The Virginia House of Delegates and a state Senate committee approved legislation that would make a rolling right-hand turn on a red light a reckless driving offense. On Thursday the Senate Transportation Committee unanimously approved a bill introduced by Delegate Bill Janis (R-Glen Allen) which the lower chamber had approved by a 67 to 31 margin on February 4.
“Any person who drives a motor vehicle in violation of Section 46.2-833 is guilty of reckless driving,” House Bill 1993 states.
Delphi’s salaried retirees lost their shirts after the Delphi bankruptcy and the GM bailout. Now they lost their main voice in congress. Rep. Christopher Lee resigned last week after Gawker showed a picture of a bare-chested congressman. Read More >
Volkswagen had unannounced visitors last week. German police raided eight offices in four German cities to secure evidence in a big corruption scandal, the Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports. According to the paper, managers of Deutsche Telekom had attempted to land a several hundred million Euro contract from Volkswagen by extending the sponsorship contract for the Wolfsburg soccer club VFL Wolfsburg. Read More >
More Chinese sales numbers for January are coming in as China slowly begins to return from the Chinese New Year holidays. We are keeping a wary eye on the January numbers. They are seen as an indicator for the whole year. Most of the world’s auto industry relies on China for growth and volume. A marked slowdown could have serious consequences. Read More >
The Center for Automotive Research claims that its latest study [full document in PDF here] is not a forecast of EV sales, but rather “focuses on the expected deployment by states.” Still, by using hybrid vehicle sales to determine deployment patterns, and using a national estimate of electric vehicle market share annually (note: “the national estimates used in this paper do not constitute a CAR forecast and only reflect projections that were available at the time of this study”), the study finds that only 496,000 plug-in vehicles will be on the road by 2015, by which time the Obama Administration hopes to have a million EVs on the road. Still, the report envisions annual sales of plug-in vehicles as growing rapidly, from 77k units in 2012 to 140k annual units by 2015… a number that casts some serious doubt on the Administration’s recent (dubious) estimate that 1.2m vehicles will have been produced for the US market by 2015 (and not for the first time).
Though it’s looking like Chrysler will be the first OEM to break the US market’s compact pickup drought, it won’t be the only manufacturer bringing a smaller truck stateside. Pickuptrucks.com reports that
development on the next-generation 2014 Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon for the U.S. and Canada is under way, based on GM’s all-new GMI 700 body-on-frame global small truck platform that will be built in Thailand starting late this year.
The bad news: it probably won’t arrive until late 2013 or early 2014… and by then, pickuptrucks.com figures that a refreshed Tacoma and a new Frontier will be on the market by then, in addition to a possible Ram or Jeep compact pickup. Still, the prospect of a Brazilian-developed and designed small truck certainly sounds tempting. Let’s just hope the coming competition helps make these trucks into the kind of bulletproof, fuel-sipping machines that helped boost US auto sales the last time we faced a major energy crisis.
Automotive News [sub] reports that Mercedes-Benz has agreed to take over Smart car distribution in the United States from Penske Automotive Group after about three years of operating as a Penske-run distribution channel. Beginning in July, Mercedes will take over all of Smart’s US-based operations because
1. It needs the small-car volume to meet new corporate average fuel economy standards that take effect in the United States in the 2016 model year.
2. Daimler AG integrated Smart into the Mercedes-Benz car unit September. The United States is the only market where Smart and Mercedes operate separately.
But the impact of this deal isn’t limited to ownership and operations, as AN [sub] reports that the four-door car being developed by Nissan for Smart USA has been canceled.
Felix Kramer, an entrepreneur and plug-in car activist, is almost certainly the first person in the world to own both a Nissan Leaf and a Chevrolet Volt… which, at least in theory, makes him the perfect person to compare the real-world ownership experiences of these two highly-hyped vehicles (and once again prove the uselessness of “automotive journalism”). Though he demurs that he “hasn’t had much chance to really compare them,” he tells The Solar Home and Business Journal that
It’s quite obvious to me that for two-car families, it’s no problem in any way for the second vehicle to be an all-electric because that’s the car used for local driving. There’s an enormous market of tens of millions for all-electric vehicles despite Americans’ so-called range anxiety.
Cars are sold as giving you freedom. People go into a dealer and say about an all-electric car, “Oh, I have to plug it in. What if I want to drive it across the country someday? I won’t buy this car.” That mentality is very deeply seated, and that’s part of the reason that the plug-in hybrids could be the primary platform for plug-in vehicles for the next decade or two.
In the meantime, people who get a plug-in hybrid as their second vehicle may find themselves asking, “Why did I pay for this engine, I’m just driving it electrically.” In our family, the Leaf will be the car my wife and I will pick first every day when we’re in the Bay Area. When we’re both driving or we want to travel beyond the range of the Leaf, we’ll take the Volt.
