On Tuesday, I will go to the Fuji racetrack in the hills halfway between Tokyo and Nagoya. I will test drive a Toyota that is not available in Japan, nor is it in the U.S. It is however available and quite a success in India. Can you guess which one it... 

Today’s race session ended about an hour earlier than planned, thanks to a wild Great Plains lightning storm that threatened to vaporize and/or float away the corner workers. Some LeMons races have a team that grabs and early lead and never relinquishes... 

The second annual B.F.E. GP, which takes place at High Plains Raceway (located somewhere in the Great Plains between Denver and Kansas), kicked off today with the traditional Friday tech and BS inspections. This weekend’s field may have the highest... 

When we wrote about dealer lots overflowing with trucks, especially of the GM kind, there were a lot of nods, but also many flames.  Some commenters said it can’t possibly be true. Mainly because the charts were the product of financial analyst algebra... 

We didn’t want to mention it when we wrote about GM’s buy a car, get free insurance deal. If we would have said it, it would have been the nasty B-word all over again. The rest of the media showed less compunction. “The worse you drive, the... 

At GM, Joel Ewanick and  Chris Perry need to repeat the miracles for which they became famous  at Hyundai. So what do you do in that case? “Let’s just do the same thing again.” If GM would do a repeat of the Hyundai Assurance Plan (lose your job,... 

Our patent-pending China sales oracle is in top form. As predicted, the Chinese market awoke from the doldrums in June and rose 6.2 percent from a year earlier to 1.11 million units. This according to a data released today by the China Association of... 

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I am getting tired writing about Saab. According to the clicks on Saab-stories, you are getting tired as well. Empty promises, missed deadlines, endless wait. There is even dissension in the ranks of Saabsunited, where more and more people are getting... 

Since the first Clean Air Act was passed in 1963 Americans have been howling about the pros and cons of The Gubmint controlling what comes out of vehicle tailpipes. The new regs didn’t have any profound effects on what we drove until that raging... 

Things are not going well between Volkswagen and Suzuki. In 2009, Volkswagen invested $2.5 billion for a 19.9 percent share in Suzuki. Suzuki sent $1.13 billion back and bought 2.5 percent of Volkswagen. Suzuki netted $1.37 billion, domo arigatou gozaimasu,... 

Usually, we don’t report on recalls. If we would, we would be reporting on recalls all day. Sometimes, we make an exception, if the matter has wider ranging implications. This is one of those times. The recall: BMW recalls “approximately 50” BMW... 

You’ve seen them before, photos from some godforsaken place of insurgent warfare. A half dozen rag tag soldiers, if you can call them soldiers, bristling with Chinese Kalishnikov knockoffs, piled into a Toyota Hilux with a heavy machine gun or some... 

You find some interesting historical documents in junked cars, and sometimes they’re glued to an engine’s valve cover. This ’68 or ’69 Dodge D-series pickup had a pretty pedestrian LA series engine— probably a 318— but the... 

End of the year, Europeans can delight in the Made in America Opel Ampera, which is a rebadged and slightly reskinned (see picture) Volt. But don’t rush to your friendly Opel dealer to put in your pre-order: The Ampera is already sold out. According... 

The ’79 Monza wagon we saw last week was a choice specimen of Malaise Era misery, to be sure, but how did the Vega Monza compare to the Chevette? Let’s say it’s 1977, you’re a Chevrolet shopper, and you want something that doesn’t... 

Drivers who pass a photo radar location frequently drop their speed far below the legal limit to be absolutely certain no citation will come in the mail weeks later. In response, officials in Valencia, Spain have begun issuing photo tickets to drivers... 

Germans bought 288,382 new cars in June, that’s pretty much the same (-0.3 percent) as in June 2010. A month does not a year make: In the first half of 2011, 1.62 million cars changed hands in Deutschland, that’s 10.5 percent more than 2010, say data... 

The transition from exclusively gasoline-powered vehicles to the new panoply of permutations of gas and electric power has not been easy on the old emm-pee-gee. The imperfect-yet-universal (in the US market) measure of efficiency finds itself at a loss... 

A 1991 Chevy Caprice in faded battleship grey went for $3000 at last week’s sale. It had only 37k miles. But none of the bells and whistles that would make such an old timer truly desirable. Now the 1996 Chevy Caprice with 71k and leather was a completely...