Daily News Digest 11-02-2014 | Automobile

• 2014 BMW X5 Available with M Performance Parts
• Q and A: Mark Reuss, General Motors' Product Chief
• Report: Mini to Focus Lineup, Add Differentiation for Fourth Generation
• Report: Porsche Could Exceed 200,000 Sales in 2015 Thanks to Macan
• 2015 Mercedes-Benz S-Class Coupe to Debut at 2014 Geneva Auto Show

2014 BMW X5 Available with M Performance Parts Posted: 11 Feb 2014 04:00 AM PST The 2014 BMW X5 may not be one of BMW's most performance-oriented models, but the company has released a full suite of M Performance parts that will be available for this luxury SUV. These accessories include numerous exterior upgrades, along with interior trim pieces, brake upgrades, and even a power kit that adds 20 hp to the BMW X5 xDrive 35i model. To sharpen the exterior of the BMW X5, available performance parts include a front splitter, a rear diffuser, and a rear spoiler, along with 21-inch wheels wrapped in performance tires. There are also carbon fiber mirror caps, a black kidney grille, and M Performance decals for the rocker panels. Interior upgrades comprise of an available Alcantara steering wheel, a carbon fiber gear selector, and stainless steel pedals. The M Performance upgrades go under the skin though, with available packages that beef up the X5's braking, and power capabilities. A performance brake kit includes many parts adapted from the previous-generation BMW X5M, including six-piston calipers with 19-inch steel rotors. The M Performance power kit ups the output of the X5 xDrive 35i's turbocharged inline-six to 320 hp and 332 lb-ft of torque. Along with the power increase comes sharper throttle calibration, and an available performance exhaust package gives the X5 a sportier engine note to compliment the extra power. The M Performance Parts for the 2014 BMW X5 will be on sale online and at BMW dealers. These parts can be installed before delivery of the car and carry the full factory warranty that comes with any new X5.

Q and A: Mark Reuss, General Motors' Product Chief Posted: 11 Feb 2014 02:30 AM PST Mark Reuss is not the new CEO of General Motors—that job went to his old friend Mary Barra. He is, however, the new head of global product development. New York bureau chief Jamie Kitman met with him at the Renaissance Center high above Detroit to talk shop and, it turned out, to witness an historic good-bye. Jamie Kitman: It's been a wild ride. Mark Reuss: It has. JK: Australia's Holden is being closed as a manufacturing base. What does that portend for the Holden Commodore-based Chevrolet SS? It seems to fill a need. MR: It does fill a need. I don't know how we're going to sell it. What's going to happen with it now that we've announced [Holden manufacturing is] gone? It's either going to be hot or it's not. JK: It's almost like a curse for American GM cars—being built in Australia. I'm thinking of the GTO and G8. MR: I know. But because we don't have a replacement product on [SS's] heels, I tell the guys at Holden we ought not go out there broadcasting dates on this stuff because as long as people buy 'em, we'll make some. There's no reason we can't. Future Cadillacs JK: What's exciting you now? MR: The future of Cadillac – I'm really excited about having influence on it firsthand. We're getting ready to redo the car part of Chevrolet. The Cruze, Malibu, Sonic excite me, but we have to prove with these cars we can sell, manufacture and design in the heart of the market. We've got to win on these next generations. We're done with those cars[' redesigns.] And I feel good about that. My daily driver is a CTS twin-turbo (V6.) Great car. JK: Do you see a market for a Cadillac halo car? MR: You've seen the Ciel, an open air, sort of big car. Then we did this big, dramatic coupe. [The Cadillac Elmiraj unveiled at Pebble Beach.] It's hard to do market research on something like that. Because you know the market is not going to be really big. You really want to find out, do people like conceptually the proportion and the size and what it says styling wise. JK: How would you go about making the Elmiraj? MR: How do you make it is exactly the question. How do you engineer it and how does it need to be engineered so that we have something that is very special?...I don't want to overanalyze the volume on it, either. The only reason we want to hone in on how many copies we would sell, if we decide to do it, is so that we can figure out how to efficiently manufacture it. And I don't mean running down a big assembly line with a bunch of other cars. It's way different. Where do we do it, what would it be, how is it constructed, how much does it weigh, what would the dimensions really need to be, what powertrains would we have in that timeframe? All that stuff. JK: There's been some criticism of the high price of the new Cadillac ELR [$75,995]. MR: I don't care, I really don't care. Because it's a really uninformed point of view. The ELR's about $1400 bucks less than a Tesla on a comparable equipment basis, it's got two doors, it's a beautiful car. It's not limited by range and it's got the $7500 tax credit, which takes it to $67-ish, and it's got a good lease rate. No read on [sales] yet. But we're not looking for big volume. It's a beautiful car. My wife wants one. That's the kind of person we want to sell it to —we've got three kids but two of them are going. Someone fiftyish. You don't need an SUV anymore. The ELR is a beautiful thing, the interior is handcrafted, it's a beautiful car. So, I feel good about it. JK: What's wrong with the Cadillac wreath? MR: We've got to move on with the brand here. If you look at the cadences of when those things have been redone, this is about the time we'd want to do it. And if you look at our product model lineup now it's dramatically different. So, it's time to signal something different. It just looked old. We didn't over think it. We've got to signal something—when people see it everyday on their steering wheel, every day at the front of their car—that this is a different time. It's cleaner, wider. You know it's a Cadillac, but it doesn't say, this is an old Cadillac. The European Connection JK: Europeans gobble up wagons. Some