Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth. Click here for a complete gallery of photos.

Before I get into the details of Acura’s press conference at the NAIAS, as the Acura presser was unfolding I couldn’t help but compare the affect at Honda’s luxury brand to the mood at Lexus. Both Honda and Toyota have had to dea; with supply chain and production disruptions caused first by the Tsunami that struck northern Japan and then complicated by large scale flooding in Thailand. More to the point, both companies were introducing new sports cars at the Detroit show. Acura announced the revival of the NSX model name and Lexus showed a sleak concept sports car called the LF-LC. Both cars are intended to change the image of their companies, but the sense that I got at Acura was “we’ve made exciting cars before and we’re going to get our mojo back”, while the vibe at Lexus was “See? We really don’t make boring cars”.

Acura used the NAIAS to introduce three new models that executives says will be the first stages of a two year process that will result in a complete makeover for the Acura lineup, a revival of Acura if you will. The goal of that makeover is a 40% increase in sales to 180,000 units in 2012, driven by what Acura says is their threefold mission statement: Value, sustainability and “time is luxury”, Acura’s characterization of aids that ease the driving task.

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Note: Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth. Click here for a complete gallery of photos from the Cadillac ATS reveal.

At an invitation only event held at Detroit’s College For Creative Studies, last night Cadillac revealed its new BMW 3 fighter, the ATS. The location was appropriate since CCS is located in a former General Motors’ building, actually the first location of Harley Earl’s “Art & Colour” department, the progenitor of what is now called GM Design. In fact there’s a lounge where Earl’s corner office used to be right around the bend from the hall where the reveal was, and the hall itself was formerly used by GM styling for in-house displays. Twenty of the 170 CCS graduates at GM Design worked on the ATS project and Cadillac is a major benefactor of the school. The choice of the location was anything but a coincidence. Cadillac is undoubtedly using styling to set the ATS apart from its luxury C segment competitors.

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Have you heard the old joke about the three Jewish engineers and Henry Ford? This is the version at Snopes.com:

It was a sweltering August day in 1937 when the 3 Cohen brothers entered the posh Dearborn, Michigan, offices of Henry Ford, the car maker.

“Mr. Ford”, announced Norman Cohen, the eldest of the three. “We have a remarkable invention that will revolutionize the automobile industry.”

Ford looked skeptical, but their threat to offer it to the competition kept his interest piqued. “We would like to demonstrate it to you in person”, said Norman.

After a little cajoling, they brought Mr. Ford outside and asked him to enter a black automobile parked in front of the building. Hyman Cohen, the middle brother, opened the door of the car. “Please step inside, Mr. Ford.”

“What!” shouted the tycoon, “Are you crazy? It’s over a hundred degrees in that car!”

“It is”, smiled the youngest brother, Max.; but sit down Mr. Ford, and push the white button.

Intrigued, Ford pushed the button. All of a sudden a whoosh of freezing air started blowing from vents all around the car, and within seconds the automobile was not only comfortable, it was quite cool.

“This is amazing!” exclaimed Ford. “How much do you want for the patent?’

One of the brothers spoke up: “The price is One Million Dollars.” Then he paused.

“And there is something else. The name ‘Cohen Brothers Air Conditioning’ must be stamped right next to the Ford logo on the dash board!”

“Money is no problem,” retorted Ford,” but there is no way I will have a Jewish name next to my logo on my cars!”

They haggled back and forth for a while and finally they settled. Five Million Dollars, and the Cohens’ name would be left off. However, the first names of the Cohen brothers would be forever emblazoned upon the console of every Ford air conditioning system.

And that is why even today, whenever you enter a Ford vehicle, you see those three names clearly printed on the air conditioning control panel……….NORM, HI and MAX

The story isn’t even apocryphal. Except for the part about Ford’s Jew-hatred it’s complete fiction. Willis Carrier invented refrigerant air conditioning and Packard, not Ford, was the first automaker to offer it in a car.

Now, though, did you hear the one about the Jewish engineer that invented the Volkswagen? Actually, that story isn’t a joke, and it’s not fiction, or at least a persuasive case can be made that it’s true.

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After spending thirty years and $45 billion dollars encouraging the use of ethanol the United States Congress has adjourned for the year without extending tax subsidies to the to ethanol industry. The subsidy currently costs taxpayers $6 billion a year. A related import tariff on Brazilian ethanol was also allowed to expire. With a wide group of critics, cutting across political and ideological lines, the tax break had become unpopular in Washington. Business interests in the food and cattle industry as well as environmentalists opposed the law which paid 45 cents per gallon to fuel blenders to subsidize their costs for producing E10 gasoline/ethanol blend. The subsidy resulting in corn being diverted from feedlots and food processors to ethanol production, raising the cost of many foodstuffs. The environmental movement now opposes corn ethanol as a fuel it because it considers the fuel and its production to be “dirty”, in the words of Friends of the Earth.

