La Dolce Veloce

Motor Trend has a nice article explaining tire technology. Tires are easily the most important part of any car; this article is worth reading.

Fans of the Smart Car rejoice! Zap is continuing its plan to import the Smart ForTwo into the US. They’ll now have the advantage of not having to compete with Mercedes for Smart car sales. Zap has accumulated around $200 million in orders for the Smart Car, but there’s no official word on when they’ll start selling.

The automobile has been around a century or so, long enough that you’d think we’d have figured out how to run motor oil through those engines reliably. However, in the past decade, a problem has been cropping up at several car makers (Toyota, VW, Audi, and Saab have admitted guilt, though others are likely guilty as well). More and more owners these days are suffering engine failure due to excessive sludge buildup in the oil passages (and the resulting oil starvation that can occure). Why is this? Automakers usually claim that it’s due to the oil not being changed on schedule, yet it appears to be more than that, it’s related to the design of modern engines instead. In Toyota’s case, it seems it may be related to the PCV valve, of all things. The problem is not limited to just small engines though – the Dodge Durango appears to have similar sludge problems. I think the best thing a person could do would be to use synthetic oil, as it’s less likely (if at all) to form any sludge in the first place. Read more about this over at AutoWeek.

This link has details of a very nice installation of a Mac Mini in a GTi. It’s the first completed project I’ve heard of, though I know many others are working on similar setups.

The latest car color numbers are in, courtesy of J.D. Power and Associates. No big surprise, silver is the most popular color for new cars at 24.1%. I’m guilty of supporting that trend, as we own two silver cars ourselves (well, maybe they’d be considered gray). Black came in at #2, followed by blue, white, gray, red, green, beige (yuck!), gold (eww), and brown (they still paint cars that color?). Read more about it here.

It’s stories like this that make people so eager to sue anyone for any reason. Remember the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit? Same thing. What’s they usually don’t hear is how these verdicts are typically thrown out in appeals. In this particular case, two young women died when they were ejected from a 2000 Ford Explored when it rolled. Tragic, certainly. However, they were not wearing their seat belts, so come on, what do you expect? Ford lost this case on the argument that they could have spent a little more money on the side windows to make them safer and less likely to be broken (hence those girls may not have been ejected). The thing is, the Explorer met all Federal safety standards already. Just because you CAN make a safer car, doesn’t mean you’re legally required to do so. If you were, there’d be no more high clearance SUVs on the road, just station wagons less likely to roll over. You can read the full article here.

The Koenigsegg CCR broke the production road car speed record, setting a top speed of 242mph at the Nardo test track in Italy. The previous record was held by the stunning McLaren F1. This small Swedish car company has done a fantastic job of refining their car’s design to get to this point. More pictures can be found here. Read the rest of this post for the official press release.
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