The 1984 Audi 5000 Junkyard Find reminded us about the nightmare faced by Audi after 60 Minutes framed the 5000 as a an unintended accelerator in 1986. Audi sales took a real beating in the late 1980s, but some 5000s (renamed the 200 in an attempt to banish the stigma of a car whose greatest sin was the proximity of the brake pedal to the gas pedal) were bought in 1989. Here’s an optioned-up example that I found in the same Denver junkyard as the ’84. (Read More…)

Four 2013 models, the Lexus ES, the Hyundai Santa Fe, the Subaru XV Crosstrek, and the Dodge Dart received the coveted  “Top Safety Pick” award by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. (Read More…)

Detroit carmakers continue telling their fairy tale of the closed Japanese market, and their UAW members eagerly hang on their lips. Both don’t want to admit that their products are largely unsalable in Japan, and they blame the mythical bad Nipponese wolf instead. At the same time, sales of imported cars are up for the third straight month in Japan. Sales of imports were 35,841 in September, the highest since September 1996, data released by the Japan Automobile Importers Association shows. (Read More…)

Japanese carmakers are worried about their sales in China after Japanese cars were smashed and dealerships torched during large scale anti-Japanese riots in China last month. As a first indicator that Japanese cars may be falling out of favor in China,  Mazda reports via Reuters that September sales in China dropped 35 percent. (Read More…)

When a Japanese chemical factory blew up over the weekend, it looked like baby bottoms would be most affected. Nippon Shokubai is one of the world’s largest producers of acrylic acid, which in turn is a key ingredient for the making of disposable diapers. Apart from causing a diaper dearth, the explosion also “may send shock waves through the auto industry,” as The Nikkei [sub] says. (Read More…)

Shai Aggasi, the visionary behind the Better Place EV battery swap network, has been ousted, with Better Place Australia’s CEO replacing Agassi as global CEO.

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“We do not need incentives for natural gas technology to drive adoption,” Bill Larkin, CFO of Westport Innovations, a Vancouver-based developer of technology that allows truck and bus engines to run on natural gas, told Reuters in an interview:

 “It actually hurts the investment in this technology because the U.S. government has been dangling this carrot … and so investments are delayed.” (Read More…)

Italy once had one of the highest rates of car ownership in the world, with 60 cars for every 100 people. But in 2011, bicycles outsold cars for the first time in decades.

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A successful test of the “biggest rocket fired in the UK for over 20 years” cleared the way for an attack on the 1,000 mph mark in a car. According to Reuters, the rocket will be twinned with a fighter jet engine from a Eurofighter Typhoon. With that new “hybrid,” the team behind the Bloodhound supersonic car wants to smash the existing world land speed record of 763 mph and go all the way to 1,000 mph. (Read More…)

I stole it.

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Mitsubishi, pretty much given up for dead in the U.S. and Europe, thrives in an easily overlooked part of the world: South-East Asia. Mitsubishi has three assembly plants in Thailand, and will spend around $150 million to increase output. (Read More…)

Coming straight out of the “I can’t believe people get paid for this nonsense” department is Scion’s new marketing initiative; picking heavy metal-listeners as its next target demographic.

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They called it the “Ferrari of the East”: The Melkus RS 1000 was East Germany’s only sports car, “powered” by a mid-mounted Wartburg 3-cylinder 2-stroke engine. Most cars had 1 liter engine, a few were 1.2 liter mills. Fitted with gullwing doors, it looked fast. 101 cars were made between 1969 and 1979 in the Dresden factory, to buy one, you had to race it.  In 2009, Sepp Melkus, grand child of founder Heinz Melkus, resurrected the company and started building the Melkus RS 2000.  No more, the company is bankrupt. (Read More…)

The exalted community of Panther-platform enthusiasts has a term for people who deliberately make their Crown Vics look like working undercover/plainclothes police cars: “wackers”.

You can’t call this fellow a “wacker”. “Wack”, on the other hand…

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I don’t have any particular bias against American cars, but it’s fair to say that I’ve always preferred imports over American muscle, save for one major exception; the GMC Typhoon.

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