The EPA’s National Clean Diesel Campaign and the Department of Energy’s Hydrogen Energy Program have both been defunded in President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget, as the White House focuses on the much–debated goal of putting one million electric cars on the road by 2015. Bloomberg reports The NCDC budget was cut from $80m in 2010 to zero, even though Obama only just reauthorized $100m per year of grants through the program ten days ago. According to Senator Tom Carper, one of the sponsors of that re-authorization, the program
leverages federal dollars so efficiently that for every $1 invested, we get over $13 in health and economic benefits in return
Oh well. Meanwhile, fans of the oil-burners imported by the German brands can relax: the NCDC focused on improving diesel emissions from freight, ports and fleets rather than subsidizing Euro-phile sports sedans. Besides, diesel isn’t the only loser in the rush to push plug-in cars to market: hydrogen is also losing out.
His mother was the first of them, leadfooting her big Buick coupe across intersections with a big-block push that pressed him into the velour and blurred the terrain around him. He tossed around in the flat seat, clinging to the sky-blue safety belt. “I was a rally driver,” she would say. Later, he would find out that she’d been a rally navigator, not a driver, and that the rally-driving boyfriend was long dead. It seemed reasonable that she might have inherited the boyfriend’s skill. Women, he realized, absorb us, becoming who we are or wish them to be, viewed through a glass darkly, or through his rearview mirror, leaving home for the last time.
She took his crutches and put them in the back of a new Corvette-engined ’88 Camaro. “So glad to see you out of the hospital. I wanted to do something nice for you… take you for a ride… we’re going to do, like, a hundred miles per hour in this IROC.” She drove with the carelessness of Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker, looking away from the road while she swerved down the freeway and reaching over to touch him through his thin shorts.
“This IROC-Z… it’s… awesome,” he managed to say, “did you just buy it?”
“Oh,” she replied, “it belongs to a… friend, I guess you could say.”
One of the recent advertising trends we’ve seen is the comparison of a new car with something ridiculous… like an armored car or a sofa. Now, Nissan is inverting the “shooting sofas in a barrel” approach by taking on one of the toughest comparisons imaginable: making readers decide between a Juke and a swimsuit model. Here, the Juke and a model from Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition go head-to-head in a “curb appeal” competition… up next, “headlights,” “airbags” and “ride quality.” Then, testers will strap on their crash helmets and try to determine which model “slides its rear end out” in the most satisfying manner… plus whatever other dirty double-entendres you can come up with. Just the thing to get you into that romantic Valentine’s Day mood…
Nothing makes this bloggers day like finding a story that highlights how the world of cars interacts with every facet of our national life… and few stories illustrate the universal impact of cars and fuels like the Atlantic’s recent piece on one man’s attempt to turn Afghanistan’s opium poppy crop into biodiesel. The plan was to help Afghanistan’s poorest farmers use poppy seeds to create biodiesel, but along the way the plan ran into the challenges of diplomacy, bureaucracy, foreign occupation, environmental issues and cultural conflict. In fact, all of the complexity and struggle involved with the military occupation of a foreign country come out in this fascinating piece, which begins:
Back in the fall of 2008, Michael Bester and a business partner, both Army veterans doing contract work in Afghanistan, hit on the equivalent of the counterinsurgency’s trifecta: a way to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans, eliminate the illegal opium trade, and take the Taliban’s money. “We had been in villages where children were dying because they didn’t have proper medicine, because they didn’t have refrigerators,” Bester told me. Light up the villages, and perhaps you could empower Afghans to resist the Taliban. And the fuel? Most any feedstock would work, but one compelling option was the ubiquitous poppies that stoke the Taliban’s lucrative drug trade. Why not turn them into biodiesel instead?
Make diesel, not drugs! Read the whole thing here.
Steve writes:
Hi TTAC, long time follower here with a 2006 VW GOLF Diesel 1.9L.
The car was one of the last batch Mk.4 Golf’s with a diesel engine purchased in Canada where I live. Since then, it has had small and large repairs galore including temperature sensor replacements, an entire transmission (Automatic Tiptronic, 09A, a big regret) replacement at 21000kms, rear hatch wiring adjustments (I noticed the hatch will not lock), front door hinge adjustment because the front 2 doors were rubbing against the top tips of the rear two doors and chipping away paint with eventual rust setting in. Later on, suspension bushings up front were replaced, the left front headlights went out a few times and then came back by itself, the dealer could not find any fault.
Infiniti will show this C-segment coupe-hatch, named Etherea, at the Geneva Auto Show, as a glimpse at the brand’s 2014 time-frame compact, front-drive offerings. But, for those of us who grew up in the 80s, the Etherea’s name is at least as likely to recall the distant planet that served as the home of He-Man’s twin sister, She-Ra. But rather than serving as the battleground between the Rebellion and the evil forces of Hordak, the Etherea is a new opportunity to highlight the hybrid drivetrain from the M35h as well as “innovative access arrangements” that Infiniti is keeping secret for now. Which is probably for the best… apparently She-Ra was a Panther girl
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