In politics, Bill Clinton once said, it’s better to be “strong and wrong” than weak and right, which is why Hillary Clinton has joined John McCain in shamelessly pandering for votes by calling for a suspension of the federal gasoline tax. Both of them know it’s a terrible concept...

Bob Lutz says the future of the automobile can be summed up in two words: Proportion and propulsion. That’s a snappy way of saying big cars aren’t going anywhere, but at least they’ll be electric. The way Lutz sees it, Americans won’t give up their pickup trucks and SUVs until...

Hyundai’s popular midsize Sonata sedan receives some meaningful updates for the 2009 model year. The changes are focused on where the car needed them most: the inside. I had a chance to drive the new model recently in the outskirts of Chicago and found that the changes are just what that model...

What does it say when one of America’s most vigorous families wants to shake up the world’s largest corporation considering it isn’t sufficiently green? Descendants of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon’s predecessor Standard Oil in 1870, will start a campaign nowadays to...

The largest subway system in the United States still does not have protection cameras inside its subway cars. Cameras will start filming inside two New York subway cars (as a pilot test) to monitor passengers. The MTA hopes to see a reduction in graffiti inside its trains, which costs the agency $1.8...

Hold on to your hats … senior editor Joe Wiesenfelder calls the much-heralded 2009 Nissan GT-R not fun to drive! Can you believe it? The audacity. The sacrilege. The gall.  Well, really he’s just talking about the daily driver’s meaning of fun. Those who live and die for...

It’s the little things that count. Start-stop technology, in which your car’s engine shuts down when you’re stopped at a red light or sitting in gridlock but automatically restarts when you lift your foot from the brake pedal, will likely be standard equipment in 20% of all cars by...

Coskata Inc. will start making cellulosic ethanol from agricultural waste and other biomass at a demonstration plant that could turn out 40,000 gallons of the stuff a year. That’s little more than a rounding error in the 9 billion gallons of ethanol that must be produced under the federal renewable...

Think rising fuel prices, global warming and tightening fuel economy and emissions rules will leave us driving cars as thrilling as a Toyota Prius? Don’t bet on it. The supercars of tomorrow will be as green as they are mean. So says Georg Kacher of Car Magazine, who talked to some of Europe’s...

Both Qatar’s oil minister and the head of OPEC can see oil hitting $200 a barrel before the end of the year and one analyst says gas could reach $7 a gallon within four years. That could mean cataclysm for the global economy. The world got a little relief nowadays when BP reopened its North Sea...

At least one analyst now predicts the new ceiling for oil will be $200 a barrel, which it could reach by 2012. That translates into about $7 a gallon at the pump. It would additionally translate into cataclysm for the global economy. It’s an unlikely scenario, and the world got a little relief...

One of the most noticeable aspects of the Beijing Subway is how tickets are still checked manually by humans at the entrance to each platform. that era of manual ticket checking is about end as Beijing introduces its new robotic fare collection system. Starting in mid-May, the current one-way paper...

You’re probably not going to live to see an electric 747 landing at O’Hare, but a growing number of aeronautical engineers believe electric airplanes are the future of general aviation. They may be right. These engineers work at places like NASA and say the battery and fuel cell technology...

On July 1, Californians had better buck up for a hands-free device–or face face $50 fine the first duration they’re caught using a cell phone while behind the wheel. California joins several other states, including New York, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and Connecticut in cracking down on...