0) { %
Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/06/16/fast-and-furious-car-chases/2424741/
Learn how to repair your car!
0) { %
0) { %
0) { %
Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/06/16/fast-and-furious-car-chases/2424741/
Subscribe:
iTunes (HD) | iTunes (SD) | iTunes (HQ)
RSS (HD) | RSS (SD) | RSS (HQ)
We round up and update a bunch of favorites this episode, including a look at the Tesla Model S that, since our first look in Fall of 2012 has gone on to become about the most celebrated
car in the world.
We have also updated our Top 5 Electric Cars list with two cars getting bumped by new entrants in the market and 6 months from now we’ll do it again as more solid EVs are in the wings. It’s a busy sector, but largely because California requires carmakers to offer a certain number of zero emission vehicles and EVs are coming to market there as what are called “compliance cars”. Don’t let the number of models make you think there is similar growth in sales, there is not and electric cars are still very much out with the jury.
We got a lot of email about self-parking tech from one of our very first episodes you may have missed so its back and self-parking tech has only become more common and affordable in the interim. In fact, it is showing up a lot these days as part of driver assist packages which means a lot of people will sample it and tell a friend. It really works and is a Godsend for those millions who can’t park.
No XCar video this week, they are back with us in Episode 21 with a look at the latest VW Golf and the history of that longtime favorite of car people everywhere.
As always, e-mail me your thoughts, suggestions, and comments.
Article source: http://cnettv.cnet.com/8301-34133_53-57589418-314/tesla-model-s-and-the-top-5-electric-cars-cnet-on-cars-episode-20/
Automakers are coming under
increasing pressure to sell zero-emission vehicles to U.S.
consumers who haven’t shown much interest in them, with more
states following California’s lead in setting sales targets.
Nine states, including New York and New Jersey, have
adopted versions of California’s goal of having electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen-powered models reach 15 percent of its
new-car purchases by 2025. Automakers face fines and potentially
restrictions on sales for not reaching the targets.
One model made to meet the standards, Honda Motor Co. (7267)’s
plug-in electric Fit, had total U.S. sales of 83 through May,
according to market-researcher Autodata Corp.
“They are essentially forcing vehicles to be built and
delivered to dealers who are forced to sell them,” said Bailey
Wood, legislative director of the National Automobile Dealers
Association, based in McLean, Virginia.
Honda had set a goal of delivering 1,100 electric Fits over
two years. With a two-year supply sitting on dealer lots, the
carmaker this month cut its lease rate by about one-third, to
$259 a month, for new and existing customers. Three days ago,
the company said some customers now have to wait for more EVs to
be produced before they can get one.
Its decision followed similar moves by General Motors Co. (GM)
and Nissan Motor Co. (7201) for the Chevrolet Volt and all-electric
Leaf. The Leaf and Volt, unlike the electric Fit, are available
in the whole U.S. market. Niche electric-car makers Fisker
Automotive Inc. and Coda Automotive stopped making vehicles last
year.
Requiring minimum numbers of plug-in vehicle sales is
“inherently a risky strategy,” said Edward Cohen, Honda vice
president for government and industry affairs. The mandate
“directs manufacturers to offer consumers technology options
along a pre-determined time frame and with specified numbers
notwithstanding whether the technology and market are ready.”
About one-third of 1 percent of the 6.4 million new
vehicles sold in the first five months of the year were zero-emission vehicles, according to the dealers group.
U.S. regulators, who require automakers to raise to 54.5
miles (88 kilometers) per gallon by 2025 the average fuel-economy of the vehicle fleets they sell in the country, say
getting to that goal will require 1 percent to 3 percent of
vehicles sold to be electrics.
“An electric car is the lowest hanging fruit on the tree
requiring the least amount of change from the consumer of
anything we can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Steve
Crolius, transportation director for the Clinton Climate
Initiative, said at a fuel-efficiency forum June 13 at Consumer
Reports magazine’s headquarters in Yonkers, New York. The group
is part of the William J. Clinton Foundation, established by the
former president.
The lower-priced electric Fit is still more expensive than
the internal-combustion engine-powered version, which leases for
$169 a month with $1,999 down.
At the end of May, there was a 162-day inventory of Volts,
according to Ward’s Automotive Group. That compares with a 50-day inventory for the top-selling Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) Camry.
“ There are only a select number of income brackets that
can afford them,” Wood said. “The Chevy Volt in terms of price
tag is equivalent to a fairly equipped BMW 3 Series. At the end
of the day, we are a consumer-driven economy, particularly in
the auto industry.”
