Ur-Turn is your weekly opportunity to contribute to TTAC. Every Weekend we select a piece submitted to our contact form, and publish it as a showcase for the diverse perspectives of TTAC’s readers.  Today’s contribution, from Jag Singh, reveals that, for an Indian immigrant in post-9/11 America, love of the Panther chassis could hold hidden dangers.

Coming out of India two decades ago, I had a broad experience with 2 wheelers of various types. But, my experience with 4 wheels was limited to micro Suzukis that still rule the road over there. When I bought an old Integra it was everything I could ask for, and provided more hoonage possibilities than I could muster courage for. I used to travel every week, and Taurus was my default weekday rental car. Soon I had a gold plated card from Hertz, and could walk into the rental car lot to pick up any car available there. There were always some Town Cars or Grand Marquis’ in the lot, most people seemed to ignore them. And so did I, initially. Jaguars were rare, but Maximas quickly became my favorite. I tried Mustangs but did not like the rattling noises or the cheap plastics used. Also, they felt way underpowered compared to a Maxima.

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With results from Audi’s driverless attempt at Pikes Peak certified, it seems that we have nothing to fear from the GPS-based autonomous drifting machine. Audi’s press release notes:

Overall, the Autonomous Audi TTS Pikes Peak completed the mountain course in 27 minutes, as verified by Pikes Peak International Hill Climb officials. No human rally driver has completed the course in fewer than 10 minutes, despite driving cars that produced more than 900 hp. The Autonomous Audi TTS Pikes Peak generates 265 hp. Race officials told researchers they would expect an expert race driver on the course to finish in around 17 minutes in a car similar to the TTS.

Take that robots! You may build cars better than humans, but you’ve still got a thing or two to learn about driving.

[UPDATE: the Stanford team writes in to remind us that the point of the exercise was to safely develop driver-assistance systems, and that the 27 minute time was ” just a measurement of our safety plan and the speed we set for the lead vehicle.” Call us insecure, but we’re still calling this a victory for H.Sapiens.]

We all knew that Bob Lutz wasn’t going to spend his retirement circulating between the golf course and the early bird special, and when Lotus rolled out the most ambitious re-boot of any car company since GM, we should have known Lutz would end up involved somehow. After all, Lotus’s CEO Dany Bahar has bragged at length about making Lotus the “Real Madrid” (think Miami Heat) of  the sports car industry… and if there’s one high-profile prima donna in the car industry, it’s Mr Robert Anthony Lutz.
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Isn’t it great to have the government as your biggest shareholder? Makes for good photo-ops. For the second time, Barack Obama went behind the wheels of a Chevy Volt, with the world press in attendance. Actually, it was the Volt’s European twin, the Ampera.

The Prez. had to weigh national security and time at the NATO summit in Lisbon against checking out the range extended Opel, and the Opel won. (Read More…)

The first time I came to Houston, TX, was  in 1986. The “reverse oil crisis” had brought the price of crude below $10, and Houston was a ghost town. In nearby Port Arthur, unused oil rigs piled up at the shore, and grass grew on downtown Procter Street. Now, Houston, home of the Petroleum Club (and some clubs the greater Baruth family would fancy), could become the model city for electric vehicles. According to plan, nobody will be farther away from a charging station than five miles, and you can charge up as much as your EV can eat for a flat monthly fee. (Read More…)

As a newcomer to Denver, I had my worries that the junkyards here would be wall-to-wall Sables and Sephias. Would my junkyard trips be a slog through a miasma of late-model boredom? As J. Frank Parnell said about the hazards of lobotomies: Not at all! (Read More…)

Hyundai seems fearless. Its venture above $30,000 with the Genesis wasn’t a rousing success, yet two short years later they’re doubling down with a $65,000 flagship. But there is one car they dare not offer here, from the opposite end of the line: the diminutive i10. So, what are we missing?

Initial stock offerings, bankruptcies, brands being shuttered, established manufacturers being taken over by other concerns, financial crises – a time of turmoil in the auto industry. The time I’m describing is not just the present, it could well describe just about any period in automotive history. With the possible exception of the 1960s, when the Big 3 consolidated market share gained after the independent automakers were reduced to American Motors, there really never has been a long period of stability in the domestic auto industry. Even in the 1960s, Chrysler Corp. stumbled badly.

