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The multitude of mysteries revealed following the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' death now includes one that puzzled car enthusiasts for years: How did Jobs get away with driving without a license plate? It was common knowledge that Jobs would park his Mercedes SL55 AMG in a handicapped spot at Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, with nothing to identify his vehicle other than the tiny barcode that usually rests behind the rear license plate. According to Walter Isaacson's new biography, Jobs wanted to avoid having a plate for privacy reasons; and yet when having a license-less silver Mercedes became a...

WASHINGTON -- A tiny car company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000. The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive Inc. follows a $465 million government loan to Tesla Motors Inc., purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Tesla is a California startup focusing on all-electric vehicles, with a number of celebrity endorsements that is backed by investors that have contributed to Democratic campaigns The awards to Fisker and Tesla have prompted concern from...

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52. Not bad? Unfortunately, it’s a sham. This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article. In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place....

The article says the average selling price for a new imported car climbed to a record high of $31,536 in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. That was $7,614 more than the average domestic-made car, the biggest gap since December 1999. With Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics in short supply, more Americans have turned to Chevrolet Cruze and Ford Fiesta cars.

Imagine that you couldn't drive on major highways without agreeing to put a camera in your car -- one that could film either the occupants or the vehicle’s surroundings and transmit the images back to a central office for inspection... It's hard to imagine Americans would tolerate such a direct, Big-Brotherish intrusion. But they might not notice if the all-seeing cameras were tucked inside another kind of government tracking technology that millions of Americans have already invited into their cars. Kapsch TrafficCom AG, an Austrian company that just signed a 10-year contract to provide in-car transponders such as the E-Z...

Chrysler is getting rid of the soccer mom staple Dodge Grand Caravan minivan, the company announced on Monday. 2013 will be the last year the Caravan is sold, despite the fact it is currently the best selling Dodge vehicle on the market. The more upscale Chrysler Town and Country minivan will continue on as the only van the company offers. Chrysler created the modern minivan in when they introduced the 1984 model year Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager models. Chrysler will replace the Dodge Grand Caravan minivan and the Dodge Avenger mid-sized sedan with a single crossover in 2013, Chrysler...

The city is promoting two new plug-in hybrid electric cars available for use by members of the Hourcar vehicle-sharing organization in St. Paul and Minneapolis. This fall and next spring, St. Paul will install 20 public stations where drivers can charge the vehicles. The two new hybrid cars were bought with a $30,000 contribution from Xcel Energy. Hourcar is run by the Neighborhood Energy Connection, a St. Paul nonprofit. The vehicles are in the Lawson and Lowertown parking ramps in downtown St. Paul. There are 13 Hourcars at nine locations throughout the city. Charging station locations, rates and details can...

A gallery of electric and hybrid vehicles on display at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany. Prototype and production hybrids and electric cars debuted this week at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany. Car manufacturers showed off sportier designs—and some outlandish models. The i8, shown here, is BMW's first plug-in hybrid sports car. It can reach 62 miles per hour in 4.6 seconds, has a top speed of 155 mph, and can achieve 87 miles per gallon. It weighs 3,200 pounds. A version of the car will probably be on sale by the end of 2013. Credit: Internationale...

NWI communities get keys to electric cars By Carrie Napoleon Post-Tribune correspondent Last Modified: Sep 22, 2011 02:01AM Kathy Kazmierczak is looking forward to retiring the city-issued older model Ford Crown Victoria she drives when performing her duties as Hammond’s recycling director. “It gets 11 miles per gallon,” she said. The THINK City all-electric vehicle Hammond and eight other Northwest Indiana municipalities took possession of Wednesday, facilitated through South Shore Clean Cities, will mean an end to the recycling director’s gas-guzzling ways and a chance to enlighten residents about alternative fuel vehicles as she tools around the city in the...

On Thursday, September 22, environmentalists want you to feel guilty about driving cars. In other words, it’s annual “World Car-Free Day.” Instead of celebrating the many ways that the automobile has liberated and improved the lives of ordinary people, environmentalists want to suggest that rejecting the car for a day is somehow virtuous. The governor of Massachusetts is going even further by advocating a car-free week – notwithstanding the governor’s real-world choice to drive around in an SUV this week.

