"Wow! Is that the new electric sports car?" That's what the excited young driver of a big Ford F-150 with a biodiesel sticker ran up to ask just after I'd parked the latest version of Mazda's RX-8 sports car, the R3. The fashionably scruffy passer-by obviously hadn't seen the chromed exhaust pipes or heard the engine, and I'll never know ..

Porsche says the Cayenne SUV gets a new edition for the 2010 model year, and it's inspired by a trans-Russian rally. The 2010 Porsche Cayenne S Transsyberia shows up at dealer next spring, derived in part from the racing trucks that ply a 4,400-mile route across Russia and Mongolia every spring for two weeks. Porsche's won the race three ..

Cautious in its decision to go diesel in the U.S., Subaru is releasing its new 2.0-liter turbodiesel horizontally opposed (boxer) four-cylinder in the Euro-spec Forester and Impreza, which will be previewed at the Paris auto show. European buyers will be able to get their hands on the Forester later this month but will have to wait for the ..

This weekend's chatter about a new Volkswagen Microbus erupting from the company's new Tennessee plant is fun reading, but don't count on a new minivan from VW anytime soon. A report in an Australian newspaper speculated that a new Microbus for the U.S. market only would be coming from VW's new Chattanooga plant, and our new favorite blog ..

The last time BMW installed a four-cylinder powerplant in a 3-Series, a Clinton was in the White House--and not just as a dinner guest. With fuel prices at semipermanent highs, BMW USA is considering adding a four-banger back to its lineup in its 3- and 1-series models, so says Edmunds Inside Line. Far from the lightweight 2002 that is their ..

Audi massages and tweaks its A3 for the 2009 model year with a wider application of all-wheel drive and an available adaptive suspension. On the mechanical front, quattro all-wheel drive, previously available only with the uplevel 3.2 liter FSI V-6, is now available with the base 2.0T engine with the brilliant S-Tronic double clutch ..

In a year that saw sales of Honda's own Civic rise sharply while the forever top-selling Ford F-150's sales plummeted, the Japanese automaker has benefited hugely from the rise in gas prices. Honda's CR-V is a prime example of the right car for the right times--which might explain why, in 2009, the only change to the fuel-sipping crossover is ..

Is HUMMER for sale? Will the Camaro have a turbo four? Does GM expect a government bailout? Answers to these and other GM-centric speculations may ostensibly be found - or e-mails and questions sent - at gmfactsandfiction.com. In what appears part rumor-busting, part proactive PR spin machine, the Web site attempts to allow GM to speak on ..

Continuing its sales onslaught from South Korea, and proving the company is paying much more attention to American tastes, Kia's brand-new Borrego full size SUV earned five of five stars for all seating positions in both frontal and side impacts in the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's crash testing. This was the vehicle's ..

How do you need to prepare your car for a hurricane--and how do you use it to get out of harm's way quickly? Matt Hardigree over at Jalopnik did a great job this week of laying out the basics in a service piece that didn't once mention Lindsay Lohan, which is sort of a mixed blessing in our book.  Otherwise, total golf clap, Matt. However, ..

In yet another computerized bit of mobile wizardry that is sure to take drivers' eyes off the road, a Mac aficionado has developed software for the iPhone called Mobileyes. The application helps commuters avoid rush hour traffic by viewing live traffic camera feeds on the fly and right on the screen of an iPhone. Currently, the application ..

If you're a good, fast writer with a keen grasp of cars and what makes them exciting to Web readers, TheCarConnection.com wants you. TheCarConnection.com family is about to expand in a big way, and that expansion means we're looking for new bloggers to help us grow an empire of sites, small and large, niche-driven and consumer-oriented ..

Desperation among truckers in the day of near-$5-per-gallon diesel fuel is tangible. But since when did Mr. Wizard drive a truck? As reported by the New York Daily News, Orlando Payano, a Queens truck driver, rigged a cable from his truck's cigarette lighter to his license plate, which he mounted on a spring-activated hinge that allowed it ..

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) says small cars can suffer some expensive damage in very low-speed driving. The IIHS conducted a battery of tests on 20 small cars that found fault with many in the test, with 3- and 6-mph simulated impacts resulting in damages totaling nearly one-third of the vehicle price in some ..

Australians John and Helen Taylor are one frugal couple. In 2006, they set a Guinness World Record by driving around the world using 24 tanks of fuel in a Volkswagen Golf. They hope to best the current U.S. cross-country miles-per-gallon record on a drive across America with one of VW's newly released 50-state-compliant clean diesel Volkswagen ..