1964 Buick Riviera Base Hardtop 2-door 7.0l on 2040-cars

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GM to add 1,200 workers at 2 Michigan factories

DETROIT — General Motors is adding 1,200 jobs at two Michigan factories to build midsize SUVs and two new luxury sedans. GM said Friday that its Lansing Delta Township plant will get a third shift and 800 more workers to build the Chevrolet Traverse and Buick Enclave SUVs, which have three rows of seats. The Lansing Grand River plant will get a second shift and 400 more workers to build two new Cadillac sedans, the CT4 and CT5. Employees laid off at other GM factories will fill the new jobs first, then workers will be added, GM spokesman Dan Flores said. The company has not determined yet how many new people will be needed, he said. Both additional shifts will start working sometime between April and June, the company said. Lansing Delta Township now employs about 2,500 salaried and blue-collar workers, while the Grand River plant has 1,400. GM sold more than 147,000 Traverse SUVs in the U.S. last year, a 0.4% increase from 2018. Enclave sales were up 3% to just over 51,000, according to Autodata Corp. Related Video:

eBay Find of the Day: 1981 DeLorean with 570-hp twin-turbo Buick V6 [w/videos]

"Are you telling me that you built a time machine... out of a DeLorean?" So asked one Marty McFly of his mentor Dr. Emmett Brown, who replied: "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"
Doc Brown was right, of course: with an exotic mid-engine layout, gullwing doors and stainless steel body, the DeLorean DMC-12 sure looked the part. It just needed a little more juice. Well this one might not have 1.21 gigawatts of time-bending power - that'd be more than one and a half million horsepower - but it does have more than the 150 hp in the the standard 2.8-liter V6.
That's because this particular DeLorean has had its stock Peugeot Renault Volvo engine swapped out for a Buick-sourced, all-aluminum, 4.3-liter V6 from the Grand National. Dutteiller Performance didn't leave the engine in stock form, either: while they were swapping it out, they added a pair of turbochargers, new pistons, crank, cams and much, much more.

As GM readies Alexa convenience for vehicles, we ponder its dark side

SEATTLE — On the 30th floor of AmazonÂ’s glass tower, in a room with a breathtaking view of downtown Seattle, thereÂ’s a beautiful bed that nobody sleeps in. ItÂ’s near a kitchen nobody cooks in, a living room couch that no one crashes on, a kitchen table that doesnÂ’t host any family meetings. ItÂ’s AmazonÂ’s Smart Home Lab, a place where every Alexa-enabled gizmo the company or its partners can produce is crammed into the same space, ostensibly for Amazon to test. The company invited us there to show us the companyÂ’s vision for consumer products to leverage AlexaÂ’s voice interaction software before taking us down to a demo of its latest implementation in a Buick Encore GX. In this eerie simulacrum of a fantastic luxury apartment, however, nothing went right the first time. ItÂ’s a challenging environment for Alexa to work correctly, our hosts noted, pointing to the fact that there were six wifi networks available for the devices to connect to. In a normal home, one wifi network controls all the devices, who can theoretically sort out for themselves which one youÂ’re actually trying to activate. In the Smart Home Lab, any unmuted Alexa device thinks itÂ’s in charge. Even so, the connected toaster wouldnÂ’t connect. The Fire TV Cube wouldnÂ’t play a song. Our handlers futzed with everything, muting and unmuting devices, repeating commands, making us feel better about our own struggles with similar technologies. If it doesnÂ’t work right at Amazon HQ, maybe itÂ’s not just us! ItÂ’s telling that down on the faux lawn, in between the gleaming Amazon spheres that host a billionaireÂ’s tropical garden and the Day 1 building that the Smart Home Lab resides in, the BuickÂ’s Alexa implementation doesnÂ’t use a “wake-word” at all. The familiar Push to Talk button on the steering wheel, which normally activates General MotorÂ’s own proprietary voice command system, can be set to default to Alexa when that rolls out to GM vehicles in the first half of 2020 via an over-the-air (OTA) update. Given the reluctance of Alexa to respond to its wake-word in the comfort of AmazonÂ’s own lab, we hoped that this was by design. Drivers are already familiar with Push to Talk, and a physical button is more reliable than the vagaries of contemporary voice recognition – not to mention the privacy and accuracy issues involved with always-on mics. Our experience with the not-ready-for-primetime Mercedes-Benz MBUX system is illustrative.