1987 Suzuki Samurai Ja Sport Utility 2-door 1.3l White No Rust on 2040-cars

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Funning around with ZF's Smart, Advanced Urban Vehicles

ZF has a lot of experience building various electric vehicle parts, including transmissions, but it doesn't put them all together into one cute little package that often. The ZF Advanced Urban Vehicle changes that, and shows what the company can do when it takes bits and pieces of its admittedly cool tech and throws them all into the shell of an old Suzuki Swift. We got to control the all-electric beast at an event in Germany this summer, using nothing but a connected iPad. There were three headline technologies on the AUV (also called the Smart Urban Vehicle): the remote control Smart Parking Assist function, the all-electric rear-axle drive electric Twist Beam (eTB), and the PreVision Cloud Assist. PreVision Cloud Assist ZF had a short track set up for us to try out the PreVision Cloud Assist. The first time around the track, nothing was different. It's not supposed to be. The trick with Cloud Assist is that the car saves real-world driver interactions into its memory and, with the addition of GPS coordinates, starts to learn how to drive the route. Go to work the same way every day? If you're being assisted by a cloud, then all you have to do is steer. The car learns how fast it can take a turn and when it needs to slow down, with the idea here is to let the car move when it can, increasing the efficiency and range of an EV. You're still in charge in case of traffic ahead, but in open road circumstances, you won't need to touch the brakes or the gas. Just the steering wheel. On my second time around the demo track (which had data from other drivers who had tested the car earlier in the day), I kept my feet off the pedals, and the darn thing worked. It slowed me down when necessary to make a curve, but kept me at a brisk pace that felt a bit too fast but was in fact totally appropriate. Electric Twist Beam There's another bit of cool tech hidden near the front wheels. The car uses a MacPherson strut that was modified to offer a wider steering angle, up to 75 degrees, to be exact. ZF calls this the electric Twist Beam (eTB), and it gives the car an incredibly tight turning radius, about 6.5 meters. An axle like this could go into an EV or an ICE vehicle, but it makes a lot of sense in an electric car since it does have a major problem: it can't be powered. No worries, thought ZF engineers, who made the little SUV rear-wheel-drive by adding two electric motors.

Indian diamond merchant gives 600 new cars to his staff

NEW DELHI — India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi helped a diamond merchant present hundreds of new cars as gifts to his employees on Thursday. Six hundred employees of Hari Krishna Exporters, a diamond trading company run by Savji Dholakia, received cars made by Indian manufacturer Maruti Suzuki, while around 1,000 more staffers were offered gifts of cash deposits and apartments in a huge outdoor ceremony in Surat, Gujarat. Indians often give each other gifts in the run-up to Diwali, a major Hindu festival celebrating the triumph of good over evil that this year falls on Nov. 7. Modi addressed the prize-giving in his home state of Gujarat via video link, as well as presenting some of the employees with car keys in the capital New Delhi. Dholakia is famous across India for giving lavish gifts to his employees at Diwali, including hundreds of apartments in 2016's ceremony. The showroom value of the 600 cars would be more than $2 million. Gift-giving in the latter part of the year when several Hindu festivals are celebrated provides a major boost to India's economy. The gifts were part of a program targeting staff who have given loyal service to the diamond trader. "The aim of this program was to reward employees' loyalty and dedication towards the company," Dholakia said in a Facebook post.Reporting by Alasdair Pal Related Video: Image Credit: Reuters Auto News Weird Car News Suzuki

Suzuki teases production C-segment crossover, could it have saved them in US?

Suzuki may be retreating (amidst booming sales) from the US market, but its efforts to woo European buyers are still going strong. Witness as proof these shadowy teaser images of the automaker's new C-segment crossover that it plans to unveil at the Geneva Motor Show next month.
Until the official debut, we've got just a few tidbits of information to report about the upcoming Suzuki. We're told, and can see, that the car has been modeled on the S-Cross concept car from the 2012 Paris Motor Show. Quite a bit of translation has happened, however, from show car to production form, as we see that the sweeping greenhouse of the S-Cross has been ditched in favor of a traditional pillared setup, large LEDs have moved from the lower front fascia to under the headlamps, and the grille is now much more in line with the rest of Suzuki's current range. The crossover is still painted in a faintly froggish shade of green, though, so the weirdness hasn't been completely leeched out.
We're also informed that the new C-segment offering will have an available a four-wheel-drive powertrain and one of the largest luggage areas in the segment. All of which strikes us as good stuff, but we're still not convinced that this unnamed entrant could have turned the Japanese automaker's fortunes in North America - even if it would have competed in one of the industry's fastest-growing segments. Feel free to read over Suzuki's brief press release below and look at the images before speculating for yourself in Comments.