Holden really wants to sell some cars. They've proven their intent. The Holden Cruze, a rebadged version of GM's Chevrolet Cruze, will go on sale within six months. At that time, it won't be locally made, and Australian production will begin at Holden's Adelaide production plant. So desperate are Holden to sell some cars and turn a profit that they have accelerated the arrival of the Cruze, which originally wasn't meant to be sold until locally-made vehicles were ready. The small-car market is currently the fastest growing in Australia, and the Cruze will be sold alongside the Viva and Astra, neither of which Holden believes will be affected in sales by the new Cruze. This is primarily because the Viva will be significantly cheaper (not to mention crapper) and the Astra is only available as a hatch. The Cruze will be sedan only, and will be up against established competitors like the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Mitsubishi Lancer, and Mazda3.

But Holden seems to be finally forgetting the foolish idea that because it is a Holden, it will sell. They've packed it with features that would make the aforementioned competitors weep - the full complement of 6 airbags and Electronic Stability Control will be standard on all models. Cruise control, steering wheel audio controls, and front/rear power windows will also be standard on all models.

And it's not just the features that sound impressive - the mechanicals sound just about right for this day and age. The Holden Cruze will be available with two engines: A brilliantly economical 1.8 Litre Petrol, (103kW, 6.8L/100km) and a 2.0 Litre Diesel (110kW, 5.8L/100km). Even the gearboxes are thoroughly modern and cutting edge - all Cruze models will be available with either a 5 speed manual or a 6 speed automatic. The interior design, also, appears to be functional and stylish (providing the quality of the plastics are up to scratch). The Cruze sounds just about unstoppable.

So although we have a thoroughly boring looking car (with a bum copied straight from the Honda City), we may also have a class-leader. And a car that will save the Australian automotive industry. And possibly save GM Holden from financial doom. Never has so much pressure rested on such a car - but the Cruze is readying itself for the challenge.

MELBOURNE 2009: Holden Cruze To Go On Sale in Six Months

This is the star of the new transformers movie, coming to cinemas later this year, called Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It's being called the Stingray Concept at the Chicago Motor Show, but in the movie, this "character" will be called Sideswipe. It's obviously a dream car from General Motors and Chevrolet, but this Stingray Concept takes inspiration from both the original Stingray Racer concept of 1959 (from which it thankfully doesn't borrow the exhaust pipes that look like noodles), and the current Corvette C6.

I think it also might be an exercise of design at GM, which is probably keen to see public reaction to this car. Want to know why? Because I think this concept might hint at what's going to turn into the Corvette C7. Although the Corvette C7 was meant to be released in 2012, it has now been "delayed indefinitely" according to the official line at GM, because of the financial crisis, of course. But providing General Motors stays afloat, I can't see them ever dropping the Chevrolet Corvette. I would guess that the new C7 Corvette will turn up by about 2014, possibly later. So because the new Corvette is going to be delayed so much, expect more drastic changes that would originally have been planned, at least from a design perspective. So while this concept might look outlandish now, it will look just about perfect for Chevrolet's hero model in 2014.

Because although the face of this car is obviously futuristic and grotesque, the rest of the car is quite neatly proportioned, and if you visualise more conventionally Corvette-like headlights on this car, I think you'll realise that what I'm talking about makes sense.

CHICAGO 2009: Chevrolet Stingray Concept to Star in Transformers

This is the first teaser picture of the Opel Ampera, Opel's version of the upcoming Chevrolet Volt, and is to be fully revealed at the Geneva Motor Show in March. But of course, it is a teaser picture, and reveals nothing because of artistically dimmed light - until IN YOUR FACE digitally enhanced the image, creating this exclusive new vision of Opel's new electric headliner.

The essentials of the Ampera are pretty much the same as the Volt - you get a 65km fully electric range, and when that is all used up, a petrol combustion engine kicks in to charge the lithium-ion battery. It's called "Voltec", but whatever. This car's more environmentally than any Prius, and that rocks. From this picture, we can see that when it comes to shape, the Ampera is pure Volt - but with a drastically altered face. Actually, that's a lie. It appears to be drastically altered, but on closer inspection, we can see that the headlights remain unchanged. But the overall look is very different, so I call that a success.

In fact, we've seen this face before, on the Opel Flextreme Concept of 2007 - which was also an electric car - so I've provided a picture of that too, so you can get a better idea of how the Ampera will look. I realise that this picture of the Flextreme is an illustration, but in this illustration, the alloys of the Flextreme have been lifted and plopped right onto the Ampera, heightening the visual connections.

More importantly for us Aussies, the Ampera is the first look at what the Holden version of this stunning electric car might look like - replace the Opel badge with a Holden one, because the word on the wire is that Holden will take this instead of the Chevrolet version.

