With the autoblogosphere abuzz over Peter Cheney’s “unintended acceleration event,” Jill McIntosh has made a fascinating connection between one auto-journo’s son’s voyage of manual transmission discovery, and a former Ontario Attorney General’s killing of a cyclist back in September. Linking to a Toronto Star report on the trial of Michael Bryant, who killed cyclist Darcy Allan Shephard, McIntosh notes a strange similarity between that fatal incident and Cheney Junior’s garage door tango:

According to a statement read in court, reprinted in the Toronto Star today: Bryant hits the brakes. His vehicle stalls. Bryant tries to start his car, but it stalls again, lurching forward … Bryant tries to start the car again. He’s concentrating on the Saab’s sensitive clutch with his head down. He succeeds at restarting the engine and the Saab accelerates into Sheppard, who lands on the hood.

Obviously, two incidents do not a crisis make, but this is hardly the only evidence suggesting that manual gear-swapping is fast becoming a lost art. But do we really want to further stigmatize manual transmissions by mandating special licenses for manual-equipped cars, as McIntosh suggests?

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So, the voiceover is wrong. Chrysler Group and its brands are too badly in need of credibility to be narrating an ad this good with a voice that sounds so similar to this guy’s. Otherwise, this spot is nearly flawless. Especially in comparison to other recent Wieden + Kennedy Dodge efforts like this one. But you all have longer memories than I… so when was the last time you saw a Dodge ad that hit the nail so directly on the head?

Yesterday’s Senate Committee On Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing on the proposed Motor Vehicle Safety Act [full text of proposed Senate version S.3302 in PDF format here] was a surprisingly low-key affair. Discussion didn’t seem to move much beyond the battle lines drawn at House hearings two weeks ago. NHTSA Administrator David Strickland continued to argue passionately in favor of so-called “imminent hazard” powers, which are included in Henry Waxman’s House version of the bill, but not the Jay Rockefeller-sponsored Senate version. Meanwhile, debates over nearly every proposal in the legislation rage on, as the industry seeks to mitigate what it considers the bill’s most onerous and intrusive measures. But Strickland framed NHTSA’s mission in zero-tolerance terms: if one American dies on the road, he argued, NHTSA should be doing more to prevent it. This philosophy is underlined by the presence of hard-core safety advocates Joan Claybrook and Clarence Ditlow at nearly every DC hearing on auto safety since the Toyota recall. The flip side to this position is the argument that cars have literally never been safer, and that deaths per vehicle mile traveled are at all time lows. This yawning divide in perspectives towards automotive safety is begging for discussion, so let’s have it. Are cars safe enough? Which new regulations make sense, and which are more onerous than they’re worth? Where should the government define an acceptable number of roadway deaths? And are cars the problem, or are people?

Because this is a political topic, please make the extra effort to make your comment constructive. Complete prepared testimony from yesterday’s hearing can be found here.

Is good old machismo dying in Brazil? On the eve of Women’s International Day (May 8), women are now held responsible for buying up to 40 percent of brand new cars in Brazil, and are said to influence over 80 percent of purchases. According to well-known Brazilian news site Globo, those are the numbers. But what motivates a woman to buy a car in Brazil? Read More >

I can’t think of anyone who has watched an episode of the BBC’s seminal car show Top Gear and not enjoyed it. In fact, even my most auto-ambivalent friends are quick to reference the exploits of Jezza, Captain Slow and The Hamster as their sole source of automotive news and entertainment. Thanks to its status as one of the world’s most-pirated TV show, Top Gear has made remarkable inroads in the US with a little “help” from fansites like Final Gear. But will an American version be able to capture the appeal of the original? It’s been tried before, and now it’s being tried again.

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On point as always, TTAC commenter ajla called it in today’s Camry review. In the comments after that tale of suburban anonymity and “the Marriot of cars,” he asked:

Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick?

