You noticed that I needed to catch my breath a bit from TTAC’s Future Writers Week.  The results still have me breathless. At the start, I thought with seven a day, I probably have enough until Friday. Was I ever wrong. (Read More…)

NTSB Chair Debbie Hersman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood will be leaving his job. Since the head of the U.S. Dept. of Transportation impacts motorists at a number of levels, from regulating auto manufacturers to pressuring states to trying to regulate driver behavior when it comes to distracted driving, it’s worthwhile to look at the possible candidates to replace Sec. LaHood and what their appointment would mean to drivers and car enthusiasts.

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It’s now apparently legal to have self-driving cars in California and Nevada, and this should spread across the country rapidly. One industry report predicts we’ll have them by 2019. For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that the costs will come down slowly but surely and adoption will grow quickly. Let’s jump all the way to the end point, where self-driving technology is safe, reliable, and mandatory (yes, mandatory), just like seat belts, air bags, and so forth.

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Perhaps it’s due to too many bouts of suburbia. A neighborhood with twenty lawnmowers. Thirty The Lion King videos, and fifty to seventy vehicles. All this redundancy seems to be a bit much for a guy who hates to see things unused by my family 98+% of the time.

Yeah. I know that most folks aren’t willing to share their ride. Some won’t even loan you Simba. But if I lived in a place where we all put a smaller chunk of our change into a ride, I wouldn’t go cheap . . . except for possibly an old Volvo wagon.

These would be my top picks. All used of course!

I review fairly few new cars, but when I head to the American Irony 24 Hours of LeMons race at the Autobahn Country Club in Joliet, Illinois, I feel like I need to take on a country club sort of approach. That means I need the appropriate press car for an official at the race that feels like Caddy Day at the Bushwood Country Club pool. In 2011, I tried to get Chrysler to get me an Avenger R/T, because who wouldn’t want the fallback rental-car Dodge with 283 front-drive horsepower? Instead, I got the Challenger SRT8 392, which was fun but certainly no Avenger R/T. For the 2012 American Irony race, I decided that what I needed was the nice version of Mitsubishi’s contribution to the current rental-car gene pool: the Galant SE. What I got, thanks to Mitsubishi axing the Galant (though not cold blasting it) and generally acknowledging that the Evo is the only big Mitsubishi blip left on Americans’ car-awareness radar, was this white ’13 Evolution MR. Hey, that’s what I’ve got, that’s what I’ll review. (Read More…)

Usually, we are not big on COTY’s, but this one is too good to pass up. According to lore, which is sometimes parroted in the comments at TTAC, there is mutual hate between Koreans and Japanese. This did not stop Korean journalists from crowning a Japanese car as Korea’s Car of the year: The Toyota Camry.  This was so momentous that Toyota Korea president Hisao Nakabayashi broke into tears when the award was presented at a Seoul hotel. (Read More…)

With only a 1.9 percent of lost sales in the black hole called Europe, Volkswagen remains relatively unaffected by the European contagion, especially compared to PSA (- 12.9 percent), Renault (-19.1 percent), Opel (- 15.8 percent), Ford (- 13.2 percent) and Fiat (- 16.1 percent). But Volkswagen can’t walk on water either. Volkswagen is throttling down the production of its bread & butter car, the Passat in reaction to lackluster demand. (Read More…)

TTAC commentator Celebrity208 writes:

Sajeev:
I’d always thought that police crash investigators would check the tail light bulbs of a car that was rear ended to determine if its lights were on at the time of the crash. I thought it had something to do with the way the filament was broken/burnt/etc. So my question is two-fold, am I crazy and do they do this, and if so how might LED tail lights remove this piece of forensic evidence regarding correctly operating brake lights at the time of an accident (presuming the fault was contested)?

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How do you beat the Dow? Occasionally, by reading TTAC. Yesterday, we wrote about Beijing rumors that Daimler and China’s BAIC are planning a big tie-up.

While we at TTAC are busy looking for the appropriate tie-up pictures, in case the rumor should prove true, the Dow Jones Newswire reports today: (Read More…)

Germany’s metal worker union IG Metall proposed a new plan yesterday to solve the overcapacity at Opel  without undue grief on its members:  The union will agree to the closure of Opel’s Bochum plant, if Opel guarantees that no hobs will be lost until 2018. Reuters takes that as a tacit warming up to the inevitable, while demanding the seemingly impossible. (Read More…)

America, land of wide open roads and big cars, listen up: On the sidelines of Nissan showing its new day care center at its Yokohama headquarters to reporters, Nissan’s COO Toshiyuki Shiga made a comment that should resonate well with American customers: (Read More…)

Nissan-Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn said today that he does not expect any sales growth in Europe over the next three to four years. He is not giving up on growth, and said that most will come from higher demand in the United States and China, Reuters reports. (Read More…)

There are rumors ricocheting around Beijing about a possible big tie-up between China’s BAIC and Daimler. BAIC is Daimler’s joint venture partner in China, where the joint venture handles Chinese production of the long version of the E-Class, the C-Class and the GLK. (Read More…)

In what Reuters calls “the latest exit from President Barack Obama’s cabinet,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced today that he would not be staying on for the second term. (Read More…)

U.S. government funded and nonetheless bankrupt battery maker A123 will be Chinese. China’s Wanxiang emerged as the successful bidder in December. All the deal needed  was U.S. government approval. The deal has been approved, says Reuters. (Read More…)