AutoComplete: Tesla rolls out a pay-to-play acceleration boost
Cars
Welcome to Road Show's Autocomplete, your weekly roundup of the biggest news in the automotive world.
This week we have news on Mercedes EQC, the FCA, PSA merger, and Ducati's ex racing parts program.
But first, let's start with Tesla's acceleration boost update.
So you've got yourself a Model 3.
You love it.
It's a great car but you wish it was just a little faster.
Unlike an internal combustion engine powered car, it's not so easy for you to modify it to make it faster.
So what can you do?
Well, now you can give the big t another two grand of your money to push it over the air update to your car that will shave half a second of your 0 to 60 time.
It'll go from 4.4 seconds to acclaimed 3.9 seconds, which is cool But since this is just a software update feels kind of lame to charge for it.
Especially since Tesla has been taking people's money for full self driving for years and still hasn't delivered on that one.
throw us a bone already.
Well, they went and did it.
Fiat Chrysler in the PSA Group made their merger official which will officially make it the fourth largest automaker on this island Earth once all the paperwork is done The make it official part mostly just means that both companies signed a binding agreement saying that they'll merge and a 5050 partnership we're stoked to see this happen if only because it dramatically increases the likelihood that I'll be able to drive a new US specs Citroen around LA.
Some time during my lifetime.
It looks like the makers of electric vehicles are in for a bit of disappointment.
Because it looks like the federal government has opted to not extend the federal EV tax credit program for another year.
This comes as part of a spending bill meant to avoid another government shutdown.
And specifically means the sales cap on the tax credit won't get bumped to the proposed 600,000 vehicle limit from the current 200,000 vehicle threshold.
So if you've got to have a boat or a model three, looks like you're gonna have to probably end up paying full freight on it.
Sorry there [UNKNOWN] Ferrari's Roma Coupe is arguably the brand's most exciting offering in years.
If only because it comes in towards the bottom of its product stack ,making it comparatively affordable, well, for a Ferrari, anyway.
And it's also one of the best looking Ferraris in decades.
But as the folks Maranello continue to roll out details on the Roma it's just gets better and better.
Specifically, we now know that it'll weigh 440 pounds less than the Portofino with which it shares around 30% of its components.
And it's arrow tweeks mean that it's got 209 more pounds of downforce than the Portofino This coupled with its 611 horsepower turbocharged V eight means that we're all chomping at the bit around the office to see who drives it next year.
Tesla's autopilot is a cool system that suffers from crappy kind of misleading branding and a somewhat ambitious feature set which has led to problems with people not paying attention while using it in the US.
And finding themselves crashed.
Europe is wanting to curb that by forcing Tesla to adhere to a set of 2017 regulations that affect how Tesla's auto steer functions can be utilized.
Specifically, a driver has to be within 18 feet of their vehicle to use summon and an automatic lane change has to be completed in five seconds or less Before the car will pull the plug on it.
Figuratively speaking, the updates that enact these changes have rolled out to euro model threes and will start to hit models s and x soon.
Over the past decade, more and more car brands decided that it was a good idea to ditch conventional car names and take on the very European trend of giving their vehicles Alphanumeric designations.
In our opinion, this is a trend that gotten very old very quickly.
And thankfully Some manufacturers are moving away from it like Cadillac, but he didn't hear that apparently.
The word around the campfire is that it's contemplating moving to an alphanumeric model designation scheme in the US and represents from the brand confirmed that those rumors are true.
Well nothing has been officially decided yet, we seriously hope that the brand doesn't decide to start calling the optima the K5 here or worse.
Do you have a wildly unhealthy and totally unchecked motorcycle obsession?
Do you also just have a bunch of money sitting around your house literally every horizontal service in it?
Well, then Ducatti has just the thing for you.
It's called the Ducatti Memorabilia Program and it sells actual race-used Moto-GP and superbike parts [UNKNOWN] in very nice display cases to people just like yourself.
Now, before you get any big ideas there, Johnny Racer, the parts are marked in such a way that makes them unusable on a motorcycle anymore.
But don't you try and tell me that a motor GP V4 crunk wouldn't look sublime on your book shelf.
You can buy Ducati Memorabilia program parts now for your local Ducati dealer or, if you're fancy At the company store in Bongo Pentagon.
Online sales will start next year.
We've been looking forward to the production version and Mercedes Benz EQC electric crossover since it was announced sometime back during the last ice age.
We really enjoyed our driving a prototype version of it last year and loved the way it looked when Mercedes shut up the production version of it this year.
It was supposed to be available for purchase in the US next year.
But now we're finding out that the folks from Daimler back in Germany have decided to push the US release of the EQC back to 2021.
Instead they're gonna divert all that production to vehicles for the European market only.
The company cites the extreme interest of customers there, but we suspect that it's also got a bit to do with fleet emissions requirements too.
That's it for autocomplete this week.
Don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell icon to stay notified of all new videos on roadshow and we'll see you again next year.
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