Tagged: automobiles

A patent is filed by General Motors that would use information collected from its OnStar navigation system to personalize passing billboards to drivers.

Paul Schubert and his wife decided to buy a new car last summer — a really fuel-efficient one. After a lot of research, they settled on a Toyota Prius. But there was a problem: They couldn't find one.

The tsunami that devastated Japan in March had dried up supplies of the Prius, which is made in Japan, and a dealer told them they would have to wait — "about four months," Schubert says. "And we thought, well, it'd be, probably, end of November, early December before we were going to have a car."

The Schuberts still had a working car.

"Did we want a Toyota badly enough that we were willing to wait?" Schubert asks.

They did. Their new red Prius now sits in the driveway, with a license plate that reads "LTLSIPR."

Recall Woes

The "Taxi of Tomorrow" has arrived in New York City. On Tuesday night, officials unveiled the Nissan-designed cab that, over the next 10 years, will gradually replace the country's largest taxi fleet. It's the first New York taxi to be designed for the job since the city's iconic Checker cab.

For Nissan's designers, the process of putting the new cab together involved months of riding in taxis and talking to cab owners, drivers and passengers about what they did and didn't like.

"We heard a lot of things about dirty smell[s]," says Francois Farion, the new taxi's design manager.

According to Farion, most cars only have to satisfy one person — the driver — but a New York City cab redesign has to work for a lot of different stakeholders.

It would be difficult for some people to let a stranger drive off with one of their most valuable possessions. But not for Stanford graduate student Katie Hagey.

Hagey is one of a growing number of individual car owners who have started renting their wheels to people they don't know through car-sharing startup companies resembling the better-known Zipcar.

Hagey makes an extra $150 a month by renting out her car via Wheelz, a Silicon Valley car-sharing startup. Wheelz allows Hagey to name a price for others to "borrow" her silver BMW when it would otherwise be sitting unused in a campus parking lot.

The statistics are pretty grim — on average 300 people a year die after being hit by cars backing up, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Half of them are children younger than 5.

Today, we kick off 2012 with a broadcast Nostradamus might appreciate…We’ll get predictions from some of our favorite guests on the things we use everyday…In this segment, Jamie-Page Deaton, Managing Editor of US News and World Report’s Best Car Rankings ticks through her 2012 predictions for the automotive industry.