I figure Toyota thinks that, in their heart of hearts, many Americans do still want a Buick. Not an actual Buick, mind you, but a big, comfortable sedan that’s somewhat luxurious but not at all flashy. Over a year ago, I made the friendly recommendation that Buick ditch its explicitly youthful marketing message for “something along the lines of Canadian Club’s “damn right your dad drank it,” campaign.” This spot for the new Avalon probably comes closer to what I had in mind for Buick than anything I’ve seen since. The question then, isn’t so much “is Toyota the new Buick?” as where is Buick going to find its own niche? The wreckage of Acura?

Free market economics are a simple process. Or so they say. Dive in, and whoever survives, survives. Let the market decide. According to the pure tenets of free market economics, it’s important that the government shows no favoritism.  Yeah, right.

The Korea Times reports that President Lee Myung-Bak is showing more than just interest in Hyundai-Kia. Read More >

Back in the muscle car heyday, enthusiasts could likely have imagined that the 2011 Mustang and Camaro would make at least 300 horsepower. They might even have imagined that the pony cars would be equipped with optional flight modes, nuclear reactors, and autopilots. What they likely never imagined is that Ford and GM would revive the time-honored tradition of pony car one-upmanship for V6 models. Read More >

As analyst comments on the freshly-announced Renault-Nissan-Daimler deal come in [via Automotive News [sub]], a consensus seems to be building around the notion that the tie-up offers few real advantages to the three firms outside the real of small-car development. The financial impact and opportunities for luxury-segment component sharing are constrained by the deal’s structure, meaning the stock-swap and attendant hoopla are little more than window-dressing for the real project: developing compact and subcompact cars for tomorrow’s C02 standards. As Bertel noted, rumors of a Daimler-Renault tie-up have always centered around the Smart brand, and today Daimler’s Dieter Zetsche told Automotive News [sub] that

We could not have found a feasible basis alone for the next-generation Smart family… Of course, we could do a next-generation Smart alone, but we would lose a lot of money

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Whilst grazing on the internet I come across some weird and wonderful things. From discovering Bill Maher’s New Rules on YouTube  to learning about the different strains of marijuana available in the coffeeshops of Amsterdam (for research purposes, ahem). But the following article is one of the funniest and I found it on the Ford’s own website. Ford got into this Web 2.0 social networking thing with a vengeance at thefordstory.com

The article starts off OK. Ford crowing about their quality beating everyone else.  O.k., we’ll discuss that another time. It’s the comments that raise my interest. The second comment starts off a “Toyota vs Ford” debate by saying “Toyota is so much better.” I call flame-bait, that comment was written March 13, at the height of the Toyota-troubles.  Then the conversation turns into an “All MBA’s aren’t bad” string (conveniently forgetting that Alan Mulally is an engineer, first and foremost). The comment is finished with a flourish: “WE MUST PROMOTE AN ‘INNOVATIVE AMERICA-‘ENVISIONEERING’ ITS FUTURE”. Read More >

I was having a look on YouTube for car adverts and came across this belter from Toyota. Which got me wondering: what are your favourite adverts or advertising campaigns from the auto world? Chevrolet’s “An American Revolution”?  VW’s “Unpimp your Ride”? Or maybe it’s a foreign spot you’ve seen on the internet, like Volvo UK’s famous SIPS advert. My favorite’s the one above, which features what I think is one of the best taglines ever. What’s yours?

Please put a link to a picture or video in to the comments, and have your name immortalized in this weekend’s TTAC’s History Of Whackiest Car Ads.

PS: If your suggestions don’t come up immediately, that’s because they have to be approved  due to links or whatever. Don’t despair, BS will approve them the minute he’s back from his Chinese pub crawl …

A Chinese friend just called me up. Claimed I would know a lot about cars. Asked whether he should invest his hard-earned Renminbi into an Audi Q7 3.6, or a Mercedes ML300, or a BMW X5-3.0, or a VW Tourareg V8?

