Think using your cell phone or other in-car distractions don’t affect your driving? Don’t try to prove it on the road (jackass), put your reaction-time skills to the test at the NYT’s multitasking reaction-time game. While using your keyboard to navigate gates, a cell phone will distract you with New Yorkian requests which you will have to answer while continuing to navigate through randomly-opening gates. The Times team that came up with the game explains

We weren’t trying to be an exact simulation of driving down the highway or the road — it’s not realistic to have all those gates and people often text in shortened words. It is a game to give you a sense of how a distraction can decrease your ability to react quickly

When you finish, the game will tell you how much multitasking impaired your ability to navigate. Let us know how you did, and if the game changed your opinion about distracted driving.

If you’re a brontosaurus, and you’re reading this, then your hindbrain is just now finding out about mommyblogger Crissy Kight Page and her refusal to spread (the good news about Toyota) for ten bucks. Well, there’s more news about Toyota out there now, and rather than wait for poor Tiffany Lewis of the recently deceased “Mommy Networks” to get the word out, I’m going to put my own money into this new publicity effort.

Mommybloggers, read on to find out how you can earn a $20 Amazon gift card, courtesy of yours truly,this very afternoon!

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One of the strongest criticisms issued in the Congressional TARP Oversight Panel’s most recent report on the auto bailout concerned GM’s lack of effort to bring its former captive lender GMAC (now called Ally Financial) back to the fold, an omission the Panel termed “disconcerting.” After all, Ally’s business is still closely intertwined with GM’s, as the financial firm provides 82% of GM’s dealer floorplanning and 38.2% of GM’s consumer loans. And, as bailed-out businesses (Ally is now 73.8% owned by the US Treasury), any competition between GM and Ally will result in a lose-lose scenario for taxpayers. In recent months it seemed that the two firms were moving towards a deal at the initiative of GM CEO Dan Akerson (and likely motivated to some extent by the COP’s criticisms), but now Bloomberg reports that there are no negotiations between GM and Treasury about a reconciliation of the two firms… in fact, with an Ally IPO planned for this year, it seems the two firms are going to war.

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TTAC Commentator GS650G writes:

I am looking for a station wagon in lieu of a mini-van or CUV/SUV.  Whereas before almost all intermediate cars were available in station wagon trim it seems only European brands and a few Japanese brands such as Subaru offer a true station wagon any longer.

I would like to move up a bit and go with either a BMW 3 series wagon or Mercedes R Class. Both trade in the 22K to 28K range. I don’t care for Volvo or SAAB wagons and their recent ownership changes has me concerned about the brands.

The Beemer and M-B seem like well-liked cars with practical carry space along with excellent driving dynamics. I’m not concerned with repair costs since I do my own work no matter what I drive.

So which would be the better choice, a 328i Wagon or a M-B 320 R?  I would also compare to a M-B E-Class wagon if the price was right.

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Having been exonerated of any mysterious electronic causes of unintended acceleration, Toyota puts the issue behind it with a final recall of over 2m vehicles for issues related to gas pedal entrapment. At the same time, the NHTSA closes its investigation. According to an official release, Toyota

will conduct a voluntary safety recall of approximately 20,000 2006 and early 2007 Model Year GS 300 and GS 350 All-Wheel Drive vehicles to modify the shape of the plastic pad embedded in the driver’s side floor carpet. In the event that the floor carpet around the accelerator pedal is not properly replaced in the correct position after a service operation, there is a possibility that the plastic pad embedded into the floor carpet may interfere with the operation of the accelerator pedal. If this occurs, the accelerator pedal may become temporarily stuck in a partially depressed position rather than returning to the idle position.

