Car Pictures And News

With the ever increasing costs of insuring your vehicle is there anything at all that you can do to save money on your car insurance? There are a number of things that you can do that will result in lower premiums and more money in your pocket. Here are some great tips that could save you some bucks on your next policy.

You need to know what liability and what levels you are required to carry to drive in your state. In West Virginia, you must carry bodily injury liability and property damage liability. Knowing ahead of time exactly what your insurance needs are will help you get the best rate without paying for coverage you really don’t need.

Now you can start shopping around for the best prices. As long as you know what your car insurance needs are you can start getting as many quotes as you can. Premiums are going to vary from company to company for the same coverage so it is important to find one that has the best rates and provides good customer service.

The internet can cut your time in half when you are ready to submit your information to insurance companies for coverage quotes. There are sites that will take your information and put them into their database and will match you up with the companies that are going to give you the best coverage for your money. This works best when you know ahead of time what coverage you need and what you don’t. If you are still not sure it is best to speak directly with an insurance agent who can guide you in the right direction.

Raising your deductible can lower your rate considerably. If you raise your out-of-pocket deductible from $250 to $500 you could realize savings up to 10 percent annually. If you are paying $1,200 per year that means around $120 less for your insurance with just that one modification.

Spending money on collision coverage for older vehicles that are valued at less than $2,000 could be a waste of money. But if you still owe money on your vehicle you must keep your collision coverage in order to protect your lenders investment.

Putting all of your insurance policies under one roof, or bundling, can save you money in the long run as well as make it easier to keep track of all of your policies. Insurance companies give discounts to their customers who use them for just about all of their insurance needs – car, life, homeowners, rental and health.

Check with your insurance agent to see if they give discounts for keeping your mileage low, being a safe driving, being a good student, attending defensive driving classes or even for having a safer car.

If in doubt, check with insurance agent to see if there are any discounts that you may qualify for. Changes occur every day and you never know what will bring you the lowest insurance rates.

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Remember the Daewoo Leganza? It was a good-looking mid-size Korean sedan powered by an ancient GM four-banger from Australia, sold here by an upstart company with no track record, few dealers, and a crackpot marketing scheme that proposed to have college kids sell cars to one another. It was hard to recommend that car with a straight face to anyone you might ever meet again, despite its apparent value for money. Not surprisingly, Daewoo went bankrupt under a crushing debt of some $10 billion, after which GM swooped in and cherry-picked the best bits of the conglomerate to form a new company called GM Daewoo Auto & Technology (GMDAT).

The car you see here is perhaps the sweetest of those cherries, and it is being sold on our shores through GM’s global partner Suzuki. Conceived essentially as the replacement for the Leganza, the Verona carries little of the old car’s DNA, which is probably a good thing. The sheetmetal is all-new, bent to a shape penned by Italdesign-Giugiaro in Moncalieri, Italy—about 200 miles west of Verona, the hometown of Shakespeare’s

Romeo and Juliet .

The new car grows almost four inches in length and 1.5 inches in width, to bring it up to the scale of the class leaders. It’s as wide as a Honda Accord and as tall as a Mazda 6, and its wheelbase and length are an inch longer than the Mazda’s. Inside, the Verona is five cubic feet roomier than the 6, its seats are more comfortable, and visibility out of the back seat is better. Relative to the Honda, the Suzuki is 1.6 cubes smaller, but the rear seat offers much better thigh support and more legroom.

Raise the self-supporting hood, and you’ll be pleased to find that the hoary old four has been euthanized in favor of a brand-new inline six, co-developed with Porsche. The engine sits sideways, Volvo S80-style, and drives the front wheels through a four-speed automatic. To squeeze six pots into an opening where four usually line up, the engine derives its 2.5 liters of displacement from closely spaced, narrow 77.0mm bores pumping a long 89.2mm stroke, much like the Volvo 2.9-liter six does. But whereas Volvo tucks its Hydra-Matic transmission in back of the engine, the Verona’s ZF-designed box sits in line with the motor. We expected the big, wide powertrain to limit how far the front wheels could turn, resulting in a nautical turning radius. But at 34.8 feet, the Verona needs 2.1 fewer feet of road than any Accord does to hang a U-turn, despite having an engine that’s four inches wider stuffed into a slightly smaller track between bigger standard tires. That’s clever packaging.