U.S. regulators and policymakers want to reduce the extra
expense of electric cars so more consumers can afford them, Ann
Schlenker, director of Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for
Transportation Research, said at the Consumer Reports forum.
She cited Energy Department figures showing it takes about
five years of driving an electric vehicle to make up the extra
upfront costs in fuel savings. That compares with a year and a
half for a hybrid vehicle, she said.
“The attempt is to get to a three-year payback period”
for plug-in electrics, she said.
The availability of charging stations and the time it takes
to recharge are other hurdles to wider consumer acceptance. New
York is among states spending money to promote and develop
electric-vehicle technology, Patrick Bolton, New York State
Energy Research and Development Authority senior project
manager, said at the Consumer Reports event.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has a program, also funded
with private-sector money, to install more than 80 charging
stations throughout the state. The first of those was unveiled
last month at a Homewood Suites hotel in Colonie, New York.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, whose members
include GM and Toyota, was one of two Washington-based
automotive trade groups that in March filed a petition with the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last month to block
California’s sales targets.
“The sales data tell the story of what consumers want,”
said Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance. “The
early adopters have purchased plug-in electric vehicles but
mainstream consumers have not followed yet.”
The state mandates are separate from the U.S. fuel-economy
standards set by federal regulators.
U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator David Strickland said the fuel-economy standards are “technology
neutral.”
“States can make the decision in terms of their own
particular needs,” he said at the Consumer Reports panel.
“That was a policy decision they chose to make, but from a
federal perspective, we want to remain technology neutral.”
California’s mandate, which accounts for about one-third of
U.S. electric-vehicle sales, is part of the state’s effort to
reduce emissions from vehicles, power plants and oil refineries.
“Both a market push and market pull are needed, and they
need to be in sync,” said Roland Hwang, the San Francisco-based
transportation program director for the Natural Resources
Defense Council and a supporter of the California mandate. “We
need both a long-term, stable signal for automakers to produce
electric cars and a robust, growing consumer market.”
Sales won’t be helped if reluctant automakers sandbag
sales, he said.
“Who killed the electric car, part three?” Hwang asked.
“Some automakers are more committed than others to the clean
car market. And it may surprise some that the industry doesn’t
follow the past patterns. We now have GM as one of the biggest
champions of electrification and Honda as one of the biggest
skeptics.”
To contact the reporter on this story:
Angela Greiling Keane in Washington at
agreilingkea@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Bernard Kohn at
bkohn2@bloomberg.net

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Sales professional Scott Watkins opens the hood of a 2012 General Motors Co. Chevrolet Volt vehicle at Green car dealership in Peoria, Illinois.
Sales professional Scott Watkins opens the hood of a 2012 General Motors Co. Chevrolet Volt vehicle at Green car dealership in Peoria, Illinois. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
Honda Motor Co.’s plug-in electric Fit had total U.S. sales of 83 through May, according to market-researcher Autodata Corp.
Honda Motor Co.’s plug-in electric Fit had total U.S. sales of 83 through May, according to market-researcher Autodata Corp. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
Article source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-17/automakers-pressed-to-sell-no-emission-cars-to-reluctant-buyers.html
0) { %
0) { %
0) { %
Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/06/15/nissan-versa-note-cheap/2424639/
They had no technical training or financial backing at first, but they built some of the fastest racecars of their time, dragsters of the 1950s and jet-propelled cars that set world speed records on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah in the 1960s.
When Walt Arfons died of pneumonia in Akron on June 4 at 96, six years after his brother’s death, he was remembered for designing, building and racing the first jet-powered dragster and for adopting drogue parachutes, previously used in aircraft, to act as racecar brakes.
But a troubling part of the brothers’ lives was recalled as well. They had become enemies in a rivalry so intense that they rarely spoke to each other.
“I like Arthur,” Walt Arfons told Sports Illustrated in November 1965. “I want to be his friend. But I’m even afraid to go over and talk to him now. Being that he give me the cold shoulder so many times, I don’t want to be turned down.”
Art Arfons felt equally aggrieved. “If someone stops at his garage and wants to know where my garage is, he don’t know where it is, even though it’s next door,” he said. “He don’t know what my phone number is or nothing.”
Walt Arfons introduced jet-powered dragsters when he obtained a Westinghouse J46 turbojet engine that had been designed to power Navy aircraft and raced with it for the first time in August 1960.
