1992 Chrysler New Yorker Ice Cold A/c 3.3 V6 Beautiful Car Dodge Plymouth on 2040-cars

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Mystery shoppers love Infiniti, hate Tesla

Infiniti, followed by Lexus tied with Mercedes-Benz took the top two spots for best sales experience according to mystery shoppers from the latest Pied Piper Prospect Satisfaction Index, while EV manufacturer Tesla recorded the lowest overall score. Not surprisingly, premium brands dominated the top ranks. Including the three already mentioned, luxury brands occupied seven of the top ten spots and included Audi, BMW, Porsche, and the only American brand to crack the upper echelon, Cadillac. Toyota, Volkswagen, and Nissan rounded out the first ten positions. The news for domestic automakers isn't good. Aside from Caddy, the only other star-spangled automaker to score above the industry average is Chrysler. The rest of FCA, most of GM, and all of Ford fell below the line. But Pied Piper's mystery shoppers handed Tesla the biggest walloping – the company is ten full points below the next lowest brand, Volvo, and its score of 86 is 17 below the average of 103. It's baffling, considering the company's touted direct-sales model. "Tesla leaves me scratching my head," Fred O'Hagan, Pied Piper's president and CEO, told Wards Auto. "They own all of their stores, so you would think each one would be doing the same thing. But they're not. Tesla is consistent in its inconsistencies." O'Hagan added that there's a "huge variation" in Tesla's store-to-store effectiveness, and that in some cases, shoppers found showroom workers that acted more like "museum curators," Wards Auto reports. It might be popular to call Tesla the Apple of the car world, but based on Pied Piper's work, the brand has a long way to go to emulate the uniform shopping experience of an Apple Store. The news might be bad for Tesla, but even for the brands that scored below average, there's cause for celebration. Only Tesla and Mini lost points in this year's rankings, and only Mercedes and Lincoln held steady. Every other brand, including Infiniti, which topped the index for the first time, gained at least one point. The biggest improvements belong to Porsche, Land Rover, and Mitsubishi, which all jumped five points. Pied Piper's annual Prospect Satisfaction Index uses mystery shoppers – over 6,100 this year – from across the country to assess dealers and generate rankings from over 50 individual factors. News Source: Pied Piper via WardsAuto Green Audi BMW Cadillac Chrysler Infiniti Lexus Mercedes-Benz Nissan Tesla Toyota Car Buying Car Dealers study

Junkyard Gem: 1964 Plymouth Valiant V-200 Wagon

When Chrysler introduced the Valiant for the 1960 model year, the automotive world had no idea that this new compact would become one of the most successful products in the company's history. Valiants and its A-Body siblings were built and sold by the millions around the world, with production continuing into the early 1980s (in Australia and South America). The sales pinnacle for the Valiant in the U.S. was 1964, and today's Junkyard Gem is one of those cars: an upscale V-200 station wagon, found in a Denver-area wrecking yard a few weeks back. The Valiant began life as its own marque, became a Plymouth for 1961, left Plymouth for 1962, then returned as a Plymouth model until American Valiant production ceased in 1976, and the Volare took its place. You'll barely see any mention of the Plymouth brand in the 1964 Valiant brochure, and Plymouth badging on the '64s was minimal. You could get the 1964 Valiant wagon as the base V-100, starting at $2,273, or as the nicer V-200 with its $2,388 price tag (that's about $21,150 and $22,220 in 2022 dollars). Valiant coupes and convertibles could be had with the even swankier (by cheap small-car standards) Signet trim level. As Ford showed us in the middle 2000s, numbers are just classier if you spell them out on emblems. In the middle 1960s, substituting an automatic for the base three-on-the-tree column-shift manual transmission jacked up the price of an affordable car by an eye-watering amount. The Torqueflite three-speed automatic and its slick-looking push-button shifter cost 172 bucks extra (around $1,600 today), which made the car more than 7% costlier. A four-on-the-floor manual was available for the first time in a new Valiant that year, but it cost $180. Also new for the 1964 Valiant was a V8 option (a 273-cubic-incher rated at 180 horsepower), but this car has the good old Slant-6. If it's the engine that came with the car when it rolled off the assembly line, it's a 101-horse example with 170 cubic inches… but these cars are notorious for getting engine swaps early and often and I didn't check the block casting numbers. The cassette deck tells us that it was being driven as recently as the late 1980s through middle 1990s. There's some rust in the usual spots, about what this car would have acquired by 1967 if it had stayed in Michigan. This car could have been restored, though the expense for rust repair and interior refurbishment wouldn't have been a good investment from a financial standpoint.

GM, FCA retain financial advisors amid merger rumors

Well, here we go again. Despite allegedly shutting down the idea of a merger, General Motors has retained financial advisors to, well, advise it on Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' advances. GM brought in New York-based Goldman Sachs, while FCA is currently working with Switzerland's UBS. Another source told Reuters that GM was working with Morgan Stanley, as well. But what does all this mean? Well, as we know, FCA boss Sergio Marchionne still has his eyes set very much on merging his automaker to combat what he claims are the prohibitive costs that come from developing today's vehicles. And while GM has said "no thanks," to a merger, the FCA boss is still looking to shareholders of the world's third-largest automaker to force the issue. Rather than a sign of an impending merger, voluntary or otherwise, between the two automotive powers – analysts called a hostile move by FCA "beyond ambitious," after all – retaining financial advisors on both sides could be viewed as just good business. News Source: ReutersImage Credit: Paul Sancya / AP Chrysler Fiat GM Sergio Marchionne FCA