Betty Skelton Erde, an aviator and auto racing pioneer who became the fastest woman on Earth in 1965, has died. She was 85. Erde set female speed records at Daytona Beach and Utah's Bonneville salt flats more than half a century ago. In 2008, she was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in suburban Detroit. Dozens of firsts are attached to her name: the auto industry's first female test driver in 1954; the first to set a female world land speed record in 1956 (145 mph at Daytona Beach); and the world land speed record for women...

A Saudi man and his family suffered from medium injuries when their car overturned in the Gulf Kingdom and police believe the accident could have been caused by magic, press reports said on Friday. Police checking the damaged car found pieces of human nails and hair tied to each other and wrapped in a handkerchief, which was concealed under one seat, Ajel daily said in a report from the northwestern town of Hail. “Security officials believe the accident was caused by magic after finding those items in the car…the maid was with the family when the accident occurred but it...

Nazar Quiryaqous, a 46-year-old from the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, guided a gleaming, new Toyota Avalon, the car maker’s flagship sedan, out of the Detroit-Windsor tunnel onto Windsor’s Goyeau Street at 1:20 a.m. on Oct. 27, 2009. The car had been rented three days earlier in Cincinnati. Seven hours after he arrived, Mr. Quiryaqous left through the same tunnel, returning not in the Avalon, however, but as a passenger in a car driven by Jason Hana, a 27-year-old from the same suburb, authorities say. Mr. Quiryaqous then filed a police report claiming the Avalon was stolen off a Detroit...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC managed to shrug off an ornery Mother Nature, some wild stock-market fluctuations and a stubborn economy to report Thursday double-digit percentage gains in U.S. sales for August. That wasn’t the case for the leading Japanese manufacturers. Toyota Motor Corp. /quotes/zigman/199376/quotes/nls/tm TM -0.95% fell behind Chrysler by just a few hundred cars and Honda Motor Co. /quotes/zigman/193599/quotes/nls/hmc HMC +0.96% saw its sales slip by more than 20% for the fourth consecutive month. GM /quotes/zigman/1466682/quotes/nls/gm GM -4.22% said it sold 218,479 cars and trucks in August, an 18%...

Recently, Toyota have been claiming to build the safest cars on Earth. Just like (Chinese owned) Volvo Cars have been doing for decades. I happen to live in Gothenburg, Sweden, home of Volvo. I also happen to admire and respect Japanese culture. But I fail to see how average Toyota cars actually could compete with vehicles like the Volvo V70/XC70/XC60/XC90. The Avensis can, to a certain degree, but is not representative of their product line. Toyota: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk9yGUu6dtA Volvo Cars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtSOYEr-rYQ

Criminals seem to have a thing for big vehicles. The Cadillac Escalade remains the car most likely to be stolen, according to new data from the Highway Loss Data Institute. This is the fourth year in a row the Escalade has topped this list. The rankings for most stolen cars are based on auto insurance claims data from 2008 and 2009.

Let’s revisit the year 1993 – or the year when Greenpeace hysterics launched their evil dinosaur car adverts. Not they were trying to scare the s**t out of kids. But Rod Frey reported: The picture opens on a fog, with a disembodied voice whispering, “It’s coming... Prepare yourself for the most significant event in automotive history.” Then, to the grating sound of twisting metal and coughing engines, a giant dinosaur constructed entirely of wrecked cars roars to its feet. Soon it begins to hack and cough, and eventually crashes to the ground and dies. “It’s coming,” concludes the voice, “The...

When President Barack Obama announced an agreement to double fuel-economy requirements Friday, standing with him were industry executives and environmental, public health and labor leaders, all of whom, remarkably, had signed off on the deal. But the real credit for this historic achievement, which is expected to cut oil consumption by 1.5 million barrels per day and eliminate half of all carbon pollution nationwide, doesn't go to the White House. Instead, thank California. For decades the state has set the nation's clean-energy agenda; it's been the tip of the spear in the fight for higher fuel standards. Its huge automobile...

IT'S the one place in the world you don't want to have a prang but one blonde driver's antics outside the Place du Casino, in Monte Carlo, made every tourists' day. A parade of some of the world's most expensive cars turned into a demolition derby after a driver scraped her $370, 000 Bentley against a $111,000 Mercedes S class. The woman's 2.7 tonne beast then went on to plough into a $207,000 black Ferrari F430 before crashing head-on into a Porsche 911 worth $118,000 and a $207,000 Aston Martin. The total value of the cars involved in the bingle...