-Benz Titan. Mercedes-Benz Frontier. Mercedes-Benz pickup truck. None of these things roll off the tongue particularly well. We'd like to think that's the reason Daimler opted to kill the idea of rebadged Titan and Frontier pickups from corporate ally Nissan. In reality, the execution before the Frankfurt Motor Show was due to more complicated issues.
Yes, Mercedes, byword for German luxury, style and quality, would have slapped a three-pointed star on a pair of Japanese pickup trucks that have failed to resonate with consumers in the world's largest truck market. That slapping of badges isn't much of an exaggeration, at least on the outside. According to the report from Road & Track, the truck's front clip would have been tweaked, but beyond that, the sheetmetal would have been unchanged. The interior would have received a more thorough going-over by the team at Mercedes, while the suspension and noise, vibration and harshness tuning would have also received significant attention.
The trucks would have ended up being sold through the light-commercial branch of Mercedes-Benz - the same folks that will happily sell you a Sprinter van - had the deal gone through. Issues arose, though, first with the engines. Mercedes wanted a wider range of powertrains to allow it to tune models for specific markets, while Nissan said it couldn't engineer the wide variety of engines that MB wanted to drop under the hood. For the smaller truck, meanwhile, MB was interested in a hybrid or plug-in variant, according to R&T, although this was also shot down by Nissan.