say Americans are congenitally uninterested in them. I say billions spent in creating demand for SUVs and crossovers versus zero spent on promoting desire for wagons helps explain the difference. MR: No one's done a wagon at a good price point, that's the problem. That's stupid. [Later in the conversation] I wish I could get in the same room all the journalists who told me not to do the Spark in the United States "because no one will buy a car that size here." Well, we can't get enough of them. We're the only game in town here. It's an experiment, but we're selling four or five thousand a month, constrained. The other one was, "Don't bring over the Buick Encore…that's a really bad idea." Well, guess what, that's from Korea as well and we're selling the heck out of it. I love doing things that make sense, that no one else is doing. JK: Then how about the Opel Adam? MR: It ain't a bad idea. You'd have to [run it through Buick and make it a little expensive.] I don't want to put it into Chevrolet because it would compete with the [Sonic and Cruze and Malibu]. I don't know why we would do that. [GM CEO Dan Akerson walks into the room.] Dan Akerson: I've come to say good-bye. I'll see you tonight. MR: Dan, this is Jamie Kitman. DA: Oh, hi. I'm yesterday's news. MR: No, he's not. Good job last night at Automotive News. It went really well. [Door closes] JK: He's leaving the building? That was historic. MR: Yep. You were here for that. [Earlier today,] I gave him a 1963 Gran Sport, a model. It was a time when GM banned racing, and so the engineers and Zora and everybody else built these chassis and made a 377 [Ci] V-8 to put in, in between the 427s and 350s. They start showing up with privateers. People are racing them and winning, just blowing everybody off the track. I also gave [Akerson] the Peter Brock book on the history of the Sting Ray; Ed Welburn wrote the forward on that. It goes all the way up to the C7. He dug that. JK: Can you believe there was talk of selling Opel at the time of GM's bankruptcy? What were GM's leaders at the time thinking? MR: I can't speak to what they were thinking. I was asked for my opinion on what the engineering capability of Opel was and I said I thought it was very high and very excellent. JK: Was the concept of dumping Opel political? As in, they didn't want to seem like they were saving German jobs? Were they that out of touch on the product side? MR: I don't know, I can't answer that. I saw the same things you did, but I was far away. [During that time, Reuss was in Australia running Holden.] Talking Trucks JK: What do you think of the new Ford F-150? MR: If I was in Ford's shoes [aluminum] would be one way to solve an equation on a line that doesn't get any better from a CAFE and grams of CO2 standpoint. That's one way to solve it. I don't know what their product portfolio is, I don't know what the time frame is, so I can't answer what the interplay is. From an engineering standpoint, mass begets mass. Relatively speaking, the Silverado is about 200 to 250 lbs. lighter [than the outgoing F-150.] They're advertising that the new truck is about 700 lbs. lighter than their old truck. So, in effect, they're now 450-500 lbs lighter than us with their aluminum truck—if we did nothing [going forward.]…I would think they're lightening up their component sets when they lighten the truck, and I would assume they're lightening their corners—cutting brakes and suspension and engines—but I don't know. We're doing this in a different way, creating models that are different in size [the 2015 Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon] , and therefore we'll get even more mass savings [than Ford]. We'll also have different powertrains than what they will have in their big truck. So this is quite a different formula but it's also floating around the solution of CAFE and grams of C02 for the future. We've got two platforms that we can be pretty agile with. We will never be done with improving these trucks from CAFE, mass and performance standpoints. But we had to get the platforms in place. Fuels of the Future JK: What's happening with hydrogen fuel cells? MR: We had fuel cell leadership for a long time, spent a lot of money. But the infrastructure is just not coming. We continue to lead in fuel stack technology and productionization of it—we invented it in the Sixties. The first fuel-cell car is sitting over in our museum. We know how to do fuel cells. The problem is, the fuel stack itself is still right around 100,000 bucks, industry-wide—that's a lot of money. [Hyundai, Honda, Toyota] are behind on the technology. We've done Chevrolet Equinox fleets. We're partnering with Honda so that we have someone to go forward with. We've solved everything except the infrastructure and the cost. Cost comes with scale. But it's a Catch-22. If you don't have the infrastructure you're never going to solve that cost equation. If I had to guess, our approach would not be entirely different that what I've done with Holden with [liquefied petroleum gas] and what we're trying to do in the United States with [compressed natural gas]. It's on a national reserve basis. We go in and put in a CNG station at one of our big dealerships in Texas, called [Classic Chevrolet.] We've got a CNG fueling station there. We're selling [CNG-enabled] pickup trucks, vans and Impalas. It's a good place [for fleet sales]. So we're going to start there. The fleet business we establish in a few of these places is going to drive really good operational costs for our fleet buyers. And that will create more demand. It works. We did it in Australia with LPG. JK: Do you see the oil companies taking over the manufacture and distribution of hydrogen fuel? MR: In the sense that it's a by-product of making gasoline, can be. I don't know. If we had an energy policy... JK: We do. MR: What's that? JK: It's the ExxonMobil policy. MR: You're right. (Laughs) You're absolutely right. JK: The system is not broken, it's fixed. MR: It is fixed. (Laughs harder.) It is very fixed. JK: Everything ExxonMobil wants done gets done. Everything they don't want done doesn't. (More laughter.) MR: I should take out my iPhone and record you.

