1966 Chrysler Newport Coupe on 2040-cars

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Everything is absurd in Fate of the Furious, including the car hacking

Truly ridiculous and absurd scenes and situations are a staple of the Fast and Furious series, And earlier trailers made it clear that Fate of the Furious wouldn't be any different as soon as the submarine appeared. However, it turns out the craziness has spread to the topic of car hacking. The hacker is Charlize Theron's character, Cipher, and she can apparently control any car in the world, and many of them at once. She uses this to great effect in creating giant rivers of rampaging automobiles through city streets, and waterfalls of cars flying off of parking structures. And if you look closely at these groups of vehicles, it is evident that she can even control older cars that have no automated steering or throttle capabilities whatsoever. We would ask how that works, but we know that's a silly question in the Fast and Furious universe. After all, this is the series that featured Dominic Toretto flying through the air over a freeway to catch Letty Ortiz and land on another car. And they survived. Your logic has no power here! We also noticed that Cipher seems to have a preference to hack vehicles from Fiat Chrysler. In the trailer, multiple Chrysler 300s, a Jeep Cherokee, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and a Dodge Challenger all get some prominent screen time when they're being hacked. We're not so sure this is good product placement for the brand, particularly considering this is the same company that recalled over a million vehicles to fix a software issue that could lead to hacking. Maybe this is the trade-off for having the Dodge Challenger Demon as a hero car. There's more to this trailer than Chryslers and hacking though. It turns out that Cipher has been following Toretto for a few movies now. Also, characters fly with jet packs, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's character shoves a torpedo out of the way, on ice, while hanging out of a truck. Check it all out in the video above. Related Video:

Chrysler's next-gen minivans will get more expensive

Chrysler introduced the value-oriented Great American Package on the base model Chrysler 300 in 2005. That morphed into the American Value Package available as an option on the Dodge Grand Caravan in 2012, which made it the lowest-priced minivan in the country, now with an MSRP of $21,395. Automotive News reports that Chrysler is going to kill the value package when the new Town & Country arrives for 2017, because the new platform and technology of the coming minivan make it "a difficult price point to get to." AN says the next-generation haulers will come in around $26,000 and can go beyond $45,000 with options; clicking every "Add" button we could find on the Town & Country build page, we couldn't get past $43,000 for today's model. That entry pricing in 2017 would eliminate the first three trims on the Dodge option, the American Value Package, the SE that starts at $24,195, and the SE Plus that starts at $24,995. This makes us think the next-generation haulers will take a sizable step upscale in terms of feel, content, and trim, a la the Chrysler 200. In this writer's opinion, if they do as good a job as they've been doing recently, the extra money will be worth it. There have been spy shots and a lot of rumors about it, like the Caravan minivan going away and becoming a crossover, but we'll see it revealed at the 2016 Detroit Auto Show. News Source: Automotive News - sub. req. Chrysler Dodge Car Buying Minivan/Van chrysler town and country price dodge grand caravan

Four-horse race opens up for next Chrysler-Fiat CEO

There are some companies that could change leadership overnight and still remain more or less the operations that they are. But some have built themselves up around one central figure. Just ask Carlos Tavares, who found he couldn't escape the long shadow of Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn. Tavares recently left to find his own limelight. But Ghosn isn't the only executive who presides over two disparate automakers on opposite ends of the globe.
Having built up Fiat and Chrysler around himself, we can hardly imagine either automaker getting along without Sergio Marchionne. But the day will come when the famously sweater-clad bigwig will step down. The pressing questions remain when when that day will come, and who will take his place. The only solid clues we have are in the statements made mostly by Marchionne himself, but those statements have been all over the place. When speaking to Automotive News in 2012, he said he would step down "no earlier than 2013, no later than 2015." But a year later, he had already seemingly changed his tune, indicating he could still be at the helm in 2016. Fiat chairman John Elkann seems to think Marchionne, 61, could and should stay on longer.