The 10 Worst Car Names of All Times

10. Dodge Swinger

The Dodge Dart family's crème de la crème -- if you get my drift -- was the ill-named "Swinger", when such a term was synonymous with wife-swapping. Yankee pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich became symbolic of the swinging generation and, by any measure, their mediocre baseball careers were rollicking successes compared to the Swinger automobile. Sadly, this wasn't even the worst-named Dodge vehicle of the era: marketers had originally intended to unveil their own version of Plymouth's abysmal Duster as "The Beaver" until someone familiar with teen slang slapped them upside their heads.

9. Ford Probe

RUH ROH: Flying Coach Now So Cramped It Could Be a Death Sentence

In your gut, you kinda knew this was true (emphases mine).

As airlines pack seats tighter than ever, the tests supposed to show that passengers can get out alive in a crash are woefully out of date. The FAA won’t make the results public, and a court warns there is “a plausible life-and-death safety concern.”

The 10 Ugliest Cars of All Times

The following list was carefully curated by summer intern Biff Spackle, who says "it is definitive and may not be questioned".

Geo Tracker

The reliability of a Ford Pinto combined with the styling beauty of a Jeep's miscarriage. The Tracker was guaranteed to last well over 20,000 miles of wear-and-tear, at least according to the salesguy.

The One Trillion Dollar Consumer Auto Loan Bubble is Perilously Close to Bursting

By Michael Snyder

Do you remember the subprime mortgage meltdown from the last financial crisis? Well, this time around we are facing a subprime auto loan meltdown. In recent years, auto lenders have become more and more aggressive, and they have been increasingly willing to lend money to people that should not be borrowing money to buy a new vehicle under any circumstances. Just like with subprime mortgages, this strategy seemed to pay off at first, but now economic reality is beginning to be felt in a major way. Delinquency rates are up by double digit percentages, and major auto lenders are bracing for hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. We are a nation that is absolutely drowning in debt, and we are most definitely going to reap what we have sown.

MUY MACHO: The 9 Most Badass Sedans in Automotive History

If you're interested in tracking car news, you may want to check out BadBlue Car News, a real-time automotive news portal. A couple of recent articles spurred me to come up with this list, a purely personal set of choices representing what I consider the premiere badass sedans over the past few decades.

1984 Mercedes 190E 2.3-16

It's hard to express how different -- and badass -- the original macho sports sedan was. Back in the day, everyone stared at the 2.3-16 as it drove by. Cosworth designed the unique, for the time, 16-valve cylinder head. In 1983, the racing version of the 190E shattered multiple world records, including averaging 154 MPH over 30,000 miles.

1986 BMW M3

When I was a kid, I thought of this vehicle as a "drug dealer's car", which was a compliment. Not that I condone drug-dealing, nimrod, but the fact that it was truly a uniquely wicked-looking car. Airbags? Digital displays? Ha! You're so cute. Its puffy fenders and 6.9 0-to-60 were astoundingly radical in 1986; its wildly successful reign arguably made the business case for a whole spectrum of M models.

CRONY CLIMATE CAPITALISTS: 6,000 First-Generation Chevrolet Volts Still Sitting On Dealer Lots

"Once a loser, always a loser" may be the new motto of Government Motors:

...before Chevrolet can concentrate on selling the all-new version of the plug-in hybrid EV, it needs to find a way to move the overstock of first-gen models currently sitting on dealer lots."

According to The Detroit Free Press, Chevy dealers had about 6,000 2015 Volts on their lots at the end of April, more than twice the amount of Volts the automaker sold in the first four months of 2015. An enticing 39-month lease at $299 per month and $1,649 due at signing is currently being offered on 2015 Volts, but the majority of owners would still rather wait for the new model to arrive.

The 2016 Volt will travel 50 miles under electric power alone before its 1.5-liter four-cylinder EcoTec engine kicks in to help charge the car’s lithium ion batteries. By comparison, the outgoing model will travel just 37 miles on electric power and uses a less efficient 1.4-liter engine. Chevy has also confirmed the 2016 model will start at $33,995 before a $7,500 tax credit, which is more than the first Volt’s current average transaction price of $30,607, but probably not enough to turn customers away and buy the cheaper first-gen car.

Cheaper gasoline prices have curbed interest in all electric and hybrid cars, with sales of plug-in hybrids like the Volt falling 33% year-over-year.

In 2012, Reuters reported that GM was losing about $50,000 on each Volt it produced. Experts estimated then the Volt cost about $90,000 each to produce.

What a freaking debacle.

And all in a day's work for Obama and his merry band of green energy crony climate fraudsters.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.
 

AAA: Top 7 Reasons for Teen Driving Accidents

A study funded by AAA probably represents the most comprehensive research project into the causes of teen driving accidents ever conducted.