His more advanced jet-propelled car, Wingfoot Express — named for the symbol of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company of Akron, which was sponsoring him, and driven by Tom Green of Wheaton, Ill. — set a world land-speed record of 413.2 miles an hour at Bonneville on Oct. 2, 1964. Mr. Arfons had sustained a heart attack while watching another driver crash his car during testing. Mr. Green was an engineer with limited race-driving experience, but he had helped Mr. Arfons rebuild the car.
Three days later, Art Arfons, who was sponsored by Firestone, a major competitor to Goodyear also based in Akron, broke that record in a car powered by a General Electric J79 turbojet aircraft engine, clocking 434.03 m.p.h. About a week after that, Craig Breedlove, a California hot-rodder, surpassed that mark in his jet-powered Spirit of America car. Then Art Arfons and Mr. Breedlove took turns breaking each other’s records.
Walt Arfons built the first rocket-propelled racecar, a redesigned Wingfoot Express, in an unsuccessful effort to regain the world land-speed record in 1965. The car, driven by Bobby Tatroe and resembling a wingless airplane, used solid-fuel rocket bottles to provide added thrust. But Mr. Arfons concluded afterward that it may have been too heavy as a result of enhanced safety equipment he installed.
Walt Arfons was born Walter Charles Stroud on Dec. 10, 1916, in Muncie, Ind., but grew up in Akron. When his mother, Bessie, was married for a second time, he took the name of his stepfather, Tom Arfons. Walt Arfons was 10 when his half brother was born.
Walt Arfons, who entered the Navy in the 1930s with a 10th-grade education, and Art Arfons, who later saw Navy service, embarked on their mechanical wizardry in 1946, assembling motorcycles and a homemade airplane before turning to dragsters.
They began drag racing for prize money in 1952 with a three-wheel hot rod powered by a prewar Oldsmobile engine. Its rear portion came from a Packard, and it used an airplane landing gear for the front wheel. They splashed green tractor paint on it that one track announcer found so ugly that he called the car a green monster. The name stuck.
Later using airplane piston engines to power their dragsters, the Arfonses jointly built a series of cars that retained the name Green Monster.
The brothers split their earnings when they competed in the same event, but Walt Arfons maintained that by the mid-1950s his brother was consumed with clocking the faster times of the two, placing himself and his cars in danger. The enmity that developed led them to build future Green Monster models separately and continued through the competition at Bonneville.
Art Arfons retired from motor sports in 1971 after a racecar he was driving blew a tire and crashed through a guardrail, killing three people. He later competed in professional tractor-pulling events. Walt Arfons retired in the 1970s as well and lived in Bradenton, Fla., until returning to Akron in his last years.
Dr. Mark Stiff, a grandson of Walt Arfons’s, said in an interview on Wednesday that the brothers spoke from time to time after their retirement from racing. “It was a strained relationship, but it was civil,” he said.
Walt Arfons, whose death was announced by his family, is survived by his wife, Gertrude; a son, Terry; a daughter, Patricia Stiff; a sister, Lou Wolfe; eight grandchildren; and 19 great-grandchildren.
Another son, Craig, carried on a family obsession. He was attempting to break a speed record on water in 1989 when his jet-powered hydroplane broke up on Lake Jackson in Sebring, Fla., killing him. Walt and his wife were in the crowd.
Dr. Stiff, who visited his grandfather’s shop when he was growing up, recalled how “he took stuff out of junkyards and made a racecar” and “could just about fix anything.”
And he remembered how his grandfather liked to say, “There’s nothing like sitting in a car and feeling the afterburners.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/sports/autoracing/walt-arfons-a-pioneer-with-cars-using-jet-engines-dies-at-96.html
TV dads have, for the most part, had pretty conservative taste in cars. While it would have been fun to imagine Ward Cleaver in a fuel-injected ’57 Corvette, it just didn’t project the image of a stable, practical family-friendly 1950s dad. Here are some of our favorites from some classic and some more recent TV shows:
Click here for more Classic Car articles from Hagerty, or here to sign up for our Classic Car Emails.
Article source: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2013/06/16/five-famous-tv-dad-cars/
Consumers spent freely on cars and building supplies in May, but a drop in restaurant sales raised questions about whether this year’s tax increases are affecting consumers’ confidence and crimping their spending.
Overall, retail sales beat expectations, rising 0.6% in May, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday.
