Years ago, I was paid to help a neighbor clean out his garage. It was an old, ramshackle building with a dirt floor and over the years it had been filled with an amazing amount of crap. At the very back, under a canvas tarp, I found a long neglected late 60s Honda CB750 in fairly rough condition. When I asked about it, my neighbor told me how, as a younger man, he had purchased the bike new and travelled the highways and byways of the American West for many years before finally coming home a settling down to start a family. To him, it was an icon of his youth and a time of freedom. To my young eyes, however, it was just a neglected old bike covered in dirt and cobwebs, found forgotten, alone and unloved and condemned to spend its remaining years as a lifeless touchstone of another time. It struck me as a particularly sad end to a life of service and I decided then that no vehicle of mine would ever languish its remaining life away in a barn or under a cover.

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The Volkswagen CrossBlue and CrossBlue Coupe will be made in China by the Shanghai-Volkswagen joint venture, Carnewschina reports today.  According to the report, the car will be built when Volkswagen’s new factory will open in Changsha in China’s Hunan Province. (Read More…)

Car and Driver scribe (and TTAC alum) Justin Berkowitz has penned an amazing feature about the U.S. Government’s campaign against grey market Land Rover Defenders.

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As predicted by TTAC, European car sales were up slightly in April. Car sales in the EU rose by 1.7 percent in the month, Europe’s car manufacturer association ACEA says. We warned you before not to read too much into it, and we warn you again. (Read More…)

Those who frequently demanded that the Autobiography Of BS © is turned into a book or a blockbuster movie see themselves a little closer to their declared goal. The series will be a monthly feature in Top Gear Deutschland, a very glossy magazine and spin-off of the TV series. The BBC-inspired buff book already hit the stands in Germany, and arrived in my Japanese mailbox today. (Read More…)

The Ford Fiesta looks to be picking up and moving from its current assembly locations in India and Mexico to a central location in Thailand when the next generation rolls around in 2016.

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I thought I’d seen the rarest member of the Camry species in North America when I spotted this 1990 Camry All-Trac on the coldest day I’ve ever experienced in a junkyard. Perhaps I was wrong. Here’s one of the very few first-gen Camry liftbacks sold in this country, now Crusher-bound. (Read More…)

If it weren’t for a Papal visit, Dr. Z may never have come to know Mercedes-Benz.

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Toyota started shipping French-made Yaris compact cars to customers in North America for the first time this month. Last year, Toyota expressed intentions to do so and said it would be around 25,000 units per year. (Read More…)

State Sen. Nicholas Sacco, D-Hudson, says drones could benefit society if used correctly; his bill , introduced on April 25, would let police and fire departments use drones for extreme conditions that might be too dangerous for humans, or where existing tools simply wouldn’t work.

“Think about missing children, missing seniors,” Sacco told the Star-Ledger of Newark. “The immediacy and the ability to use drones to find them quickly is very important. Think about forest fires. Things like this are extremely important.”

Children: Used As A Vague Justification For Tyranny Since About 1950! Is there anybody left who is naive enough to think that drones will be used to find missing children? After all, missing children tend to be inside buildings and/or surrounded by other, taller people. Not great conditions for drones, really.

On the other hand, a freeway is a great place for drone surveillance. And while they’re up there scanning the freeways tirelessly for missing children, seniors, or forest fires, they might as well issue some speeding tickets, right?

Welcome to the traffic Skynet. But New Jersey already has a John Connor.

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It wasn’t that many decades ago that imported cars— any imported cars— were considered fairly exotic. I’ve dredged up memories of some very funny 1980 Aamco ads that deal with that subject, and the internet has obliged by providing those very ads for us! (Read More…)

Daimler presented its new S-Class yesterday night in the airbus factory in Hamburg, and with the pomp and circumstance appropriate for a car that is supposed to bring the big turn-around at Daimler. German Spiegel magazine promptly grouched “that the most revolutionary part in the car is the fact that in large parts, it is not new at all.” Der Spiegel called an unimpeachable witness: Germany’s Kraftfahrtbundesamt,  the agency that issues  type approvals in Germany.  It simply amended the type approval for the old W221 model. (Read More…)

Thursday-afternoon press  conferences at Mitsubishi and Nissan remained mostly deserted  as the Fourth Estate congregated at Honda to hear the not so secret news that Honda will return to F1. I didn’t go because I thought we don’t cover F1. When I remembered that we now do, it was too late. Did I mention that running around Tokyo covering the auto beat is a world of tough decisions? (Read More…)

The annual Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is quickly turning into a Nurburgring equivalent when it comes to bragging rights of electric vehicle makers. The venue is perfect for EVs:  The track is 12.42 miles long, as cinch even for the most range-challenged EV.  The track finishes at 14,110 ft, a height that deprives ICE-powered cars of oxygen and some 40 percent of their power. An EV just laughs at the breathless engines. I learn all those trivia today in Mitsubishi’s showroom in Tamachi, Tokyo. A descendant on Mitsubishi’s iMiev will be part of the electrified hill climb. (Read More…)

You see a fair amount of customization among the inmates of a high-turnover, self-service wrecking yard; sometimes it’s a full-on time-capsule RX-7 and sometimes it’s the kind of thing Manny, Moe, and Jack would build after a week-long ether-and-DMT binge. Here’s a fairly well-executed, if puzzling, airbrush mural I spotted at a Denver yard a few months back. (Read More…)