The research team analyzed nearly 1,700 videos taken from in-vehicle event recorders covering the six seconds immediately prior to crashes involving teen drivers. Results identified driver distraction as a factor in 58% of all crashes studied, including 89% of road-departure crashes and 76% of rear-end crashes. The National HIghway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had previously estimated that distraction would be a factor in only 14% of teen driver crashes, which had to be an absurdly low expectation given the ubiquity of cellphone and texting addiction among (but not limited to) teens.

Video data was recorded by Lytx DriveCam devices that collect video, audio and accelerometer data when a driver triggers an in-vehicle device by hard braking, fast cornering or impacts that exceed a certain g-force. Each video is 12 seconds long and provides information from before and after the trigger event...

...The AAA researchers found that drivers manipulating their cellphone (calling, texting or other uses), had their eyes off the road for an average of 4.1 out of the final six seconds leading up to a crash. According to distraction.gov, checking a text typically takes your eyes off the road for 4.6 seconds, during which time the car will have covered the length of a football field when traveling at 55 miles per hour.

The top 7 reasons for teen crashes:

ind the wheel were found to be:

  1. Interacting with one or more passengers: 15% of crashes
  2. Cell phone use: 12% of crashes
  3. Looking at something in the vehicle: 10% of crashes
  4. Looking at something outside the vehicle: 9% of crashes
  5. Singing/moving to music: 8% of crashes
  6. Grooming: 6% of crashes
  7. Reaching for an object: 6% of crashes

Send this to any teen drivers you know.


Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News

10 Best and Worst Looking Automotive Grilles

The "face" of an automobile is its grille. With the advent of hybrid, all-electric and other vehicles that have minimal reliance on water-cooled engines, one would think that grilles might be on the way out. Then, one would think wrong.

BAD: THE AUDI A8

Audi deserves special ridicule not only for this example of IGS (Immense Grille Syndrome), but also for actually starting the ginormous grille trend in 2005. Why not just use a mini-fridge as your grille, Audi?

GREAT NEWS: New Ford car automatically obeys speed limits

A computer in charge of your vehicle: what could possibly go wrong?

Ford says it has the answer for speed demons who can't keep their gas pedals off the metal: A car that reads speed limit signs and automatically slows down.

Ford says that the newest edition of its S-Max car has "a new technology that scans traffic signs and adjusts the throttle to help drivers stay within legal speed limits and avoid fines."

...The technology seems to be a step in the direction of the driverless car, also known as an autonomous car. While these cars have yet to hit the market, Audi unveiled one last year that reached 140 miles per hour with no driver at the wheel.

Google and Nokia have also been experimenting with driverless cars. Google's electric-powered LUTZ Pathfinder started rolling through London last month at a not-so-brisk 12 miles per hour, and the company plans to expand tests later this week.

All the way back in 2012, I wrote that Americans should be very leery of self-driving cars. My rationale was simple and completely relevant today.

• How long until these cars (and therefore all of us) are tracked in real-time by the government?

• How long until government mandates the use of self-driving cars, under the aegis of safety, fuel efficiency, traffic control or heaven knows what?

• And how long until the government determines where you are permitted to go and when you will go there, like an ant-colony form of mass transit?

Knowing the power-hungry band of thieves and worse we currently employ in Washington, the answer to each of these questions is most assuredly: not long.

Self-driving cars are not bad ideas per se. But when government gets involved, you can be sure they will be used as tools to control citizens. For that is precisely what this enormous, bankrupt, doddering leviathan of a federal government always does.

It never scales back. It never "right-sizes". It never strips away laws or sheds outdated regulations.

Write it down. Put it in the time capsule.

Self-driving cars ride on the road to tyranny.


Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News.

The 10 Worst Automotive Love-Children of All-Time

I saw a 2000-vintage Jaguar the other day and it reminded me of some of the failed marriages between auto companies and their hellspawn products. Like:


10. The Jaguar/Ford Jagaurus

When The New York Times asserts that your vehicle may have been "the dud of the decade", it should give you pause. Like reconsidering whether you should visit a car dealership without a parent or guardian.

Ford and Jaguar combined the beauty of the Taurus with the, uhm, price of a Jag and the result was as you would expect. Many drivers had the experience of Edmunds commenter nomorejags14 who wrote of his 2003 copy, "...after a week the radio screen stop working, not long the wheels bent (all four), the check engine light came on, cat converter 2, after replacing twice the light is still on, then all codes possibles were detected by the scanner... and no mechanic could even look at it. Last hope I took it to a expert, his first words were 'get rid of this thing'."

Good advice, Sparky.