And providing it's priced well enough, I'm sure I'll put my money where my mouth is. I would buy an Ampera, that's for sure - I've been a petrolhead for too long, I reckon. It's about time I became an electrichead.

NEWS: Opel Ampera Set To Make Chevy Volt Sexy

China is a very new automotive industry, and global carmakers all want a piece of what will, inevitably, be the largest market in the world. So you can imagine the furore when General Motors bosses back in Detroit noticed that one of their cars - the Daewoo Matiz - had been blatantly copied (remember that GM owns Daewoo...) by a tiny Chinese company, Chery, which had at the time existed for only six years.

Exhibit A: The Chery QQ. It has a choice of two wonderous engines: a 0.8 Litre, 38kW engine, or an absolutely bullet-like 1.1 Litre 50kW version. It is 3.5 Metres long, which is about half a metre shorter than a Mazda2. And it is cheap. Very cheap. The equivalent of about $8,000 - depending on where it's sold.






Exhibit B: The Daewoo Matiz. Probably best known to you as Kel's car in the sitcom "Kath and Kim". Probably not the best car to copy, but the Chinese thought otherwise. It had almost identically gutless engines as the Chery (0.8 Litre/37kW and 1.0 Litre/47kW), weighed little more than the average American, and went from 0-100kmh in 18 seconds. A Ford Focus will do it in less than half that time.



But the Chery is a real oddity - something that doesn't come around very often. One could argue that in these modern times, with advanced industrial techniques, robots and so forth, that a "bad" car - and I mean truly bad, even worse than a Kia - doesn't exist. But you'd be wrong, because the Chery QQ exists. Complaints about the QQ have flooded the internet, among which a owner bemoaning the loss of his iPod touch after the in-car USB dock fried its internal hardware. I find it odd that that guy could afford an iPod touch, but could not afford a better car than a Chery QQ. The iPod touch would have cost almost as much.

I know what you're wondering. Is this monstrosity available in Australia? Thankfully no. But we can laugh at the rest of the world, for now. Take this extract from Singapore motor review website OneMotor:

"In our test car, where the lower part of the centre console and dashboard meet, you get a smooth, flush interface on one side, and a gaping, uneven gap large enough to poke your hand through on the other. Comical."

So it ain't the best quality. But you get what you pay for, right? Yeah, I guess. Still, you can't deny that it is the funniest copy of an equally stupid original car. General Motors were, in truth, really angry about the copy, even though they really probably shouldn't have given a stuff about it. It's only a Daewoo Matiz after all. But the QQ is still being produced and sold, even though GM in America threw a tantrum - want to know why? Because Chery is a Chinese Government-owned corporation. The USA government couldn't afford to upset them, so GM's cries of plagiarism fell on purposely deaf ears. Even though GM Executives demostrated very publicly that the doors on the Chery QQ and Daewoo Matiz are interchangeable without any modification.

Apparently, Chery has conceded that for more success, it shouldn't really copy other people. So this was part of a statement released on one of their European english language websites:

"Chery, the eighth on size the motor-car manufacturer of China, is persistently torn to foreign markets, type of Northern America, Malaysia and the Europe where its{her} strategy of the low price should be popular. To make it, in Chery have realized, that they should stop to do{make} the latent copies of cars of other manufacturers carrying badge Chery."

I couldn't make up anything so retarded if I had tried.

But I maintain that this car should not be still on the road - any road, anywhere in the world. It is an accident waiting to happen. And when they do, you had better not be in a Chery QQ. It's EuroNCAP rating is no more than 0 stars. None. In a frontal collision at 80 kilometres per hour, the likelyhood of walking away unhurt was 0%. Chance of death was 70%.

Don't believe me? Check out these two EuroNCAP crash test pictures. The left picture is a frontal crash test of a MY2000 Daewoo Matiz. It achieved 3 stars, and assessors were reasonably satisfied with the way the passenger compartment maintained its shape (aside from the windscreen), and protected the occupant, considering the size of the car. The picture on the right is a Chery QQ. Note the extensive use of red on the diagram - this means severe damage and poor protection.

The pictures speak for themselves. It means that not only have the Chinese copied a crap car, they have made a car significantly worse than it. And although it begs the question: "why did they make this?" - I simply look at the crash test picture, with the door falling off, and go: "WTF man, how is this even allowed?!?!"

WTF?! #4: The Copycat Chery QQ

I suppose I wanted to bring this story to you a while ago, but really, I wanted to be well-informed before I made a decision to love or loathe the Chevrolet Volt. I wanted to be knowledgeable of all that it can and can't do, so I could bring you an informative article. For a change.