Report: Mini to Focus Lineup, Add Differentiation for Fourth Generation Posted: 11 Feb 2014 01:30 AM PST The third-generation Mini Cooper and Cooper S have only just arrived, but rumors are already circulating about the fourth-generation lineup expected to roll out before 2020. According to Autocar, Mini plans to scale back the rapid brand expansion we've seen in recent years, and focus its efforts on four or five "hero cars." Among these future vehicles would be a Mini SUV nearly a foot longer than the current Countryman. Mini's current lineup has grown considerably since BMW reintroduced the Cooper in 2001, but there is a lot of styling overlap between models like the Cooper, Clubman, and convertible models (the Countryman and Paceman are also closely linked). BMW board member Peter Schwarzenbauer told Autocar that the company is looking to remedy the situation with a better-differentiated lineup in the fourth-generation. "It is better to go in a different direction to concentrate on doing less but better,"Schwarzenbauer said. "…Each model must be a hero in its own market and have the trademark personality, style, and go-kart handling." This strategy is consistent with earlier predictions from our European bureau chief Georg Kacher, who projected that Mini would add a sporty MiniVan and a small four-door sedan by the end of 2016. We already spied upcoming four-door Cooper hatchback and four-door Clubman models out testing, although these could potentially be scratched after the third generation runs its course. Of the four or five "hero cars" Mini has planned, we expect to see a three-door hatchback, a roadster, a four-door sedan, the MiniVan, and the aforementioned larger SUV. The MiniVan will arrive with distinctive proportions and design for a five-seater van, utilizing a long wheelbase and low roofline as well as a newly versatile seating arrangement. One of the original proposals for the MiniVan was a kind of extra-large Countryman, which could be the jumping-off point for the rumored SUV which may arrive as early as 2017. A new front-wheel drive platform shared with BMW serves as the basis for the latest 2014 Mini Cooper and Cooper S, which use turbocharged three-cylinder and turbocharged four-cylinder engines, respectively. The new platform and engines will find their way into upcoming third-generation models like the convertible, unnamed four-door hatchback, and four-door Clubman models, as well as into various entry-level BMW models, like the 1-Series and Active Tourer. Despite the overall departure from traditional Mini proportions and styling since BMW first began building the Cooper, the Brits may have more of a say in this matter moving forward – Schwarzenbauer is looking to build a small London-based design studio apart from the existing studio based in Munich, where it is rumored that the only British employees work on the clay modeling team. The 2014 Mini Cooper and Cooper S are set to go on sale in March, with the convertible and four-door hatchback to follow sometime this summer, and the Clubman slotted for 2015. As of now it looks like the Mini lineup as well as its models are constantly growing, but we'll have to stay tuned to see if this trend is reversed by the time the fourth generation Mini arrives before 2020.

