Vorderman Volkswagen

It’s been a long three years of waiting, delays, and more waiting, but finally the next installment in the Gran Turismo series is (nearly) here. Just in time to keep you glued to your flat screen this summer, Gran Turismo Sport  has just been released in closed beta form to a select group of PlayStation 4 users, a sure sign that release is imminent after the game’s launch date was pushed from 2016 into 2017. Invites to test the beta were only given to gamers in the United States as the Gran Turismo team aims to collect data and fine tune the game’s final development. Hard-core hopefuls were given the chance to sign up for the game’s beta, although that didn’t guarantee you would get it. PlayStation, however, is offering a subsequent signup for future updates, which indicates a second beta phase is likely. The Gran Turismo team also took the opportunity to release several screen shots of gameplay, plus player profile details and a new trailer . Driver and Sportsmanship ratings...

Sergio’s waiting by the phone. Waiting for someone to call him up and tell him he’s not alone. ( Our apologies to Soul Asylum – Ed .) It’s not our fault Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne’s corporate life resembles a game of Mystery Date. That’s just the way it is for an automaker on the prowl for a partner. After having its advances repeatedly rebuffed by General Motors, FCA has now latched onto Volkswagen as a potential suitor — but the merger dance hasn’t been a smooth one. After some cattiness on VW’s part, it seems the eternally — and perhaps naïvely — optimistic Marchionne’s hopes are once again up. He’s anticipating a call. “We are waiting with anticipation,” Marchionne told reporters today, according to Reuters . It seems that Marchionne could be reading too much into comments made by Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Müller last week. Still, stranger things have happened. Perhaps Müller is being coy with his true intentions, playing hard to get to keep up...

Sending a text is nerve-racking enough. Even after countless edits, rereads, and some thoughtful meditation on the nature of non-instant communication, a text will always have inexplicable errors that you only see after having pressed send. It’s a law of IT, similar to the law of reply-all. So can you imagine what it’s like to fire up the production line on a new car? The only protection against the law of unintended errors is testing. How do you get to Chattanooga assembly? Testing, testing, testing. And that’s the subject of this latest video from Volkswagen. This is the third instalment in a series of videos designed to let people in on the lengths that VW went to to make an SUV that it hopes will capture the American imagination and market In the video, vehicle tech Everett Collins and Director of vehicle integration Rainer Santelmann go over what happens to a car when VW is trying to make sure it doesn’t break down like an Alfa. “With a prototype vehicle a lot of the prob...

Are you looking for a path to a career in the automotive industry? Well, before you send that application in to Lincoln Tech, consider Lambo Univeristy, Italy’s latest gift to higher education. Okay, so it’s not really called Lambo Univeristy. The school’s founders insist on calling it the Motorvehicle University of Emilia Romagna (the unappealingly initialized MUNER) and Lamborghini isn’t the only automaker participating in its creation. Ducati, Maserati, and Ferrari have all joined in, too, along with Magneti Morelli, Dallara, Haas, and more. The actual, like, educational bit of the school will be helped along by a number of universities in central Italy, but MUNER will only accept 150 students, so I hope your transcript is impressive. 120 of the students will go into Advanced Automotive Engineering, with the other 30 going into Advanced Electronic Engineering. The former covers advanced sport car manufacturing, while the latter covers IT and connectivity. The good news for A...

With the average age of cars on the road now on the far side of 11 years, the latest electronic safety and convenience systems don’t do most drivers much good. But the good news is that any car can be upgraded with many of these features, from blind spot warning to Bluetooth for streaming music and hands free phone calls. You can easily install most of them yourself, and for a lot less than making payments on a new car. Our new series of articles detailing some of these features will take you through what products are available, how they work, and what they cost. We’re starting with nine products available from the automotive aftermarket provided by our sponsor eBay, who has also graciously offered up three $500 gift cards . We’ve independently made our product choices based on ease of DIY installation, popularity, favorable reviews from other sources and users, and brand recognition with websites and readily available customer support. Oh, and we’re installing all these upgrades on ...

As we age, life takes away our health and our figure, and in turn gives us people and things to look after. With its new ad campaign, Volkswagen wants to show you how its new SUV, the Atlas, is the perfect vehicle to help you cope with this unending transaction. Trading on its reputation for peace and love, both of which are meant euphemistically in this case, the new Atlas ad campaign starts with the love bug, which leads inevitably to a child. As the dependents add up, the cars get bigger, moving from a Jetta, to a Tiguan, and eventually onto the new Atlas. Except in this case instead of rocking with the euphemistic love of the previous cars, it is instead rocking with the literal love of an active family. With its jangling Dean Martin song about the facts of life, and its ironically familially unsuitable content, it calls back to VW ads from the last decade, like the ad for the Rabbit. The post Watch: VW Launches Atlas Ad Campagin with “Luv Bug” appeared first on VWVortex...

Volkswagen expects to build fast DC charging sites in the U.S. over the next two years that would rival and in some ways exceed today’s Tesla Supercharger network. This news comes via a draft plan released by the California Air Resources Board yesterday in advance of a board meeting later this month. Final approval of the plan is on track for April with construction to begin soon after. Volkswagen says it plans to spend a total of $200 million in California over the first of four 2.5 year investment cycles. A further $300 million would be spent nationally in states other than California. In total, VW expects to spend $2 billion over 10 years as one part of its recent settlement of claims related to its cheating on 2.0 liter diesel engine emissions. As part of this first cycle of its investment plan, VW would spend $120 million on EV charging infrastructure in California. About $65 million of that would go toward long-distance highway corridor fast DC charging at 50 locations. Eac...