NAPA Ad Features Hillary Clinton as the Annoying Mother-In-Law

I wonder what Hillary charged NAPA for her brilliant acting performance as the freakishly annoying Mother-In-Law?

Oh, that Barney Rubble. What an actor.


Related: "Why Hillary Clinton's Email Habits Annoy So Many People".

Best Cop Car Ever

I'm wagering it's the 2010 Dodge Challenger R/T used by Deputies in Broward County, Florida:

If memory serves, the R/T employs a 425 HP V8. Which would be nice.


Hat tip: BadBlue Cars.

REPORT: Progressive Insurance Driving Tracker Lacks Basic Security, Allows Attacker "Full Control" of Vehicles

Well, this seems rather disturbing.

Corey Thuen, a senior researcher with Digital Bond Labs, reverse engineered Progressive Insurance's SnapShot device -- used in 2 million US vehicles -- and tested it on his 2013 Toyota Tundra truck. After picking apart the hardware and testing its wireless communications while plugged into the vehicle's ODP-II diagnostic port on the car's local network, Thuen found the Progressive dongle doesn't authenticate to the cellular network or encrypt its traffic. The firmware isn't signed or validated, and there's no secure boot function. Also, the device uses the notoriously unsecure FTP protocol.

The device runs on CANbus, the very same network where key vehicle functions -- including braking, park assist steering, and ECU -- are housed. It sends messages over the CAN to request information from the vehicle's computer systems, such as revolutions per minute, to calculate the driver's ultimate insurance policy rate.

"Anything on the bus can talk to anything [else] on the bus," he says "You could do a cellular man-in-the-middle attack" on the device's communications to Progressive, because there's no authentication or encryption. But a MITM would require spoofing a cell tower to capture the traffic, which Thuen did not test.

It would be easy for data to be leaked wirelessly. "What happens if Progressive's servers are compromised?" he says. "An attacker who controls that dongle has full control of the vehicle."

The official response from Xirgo, the manufacturer of the dongle device, and Progressive isn't exactly reassuring.

Xirgo had not responded to Forbes requests for comment. Thuen said he’d tried to disclose his findings to Xirgo but got no response. Progressive said it hadn’t heard from Thuen, but handed this comment via email to Forbes: “The safety of our customers is paramount to us. We are confident in the performance of our Snapshot device – used in more than two million vehicles since 2008 – and routinely monitor the security of our device to help ensure customer safety.

“However, if an individual has credible evidence of a potential vulnerability related to our device, we would prefer that the person would first disclose that potential vulnerability to us so that we could evaluate it and, if necessary, correct it before the vulnerability could be exploited. While it’s unfortunate that Mr. Thuen didn’t share his findings with us privately in advance, we would welcome his confidential and detailed input so that we can properly evaluate his claims.”

One could easily imagine an information warfare operation executed by an adversary of the U.S. that targeted automobiles; said actor could literally paralyze the economy by shutting down traffic across the country.


Hat tip: Real-Time Science & Technology News at BadBlue Tech.

Sorry, Nissan, but you're no Kim Kardashian

Road and Track highlights another corporate Twitter meme gone bad.

Paper set out to “break the Internet” yesterday with its now-infamous cover photo prominently featuring Kim Kardashian’s ass. This, of course, got everyone talking on the (as yet unbroken) Internet, driving Nissan to awkwardly tweet its way in on the joke.

Nissan’s gag plays on the less revealing version of Paper’s two-part cover photo (see them here, and be warned—there’s naked booty ahead). But that’s the problem: the non-naked photo Paper chose for its cover is itself a riff on an older photo, Jean-Paul Goude’s equally NSFW “Champagne Incident”. That makes Nissan’s tweet a joke about a joke—all in the name of riding a dopey hashtag wave.

The GT-R is one of the world's few, true sports cars; as such, its image doesn't deserve to be tarnished with the likes of the least interesting celebrity in the world.


Hat tip: BadBlue Car News.

DUDE: One Possible Replacement for the Hummer Makes the Batmobile Look as Tame as a Kia

Not that there's anything wrong with a Kia, mind you. Just that they're relatively... tame.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency last week posted a video of an advanced concept ground vehicle under development in its Ground X-Vehicle Technologies (GXV-T) program... It's not clear whether the vehicle in question is a light armored car or a tank, but DARPA wants to give it improved survivability through the use of advanced technologies.

The technologies might include visualization systems to provide high-definition, wide-angle views of external conditions for a closed cockpit; path planning, which would display optimal routes to take; terrain classification, which would evaluate the surroundings for optimal travel surfaces; sensors using various technologies to visualize the surroundings and identify and track friends and foes; and autopilot capabilities that would let the driver focus on more-strategic activities.

