At the end of yesterday’s race session, it appeared that we had a Stealth-626-Supra battle for the B.F.E. GP win on laps. All day today, however, the Ghetto Motorsports Mazda RX-7 (winner of the 2010 B.F.E. GP, not to mention the LeMons Mountain Region championship) kept creeping up on the 1-2-3 cars. (Read More…)

On Tuesday, I will go to the Fuji racetrack in the hills halfway between Tokyo and Nagoya. I will test drive a Toyota that is not available in Japan, nor is it in the U.S. It is however available and quite a success in India. Can you guess which one it is?

When I pointed at the map, my wife mentioned that her father, bless his heart, has some real estate in Yugawara, and that she has the keys. Yugawara, famous for its hot springs and not much else, sits right smack in the middle of the area which has an 87 percent chance of getting hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of about 8 within the next 30 years.

I was reminded of that this morning. Instead of being woken up with kisses and a cup of coffee, the house kicked me in the butt. Earthquake. (Read More…)

Did you notice? TTAC loads much faster. Most likely , you did not notice. An old axiom in the nerd industry is that performance gains mostly go unnoticed. Slowdowns on the other hand drive people nuts.  Our gee-whiz kids in Toronto moved TTAC to something called “Cloudflare,” which really speeds up load times. The trouble is: Once in a while, the Cloudflare suffers burnout and TTAC becomes inaccessible.

Today was such a day. (Read More…)

Today’s race session ended about an hour earlier than planned, thanks to a wild Great Plains lightning storm that threatened to vaporize and/or float away the corner workers. Some LeMons races have a team that grabs and early lead and never relinquishes it, while others feature a three- or four-way battle with endless lead changes. Today was the latter type, with the Ghetto Motorsports RX-7 dueling with the Marvin Martian Saab 9000 for the first position for most of the early going and a trio of Japanese machines swooping in when the Saab popped an oil line and the RX-7 caught a few black flags. (Read More…)

Women and minivans, women and minivans. They don’t quite go together like a horse and carriage, but it’s possible to be just a little more romantic about either when the location is right. I fell in love with the revise-and-retouch 2011 Chrysler minivans during an epic Northern California trip, as detailed in my first-drive review, […]

So let’s say you don’t live in Washington or Oregon, and you don’t want to buy a GM vehicle, what do you do to save on car insurance? Easy: You say you drive it on your farm. Auto insurers offer farm-use discounts of up to 20 percent. And a lot of less-than-gentleman farmers harvest the savings. (Read More…)

We didn’t want to mention it when we wrote about GM’s buy a car, get free insurance deal. If we would have said it, it would have been the nasty B-word all over again. The rest of the media showed less compunction. “The worse you drive, the bigger the deal” headlined MSN Money. The deal can be staggering under the right or wrong circumstances, says MSN Money: (Read More…)

Ford’s Sync doesn’t get a break. It attracted undue attention from LaHood’s distracted driving crusade. Consumer Reports had issues with the system. Sync sank Ford in the 2011 J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey. Can it get any worse?

Yes, it can. Ford is being sued for patent infringement. (Read More…)

When we wrote about dealer lots overflowing with trucks, especially of the GM kind, there were a lot of nods, but also many flames.  Some commenters said it can’t possibly be true. Mainly because the charts were the product of financial analyst algebra that was not readily transparent to the common high school graduate.  Then, we received messages accusing us of sleeping, because other more esoteric blogs supposedly “called the GM bulls.. months ago” ago. (Or two days later.)  Can’t please them all. However, today, Automotive News [sub] confirms that “Big pickup trucks are clogging many U.S. dealer lots, causing headaches for General Motors and other automakers, and raising concerns about price wars and lower profits later in the year.” (Read More…)

The second annual B.F.E. GP, which takes place at High Plains Raceway (located somewhere in the Great Plains between Denver and Kansas), kicked off today with the traditional Friday tech and BS inspections. This weekend’s field may have the highest concentration of German iron ever seen at a 24 Hours of LeMons race, with what seemed like about half the entries bearing Porsche, Volkswagen, BMW, or Audi emblems. (Read More…)

Our patent-pending China sales oracle is in top form. As predicted, the Chinese market awoke from the doldrums in June and rose 6.2 percent from a year earlier to 1.11 million units. This according to a data released today by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM). (Read More…)

Suzuki is not buying into the „once in a millennium tsunami.” Suzuki has a lot of its production near the waterfront in Japan’s Tokai region. Scientists give the area between Toyko and Nagoya an 87 percent chance of getting hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of about 8 within the next 30 years. Suzuki’s answer: Let’s get out of here, fast. (Read More…)

Chinacartimes did protracted research, quite literally into the dark underbelly of the Chinese car culture. As it turns out, the Chinese have not only eclipsed America as the world’s largest car market. They also found out that the car can be used for other things than driving. The know-how developed by us eons ago on lover’s lane, and in drive-ins, has been unabashedly ripped off by the Chinese who are getting at it in their cars.

The matter is all over Chinese websites, along with maps. This page shows Qingdao’s own top spots, which Chinacartimes head honcho Ash Sutcliffe (who lives there) failed to investigate in person. Travellers to Shanghai are treated to favorite spots of vehicular nookie. No big city is without a suitable dark corner. (Read More…)

Though Hyundai owns a controlling stake in and shares platforms with Kia, the two Korean car companies continue to operate more independently than GM’s divisions did back in their heydays. So the decision between related products often comes down to something beyond price. Take, for example, the Kia Sportage. Why buy it instead of the […]

At GM, Joel Ewanick and  Chris Perry need to repeat the miracles for which they became famous  at Hyundai. So what do you do in that case? “Let’s just do the same thing again.”

If GM would do a repeat of the Hyundai Assurance Plan (lose your job, return your car), with a 10 year warranty thrown in, the journos would snicker, but the cars would fly off the lot. But at GM, this would be too gutsy.  So what about the next best idea? That’s right: “Free insurance!” (Read More…)