A note left for the milkman, three boys bouncing on the back seat—one brandishing a toy gun—and planning a route with multiple turns, it’s How to Go Places, an educational film brought to you by Your Chevrolet Dealer. How to Go Places tells how to take a vacation by car, which isn’t as ludicrous as [...]
It’s an age old conundrum: What’s better for aerodynamics, driving a pickup truck with the tailgate up or tailgate down? Redneck or rocket scientist, it’s probably not what you think, and it’s definitely counterintuitive. Of course, if you have a 750-foot-long tunnel through which a 43-foot-diameter fan powered by a DC electric motor with the [...]
Wow, that was quick. Most car companies let a model year pass before making even minor changes to an all-new model. But not Honda. The 2012 Honda Civic marked the beginning of a new generation of Honda’s venerable economy sedan, and before the ink is barely dry on the 2012 press releases, along comes the [...]
Ah, the Volkswagen Amarok Power-Pickup concept. You know you want to. Although Volkswagen imported Golf-based pickups to the U.S. in the ‘80s, it doesn’t now, no doubt for many reasons, none more than perhaps the 25 percent import tariff it would have to pay on each one. So perhaps it’s not just the utility and [...]
Steve Jobs from Apple once said, “…people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” This was the truth when it came to the Porsche Panamera four-door sport sedan. No Porschephile in his right mind wanted this car. They thought that the Cayenne SUV was an abomination, and then Porsche had the [...]
The battle of the vans is heating up, but the old adage “you can win if you don’t play” hold true for General Motors. Nissan and Ford are in a great position to grab sales in the States with a cargo van for commercial use with small businesses, or large businesses with a need [...]
We’ll start in the spring of 1975. I was driving a Fiat 128 which, after making contact (at speed) with a ditch in Brown County, Indiana, was never quite the same. My bride-to-be was driving a Ford Maverick with a straight six, finished in baby blue and topped with white vinyl. With marriage – and [...]
Wow, that was quick. Most car companies let a model year pass before making even minor changes to an all-new model. But not Honda. The 2012 Honda Civic marked the beginning of a new generation of Honda’s venerable economy sedan, and before the ink is barely dry on the 2012 press releases, along comes the [...]
The 2013 Jeep Patriot is something of a mixed bag, disappointing in some ways and worthy of respect in others. The reason could simply be that the compact Patriot was born in 2007, a time when parent Chrysler was in a big financial hole and digging itself deeper all the time. Penny pinching was apparently [...]
One doesn’t expect many changes the second year of a new generation of car model, and one’s expectations would be fully met with the 2013 Hyundai Azera. The second generation of the Azera debuted last year and, well, there’s precious little different between last year’s and this. Well, actually none. Which overall is a good [...]
Ah, the Volkswagen Amarok Power-Pickup concept. You know you want to. Although Volkswagen imported Golf-based pickups to the U.S. in the ‘80s, it doesn’t now, no doubt for many reasons, none more than perhaps the 25 percent import tariff it would have to pay on each one. So perhaps it’s not just the utility and [...]
Steve Jobs from Apple once said, “…people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” This was the truth when it came to the Porsche Panamera four-door sport sedan. No Porschephile in his right mind wanted this car. They thought that the Cayenne SUV was an abomination, and then Porsche had the [...]
The battle of the vans is heating up, but the old adage “you can win if you don’t play” hold true for General Motors. Nissan and Ford are in a great position to grab sales in the States with a cargo van for commercial use with small businesses, or large businesses with a need [...]
First came the car. Then came the car racing. Man’s need for speed has been well publicized. But you already know that story. What sets auto racing apart from other sports that captivate us is its variety. While we adore baseball and football, they rarely diverge from the norm. Hit the ball, run around the [...]
The Mazda Museum in Hiroshima has a lot of interesting exhibits, from the three-wheel trucks that formed the majority of Mazda output in the 1950s to the Mazda 787B, the only Japanese car that won Le Mans, to a whole array of rotary engines up to and including the four-rotor engine of the Le Mans [...]
Cancer is one of the ugliest words in the English language. It doesn’t discriminate, nor care about how busy your life is at the moment. For women, breast cancer is the most common cancer, and the second leading cause of death for women. Estimates are that over 220,000 women a year will be diagnosed with [...]
It’s an age old conundrum: What’s better for aerodynamics, driving a pickup truck with the tailgate up or tailgate down? Redneck or rocket scientist, it’s probably not what you think, and it’s definitely counterintuitive. Of course, if you have a 750-foot-long tunnel through which a 43-foot-diameter fan powered by a DC electric motor with the [...]
A Volvo flywheel hybrid system, or flywheel KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System), has the potential to out save hybrids now on the market with a new application of a concept earlier considered but not adopted. Batteries have been the conventional—if hybrid technology of any kind can be conventional—route to storing kinetic energy by converting it [...]
What could you do if you didn’t have to put a motor under the hood of a car? Well, for starters you could get rid of the hood, not to mention the space underneath it. Or you could simply expand what would otherwise be a two-seater into four. That’s the idea behind the Schaeffler eWheelDrive, [...]
A note left for the milkman, three boys bouncing on the back seat—one brandishing a toy gun—and planning a route with multiple turns, it’s How to Go Places, an educational film brought to you by Your Chevrolet Dealer. How to Go Places tells how to take a vacation by car, which isn’t as ludicrous as [...]
Summer nights are special magic, a sorcery that suspends time and makes déjà vu the common experience. A web of warmth and darkness and fantasy. The weatherman may say it is warm and humid, but anyone with a soul knows it’s not meteorology, but mood. A time to lower the top of a Maserati [...]
Perhaps it’s not what it once was, but the cult of the radically modified VW Beetle approached minor religion status in Southern California, but then what doesn’t? It’s easy to forget that in the 1950′s the Volkswagen was just another imported car and that buying an imported car was like shopping in the weird fruit [...]
One must wonder what “creative types” had for breakfast when they come up with things like the advertisement former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in a Ford Figo with handcuffed and gagged women in the trunk, or now, an offputing online Hyundai ad that has the Korean carmaker issuing denials and chasing the ad to [...]
Like Emily Litella’s classic “never mind,” the folks at Guinness World Records has withdrawn its withdrawal of the record as “World’s Fastest Production Car” from the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport. As we noted recently, Guinness World Records objected to the disabling of the Veyron’s top speed limiter, which on production cars imits the Veyron [...]
It makes sense to us. If you’re six years old and driving to the Chinese restaurant where you ate the night before, and accidentally hit a signpost and crack the car’s bumper, you go to the car dealership to get the car repaired. And with any luck, it might be before mom and dad wake [...]