Cadillac to Throw Down Against Mercedes S-Class and BMW 7-Series

So... despite the government bailout and the recall skulduggery, I hope for the best.

General Motors global product development chief Mark Reuss revealed Tuesday that Cadillac will press ahead with an F-segment sedan built upon a new platform.

The Detroit News reports the new Cadillac will slot above the full-size XTS, and will throw down against the Mercedes S-Class and BMW 7 Series.

Reuss adds that the flagship sedan is important for the brand “if it is to compete as a serious luxury carmaker” in the top luxury segment...

If it's to "compete as a serious luxury carmaker", I'd humbly suggest that moving all manufacturing to right-to-work states might be a good start.


Hat tip: BadBlue Car News.

COLOR ME SHOCKED: Chevy Volt Resale Values Plummet as Lease Returns Hit Market

By Mark Modica

It has been two years since General Motors admitted that there was little demand for the Chevy Volt (as reported here) due to there being "no plug-in market." Their answer was to "create market" to drive sales for the politically popular but economically-nonviable Volt. GM manipulated sales for the Volt through the use of subsidized leases at a time when President Obama's favorite, green wonder-car was being criticized for low sales as it failed to live up to the early hype.

GM was able to use taxpayer money in the form of electric vehicle tax credits to help drive down costs to lessees. Taxpayers chipped in $7,500 for each Chevy Volt placed on the road for terms as low as two years. The taxpayer subsidies, along with inflated residual values and other GM incentives, provided for low monthly lease payments and led to a full two-thirds of all Volt "sales" being attributed to leases. That's about three times the lease rate for the overall industry.

So, what happens to resale values of vehicles with little mass appeal that are forced upon the public with subsidies and manipulated leases? The result was predictable; those leased vehicles are now being returned and resale values are plunging. Having won many awards in the past, the Chevy Volt is now the front-runner to be the recipient of the highest depreciating vehicle award.

A search on the Manheim auction site, a primary indicator of vehicle wholesale value, shows that 81 Chevy Volts, model year 2012, were sold at auction for the week ending August 2^nd. The average price was $14,871 for vehicles that are only two or three years old, primarily coming off of the manipulated leases. That equates to an absurd loss of values for Chevy Volts of about 65% in only two or three years.

I'M SURE THIS HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH OPEN BORDERS: California Claims 9 of Top 10 Cities for Car Thefts

The fact that, for the first time in history, California cities rank in 9 of the top 10 nationally for auto thefts has nothing at all to do with illegal immigration, open borders, sanctuary cities, and criminal gang-bangers entering the country.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau’s (NICB) “Hot Spots” report examines vehicle theft data obtained from the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) for each of the nation’s metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs)...

...Although California tends to place high in this report, this is the first time that California has held nine of the top 10 spots for MSAs with the highest per capita vehicle theft rates. In 2012, it held eight and in 2011, seven.

And, even if illegal immigration had something to do with this uncomfortable fact, they're doing it for love, according to Jeb Bush.

So, by all means, let's pass Amnesty and incentivize even more unvetted individuals to break into the U.S.


Hat tip: BadBlue Money News

TRIVIA QUESTION: How Many Stuntmen Were Killed During the Filming of The Road Warrior?

If you haven't seen the film Road Warrior at least a dozen times, I'm guessing you're a Soviet sleeper spy. The movie depicts a dystopian future in which gasoline is among the most precious of commodities and vicious gangs roam the land. In other words, somewhat like Chicago, but with fewer guns.

In any case, watching the vicious chase scenes, fight scenes, and crazy stunts, I got myself to wondering: how many people were killed filming this insanely awesome movie?

There were rumors that at least one stuntman died, however:

Steve Bisley denied this "myth" in a Japanese motorcycle magazine interview, which was held about ten years ago. He claimed that two stunt men were injured during the film shoot, but none of them sustained serious injuries. He also noted that this "myth" maybe created by the film's distributor as a promotional purpose.

Some cool facts about the set:

Stunt coordinator Max Aspin broke his leg during a stunt and was unable to return to the production...

...There were over 80 custom vehicles made for this movie. More than half got demolished...

For one of the explosions, airlines were notified and all the mines in the area were closed. Director George Miller: “I remember the shockwaves. They were huge.”

There were over 200 stunts performed in this movie...

Costume designer Norma Moriceau was inspired by an S&M leather shop near her home in Sydney.

Since it's on the Internets, all of this has gotta be true.


Hat tip: BadBlue Car News.

PREPARE TO LOSE YOUR MIND: 5 Baddest Cars for Father's Day 2015

Daddy like.

SUPRA...

"...In case you were wondering, yes, this is the new Toyota Supra."

"...There's a Formula-1 style steering wheel, while a colour head-up display allows the driver to keep their eyes on the road at all times..."