Several e-mails arrived in my inbox last month touting a thorium-laser-powered atomic car. It produces no emissions and runs 300,000 miles on 8 grams of thorium! By the time I got around to Googling the articles in Wards and the Txchnologist, their comments sections were filled by skeptics pointing out fundamental conflicts with the basic [...]

Saabanistas will not like this column. Victor Muller and Co. have managed to drag out the death of Saab some seven months after it shut down the Trollhatten assembly plant. It’s time to let go. Here’s the latest: on Tuesday, administrator Guy Lofalk requested that Saab’s voluntary reorganization process be stopped. On Wednesday, Swedish Automobile [...]

Luca Cordero di Montezemolo and I agree: The Ferrari 348 is one of the worst cars ever to wear the storied Prancing Horse badge. I’ve hated the 348 ever since one tried to kill me midway through a corner on a winding two-lane crossways Salisbury Plain in the primeval 1990s. The Ferrari chairman actually bought [...]

In our Gadget Geek’s Gift Guide we alluded to a forthcoming product from Valentine One, and now we can tell you all about it. This is not a new radiolocation locator, but rather a quite inexpensive and helpful accessory that both simplifies “hard-wiring” your detector into the car, and allows you to automatically stifle all [...]

Honda President and CEO Takanobu Ito There’s been a new sheriff in Hondaville since June 2009, and he understands what we automotive media types have been whining about recently, regarding Honda’s design and technology malaise. Takanobu Ito assumed the presidency then and has ever since been yanking on the reins of the company to steer [...]

The U.S. first reached car and light truck income of 15 million back in calendar 1965, when baby boomers bought boatloads of Ford Mustangs and their parents bought a million Chevy Impalas, Belairs and Biscaynes. That number remains elusive in today’s market. November 2011 income totaled about 1 million — good for a Seasonally Adjusted [...]

By now you’ve probably seen the reports: Maybach is no more. And since car companies are actually in the game to make money (as opposed to what I like to think — keeping jerks like me thrilled and delighted with shiny objects), the notoriously, comically, make that absurdly slow-selling Maybach brand is going the way [...]

The Tokyo show has always been a bit peculiar. At my first show in 1991 it was the anime-come-to-life models wearing space suits and antennae headbands. This year it was car-company-designed smart homes on the auto-show floor. It may well be a direct reaction to this year’s natural disaster, which left so many people without [...]

The immoderate engineering powerhouse that Soichiro Honda founded has been foundering lately. Hyundai offers gasoline direct injection on most of its engines nowadays, often teamed with turbocharging and downsizing. This is the kind of cutting edge tech Honda used to be renowned for, but the Motor Company hasn’t broken much new ground of late. During [...]

Monthly entrepot deadlines still statement for a good portion of my workday. Here, for your Thanksgiving weekend leisure, are a few issues that have come along in the past few weeks while I concentrated on the stuff that goes into print. Speaking of which, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @MT_Lassa: Poetry in car [...]