According to several independent sources, President-elect Barack Obama has been privately discussing the appointment of an auto “czar” to oversee the impending $25 billion dollar bailout that will be issued to U.S. automakers. Although Obama has declined to identify whom he is considering for the post, speculation suggests the responsibility might fall upon the shoulders of one of the three auto industry advisory already on the Obama payroll. Still others look towards Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, who has been a very public liaison between the interests of the Detroit 3 and the Obama White House. Stressing the importance of appointing a czar who is benevolent and all-knowing, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, MI, David Cole explained, “It can’t be some ideologue or someone with an ax to grind or someone who read about the auto industry in a pamphlet two years ago.”
I know just about every major auto news outlet is reporting that Alfa Romeo has postponed it’s US launch until 2011 because of the depressed financial markets. Well, that’s not entirely true. While the official launch won’t happen until 2011, at the earliest, a few lucky bastards (Jim Glickenhaus is one of them) got their Alfa 8C Competizione ahead of time.
Miller Motorcars in Greenwich, Connecticut was ground zero for last week’s Alfa Romeo’s US mini-launch. Three 8Cs were lined up in their showroom under racing red covers with the glorious Alfa shield emblazoned on it. Mini-launch or no, it drew a crowd, and some bigshots from the home country. Alfa’s Project Manager, Renzo Barbirato and the development test driver, Domenico Martino were there, as was a small crowd of onlookers.
I just got done singing the praises of BMW’s automotive line, especially the 3 Series, and now they’re upping their game even further with a mysterious performance-tuned 3 Series.
You can’t see much from the video, but what you can see tells you at least something. It has carbon fiber bits, a single exhaust (328 model?), lots of plastic moldings, a front air dam smaller than the M3, and it’s a four-door. If you caught anything I didn’t, let me know in the comments.
As if the BMW 3 Series didn’t have enough accolades and history and positive press about it already, now they’re officially the most reliable car in the UK. This according to the annual Fleet News FN50 reliability survey of all the car leasing companies in Britain.
The survey takes into account the reliability history of 881,000 vehicles. Japanese automakers have traditionally been on top, but this year, BMW took the top spot. In addition to the #1 position, BMW also has two other spots in the top ten with the 1 Series and the Mini.
The survey assessed vehicles by the number of breakdowns per 100 of each type of model on each leasing company’s fleet, that gives them a simple percentage. Easy peasy… now check out the official press release and the complete top ten list:
Photo by Susan Walsh/Associated Press From left, Ford President and CEO Alan Mullally, GM CEO Richard Wagoner, Jr., Chrysler Chairman and CEO Robert L. Nardelli, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Capitol Hill, Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008.
On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that in the likely event that Congress approves a $25 billion dollar bailout for the auto industry, it will come with considerably more stipulations then were attached to the loans extended to Wall Street in October. Although the Bush Administration is still refusing to approve an executive orders that would disperse emergency funds to domestic automakers, Detroit need only bide its time for 2 short months before inside sources say a bailout bill is all but guaranteed them. Official legislation has yet to be drafted and public support for the apparently pending federal prop for Detroit is at an underwhelming 20%, Nancy Pelosi has reportedly already requested Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to begin drafting an amendment to the $700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout that would guarantee $25 billion of those funds specifically for use by Chrysler, Ford, and GM. Treading significantly lighter on concerned taxpayers than last month, Pelosi made it clear that any government loans provided to the Big U.S. 3 would not be done so without stringent requirements for eligibility.
Thanks go to HellForLeather for coming through with the official price list for the 2009 Ducati lineup. It looks like they got their hands on a dealer’s order form with all the prices and availability dates. Well done.
Most of the bikes fall in line with expected prices, but the big question was the Streetfighter and the Streetfighter S: turns out they’ll be $14,005 and $18,995, respectively.
Check out the whole price list and the actual order form where they came from:
A Lincoln just doesn’t seem right without a keypad on the door, am I right? Thankfully they’ve decided to bring back the old system on the Lincoln MKS. And as Wired’s Autopia blog correctly remembered, it was exactly 28 years ago today that Ford introduced the keyless entry keypad system on the 1980 Thunderbird. Fitting.
It won’t be the obvious door-mounted buttons from your Grandpa’s Town Car though, the new SecuriCode keypad is seamlessly concealed, nearly invisible, inside the driver’s side B-pillar. The whole SecuriCode system includes not only the keypad, but also an Intelligent Access “smart key”.
Back in 2001, the IIAS, Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, funded a report on the benefits of red-light cameras, commonly referred to as the Oxnard report (you can read the study here). It was the first study to claim red-light cameras decrease accidents, and it has since been cited by hundreds of cities as the reason for the adoption of their red-light camera systems. But some people questioned the validity of that study, and three researchers from the University of South Florida; Barbara Orban, Etienne Pracht and John T. Large; recently attempted to replicate the studies findings… and they discovered the numbers just didn’t add up.
“The regression analysis of Retting and Kyrychenko [the authors of the Oxnard study] does not support their conclusion that red light cameras reduced total or injury crashes,” the University of South Florida team wrote in the American Journal of Public Health last month.
One recent line of research shows that ants are better at managing congestion than humans, and actually help each other move around their colony much more efficiently that we thought. Traffic and traffic jams have baffled scientists for ages. Congestion often appears and then disappears on the same road without any obvious reasons. But ants have a way of avoiding that congestion before it even starts.
Recently, reports have surfaced that President-elect Obama has been meeting with President Bush, as well as various Bush Administration officials, in an earnest attempt to encourage the passage of an additional $50 billion dollar government bailout. In contrast to the $700 billion emergency assistance Bush reluctantly rendered to Wall Street in early October, this new $50 billion dollar stimulus package would be solely intended to aid the publicly distraught Detroit 3.