This is an important car. And as soon as a carmaker claims that their latest car is "theoretically emissionless" and not only that, will be going to production as shown, you can't help but raise an eyebrow. Is it General Motors spin? I'm pleased to say that it probably isn't.

At first, the Volt seems close to normal. It is based on the next-generation Astra platform, is front drive, front engined... yet nothing is as it seems. I'll start with what I know best - aesthetics. At first I thought it looked funny, like a joke - I mean, why are the windows indented into the shape of the body. Why does it seem to look like it tried to look normal, but couldn't? Because this car has an electric motor, and for it to be effective the Volt needs to be as aerodynamic as humanly possible. Aerodynamics govern the way the Volt looks. Given that GM had to achieve such a feat in aerodynamics, the Volt doesn't look half bad. A bit gawkily futuristic, but hey, it's a brave new world out there.

But what was that I just said? The Volt has an electric motor? Yes, it does. It is the principle motor of the car, and is what drives the front wheels. The Volt also has a not-so-futuristic petrol engine, but GM says that it really doesn't even need to be there, in most consumer's cases. Did you think it was a petrol-electric hybrid like the Toyota Prius? Think again. At the helm is the 112kW electric engine (with an instantaneous 370Nm of torque), which is connected to a high-tech lithium-ion battery. Even Toyota, with it's next-generation Toyota Prius, hasn't fully developed the lithium-ion technology for everyday use. So far, so good. The battery will power the Volt for 65km, but then has to be plugged in to a mains power supply to recharge the battery overnight. 65km may not sound like much, but GM has somehow researched the subject and found that it is enough for approximately 75% of private american drivers. That figure could be a crock, but it sounds about right to me.

So what about the other 25%? Sometimes we need to travel more than 65km, and although the Volt is emissionless when it runs on electric power, what do you do then? This is where the petrol engine comes into the equation. Only one the battery has no power left does it start up, and even then, it does not actually directly power the wheels of the car. Instead, the 55kW generated by the 1.4 litre engine is used to power the electric engine until you can find mains power supply. Even in this situation however, the Volt uses only 4.7 litres/100km. About the same as the current Prius, then.

Other upsides to this car are numerous. A full 65km charge in mains power will cost only roughly $1.20. If you're commuting around town in your little Yaris-sized small car, doing 7.6/100km, you will save 1520 litres of fuel a year, which, even at the currently lower-than-usual prices, would be $1672 a year. Or about 5.9 tonnes of greenhouse gas. Impressive. But then I thought about the greenhouse effect a little more, and wondered: if the Volt charges from mains power, and mains power isn't green power (like Australia, where Coal power stations are the most common) - is the Volt really a green car? There are people on both sides of the fence, some arguing that the Volt would still create less CO2 that the average car, some arguing that it would produce more.

But I decided that this is irrelevant. The Chevrolet Volt present a way that everyone with a car can be carbon-negligible, and if governments were truly serious about making that a reality, they would continue the process that creates a green power grid with more renewable energy sources. With everyone driving Chevrolet Volts, the fault rests on the government if we are still producing heaps of CO2. Sort of like "well, we all went out and bought Chevy Volts so we could all go green, now it's your turn". Yeah, that's about right.

Downsides? It weighs 1750kg, so don't expect blistering performance, even if all that torque is available as soon as the tacho needle leaves 0 rpm. Will it be expensive? Only time will tell, but expect GM to make it as competitive as it possibly can. Why? Because GM is failing - without properly good sales, it will go bankrupt, just like everything else at the moment. It can see that the Volt could be a world-changing (but more importantly for them, profit-changing) car, provided people buy them buy the bucketload. And encouraging that will most definitely mean a price incentive.

In my belief, a car like the Chevrolet Volt should be partially subsidised by the american government, so that it reaches as many people as possible, and prevents climate change as much as it possibly can. If everyone in America (300 million) saved 5.9 tonnes a year like the Yaris driver (and most will save more), you're looking at nearly 2 billion tonnes of CO2 that the human race hasn't emitted. It's becoming more and more important, even for the future of the human race, that this car sells. And sells phenomenally. Because there just isn't a car anywhere in the world that makes negating carbon emissions so accessible and possible.

So when can we all buy one? In America, it will go on sale in late 2010 (if everything goes as planned), and elsewhere in the years following that. Expect it to arrive here at the earliest in 2012. It can't come soon enough.

I've given the US of A a bit of a sledging lately - but this is their chance to prove my sentiments unfounded. I want a Chevrolet Volt. I want an American Car. I never thought I'd say that, but I want an American Car. It is desirable.

NEWS: Chevrolet Volt to Save the Planet