And that’s not all…

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Bloomberg reports that Spyker Cars NV has sold its sportscar business to former chairman Vladimir Antonov for €15m, with the promise of up to €17m more over the next six years if profits allow it. They probably wont, however, as Spyker’s sportscars sell at a rate of about 30 per year, and have never turned a profit in the seven years the business has been public. The move is necessary, however, as Antonov was forced out of his ownership stake at Spyker (at GM’s request) when the firm bought Saab. CEO Victor Muller bought Antonov’s stake through his holding company Tenaci, and by selling Antonov the sportscar business, Spyker can pay back some of its €74m debt to Tenaci (another €17m will be converted into Spyker shares). Plus, explains Muller

Spyker’s (luxury car business) is a small fish in a large pond. Spyker would need additional funds, but to issue shares and dilute shareholders seemed like a very bad plan so we decided to divest these activities

With Spyker no longer part of Spyker Cars NV (the firm that owns Saab), the firm will be renamed this May (probably to some variation of “Saab”) when it lists on the Stockholm stock exchange. Still, though Saab and Spyker sportscars are no longer combining their crazy plans into a pie-in-the-sky juggernaut, and this may help get the ship right-side-up again, there’s no knowing where it’s all headed. Antonov could still buy back into Saab, and it sounds like the two will continue to share distribution channels. Whether either side of the business can actually make money is still the real question.

GM has announced its full-year results for 2010 [Highlights here, Chart set here, in PDF], and has achieved its first full-year profit since 2004 by pulling in $4.7b. Perhaps more significant than the numbers alone, however, is GM’s claim that it has whipped its “material weakness” in terms of financial reporting and internal controls, an issue that had haunted The General since being disclosed in the runup to its IPO. Still, GM’s earnings were well below the $5b+ full-year profit expected by analysts, and its half-billion Q4 profit was considerably more “pinched” than the $1b that Wall Street expected. More importantly, GM burned $1.7b in automotive operating cash (including a $4b pension contribution) and another $1.1b in CapEx in the fourth quarter, resulting in a $2.8b automotive free cash burn for the quarter. Over the course of 2010, GM’s cash pile has gone from $36.2b to $27.6b, although GM has access to over $5b in new credit facilities while cutting debt from $15.8b to $4.6b. Still, a weakly-profitable Q4 is better than last year’s $3.4b Q4 loss.

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A police officer in Houston, Texas thought he had a slam dunk case against a motorist he stopped for driving on the wrong side of the road on September 15, 2008. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in a February 10 decision overturned the stop on the grounds that driving on the wrong side of the road is not always against the law.

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GM is pushing its Chevrolet brand as a ”world brand,” reports the Freep. First battlefields for global bowtiefication: Europe and Korea. In Korea, the matter is easy: Last month, they took off the Daewoo badge and put a bowtie on instead. As predicted by TTAC nearly a year ago. There is not much that can go wrong in Korea: Hyundai dominates the market, Dawoo’s and now Chevrolet’s market share treads water in the single digits.

In Europe, any substantial market penetration by Chevrolet is “still a long-term goal,” concedes the Freep. And then, the Detroit paper proceeds to publish completely bogus numbers: Read More >

Yesterday, Porsche went through more mood swings in a single day than a manic depressive in three months. In the morning, Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, usually well clued into high level auto gossip in Germany, had the good news that the public prosecutor in Stuttgart had dropped most of the investigation into former Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking and former CFO Holger Härter. Supposedly, no evidence of share price manipulation was found. With that out of the way, the formal amalgamation of Porsche into Volkswagen could now progress at full speed, said the paper. However, they were misinformed. Read More >

One of the first rumors to come out of the Fiat/Chrysler tie-up was that Alfa-Romeo would replace its expired 166 flagship with a large, RWD sedan based on Chrysler’s updated LX platform. But with Lancia getting its own rebadge of the new Chrysler 300, and a possibly LX/LC-based entry-level Maserati in development, it seems that Alfa’s opportunity for a flagship rear-drive sedan has passed. Auto Motor und Sport reports that, rather than developing a large Alfa flagship, the brand will top out (in sedan terms) with its forthcoming, 159-replacing Giulia front-drive D-segment effort. That might not come as terribly shocking news to the brand faithful, as Alfa’s have been almost exclusively front-drivers for some time… but the fact that no fizzy, crackling Alfa-typical V6 is planned for the brand’s midsized flagship might come as a letdown (instead, look for turbocharged four-bangers making between 120 and 235 HP). All of which is very interesting in light of CEO Sergio Marchionne’s recent diagnosis of Alfa’s woes, in which he argued