Report: Porsche Could Exceed 200,000 Sales in 2015 Thanks to Macan Posted: 11 Feb 2014 12:00 AM PST The 2015 Porsche Macan hasn't even gone on sale yet, but Porsche is already predicting big things for this compact crossover that debuted last fall. According to a report from Automotive News, Porsche CEO Matthias Mueller stated that Porsche would exceed 200,000 annual global sales in 2015, largely due to expected demand for the Macan. The Porsche Macan has had big shoes to fill ever since Porsche announced a huge $650 million investment in its Leipzig plant in order to provide the capacity to build 50,000 Macans per year. Now, Mueller is estimating that demand for the Porsche Macan will exceed this 50,000 mark. Porsche sold 162,145 vehicles in 2013 globally, so if the company continues at this pace, then strong sales for the Macan—which goes on sale this spring—could even put Porsche close to the 200,000 mark in 2014. Surpassing this magic in number in 2015 would mean reaching this target three years earlier than originally planned. The Porsche Cayenne SUV is currently the best-selling Porsche, and AN reports that the Cayenne and Macan together are expected to make up 64 percent of Porsche's total sales in 2015. The 2015 Porsche Macan starts at $51,095 with destination for the S model that's powered by a 340-hp, 3.0-liter twin-turbo V-6; the more powerful, 400-hp Macan Turbo starts at $73,495. We expect to see more Macan variants like diesel and hybrid models in the future, although it's unclear whether these versions will make it to the U.S. The Porsche Macan goes on sale in the U.S. in late spring, so keep an eye out for strong sales for this small SUV.

2015 Mercedes-Benz S-Class Coupe to Debut at 2014 Geneva Auto Show Posted: 10 Feb 2014 05:00 PM PST By the time the leaves change this fall, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class family will add a new range-topping luxury coupe to its stable. The 2015 Mercedes-Benz S-Class Coupe will take over for the outgoing CL-Class, adopting Mercedes-Benz's latest "sensual purity" design language along with all of the cutting-edge luxury and technology features expected of a Mercedes-Benz halo car. For now, it will be offered exclusively as an S550 model with 4Matic all-wheel-drive. Dashing Design Unsurprisingly, the 2015 Mercedes-Benz S-Class coupe is nearly identical to the Concept S-Class Coupe that debuted at the 2013 Frankfurt auto show. Some of the flashy show-car elements from the concept, such as the chrome bar in the lower front intake, will not make it into production, but there is still plenty of bling. Among the more absurdly extravagant details are the 47 Swarovski crystals integrated into the headlamps on special S550 Edition 1 models. On these models, daytime running lamps consist of 17 angular crystals, while the remaining 30 rounded crystals compose the turn-indicator lamps. There are also a few sportier design features, such as the more sculpted side skirts and C-shaped rear bumper scoops, which underscore the S-Class coupe's performance character. 18-inch wheels come standard, but wheels up to 20 inches in diameter are available as optional equipment. Despite the coupe's long hood and flowing shape, it is actually much smaller than its four-door counterpart: 8.5 inches shorter in length and 2.8 inches lower in height, with a wheelbase that is 8.6 inches less than that of the S-Class sedan. The interior is essentially the same as the one found in the 2014 S-Class sedan, complete with its "floating" lower dashboard positioned beneath the dual-screen digital instrument cluster and display. Standard on the S-Class coupe is a panorama roof that Mercedes-Benz says appears nearly 150 percent larger than on the CL-Class; it also features adjustable light transparency. The rear seats were designed as the individual seats, and like the front passenger and driver's seat, can be fitted with nappa leather in a diamond-shaped stitching pattern. Three new interior colors will be introduced for the two-door S-Class: Bengal red, saddle brown, and porcelain. Like the latest S550 sedan, the 2015 Mercedes-Benz S550 4Matic is powered by a 4.7-liter twin-turbocharged V-8 engine making 449 hp and 516 lb-ft of torque. Although the powertrain is not unique to the S-Class Coupe, the model will be the first to incorporate Mercedes-Benz's new active curve tilting technology. The technology aims to make the grand-touring coupe enter and lean into winding curves "in a manner similar to a motorcyclist or skier." Hydraulic cylinders in each individual suspension strut respond to steering inputs, allowing the vehicle to change its body angle by up to 2.5 degrees in a fraction of a second. These changes are supposed to cause the passengers to sit more snugly in their seats, thereby lessening the sensation of lateral movement on winding roads. Although passengers may not feel the sportiness of the S-Class coupe as much, they'll surely be able to hear it thanks to the vehicle's input-sensitive exhaust note. Flaps in the exhaust system either open or close for a sportier sound depending on engine speed, and the switch points for these flaps can be changed via the car's selectable driving modes. A Statement of Stateliness The 2014 S-Class sedan broke new ground for Mercedes in terms of comfort, design, and technology, and set the benchmark its segment. The S-Class coupe marries those qualities with a much more expressive design language that is meant to make a statement. As Mercedes-Benz has previously said, there is a tradition of large coupes sitting atop the German automaker's lineup. Expect the S550 4Matic coupe, like the current CL-Class, to carry a six-figure price tag when it hits showrooms this fall following its debut at the 2014 Geneva auto show. No doubt the 2015 Mercedes-Benz S-Class Coupe will attract those who want (and can afford) the absolute best in style and luxury – and aren't shy about showing it off.