Hi there. Your friendly Managing Editor here. I am checking in with you out there in B and B land to give you a quick update on what’s going on over here on this side of the computer/phone/tablet screen, over here in TTAC country.
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The pandemic isn’t over, but here in the U.S., we’re rolling toward normalcy, and assuming nothing drastic changes, we’ll get there as more folks get vaccinated.
Hopefully, the rest of the world will follow in fairly short order.
A new report suggests that Tesla has filed a trademark for its brand under restaurant services.
Yes, you read that right.
General Motors has a long and illustrious history of receiving government favors, with 2021 likely to continue the trend. Having recently seen its request to have federal EV tax credits reset approved by the Senate Finance Committee, GM-owned Cruise is now seeking to double down by asking regulators to scale back restrictions on autonomous vehicle testing. With practically every automaker simultaneously requesting government hookups on a weekly basis, it’s hardly surprising to see this.
What is unique is the rationales given for government help and it’s often the only way to measure their merit. While most claims tend to boil down to “we need more money,” Cruise wants regulators to get out of the way so the United States can become more competitive against China’s AV programs and is hardly the first company to make such a suggestion. (Read More…)
The Rare Rides series has touched on the Ford Escort a couple of times before, via the sporty EXP and extra sporty Mercury Tracer LTS. And we’re back with more Escort today! This one carries no sporting pretense whatsoever, and unlike the prior two actually wears an Escort badge.
It’s an early wagon with the seldom-selected Squire package.
I’m not doing a detailed Indy 500 recap this year because the race, while certainly not boring, was a bit bereft of drama. Not totally bereft — Helio Castroneves’ win was thrilling, especially since he spent the final portion of the race in a shootout in order to take the checkered flag — but it was clean and quick, and not a soap opera on wheels. This is a good thing.
Sure, there were pit-road spins and Graham Rahal knows how it feels when the wheels fall off, but the race was mostly crash-free. Eventual winner Castroneves worked his way toward the front and got into a duel with Alex Palou for the win. The win put Castroneves into the four-time winner club. And we can’t help but think we had a small part in his victory.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is downgrading the Tesla Model 3 and Y following the company’s decision to remove radar from its advanced driver-assistance suite. We wrote about it, noting that the change actually removed several features from the affected cars and introduced the activation of another creepy, driving-monitoring camera.
While the latter aspect warranted the most cursing from your author’s side of the laptop, it’s the former that’s seeing the lion’s share of debate among groups advocating for vehicular safety. Everyone wants to blame Tesla’s overreliance on cameras as the thing contributing to high-profile crashes when there’s nary a vehicle on this planet that’s truly capable of driving itself. But that hasn’t stopped the NHTSA from slapping affected Tesla models into their own category, noting that they lack several functions it deemed important for safety. It’s all relative, considering there are millions of vehicles on the road that don’t have any advanced driving aids to speak of and heaps of evidence that electronic nannies don’t always function as intended. But it’s earning Tesla bad publicity as it gets dinged by increasingly more safety groups. (Read More…)
Many of you are no doubt familiar with the Am I the Asshole section of Reddit. For those who aren’t, the gist is this — some anonymous user posts about a situation in which they acted a certain way and then ask the reader to determine if they acted like an asshole or if they were in the right.
Well, I encountered a situation Friday evening that could qualify for an AITA, but I am deciding to ask you guys, publicly, if I am the asshole, since this involves a subject near and dear to this blog’s heart: Driving.
While General Motors may have developed an alarming rod knock during the middle 2000s, culminating in Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, The General’s Pontiac Division was shooting rods through the hood by 2007 or so. Oh, sure, the Solstice gave us all hope for the marque that gave us so many great machines over the decades, but few felt optimistic about Pontiac by the time the G5 hit showrooms for the 2007 model year. Here’s one of those first-year G5s, a Performance Red GT Coupe found in a Denver-area yard over the weekend. (Read More…)
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