About a month ago Wayne State University Press, one of the leading publishers of automotive history books, sent me a box full of their recent titles, most of which concern the earliest days of the American auto industry: David Buick’s Marvelous Motor Car by Lawrence Gustin, Maxwell Motor and the Making of the Chrysler Corporation by Anthony J. Yanik, The Dodge Brothers: The Men, the Motor Cars, and the Legacy by Charles K. Hyde, and Hyde’s latest book, Storied Independent Automakers: Nash, Hudson, and American Motors.

While reading up on early American automotive history and I couldn’t help being struck by a sense of the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Looking for an electric car in the $33k price range (before tax credits)? Starting soon you will have two options: Nissan’s Leaf, a 100 mile range, four-door, US-made compact hatchback or Wheego‘s LiFe, a 100 mile range, electrified Chinese city car that is barely distinguishable from the Smart ForTwo. Can you picture many Americans picking the Chinese Smart clone over the Nissan? But Wheego, which previously sold only Low Speed Vehicles, is undeterred. The company claims it will start selling the 70 MPH top-speed LiFe next month… even though AN [sub] reports that the LiFe hasn’t completed EPA certification. Meanwhile, we still haven’t seen a US crash test of the Wheego or the Shuanghuan Noble it’s based on… so we have to rely on questionable Chinese vids like the one above (where’s that airbag?). Wheego is going to need some seriously slick salesmen to make the pitch on this car…

Boring. Small. The automotive equivalent of an advanced econ class. That’s pretty much what a 2000 Elantra Wagon was in the auction world back in 07’. You know that the automotive fashionistas won’t be knocking on your door… and three years ago you wouldn’t get much more than the extraordinarily cheap and chancy taking another glance at it. Hyundai still suffered from the stigma that came with making second-rate cars in a world where sub-prime buyers could buy far better vehicles with a pulse and a paycheck. To put it kindly, this one was a tough sell.
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Subaru’s search for a consistent design language is the stuff of automotive legend, as the brand has flitted from one theme to the next, seemingly coming up with a new direction with each new vehicle. Now, starting with the Hybrid Tourer Concept from the last Geneva Show, Subaru seems to have settled into something of a groove. It’s a sleek, stripped-down, mature look that might stray towards the bland side for some Subaru fans… but at least it’s a direction. With this peek at a future look for the Impreza, we’re getting a little closer to the day when Subaru actually offers a line of consistently-styled vehicles.

“I think it will be done… I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones. We need to do a lot more if were going to save lives.”

To paraphrase Leslie Ann Phillips on her fabulous Martinis and Bikinis album, however, Ray says “save” when he means “control”.

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The Butthole Surfers’ song Pittsburgh To Lebanon contains one of the all-time greatest blues lyrics: “I bought my first shotgun at the age of three.” Now, I can’t match Gibby‘s feat, but I can say that I owned my first tow truck at the age of five. (Read More…)

We’ve called Toyota’s Tesla-developed RAV4 EV an “EV insurance policy,” but it seems that Toyota is even hedging its hedges. Automotive News [sub] reports that the Japanese automaker is developing an EV version of its iQ city car in-house, the first in-house EV developed by Toyota for the mass market. If Toyota’s experiment with Tesla fails the way Tesla’s development partnership for the Smart EV with Daimler did, Toyota will be ready with an in-house developed EV. The iQ EV should have a 65 mile range when market-ready, but no date has been given for its launch. Though offering less range than the RAV4 EV, the iQ EV should be considerably cheaper for Toyota to produce… and it keeps the automaker’s engineers in the EV game. As Toyota moves towards a 2015 hydrogen car, it’s plugging EVs into the city car profile where they should remain competitive long-term. This seems to be the model for the future: EVs for short-range city commuting, hydrogen for longer distances, and continuously-improved gasoline cars for those who can’t afford either. The broad-based green car portfolio seems to be the way of the future.

Automated cameras will begin issuing tickets to the owners of vehicles that momentarily stray into bus lanes in New York City, New York beginning Monday. The cash-strapped metropolis imported the idea from London where a similar system generated 293,000 citations and more than £35 million (US $56 million) in 2008. New York’s bus lane tickets will run between $115 and $150 each.

The project marks one of the first uses of automated enforcement in the United States that drops the pretense of being a safety measure. The stated purpose of the new cameras is to give buses a travel priority over automobile traffic.

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