I mean it’s got this incredible appeal which goes back, you know, to the time they used to be on the racetrack, and it’s the embodiment of a lot of things which are typically Italian; sportiness, lightweight, and everything else. And what happened is that when Fiat bought them back in the end of ’86 we Fiatized Alfa. Fiat was front-wheel drive; Alfa was rear wheel drive. So now all the Alfas are front-wheel drive. And we put Fiat engines inside the Alfas, and Alfa started losing more and more of its DNA as a car company.

Start the video, then click on the 3D button in the menu bar to select 3D or 2D format. You can also select resolution up to 1080p HD. Video courtesy of Ford Motor Company and Cars In Depth, where you can also find 3D images of Ford’s VR lab.

With a big push from the film, computer, video game, camera, and television set industries, 3D seems poised to become rather commonplace, particularly when passive display panels requiring no special eyeglasses will soon be at consumer level price points in just a year or so, I’d say. Some of the most sophisticated 3D technology in use today, though, is not in use in Hollywood, California, or Redmond, Washington, it’s in places called Dearborn, Auburn Hills and Warren, Michigan. The domestic automakers were early adopters of advanced computer aided design and manufacturing (CADCAM) as well as advanced computer imagery. They have some of the the most advanced tools available today and some of the most skilled and creative engineers and designers who develop and use those tools. Virtual reality is one of those tools. By projecting a realistic holographic or stereo display, stylists and exterior designers can get an accurate perspective on how their ideas will look without having to make time consuming and expensive scale and full size models. I think it’s pretty understandable that car companies would use 3D and VR for exterior design studies. Perhaps even more valuable to automakers, though, is how stereo image technology can be used in the interior design and engineering of modern cars.
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The interior on the right belongs to the 2011 Honda Civic. The interior on the left belongs to the new 2012 Civic. Apparently they just left the older one out in the sun for a while, causing it to melt and sag.

In what may be one of the most important Supreme Court rulings for the car industry in some time [full opinion in PDF here], the highest court in the land has found that compliance with minimum federal safety standards is not a defense against personal injury or wrongful death suits brought in state courts. The case in question involved a 2002 accident in which Than Williamson was killed when a Jeep Wrangler hit her family’s 1993 Mazda MPV. The Williamson MPV had only lap belts because shoulder belts weren’t required by federal law until 2007. A California court has already barred the lawsuit from coming forward, arguing that federal regulations supersede any local rulings, and that then-legal seatbelts should protect manufacturers from personal injury liability. But in the wake of another ruling involving pharmaceutical companies, it seemed that the court might overturn that ruling, which it now has.

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Analysts are reporting that GM could announce full-year 2010 profits of over $5b tomorrow, although Q4 profits may have dipped to $1.06b. That would make its full-year results the best since a $6b profit in 1999, but Q4 results could be the second-worst since emerging from bankruptcy. Why the slowdown? Analysts give Bloomberg a number of possible explanations, including

• GM’s spending on cars including the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid and future products may lead to higher costs similar to those that restrained profits at Ford and Daimler AG.
• Automakers are paying more for materials such as steel and are struggling to pass the costs to consumers amid a “somewhat weak” economy
• Restructuring unprofitable European operations

Of all these dynamics, however, CEO Dan Akerson’s rush to revamp GM’s lineup and expand the applications of the Volt’s drivetrain could end up driving the most cost. Though GM is making a healthy profit again (and not paying taxes on it), an overly-ambitious speed-up in product cadence could combine with rising costs to slow The General back down (as they have already done to some extent at Ford). In any case, we will certainly have a better picture of GM’s financial performance tomorrow, when the firm’s results are announced.