2003 Bmw X5 4.6is Black 340hp-beautful Truck !!! on 2040-cars

Auto blog

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

2015 BMW i8 offers you a fast ride to the future for $135,700* [w/video]

BMW's long-form teasing and rollout of its incredibly cool i8 has put us in a unique position to report from its world debut here in Frankfurt. Typically, an auto show debut marks just the start of the information dump about a new vehicle. The i8, however, is a car that we've already driven and reviewed, so perhaps the biggest news from the show floor is the official price of the thing, as well as getting to see it live and in person, of course.
Arriving in US showrooms in the spring of 2014, the i8 performance plug-in hybrid will carry a price tag of $135,700 (*not including $925 for destination and handling charges). That kind of cash puts the i8 near the very top of the BMW range (slotting just under the top-trim 7-Series models), and will buy a massive amount of new technology.
The four-seat i8 has the look of a true supercar, and its new-tech drivetrain will offer up the performance of a stirring sports car, at least. A TwinPower Turbo, three-cylinder, 1.5-liter engine will make 231 horsepower and 236 pound-feet of torque that's gets sent to the rear wheels, while a 96-kilowatt electric motor doles out 131 hp and 184 lb-ft of maximum torque to the fronts. Total system output of 362 hp and 420 lb-ft allows the i8 to sprint to 62 miles per hour in 4.4 seconds with all-wheels-driven handling, and it still returns an astonishing 94 miles per gallon US.

BMW spied testing new Alpina B7

Just last month BMW released the 2016 7 Series, ushering in a new era for the Bavarian automaker's flagship luxury sedan. And fans of big European performance sedans know what that means: Yes, a V12 model to follow, and maybe an M Performance variant at some point in the future. But before that, we're getting a new Alpina B7. Spied leaving BMW's test center at the Nurburgring, this camouflaged prototype for the new B7 appears to be wearing Alpina's signature low-key visual enhancements. Those include a subtle aero kit and upgraded rolling stock. Though we're only looking at it from the outside, you can expect the interior to feature some similarly discreet upgrades as well. The bigger question is what Alpina will have done to the new 7 underneath the bodywork. The outgoing B7 packed a 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8 with 540 horsepower and nearly as much torque, netting a 0-60 time quoted at 4.3 seconds and an autobahn-crunching top speed of 194 miles per hour. Hardly a slouch, then, but the new Alpina B7 is tipped to pack 600 horsepower or more, which ought to give the high-powered, high-speed, and high-end likes of the Mercedes-AMG S63, Audi S8, Maserati Quattroporte, and Jaguar XJR a run for their considerable money. We smell a battle heating up amidst all that burning rubber and sumptuous leather.