We’d be even more impressed if this new six could outperform Honda’s 160-horse, 2.4-liter four—or Mazda’s 2.3, or Toyota’s 2.4, or Nissan’s 2.5, or practically anyone else’s big four. But that’s not the case. Output is a fairly meager 155 horsepower and 177 pound-feet of torque. Apparently, Porsche didn’t share many racing secrets with the Daewoo engineers. The six idles smoothly and plays a stirring soundtrack when you give it the whip, but towing 3446 pounds of car, it struggles hard to catch the back of the pack of similarly priced family sedans.

At 10.7 seconds to 60 mph and 17.9 at 78 mph in the quarter, the Verona would have placed dead last in our February comparison test, "

," where the next pokiest car was a 3300-pound all-wheel-drive Subaru Legacy at 8.8 and 16.8 seconds, respectively. Yes, most of those cars had manual transmissions (not available with the Verona), but shifting for oneself wouldn’t shave off two-plus seconds.

Automotive obesity seems to be a major problem for Korean cars. Perhaps computer optimization of body structures is a skill yet to be mastered there, or maybe the pork comes from the astounding array of standard equipment. For a base price of $19,999, our ne plus ultra EX model featured a sunroof, leather, automatic climate control, anti-lock brakes, power everything, heated seats and mirrors, tilt, cruise, and a cassette/CD player as standard equipment (the only option is traction control, for $500). And it’s all controlled from a two-tone interior that looks classy, from the soft-touch door panels with French-stitched leather inserts to the fake wood trim that nearly suspended our disbelief. Base S models start at $16,999, and the mid-level LX rings in at $18,299.

Another complaint we’ve had with Korean cars is that they tend to be too softly sprung to suit our tastes, but here we can thank GM/Suzuki for buying in early enough to recalibrate the front-strut, rear-multilink suspension. The ride is still comfort-biased, but most of the roll and float have been baked out. The tires generate a reasonable 0.78 g of grip without much squealing, and the standard four-wheel disc brakes can stop from 70 mph in just 185 feet—the same as an Accord EX and two feet better than February’s comparo average.

This is not an enthusiast’s sports sedan. Nevertheless, we found the Verona easy to place on a line through a series of esses, thanks to a no-surprises steering rack that builds effort naturally and provides a bit of feedback. Bumpy turns provoke some steering-wheel kickback and a general loss of composure that 6s and Accords don’t suffer, due mostly to a body structure that trails the benchmark sedans for structural rigidity (impacts tend to resonate and reverberate somewhat).

Article source: http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/car/04q1/suzuki_verona_ex-road_test

Disputes with some of its suppliers forced Saab to temporarily cease production at its Trollhattan plant in Sweden yesterday.

The manufacturer has since restarted the production line, and says it has both short and long term plans to prevent the disputes, which revolved around payments, happening again.

“Certain suppliers halted supplies to Saab Automobile pending discussions about payments and supply terms,” said the official statement.

Production restarted this morning, with Saab saying that it has sufficient funds to prevent another halt.

“Saab Automobile expects to resolve these issues in the short term, also to prevent any further disruptions in supply,” said Saab’s parent company Spyker in a news release on Wednesday. “Saab has sufficient means to meet its immediate liquidity needs from existing and available sources.”

The delay in manufacturing comes just a week after Saab announced a 218m Euro (f191m) net loss for 2010, and long-time employee Jan Ake Jonsson announced he would step down as chief executive of the brand.

In February Spyker Cars NV sold its supercar arm to UK-based coachbuilder CPP in order to concentrate its efforts on Saab, which it bought from General Motors for $400m (f248m) in 2010.

Source: http://uk.autoblog.com/2011/03/30/saab-restarts-production-after-half-day-halt/