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Blue car but no blue oval.

Wintertime is coming, mama, the windows are filled with frost. So I went over to the nearby strip mall to get some thermal underwear. That doesn’t rhyme even half as well as Dylan’s most forced rhymes, but it’s really what happened. There’s a C.W. Price store in the mall. It used to be a location of the A.J. Wright chain that went under, and from the looks of things, all they needed to change were the signs. C.W. Price carries pretty much the same overstocked and distressed merchandise as A.J. Wright. Not quite as depressing as shopping at Big Lots but definitely not the Somerset Collection. While I was at the store of course I had to check out the cheap R/C cars that they had on sale for $6.99 and $7.99 with the other Christmas toys. At first glance they looked like Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Bugattis and Ford GTs. Actually, at second and third glance they still looked like those cars, scale models accurate down to the Veyron’s distinctive black hood, horseshoe Bugatti grille and exposed mid-mounted W16 engine.

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Back in junior high in the late 1960s, we had an assignment to write about “the good life in the year 2000”. Since I regularly read magazines like Popular Science and Mechanics Illustrated, it wasn’t too hard to put something together about edible silverware (didn’t happen) and microwave ovens (did). Perhaps that’s why I like the site Retro Future so much. There’s something meta about looking back into the past at how people looked forward into the future. While researching the Brooks Stevens Studebaker concepts I came across this 1963 clipping from the Milwaukee Journal. Stevens was based in Milwaukee and his hometown paper reported on a panel at the SAE congress in Detroit which featured Stevens and Richard Teague, who was by then the head of styling for American Motors after stints at Chrysler, GM and Packard. Stevens worked as a contract designer for a variety of non-automotive companies in addition to his work for Studebaker. The topic of the SAE panel was the car of the future. Stevens had a grandiose plan for a rolling living room. Teague, no stranger to cutting edge designs himself (cf. Packard Predictor) suggested a more evolutionary process. The interesting thing is that they both sort of turned out to be right, if not on the exact time frame.

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Location: John Dodge mansion, Detroit Editor’s note: The car pictured is not a long-wheelbase model, which is the only “Portfolio” model sold in the US. We are looking into the discrepancy. When Jaguar of North America informed me that I’d be getting a 2012 XJL Portfolio for review, my first reaction was to engage in […]

Here’s a simple truth. Virtually everything that I write online about cars gets ripped off. Whether I publish it here, at Cars In Depth, over at The Truth About Cars, or Left Lane News, I can go to sleep at night safe in the knowledge that I’m getting ripped off by other websites, usually single topic content aggregators. When the site operators are nice, they just excerpt the first paragraph and link back to the originating site. While that’s still a copyright violation (it’s not “fair use” because the excerpt isn’t used for the purpose of commentary or criticism), at least the original publisher gets some traffic out of the situation. Other site operators just go ahead and steal the entire post.

Take just about any post on TTAC, select and copy a complete sentence, drop that phrase in Google and you’ll probably find a plethora of purloining publishers. This site, copied Steve Lang’s post about repossessing cars verbatim. Another site, Edwards420.com, does nothing but publish content from TTAC, probably from our RSS feed.

It’s so commonplace that those of us who write for the site have a ho hum attitude about it because there really isn’t much that we can do about it.

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Federal Mogul's new Advanced Corona Ignition System

Last May, at the international Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, a joint Japanese/Bulgarian team of researchers introduced ceramic based lasers that are compact, durable and powerful enough to be used to ignite a fuel/air mixture in a combustion engine. At the time, the researchers announced that they were working with spark plug maker Denso on commercializing the idea. That announcement was followed up by word that Mazda’s next generation “16X” rotary engine will exploit the compact size of those laser igniters. Now Michigan auto supplier Federal Mogul has released news about a US patent on their Advanced Corona Ignition System, or ACIS. Instead of a spark (or laser) the ACIS uses a high-intensity burst of plasma to ignite the fuel. (Read More…)

 Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

Every year, the Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum sponsors the Orphan Car Show, dedicated to vehicles, brands, and companies that are not with us anymore. Lots of oddball cars and classes means lots of graphic content for Cars In Depth and maybe an article or two at TTAC. It looks like there are more than 800 images on the memory cards so it’s going to be a bit before I get them all processed and winnowed for a proper report on the show for the Best & Brightest. Still, as I’ve said before, you never know when you’re going to find an interesting car or something else automotive worthy of note. Driving to the Orphan show I decided not to take the Interstates and instead took winding two lane roads out to the Ann Arbor / Ypsilanti area. I wasn’t sure about an intersection and ended up going a couple of miles in the wrong direction. On the way back I noticed a home with a bunch of old Fords in front of the garage. There were a couple of 1970s vintage LTDs, two Fox body Mustangs, and a Pinto. One of the Mustangs has current license plates and looks like it’s a daily driver. The rest of the cars appeared, from a distance of about 100 feet, to be solid restoration candidates, but they had the look of “when I get the time” projects. What really caught my eye, though, was the yard sign standing by one of the big Ford sedans: “Cars NOT For Sale – Don’t Ask!”. It’s enticing to wonder what’s out of sight in the garage, but it’s still a nice collection of Fords.

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Whether or not the White House pressured or even contacted Ford Motor Company after the company released their recent ad appealing to anti-bailout sentiments we’ll probably never know. We’ll also probably never know if this was all just a symphony of leaks and disclaimers orchestrated by Ford. What we do know, thanks to a Rasmussen opinion poll [Sub. required, some data here], is that Ford had good reason to stoke American consumers’ resentment against it’s domestic competitors because they were bailed out by the government. The poll shows that the bailout is clearly a factor, sometimes an overriding one, in automobile purchase decisions. Not only did nearly one in five recent Ford buyers say that they or family members specifically chose Ford products because they didn’t take a government bailout, about half of all consumers surveyed said that they were more likely to buy Fords than GM or Chrysler products specifically because Ford didn’t get bailed out. [Note: Yes, Ford took Dept. of Energy loans and other government funds, but this survey was looking at people’s opinions, not facts.]

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Chrysler's GEMA Dundee plant -Photo: Toledo Blade

UAW Local #273 members working at Chrysler’s Global Engine Manufacturing Alliance factory in Dundee, Michigan voted to authorize a strike [Ed: despite a no-strike agreement that was agreed to inexchange for Chrysler’s bailout] in advance of negotiations over local issues, particularly a recently announced rotating shift schedule that has created unrest at another Chrysler plant in the Detroit area. The proposed schedule is so unpopular that almost 99% of local #273 members voted to authorize a strike if negotiations break down. The shifts, which rotate 12 hr day and night shifts week to week, are intended, Chrysler says, to maximize productivity. The UAW says it is to reduce overtime pay. The normal 3 shift model increases straight-time production by 20% to 120 hours per week.

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Wow. I don’t know if Ford is broadcasting this particular commercial [Ed: They are, although possibly not in the Detroit area], but it’s part of a series of ads that Fred Goss directed for Company Productions. The ads were set up by recruiting recent Ford buyers to come in and answer some market research questions. Those Ford owners did not know that they would be walking into a press conference with, apparently, real journalists [Ed: Huh?] asking them about their purchase. Company Productions released a video on the making of the ads. In this particular case Ford got lucky when a F-150 owner named Chris sat behind the microphone. Answering a reporter’s question, “Was buying American important to you?” Chris came up with something that advertising copy writers dream of writing.
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Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood wants to get people out of their cars and start riding bikes and walking to work. Unlike LaHood, I’ve actually done 18 mile commutes on a bike, five days a week, seven months out of the year, and when I worked only 3.5 miles from home on nice days I’d sometimes walk.

Once, while doing intervals on my way to work and with my heart close to terminal rate and breathing pretty hard, contrarian that I am I wondered just how much CO2 a person puts out on a bicycle and how it compares to a car with an ICE. It turns out that it’s a non-trivial amount and it’s possible that with enough passengers a car-pool or bus filled with commuters has a smaller carbon footprint than the same amount of people riding bicycles to work.

Some said that I need to be a more focused and a more disciplined writer, that I must be more ruthless when excising or editing extra, redundant, superfluous, unnecessary, and/or gratuitous words. So I’m not here to talk about CO2, though I am here to talk about bicycles. Another of those funny thoughts occurred to me while out on the *Litespeed this morning : Are bicycles really more efficient than cars? (Read More…)

I was listening to a local radio station and as will happen in a regular Detroit newscast, they mentioned something newsworthy going on in the domestic auto industry. In this case they said that Ford would be spending $1 billion on 7 new products to revamp the Lincoln brand. Well that wasn’t really news so I wondered what really was going on and it turns out that the radio station’s news team grabbed a headline from an Alisa Priddle article at the Detroit News. Though the headline was nothing new, Priddle has interviewed Ford designers and product managers and has managed to give us a better idea of what the Lincoln brand will mean once Lincoln’s new team of 120 or so engineers, designers and marketing experts gets done reinventing the marque.

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