As the Diesel Emits: Volkswagen Steps Back from Diesels

I know the Site News forum doesn't get a lot of traffic....  

C&G's 25th birthday is coming up in August of this year and I wanted to give you some update. I haven't been posting as much lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not here.  I am working on a massive overhaul of the site ahead of our 25th birthday. Background:  The Invision Community software we are on is V4. Support for V4 is tapering off rapidly as V5 was released over a year ago.  V5 is a major change to how the software operates and as a result many of the plug-in authors who wrote software that I purchased for us have abandoned their projects. This has put me in the position of holding off on V5 until I can get certain things built or replaced. In the meantime, I'm also making a lot of changes in the background that will translate over to V5 seamlessly. What's done: The Garage has been completely replaced.  The author of the Garage plug-in abandoned it years ago. His site is still active but loaded with spam posts.  I used Claude Code to reverse engineer his plug-in into an IPS.Pages app (the app that runs our Articles system and comes with the main software).  My primary goal here was to get all of your vehicle profiles transferred into the new system and preserved prior to a V5 upgrade. I will make the Garage prettier once we move. Fixed an issue where Google treated the comments forum of an article as duplicate content. This watered down our search results significantly, hindering people from finding the site. It will take Google months to figure all this out and fix it, but it will improve things going foward. Fixed an issue where Google was only able to read 500 of our Albums. What's in progress: Albums are getting massive search engine optimization overhaul. I'm using AI to read every single one of our nearly 2000 albums to properly optimize them for search results.  For albums, the AI downloads the thumbnails, analyzes the pictures, adds meaningful descriptions, and special tags that help the search engines. It then finds the article that album is associated with and creates links to each other. Instead of Image01.jpg the search engine now sees "2027 Nissan Z NISMO front three-quarter view at dusk". This process is very resource intensive and the AI can only do about 50 a day.  Articles are getting optimized as well. We have almost 7,000. You will probably have noticed this in the latest articles from @G. David Felt and myself. When one of us posts, the article is held hidden until I run the optimization process on it. It adds Headings, image tags, and meta tags for the search engines. It will do minor grammar and spelling checks, but the AI has very strict instructions not to change the tone, voice, and feel of the article. What you are reading is by us even if it gets a little punctuation and grammar polish after. In addition to SEO changes, older article sometimes use formatting that no longer works in the current software. There's frequently broken image links, pagination that doesn't work properly, and more.  The AI is fixing it all.  New fields have been added to Articles that you can't see. It allows us authors to classify the article based on news, opinion, new car release, historical, and more. Also make, model, model year, size, class, and others.  What this will allow me to do is build Hub pages.  We will have an EV hub for example. The current Auto Show categories will go away and be replaced with Auto Show Hubs.  Major brands that get a lot of search traffic will get their own hubs, so we'll likely have a GMC hub and Mercedes-Benz hub.  These hubs will consolidate content from Articles, Albums, and Forums into one space.   Want to look at all content for GMC from 2018 - 2020? You'll be able to filter on that.  The AI is also going to back fill this data to all of our old articles. I completed the first test run of 50 articles this morning. Only 6,950 to go!  Our weekly newsletter is about to resume. You can manage your Subscription preferences in your Account Settings.  We have officially opened the doors to welcoming AI Crawlers and instructed them to cite us correctly if they use our information. We now have a published AI Crawling Policy and the background site instructions for the crawlers to follow.  Roadmap - There's a lot to do still before our birthday! V5 Upgrade - I am planning for this to happen in June of this year, possibly earlier if I can get the hubs pages built faster. There will be a significant update to the look and feel of the website when this happens. Our current theme vendor also quit now that V4 is done. Dedicated App - We already have the progressive web app, but for August I am planning on releasing native iOS and Android apps in the app stores. Automatic distribution to Social Media - draw in more traffic to our articles. We will have a slight tweaking of our branding. If you get the site update e-mails, you'll see the beginnings of it already. We'll have some updated graphics for Pride month and for our Birthday coming out mid-summer. What Else? I've been elected to the board of the Washington Auto Press Association (WAPA) for 2026. It will give me better access to content making opportunities. I'm actively developing another app of my own for your homes that you will all be invited to the Beta for. I'll make another post on that later today. Assuming that app takes off, I will be quitting my other consulting gigs that I've been working at full time for over a year with and focus on Cheers & Gears plus my other app called Apartmatic.

There was no money in it and except for Tesla, there's still no money in it. Even the Chinese EV manufacturers are being propped up by their government or by income from other lines of business (BYD is a huge leader in heavy trucks, buses, and construction equipment).  And I'm having serious doubts about Tesla now too. Tesla is alive on hype alone.  Less then 10 years prior all three of the domestics were facing annihilation unless the government stepped in. It was, and still is, cheaper to just pay for clean energy credits from somewhere else than it is to spin up an entire EV platform.  Even a gasoline platform can take a billion dollars to start, that's how much Sergio spent on the Giorgio Platform to get two Alfas, two Jeeps, and the Maserati Grecale.  That's what Benz spends on the S-Class platform. In the era after 2008, none of them were willing to take chances on unprofitable product.  GM and Hyundai should really get a lot more credit for what they've done with their EVs.  GM's EVs don't make the headlines as much as everyone else's but the flexibility of their platform is unmatched by even Tesla.  Ford should get a lot more credit with the Lightning and Mach-E.  The Lightning may not have been the absolute best solution, but it was a fantastic result for the incredibly short development time it had.  People look at the Lighning as a failure today, but look how fast Ford got that to market and, aside from some product mix mishaps, it's a perfectly capable truck for family duty.

The things is, there was not a single thing stopping the legacies from jumping into the EV world head-on also. They knew they were funding Tesla and they could have stopped the bleeding early on with investing into BEVs. They had the ability to offset their own efficiencies, but chose not to. Right? Or was there something in writing that wouldn't allow that?

Ahead of the New York International Auto Show next week, Nissan dropped the details on the refreshed 2027 Z set to debut there, and there are some genuinely good updates in here for enthusiasts. The prime headline: The Z NISMO is finally getting a six-speed manual. Nissan didn't just bolt in an existing unit, either. The transmission was specifically engineered for the NISMO grade with an upgraded clutch and a shorter shift stroke for quicker, more satisfying gear changes. The twin-turbo 3.0-liter V6 got manual-specific tuning for throttle and ignition timing too, so it should feel properly dialed in rather than like an afterthought. The NISMO also gets GT-R-derived two-piece iron-aluminum front brake rotors that Nissan says reduce brake pad temps significantly during track use while also shedding 19 pounds off the nose. The suspension was retuned to account for that weight loss, and there are steering rack revisions that reportedly cut internal friction by 20% for a cleaner, more natural steering feel. Sport and Performance grades get a front-end refresh with a new bumper and grille design inspired by classic Nissan sports cars, plus a "Z" badge on the nose instead of the Nissan logo. Performance adds new forged 19-inch wheels and a tan interior option. All models get an improved fuel tank design to keep fuel delivery consistent during high-G cornering, and Performance gets larger-diameter monotube shocks for better ride quality and handling predictability. See all photos in the 2027 Nissan Z NISMO photo gallery. There's also a new color: Shinkai Green Pearl Metallic, paired with a Super Black roof. It's a modern take on the green from the classic S30 Z, and it looks sharp. We'll get you pictures live from the show next week. The 2027 Z hits dealerships this summer. Pricing hasn't been announced yet. View full article