The new highway bill recently passed by the U.S. Senate, the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act or MAP21, has come under some criticism, in part because of a provision that would give the IRS power to strip American citizens of their U.S. passports if they own the federal government enough money. (Read More…)

Last week General Motors filed an application with United States Patent & Trademark Office to register SS as a trademark (search for 85597402 here). Though Chevrolet has used the SS designation since the early 1960s, first appearing on the ’61 Impala SS, it has apparently never before taken the steps to protect it as a trademark. (Read More…)

The third worst thing about this car is the fact that it’s known as the “Tom Mix Duesenberg” though western actor Tom Mix had apparently had absolutely nothing to do with it. That was a ginned up provenance by a former owner of the car. The second worst thing would be that somebody thought that the car pictured above looked better than the Murphy built Beverly Berline body styled by Gordon Buehrig pictured here: (Read More…)

Though the Fisker car company tried to put on a brave face at the New York Auto Show, making the public introduction of their proposed midsized Atlantic sedan, the state of the company’s affairs might be better evaluated from what they’ve done farther down the eastern seaboard – effectively shuttering the former GM plant in Delaware where the Atlantic was supposed to be assembled, laying off the 12 remaining engineers and technicians at the facility.

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It hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as the handful of early production Tata Nanos that caught fire, or the Ferrari 458 recall, also for fire safety issues, or the newly expanded investigation into Jeep Wranglers burning, and certainly not nearly the attention given the near non-event with that one crash tested Chevy Volt, but BMW appears to have a corporate wide fire problem with turbocharged models that has now resulted in recalls of BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce vehicles. (Read More…)

Chrysler’s pavilion, with the mammoth engine is in the foreground. The giant US Royal tire in the background now sits just outside Detroit.

Mention the 1964 New York World’s Fair to a car enthusiast and they’re likely to associate it with the 1964 1/2 Ford Mustang, which was introduced April 17, 1964 on the fair’s opening day. As former Ford president Lee Iacocca told Mustang Monthly in a 2004 interview, “Where else could you introduce a car at such a world-class event?”. In 1964 and 1965, the New York World’s Fair was about as big as events got. (Read More…)

The autoblogosphere is buzzing with news of an explosion in an electric vehicle battery testing facility at General Motors’ Tech Center in Warren, outside of Detroit. This isn’t the first time that the Tech Center has been the site of an explosion involving alternative energy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the domestic automakers have invested many millions of dollars trying to develop alternatives to gasoline power over much of the second half of the 20th century. Almost 50 years before Toyota introduced the hybrid Prius and Honda started making the FCV hydrogen fuel cell powered car, General Motors was working on cars and trucks powered by fuel cells or batteries. Not all of that R&D proceeded without incident. (Read More…)

More details have been released about the explosion at a GM Tech Center battery lab yesterday that left one person hospitalized with chemical burns and a possible concussion. In a statement, GM said that while an “experimental battery” was undergoing “extreme testing”, gases were released from the battery cells. Something in the lab then ignited the gases and the subsequent explosion was severe enough to cause structural damage, blowing out windows and forcing open fortified doors. The battery itself was left intact. The Detroit News, according to an unnamed source, reports that prototype lithium-ion battery was made by A123, and that explosion happened during “intensive tests designed to make it fail”. The Warren, Michigan fire commissioner said that the lab was designed with safety in mind so damage was confined to the one laboratory. Though some of the 80 workers in the building were sent home for the day after the explosion, others continued to work. The 63,000 sq ft Global Battery Systems Lab has 176 test cells as well as 49 thermal chambers, where GM tests both production and prototype batteries. A HAZMAT team was dispatched to the facility, as were OSHA and MIOSHA inspectors, because of the injuries.

GM stressed that the incident was not related to the Chevrolet Volt or any other production vehicle. Since the electric version of the Chevy Spark won’t go into production until next year, the battery involved in the explosion might be a developmental version of the batteries A123 will be supplying for that project. It also might be a completely experimental prototype.

