American car ads of the early 1980s came up short in several departments: Burning rubber, jet-engine-grade turbocharger sound, and blatantly sped-up film that made the cars appear to be going 300 MPH. Oh, and they also lacked James Bond! (Read More…)

On the list of things that can go wrong with plug-in cars, this is one the engineers probably never thought of: rodent attack. Cars.com‘s Chevy Volt was parked at a public charging point when a ground error occurred, ending the charging session. We’ll let the firsthand account take it from there:

Monitoring the online ChargePoint portal from home, I hoped the charging station would reset, something it attempts to do a total of four times every 15 minutes. That’s when I received an e-mail from Todd Dore, the treasurer of the Fox Valley Electric Auto Association who parks and charges his converted Volkswagen Beetle right next to our Volt. He said that at 6:30 when he left work, we’d had a “furry visitor,” a brown rat who scurried under our Volt, probably seeking warmth. The temperatures had been below 10 degrees.

Rodents are known to climb into the engine compartments of conventional cars when it’s frigid outside, so it made sense. The Volt maintains a minimum battery temperature when it’s plugged in, even once fully charged, because a warm battery is a more powerful one. It also extends the battery’s longevity, according to Chevrolet.

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Dodge brand CEO Ralph Gilles tells Automotive News [sub] that Dodge’s primary design cue, the “Cross-Hair” grille, will be limited to Ram-branded trucks as Dodge moves on to an undefined “different way.”

We did as much as we could with the split cross-hair grille. We had to be careful because the cooling work was pretty much done when we decided to rebrand the vehicles. That will continue evolving over time. The Ram brand, the truck look they have, they own it.

The obvious question: having relied on truck-derived styling for decades now, where does Dodge go from here? We’ve puzzled over this question since Chrysler announced that Ram would be split off from the Dodge brand, and over a year later, we’re still at a loss. So we’ll put it to you: what would you do to bring Dodge’s design into the post-truck era?

…with Lancia badges! And yes, that is the Lancia Grand Voyager. Chrysler must have held on to the name after Plymouth kicked the bucket. Of course, few consumers in the European markets where Lancias are sold will get the reference to a defunct budget brand, but the decision does add to the surreal vibe that these Chrysler-cum-Lancias exude.

While we were focused on the U.S. market in 2010 and were happy that it awoke from the dead and went above 10 million, the world quietly left carmageddon behind itself and set a new record: 72 million light-vehicles were sold worldwide in 2010, a number never seen before, says J.D. Power. For this year, the Westlake Village research group expects another world record. However, most of this record was not and will not be produced where most of our readership lives. (Read More…)

The Virginia House of Delegates and a state Senate committee approved legislation that would make a rolling right-hand turn on a red light a reckless driving offense. On Thursday the Senate Transportation Committee unanimously approved a bill introduced by Delegate Bill Janis (R-Glen Allen) which the lower chamber had approved by a 67 to 31 margin on February 4.

“Any person who drives a motor vehicle in violation of Section 46.2-833 is guilty of reckless driving,” House Bill 1993 states.

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Delphi’s salaried retirees lost their shirts after the Delphi bankruptcy and the GM bailout. Now they lost their main voice in congress. Rep. Christopher Lee resigned last week after Gawker showed a picture of a bare-chested congressman. (Read More…)

Volkswagen had unannounced visitors last week. German police raided eight offices in four German cities to secure evidence in a big corruption scandal, the Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports. According to the paper, managers of  Deutsche Telekom had attempted to land a several hundred million Euro contract from Volkswagen by extending the sponsorship contract for the Wolfsburg soccer club VFL Wolfsburg. (Read More…)

More Chinese sales numbers for January are coming in as China slowly begins to return from the Chinese New Year holidays. We are keeping a wary eye on the January numbers. They are seen as an indicator for the whole year. Most of the world’s auto industry relies on China for growth and volume. A marked slowdown could have serious consequences. (Read More…)

The Center for Automotive Research claims that its latest study [full document in PDF here] is not a forecast of EV sales, but rather “focuses on the expected deployment by states.” Still, by using hybrid vehicle sales to determine deployment patterns, and using a national estimate of electric vehicle market share annually (note: “the national estimates used in this paper do not constitute a CAR forecast and only reflect projections that were available at the time of this study”), the study finds that only 496,000 plug-in vehicles will be on the road by 2015, by which time the Obama Administration hopes to have a million EVs on the road. Still, the report envisions annual sales of plug-in vehicles as growing rapidly, from 77k units in 2012 to 140k annual units by 2015… a number that casts some serious doubt on the Administration’s recent (dubious) estimate that 1.2m vehicles will have been produced for the US market by 2015 (and not for the first time).

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Though it’s looking like Chrysler will be the first OEM to break the US market’s compact pickup drought, it won’t be the only manufacturer bringing a smaller truck stateside. Pickuptrucks.com reports that

development on the next-generation 2014 Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon for the U.S. and Canada is under way, based on GM’s all-new GMI 700 body-on-frame global small truck platform that will be built in Thailand starting late this year.

The bad news: it probably won’t arrive until late 2013 or early 2014… and by then, pickuptrucks.com figures that a refreshed Tacoma and a new Frontier will be on the market by then, in addition to a possible Ram or Jeep compact pickup. Still, the prospect of a Brazilian-developed and designed small truck certainly sounds tempting. Let’s just hope the coming competition helps make these trucks into the kind of bulletproof, fuel-sipping machines that helped boost US auto sales the last time we faced a major energy crisis.

Automotive News [sub] reports that Mercedes-Benz has agreed to take over Smart car distribution in the United States from Penske Automotive Group after about three years of operating as a Penske-run distribution channel. Beginning in July, Mercedes will take over all of Smart’s US-based operations because

1. It needs the small-car volume to meet new corporate average fuel economy standards that take effect in the United States in the 2016 model year.

2. Daimler AG integrated Smart into the Mercedes-Benz car unit September. The United States is the only market where Smart and Mercedes operate separately.

But the impact of this deal isn’t limited to ownership and operations, as AN [sub] reports that the four-door car being developed by Nissan for Smart USA has been canceled.

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Felix Kramer, an entrepreneur and plug-in car activist, is almost certainly the first person in the world to own both a Nissan Leaf and a Chevrolet Volt… which, at least in theory, makes him the perfect person to compare the real-world ownership experiences of these two highly-hyped vehicles (and once again prove the uselessness of “automotive journalism”). Though he demurs that he “hasn’t had much chance to really compare them,” he tells The Solar Home and Business Journal that

It’s quite obvious to me that for two-car families, it’s no problem in any way for the second vehicle to be an all-electric because that’s the car used for local driving. There’s an enormous market of tens of millions for all-electric vehicles despite Americans’ so-called range anxiety.

Cars are sold as giving you freedom. People go into a dealer and say about an all-electric car, “Oh, I have to plug it in. What if I want to drive it across the country someday? I won’t buy this car.” That mentality is very deeply seated, and that’s part of the reason that the plug-in hybrids could be the primary platform for plug-in vehicles for the next decade or two.

In the meantime, people who get a plug-in hybrid as their second vehicle may find themselves asking, “Why did I pay for this engine, I’m just driving it electrically.” In our family, the Leaf will be the car my wife and I will pick first every day when we’re in the Bay Area. When we’re both driving or we want to travel beyond the range of the Leaf, we’ll take the Volt.

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