The city of St Petersburg, Florida uses camera systems sold by American Traffic Solutions (ATS, formerly American Traffic Systems) to issue tickets to drivers allegedly running red lights. According to The Newspaper, when the activists at St Petersburg Red Light Cameras reviewed logs of the 21,602 photo tickets issued in the city from October 29, 2011 to April 30, 2012 they discovered that the ATS cameras were reporting that they “measured” Bugatti Veyron level speeds from cars not realistically capable of that kind of velocity.

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It looks more and more like a divided Europe. While carmakers Opel, Ford, PSA, Fiat etc. are wailing with pain, German carmakers report expectation-beating profits. (Read More…)

I admit it: I’m suffering from a silly infatuation with Broughamness. Every American car manufacturer (and a few Japanese ones) slapped Brougham emblems on a wide variety of vehicles during the Brougham Era, which we’ll call 1968 through 1992, and the last hurrah for Detroit Broughams was the car that I found in a Denver self-serve wrecking yard yesterday. (Read More…)

Sometimes designers become super stars in the car biz: just ask that dude who made the Ford GT, or the other dude responsible for the Chrysler 300. I am sure both made other vehicles which they truly hated.  Perhaps the 300’s designer shares some amount of blame for the last Chrysler Sebring?  I am sure that Ital Design’s Giorgetto Giugiaro has the same problem, but Hyundai wrote him a check and he made it happen.  Quite honestly, the original Hyundai Excel here in the USA wasn’t a bad car at all.  Bad looking, that is.

And honestly, after walking around this example at a historically savvy Hyundai dealer (next to a Lamborghini Dealership that bored me after 20 minutes) I suggest to you, dear reader, that the Excel sold so unbelievably well on both price and design. Because this machine could look much, much worse.

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Sergio  Marchionne accuses Volkswagen of exploiting the European crisis to gain market share by offering aggressive discounts, the New York Times writes.  “It’s a bloodbath of pricing and it’s a bloodbath on margins,” the Fiat and Chrysler CEO told the paper. (Read More…)

I currently drive a 2005 MINI Cooper S convertible. I’ve been swapping winter/summer tires for the past few years but I was thinking that this year I might get a beater car for the harsher weather months. The combination of FWD and wear and tear on the fabric roof are my main reasons for these considerations.

I live in NJ, so most of my driving is on the highway but as part of my job as a systems admin in a datacenter, I’m occasionally called into work at times when even the highways haven’t been plowed.

Do you think it’s possible to find a cheap (around $1000), preferably AWD car that would work well for winters in the northeast? Craigslist searches so far have turned up a handful of Subarus, Volvos, and Audis Quattro.

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Your humble author is TTAC’s resident cycling enthusiast, as shown in the eminently regrettable photo above which can best be titled “35-Year-Old Man Takes Mountain Bike To Skatepark For No Good Reason.” When I was younger, I had unveiled contempt for people who drove somewhere when they could ride. Three knee surgeries and a child later, I’m not so sure. Still, cycling is gaining momentum across Europe in precisely the same way that the economy isn’t. The public-bicycle scheme in Paris, Velib, now profitably shares 23,000 public bicycles across a subscriber network of 225,000 people — and the electric-auto-sharing service which has been operating for over half a year now looks to be headed for similar success. The implications regarding private and public property raised by both services are worth discussing.

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A few years ago I got a Civic Si race car around VIR in about 2:12 and I thought I was really doing something, man. Had Mike Skeen been at the track that day, he would have had time to cross the line, stop his car, get out, remove his helmet, and have a short sip of The Kraken Rum Gatorade before I trundled past in my little econocar. We’ll have coverage and highlights from this event tomorrow, but in the meantime, watch this video. It will show you just how fast driving is really done: with economical hand motions, solid control inputs, and an utterly fearless mentality.

The best advice I ever received about cars came from a fellow named Charlie.

He sat me down. Looked right into my 22 year old face and told me,

“You know nothing!”

He was right.

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Road and Track has exciting new photoconcepts of the anxiously awaited Porsche Pajun. They purchased said illustrations from our friend Chris Doane, so we won’t steal them and reprint ’em here. Check it out! Insightful comments from R&T on this wonderful new entry-level-luxury sedan from the well-respected full-line German automaker: “The car will have a V-6, not a flat-6″ and ” As long as vehicles like these help fund even better future 911s and Caymans, we’re all for them.” Sounds good!

In a recent post on Stillen’s contest to design a body kit for the Scion FR-S, I brought up the history of the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, a scholarship based model making contest for budding designers that ran from 1930 to 1968. Since just about all of the promotional materials for the Guild were targeted at boys, I wondered if any girls ever tried to enter the competition.

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With 25 percent of its manufacturing capabilities in Canada, Chrysler would be hardest hit in the event of a strike by the Canadian Auto Workers union.

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Jaguar’s Castle Bromwich plant is going on a recruitment drive to add 1,100 jobs, as the plant prepares to produce the F-Type sports car and the holy grail of automotive-dom…the XF Sportbrake diesel!

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HEY! Remember when I said the Cadillac ATS was going to be a miserable failure? Guess what? It still IS going to be a miserable failure! But you’d never know it from the glowing reviews on the Web right now, many of which are filled with self-described on-track driving heroics that sound utterly Schumacher-esque until you realize they were done with mandatory save-the-brakes stops every lap and with careful supervision.

Motor Trend’s Scott Evans managed to slip the surly bonds of that supervision long enough to touch his Cadillac’s face to a couple of trees. We challenged GM and Motor Trend to release the black box data and share with the public what really happened.

Well, I’m pleased to announce that Mr. Evans completely fessed-up to the real reasons behind the accident in the full-length MT feature on the car, which was just released. Just kidding! He didn’t even mention it! He who controls the past, controls the future! It never happened! Love ya, Scott! For the amusement of TTAC’s readers, I have, ah, slightly edited Mr. Evans’ review to reflect what he perhaps should have written.

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Today’s Chart comes from finance blog Zero Hedge, which has taken a periodic interest in General Motors channel stuffing endeavors. While we don’t normally report on stock prices here at TTAC, this one is worth mentioning.

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