Start cutting into the wrong car and you’re likely to get hate mail from brand purists. When Jesse James’ old Monster Garage show turned a fairly rare 1971 Chevy El Camino SS into a Figure 8 race car, the producers wouldn’t tell the seller what their plans were for fear of queering the deal. Now Figure 8, being a step above demo derby, is admittedly not exactly a concours, but Chevy cowboy Cadillacs are not quite as rare as hens’ teeth. There were 44,606 El Caminos produced in 1971. I remember something guitar dealer and trader George Gruhn said to me about $25,000 Fender Strats and $50,000 Gibson Les Pauls (paraphrased), “Remember, they were built in factories, on assembly lines, by Mexican American immigrant women, not by artisans like Cremona violins.” (Read More…)

Last month Mitsubishi announced that it will be running an i-MiEV based race car up Pikes Peak in this year’s version of the famed Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. Now comes word that six time consecutive winner and current Pikes Peak course record holder Nobuhiro “Monster” Tajima (you can see his record run from last year below) will be attacking the mountain in another electric car, sponsored by Japan’s Association for the Promotion of Electric Vehicles, a trade group of over 170 companies with an interest in EVs, including Toyota and Tesla. Winning an event six times in a row in any form of motorsport is impressive. Doing that and setting a course record at 62 years old is even more impressive. As the saying goes, he’s big in Japan. Tajima has joined the APEV as a “commissioner” and his high profile will be used to promote EVs and APEV’s environmental and humanitarian efforts, including aid to victims of last year’s earthquake and tsunami.

Those environmental and humanitarian efforts ironically come as Bloomberg reports that EV’s have lost some of their green sheen in Japan in the wake of the tsunami caused meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant. (Read More…)

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has come in for some criticism for awkwardly relating what he characterized as a “humorous” story involving his father, former American Motors CEO and later Michigan governor, George Romney. In 1954 George Romney became head of the newly merged (from Hudson and Nash) American Motors Corp., following the sudden death of his corporate mentor and patron, George W. Mason. One of the first things Romney did was to close the money-losing Hudson assembly plant in Detroit and consolidate all Hudson and Nash assembly in Nash’s Kenosha facility, which put about 4,300 Michiganders out of work. The story that Mitt Romney related had to do with his father’s campaign for governor in 1962, eight years later. The senior Romney was in a parade and apparently the high school marching band in front of his parade car didn’t know how to play The Victors, the fight song of the University of Michigan. Instead they kept trying to play On Wisconsin, much to the chagrin of Romney’s campaign staff, who didn’t want Michigan voters reminded of the plant closing. Though it’s clear to me from the context that Mitt Romney found humor in the parade incident, not in the plant closing, Democrats have seized on his remark, saying to it betrays a callous attitude towards working people.

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The Detroit News is reporting that the company that electrifies Ford’s Transit Connect Electric vans, Azure Dynamics, AZD, has filed for bankruptcy and suspended the production of the small battery electric van. Azure Dynamics announced that 120 employees, including 50 at their Oak Park facility just outside Detroit where AZD performed the conversions, have been laid off. So far about 500 Transit EVs have been made since late 2010. There is no word if the company will be able to restart production.

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I’m pretty good at taking tests. The problem is, with some tests that you take, success is not attained by giving the logically correct answer but rather by regurgitating the answer the test giver wants. I forget that sometimes. When the Michigan Secretary of State’s office told me that I needed to take a written test to continue to have the privilege of driving, on one question I forgot the proper test taking strategy was to determine what some bureaucrat in Lansing wanted me to think. Instead I just read the question, parsed its logic, and gave the same answer that I’ve given my now-adult children concerning the same driving situation. Wait. That’s a fib. I didn’t just read the question, parse etc. The question and possible answers intrigued me enough that I jotted them down on an envelope I had with me. They were unclear enough that I wanted to run them by the other TTAC writers and the Best and Brightest to get your opinions. Here’s the question:

Q. If you cannot stop before hitting another vehicle it’s usually best to:

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Last month the Dept. of Transportation, through NHTSA, issued proposed guidelines on drivers’ use of electronic devices that could distract them from driving. Wayne Cunningham, an automotive writer for CNet, has been mining the 177 page document and he’s uncovered regulations that would effectively cripple navigation systems as we know them and also reduce the amount of information a car’s systems can display to a driver at any one time.

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The AHoF today honors automotive notables from around the world so seeing displays devoted to Armand Peugeot and Eiji Toyoda wasn’t that surprising. The AHoF, though, didn’t always have such an international flavor. It was only in 1989 that the Hall inducted its first Japanese auto executive, Soichiro Honda. Racing was near to Soichiro’s heart so currently on display in the exhibit dedicated to him is the 1968 Honda S800 RSC race car that won its class in the 1968 12 Hours of Suzuka endurance race.

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