The Crank: Can the French build a true super car?

By John LeBlanc We’ll be getting more, official details later on today, but earlier this week, images of a new super car from France’s Renault were splashed all over the Interweb. Called the Alpine A110-50, seen above, the mid-engine super car is a 50th-anniversary hommage to the original A110 that first appeared in 1961.

2011 Geneva: Renault R-Space & Captur Concepts

Story and photos by John LeBlanc GENEVA – The first of the three French automakers making debuts this year in Geneva was Renault. And the French biased crowd (France is just a croissant’s throw away) loved the new pair of compact concepts. The R-Space, left, and Captur, above, are the second and third concepts under […]

Paris 2010: Is it the end of the car, as we know it?

Story and photos by John LeBlanc PARIS — Woe be the modern automaker. With a lingering economic recession, ever-tightening fuel economy and emissions regulations and a younger population that is more interested in their next cell phone than their next set of four wheels, the global auto industry is seemingly under attack from all sides.

Top 10s: Cars not sold in Canada

[svgallery name=”2010_Cars_not_sold_Canada”] By John LeBlanc We Canadians have a lot to celebrate — universal healthcare, poutine and mosquitoes at the cottage. But living in the Great White North isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, sometimes. Take, for instance, Canadian driving enthusiasts being denied access to cars only found in other markets. Now, I’m not […]

Will going electric ever make automotive sense?

By John LeBlanc We’re hearing — and seeing — a lot this year about the electrification of the car. And not just from boutique, low volume companies like California’s Tesla, which has only sold about 1,000 copies of its $125,000 Roadster since going on sale two years ago. Huge, mainstream global automakers like Toyota, Mitsubishi, […]

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