Word: passate
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...being Kenya, though, what at first glance appears an admirable austerity move has quickly fueled conspiracy theories and come to symbolize the government's inability to set priorities in the face of drought, food shortages and the lingering threat of political violence. Why, average Kenyans are asking, the Volkswagen Passat and not a Toyota, Honda or some other cheap and more widely available alternative? "To me, these guys are playing around with the minds of Kenyans," says Martin Kitunga, the 37-year-old senior mechanic at New World Auto in Nairobi. "Passat or Mercedes, it doesn't make that...
...Finance Minister Kenyatta (son of Kenya's first President) insists that a tender was run in 2008, though he has yet to produce proof of that process. Kenyatta says that the Passats send a message of frugality and insists the tender was aboveboard. "The purchase passes the test of integrity, transparency, accountability and public confidence as set in the law," he told a parliamentary committee that summoned him to clear up the Passat controversy in early November. He called all criticism "baseless, unfounded and untenable," and the result of "corporate wrangles and lobby interests...
...winner of the DARPA Urban Challenge, Carnegie Mellon's Chevy Tahoe, a.k.a. "Boss," finished 20 minutes ahead of the runner-up, a Passat from Stanford. The Chevy's average speed of 14 m.p.h. (23 km/h) wasn't exactly blazing but was a big improvement over the 2004 race, in which no robots finished at all. The atmosphere was celebratory, though tempered by the uncanniness of watching driverless cars à la Stephen King's Christine, a 1958 Plymouth with a taste for blood. "It's pretty creepy when your vehicle starts beeping and it peels out," says a grad student...
...help fuel a modest turnaround. Sales in the U.S. are up 11.8% through September of this year, thanks to all-new versions of the Jetta, Passat and Golf (now going by its old name, Rabbit), and Eos has sold out since debuting last month. But analysts estimate VW will lose an additional $800 million in the region in 2006, and they aren't sanguine about 2007. Until VW can address some production and quality issues, it can forget about profitable growth. "North America is one of VW's intractable problems," says Stephen Cheetham, an analyst with Bernstein Research in London...
...plan to work, VW must figure out how to act nimbly. It has a long history of drifting from profitable years to lean ones. Instead of following up hits from the '90s like the New Beetle and Passat, the Germans were either late or missed virtually every automotive trend: hybrids, crossovers, small SUVs. VW got so out of touch with U.S. consumers that in 2005 the company sent a group of employees, dubbed the Moonraker team, to the U.S. to spend a year figuring out what Americans wanted in a car. The answer: models designed specifically for this market...