General Motors Co. is enlisting its dealers as it fires back in a horsepower battle between diesel-powered heavy-duty pickups.

Ford will begin production this week of the most powerful diesel engine ever installed in a heavy-duty pickup, Barb Samardzich, vice president of powertrain engineering, said today in a statement released here at the CAR Management Briefing Seminars.

Dealers will make sure pickup buyers who purchased Ford's brawniest truck over the last four months get the power boost, too.

The 6.7-liter Power Stroke V-8 turbocharged diesel powering the 2011 Ford F-Series Super Duty, introduced in April, will be upgraded to 800 lbs.-ft. of torque and 400 horsepower, an increase of 65 lbs.-ft. of torque and 10 horsepower.

 

Jaguar's annual report for the year ending in March 2010 was recently published on the company's website, and according to the Detroit Free Press, it lays out plans for new models, including a roadster and a station wagon. (Maybe it's not just us -- maybe wagon fever really is taking over.)

Ratan Tata, chairman of India's Tata Motor Group, which owns Jaguar after taking the British luxury brand and the Land Rover badge off Ford's hands in 2008, also said that the company is considering an entry-level Jaguar model. Details, aside from the announcement, are still pretty much nonexistent at this point. 

Chevrolet fans, start scratching off lottery tickets: A Detroit-area customizer has devised a creation based on the Camaro SS dubbed “FireBreather.” And, it has a bit of star power.

The FireBreather is a movie prop made for an upcoming Michigan-produced film, Jinn. But Classic Design Concepts will craft 50 copies of this cruiser for sale to the public.

 

The Internet has a way of breeding, then amplifying, rumors. Think of it as one big high-school cafeteria. That’s especially true for the handful of sites that devote themselves to covering the automotive realm, where one misplaced word from a company representative winds up as the insinuation of an all-new model to come or, in this case, the death of two products from Ford. Recently, Automotive News reported that both the Ford Flex and its sister, the Lincoln MKT, weren’t long for this world. The story centered on Ford’s desire to separate Lincoln further from its more common sibling, but according to Ford, the report is flat-out wrong.

Ford representative Said Deep said the company has no intention of putting either the Flex or the MKT out to pasture after 2013, as the Automotive News article suggests.

“Speculative reports are incorrect,” Deep said. “These full size crossovers are vital to each brand. The MKT is one of the newest vehicles in the showroom and one of the most differentiated crossovers on the road today. Flex is one of Ford's highest-scoring vehicles in customer satisfaction, and continues to build a strong following." 

It seems car thieves haven’t caught up with the times yet. While law-abiding Americans are beginning to transition away from mammoth, gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles in favor of smaller, more fuel-efficient coupes, sedans, crossovers and hybrids, scofflaws are still drawn to the bling of luxury SUVs, according to a newly released study by the Highway Loss Data Institute, an affiliate of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

 

For the sixth time in seven years, the Cadillac Escalade, a luxury sport-utility vehicle priced between $60,000 and $190,000, tops the institute's list as the vehicle most likely to be stolen here in the U.S. The report says that for every 1,000 insured Cadillac Escalades, during the 2007 through 2009 model years, an average of 10.8 were reported stolen. And the average claim for an Escalade is seven times the average for all passenger vehicles -- $11,934, which is a fraction of its sticker price.

 

Ford Motor Co., long known for pickups and SUVs, will emphasize cars, crossovers and fuel-efficient engines in the next few years.

The company wants to be the fuel economy leader, and federal mpg standards are rising. Ford launched the Fiesta subcompact this summer and will introduce a redesigned Focus compact early next year.

The Fiesta and Focus are the first U.S. vehicles from the One Ford plan. Under the plan, each region has global responsibility for certain models. For example, designers and engineers in Dearborn, Mich., will continue to work on trucks and crossovers that can be adapted worldwide. The Europeans are designing small cars.

With Mercury dying by year end, Ford has promised Lincoln more product investment in the coming years.

The Ford brand will get at least one new crossover and possibly a subcompact crossover. Ford and Lincoln also will add powertrain options to many products.

 

As the first cordless phone freed talkers everywhere from the tyranny of wires, Evatran hopes to do the same for drivers of electric vehicles with its new Plugless Power EV charging station.

Though the system operates without plugs or cables, it's not exactly "wireless" -- rather, it works through proximity induction charging, in which a charge flows over a small air space when the two charging components are close enough to each other. 

Tesla's recent initial public stock offering was good news for the electric-vehicle manufacturer, both because it pulled in about $226 million and because it was a vote of confidence not only for Elon Musk's company but for the EV segment as a whole. Unfortunately for Tesla, this same forward march of progress within the EV segment is about to undercut what was a major source of income for the company: sales of zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) credits to the major automotive manufacturers. Automakers buy the credits to comply with the California Air Resource Board's zero-emissions vehicle mandate (as well as similar programs in several other states). The mandate requires manufacturers to build and sell electric vehicles -- or to purchase credits from EV manufacturers in a cap-and-trade scenario.