What do I know. Of course, I didn’t tell him that.

My reputation as a know-it-all foreigner is at stake here. You know, China, all about face. So I’m asking the best and brightest of the Best & Brightest: What should I recommend? Serious, snark-free advice, please. Obviously, this guy has money, and I don’t want to end up on his wrong side. I would suffer a serious quanxi deduction if my advice turns out as bogus.  No other brands, he’s fairly set on these Teutonic choices.

The good folks from the Public Radio show This American Life are hunting down a headline. Writer Emily Condon writes:

There was an article, likely between 1980 and 1988, that ran about the NUMMI plant in Fremont California, focusing on the GM and Toyota partnership. We think the headline was “HELL FREEZES OVER,” or possibly “HELL FREEZES OVER IN FREMONT,” or something to that effect. The person we’re interviewing thought it was Motor Trend – they couldn’t find any record of it. I couldn’t find it in Motor Trend or Car & Driver…but it’s possible I somehow missed it, since the archives weren’t searchable, but only on microfilm. But could possibly be another publication, too.

Long story short, their investigation seems to have gone cold at a TTAC comment thread, which is where you, our Best and Brightest, come in. The first commenter to identify the magazine and issue that This American Life is looking for, will win immortal TTAC fame, and the much-coveted Fiat 500 mouse.

[UPDATE: Commenter Msquare proves that whether you need an old car mag headline hunted down, or a ’51 Packard identified from only a picture of its gas cap, TTAC’s Best & Brightest are the place to go. Congratulations Msquare, check your email for instructions on claiming your prize. Everyone else, be sure to check out This American Life‘s piece on NUMMI, “the car plant that could have changed everything,” which airs on March 26. ]

Nearly a month ago, Toyota’s Jim Lentz was asked by National Public Radio about the then-new “shim fix” for sticky accelerator pedals.

NPR asked: “if I’m a Toyota owner subject to this recall and I say ‘I don’t want a repaired accelerator pedal, I want a new one.’ Is that an option?” To which Lentz replied: “it will be looked at on a case-by-case basis.” When NPR asked for Lentz to clarify what he meant by “case-by-case basis,” he said “It’s really up to… between the dealer and the customer. We would like to see customers get this fix done with the precision cut steel bar and see how that is. I think the customers are going to be very satisfied with overall quality of the pedal and the feel of the pedal.”

At the time, this was interpreted as a not-so-great sign for Toyota’s “precision cut” shim fix. Reinforcing the impression that some might not be happy with the fix, a Toyota memo to dealers has surfaced today at the AP [via Google], which requests that:

If a customer is not satisfied with the operation and/or the feel of the accelerator pedal after the reinforcement bar has been installed, please assist us by assuring a replacement pedal is provided at no charge to these customers

Which makes us wonder: is there anyone out there who has had the shim fix done to their recalled Toyota only to have the problem reoccur? Has anyone requested a replacement pedal instead of the shim fix, and had a Toyota dealer turn you down? Toyota is probably playing it safe by asking dealers to provide new pedals, but we’re cant help but wonder why they would cast suspicion on the shim fix this way. Any ideas?

In testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Energy and Transportation, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said he was “looking at the possibility of recommending” mandatory brake override systems on all new vehicles sold in the US. Given the congressional hysteria about auto safety in the past few weeks (not to mention the already-expectant MSM headlines), such a requirement would likely face little political opposition. When Toyota first announced that it would be installing the buzz-worthy “failsafe” system on its new cars, we whined that the days of doing burnouts in Mom’s autobox IS350 were over. Which, frankly, was fairly petty of us. At this point it’s become fairly clear that, whether there are unfound defects still lurking in the evil minds of our appliance-mobiles or not, Americans need to feel that they could stop their cars in a worst case demonic possession scenario. So let them eat brake override systems, say I. At least until I hear someone advocating for mandatory manual transmissions.