Leading the charge: A 1.8% jump in sales of cars and parts, which were also 8.5% higher than this time last year. Building materials and supplies gained 0.9%.
But the newest weak spot was a 0.4% drop at restaurants and bars, which had been among the biggest gainers in April, the bureau reported.
Economists watch restaurant sales for signs of how consumers are handling discretionary income. When restaurant sales held up last year, that was seen as a sign that then-surging gasoline prices wouldn’t slow the economy. Their strength in early 2013 was taken as evidence that the impact of the tax hikes was turning out to be smaller than expected, and the latest news doesn’t immediately change that, economists said.
“You can’t draw conclusions based on one month,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. “Year-over-year, it’s still up about 4%.”
The industry has already been dealing with cash-strapped middle-income consumers, said Bryan Elliott, restaurant analyst at stock-brokerage firm Raymond James. Personal income fell for families around the $50,000-a-year national median during the recession and hasn’t yet recovered, he said.
“That segment has lost considerable purchasing power over the last few years, and lost more in January,” when payroll taxes went up by 2 percentage points, reversing a cut in 2010. “Restaurants are the first places consumers cut when they are tight for money.”
Restaurants are being managed to boost profits on sales growth of less than 5% a year, he said. A handful of fast-growing brands such as Panera and Chipotle have been exceptions, he said.
A small number of companies, including Red Lobster owner Darden Restaurants, blamed soft sales earlier this year on the tax increase. Darden spokesman Rich Jeffers declined to comment Thursday.
The impact of higher taxes may show up in more demands for discounting and price promotion, said Robin Lee Allen, executive editor of trade journal Nation’s Restaurant News. She pointed to a promotion by Subway for a $4 sandwich-and-soda lunch that launched this month. McDonald’s said June 11 that discounting drove its May gain in same-store sales.
Excluding autos, retail sales rose 0.3% in May, the Commerce Department reported.
The overall retail sales number beat the 0.5% median forecast of 83 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
Any weakness in restaurant spending is likely to be short-lived, said Andrew Wilkinson, economic strategist at Miller Tabak in New York. Restaurants and bars added 38,000 jobs in May, a sign that owners think sales will hold up, he said.
Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/06/13/may-retail-sales/2416995/

Anki cofounder Boris Sofman shows off Anki Drive at Apple’s WWDC keynote on June 10, 2013
The first demo at Apple’s WWDC conference keynote last Monday wasn’t an Apple demo. Instead, it was from a stealthy startup showing off its stuff in public for the first time. The startup is named Anki, and the stuff was Anki Drive, a racing game with real, physical tiny motorized cars that are controlled via iPhone.
Anki doesn’t, however, think of itself as a toy company. Its founders are robotics scientists from Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, and the company, which has raised $50 million in funding, simply sees its little cars as the first step towards its goal of revolutionizing consumer robotics. Later in the week, I chatted with cofounder Boris Sofman, who presided over the WWDC demo (which went well after a few scary seconds of wireless trouble).
Anki Drive’s cars look like the slot-cars of my youth–albeit a whole lot nicer–but they pack technology that Aurora and Tyco never dreamed of. Yet they’re also designed to be manufacturable as mainstream consumer-electronics products.
(Sofman told me that Anki Drive will cost around $200, a pricetag which will include a quantity of cars Anki isn’t yet disclosing. That sounded stratospheric to me until I realized that I tend to think of playthings in the prices of my youth. In 1972, a top-of-the-line slot-car set went for $35, roughly the same as Anki Drive once you’ve adjusted for inflation.)
Each Anki car includes two motors, at a cost of less than $1 apiece. Also onboard is an optical sensor which can record the car’s location 500 times a second, then transmits it back to an iPhone via a Bluetooth Low Power wireless module. And each car includes a 50-MHz processor–more powerful, Sofman told me, than the one in his first PC–that costs around 80 cents.
Much of the magic is in the Anki Drive racetrack, which is printed on a mat you can roll up. The mat includes embedded positioning information that lets each car locate itself precisely; rather than being able to see each other directly, the cars report where they are to the iPhone, which keeps track.
As you’d expect, the cars can be controlled by human players. But they can also be guided by the iPhone. Anki Drive takes full advantage of the phone’s processing power to tackle the artificial intelligence necessary to precisely steer multiple miniature vehicles at the equivalent of 250 miles per hour. Rather than just tearing along like drones, they can interact with each other: Sofman’s WWDC demo involved one car using a virtual weapon to blast others right off the track.
