Like GM, Ford Motor Company is continuing to shrink its brand portfolio. Following the recent sale of Volvo Cars to China's Geely, with which it completed the dismantling of the premium group that once included Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover, the Deaborn automaker made it official today that it will terminate the Mercury division in the fourth quarter of this year.
Given Mercury's declining sales over the years (the brand holds a pitiful 0.8 percent market share in the U.S. - overall Ford has 16%) and the fact that its entire lineup comprises of re-grilled / re-badged Ford models, the announcement was no surprise.
Some had suggested in the past that Mercury should do what GM is doing with Buick - enhance its U.S. lineup with Ford's European models, but apparently that role is partially going to Ford with the new Euro-style Fiesta and Focus cars.
Ford admitted that the majority of current Mercury sales are to fleet buyers and customers purchasing through employee, retiree and friends and family discounts, which the company anticipates can be satisfied by Ford brand vehicles.
In an interview with German webzine "Auto-News", BMW M GmbH's Managing Director Dr. Kay Segler for the first time officially acknowledged the Bavarian automaker's plans to introduce an M-variant of the 1-Series Coupe.
The experiment was performed by the same guys who brought us the sky-scraping Mentos/Coke geysers, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz. Their "innovative" three-wheeled vehicle was attached to a complicated PVC pipe crate holding 108 two-liter Coke Zero bottles and 648 Mentos tablets.
But just so you can get an idea, the "Live Every Litre" is supposed to be a documentary-style road movie in which numerous members of the public have been nominated by the project's online community to realize their dream in the new Honda CR-Z hybrid coupe.
In this case, Agent Lynch, aka Kate Rawlinson (originally from Newcastle), wanted to perform the world's first guerrilla burlesque routine in the streets of Monmartre in Paris.