A hint of Anki’s overarching ambitions beyond building a racing game is present in the fact that Sofman calls the automobiles characters rather than merely cars. “All of a sudden, the entire gameplay is defined in software,” he told me. “We’re able to program the physical characters as if they were video game characters. That’s something nobody else has been able to do.”
And because Anki Drive’s world is physical rather than digital, the cars must adjust to real-world challenges. Each car oscillates its wheel speed 500 times per second to make it stick to the intended trajectory. ”A tiny bit of dust on the tires changes their properties,” Sofman says.
“For the people buying this, we want it to be deceptive how difficult this was. We spent half a decade on this, but we want people to take it for granted.”
So what does Anki plan to build other than Anki Drive? Sofman described the company’s plans to me in expansive terms, not specific ones. He did say that Anki has lots of options: “It’s weird to think of robotics as an industry, because robotics and AI are tools that apply to every industry. It’s kind of nice to have the problem of choice.”
“People are going to be surprised at how many aspects of their daily lives are going to be reinvented over the coming years,” Sofman says. But for now, Anki is still busy reinventing scale-model auto racing. Anki Drive is due to show up at Apple Store retail locations this fall; the company doesn’t have any immediate plans to support Android or other platforms, but hasn’t ruled the idea out.
Article source: http://techland.time.com/2013/06/14/anki-drive/
“Ayrton Senna was still alive at that time,” said Nagamura, who starts in the midfield for Sporting Kansas City. “He’s one of the best drivers ever, and I had the honor to watch him race. I really like Formula One, and I really like race cars.”
Friday afternoon at Kansas Speedway, Nagamura slipped behind the wheel of a Ferrari 458 Italia — retail price $295,000 — and rattled off six laps on the infield road course.
“It was great,” Nagamura said. “It’s not every day you get to drive a Ferrari and drive on a race course. The car is amazing. It’s so fast. I really enjoyed it.”
Chance Myers, Sporting KC’s starting right back, grew up in Thousand Oaks, Calif., but he developed the same passions for soccer and fast cars.
Myers and Nagamura were among four Sporting KC players, including defensive midfielder Oriol Rosell and striker Claudio Bieler, to test out the supercars as part of the Exotic Driving Experience.
“I love cars, whether it’s these exotic cars or the old muscle cars,” Myers said. “I have an appreciation for them, for sure.”
Of course, he’d never driven anything like the Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera until Friday, when he reached a top speed of 107 down the front stretch and turned a 53.08 lap, the fastest among the Sporting KC quartet.
Rosell’s best lap was .03 seconds slower (53.11).
“It’s effortless,” Myers said. “The car does all the work. It’s crazy. You just kind of listen (to the driving instructor) and let it go. Honestly, you’re pinning it on the straightaway down here. It’s just crazy.”
Myers has never been a big racing enthusiast, but he’s willing to be swayed.
“I’ve never been to a NASCAR event,” Myers said. “I’d love to come. We’re always kind of out of town or there’s something else going on, but, for sure, I want to come out for a race sometime.”
On the other hand, Rosell did grow up a race fan. He also drove the Lamborghini.
“You have to drive it to understand, but the braking and acceleration are just so responsive,” said Rosell, who topped out at 106 mph. “You really have to respect these cars. The acceleration it had was so crazy. Maybe next time they’ll let us on the Speedway (oval).”
That was a consistent theme that emerged after each player finished a six-lap circuit: They are eager for the next time.
“I don’t know if I’m ready to buy one, but I’m ready to come back for another driving experience,” Bieler said.
He recorded the fastest top speed at 110 mph, but turned in only the third fastest lap.
“I was lucky to have a very good instructor, who let me push the gas all the way to the end,” Bieler said.
The Exotic Driving Experience will return to Kansas Speedway three more times this year — July 26-28, Sept. 13-15 and Oct. 25-27.
Racing fans and/or car enthusiasts can sign up for their chance to drive a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche or high-end Audi by visiting ExoticDriving.com.
Prices for the six-lap program vary depending upon which model’s steering wheel a driver wants to slip behind.
Article source: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/06/14/4293976/sporting-kc-players-get-behind.html
Answers allows you to tap the knowledge of Community members. Answer a question below or ask a question.
Please fill out the answer field.
The language you used does not comply with community standards. Please re-enter.
Article source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323734304578542473814965006.html
automotive industry auto news auto repair car blog cars news cars reviews
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better.
Copyright © 2013 · Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in