Automobiles

Sputnic A German art collective has devised Racer 0.2, a real-life version of the Wipeout driving video game.

With apologies to Gran Tursimo, Forza Motorsport, Project Gotham and any number of hyperrealistic, console-based racing simulators and video games, arguably none channels the visceral thrill of hurtling around a course like the futuristic Wipeout series. Now, a German art collective has rendered that thrill tactile, using defiantly analog components: cardboard, glue and vintage-video-arcade kitsch.

Called (with a wink) Racer 0.2, the project is the creation of three media artists collectively known as Sputnic.

Sputnic A camera on a radio-controlled car delivers images to an arcade console.

The group envisioned a race simulator whereby a gamer sits inside an Out Run-style driver’s cockpit and feeds steering, braking and acceleration inputs to a radio-controlled, 1:28 scale racer positioned on an elevated cardboard course. The vehicle then projects its movements onto the game cockpit’s video screen via an onboard camera. The driver sits with his or her back to the actual course, a layout that gives Racer 0.2 a conceptual twist by treating reality and virtual reality as manipulable constructs.

The project can also be interpreted as a hoot.

“It’s like being a child again,” said Nicolai Skopalik, a Sputnic conspirator, reached by phone at the collective’s base in Krefeld, Germany. “We all dreamed of having something like this back then. It’s a wishful childhood dream.”

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This video is a trailer for the coming American version of “Top Gear,” a television series on the History Channel (for some reason) this fall.

It doesn’t veer far from the formula that’s made the original British version a huge success and BitTorrent favorite around the world. There are three hosts of various sizes and body types, driving fast cars, skidding and smoking tires, all the while hollering and interjecting hyperbolic quips, as if they were in an action movie.

“This car is determined to kill me,” says Tanner Foust, a professional stunt car driver and race car driver, as he pilots a roadster in one clip.

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Two consumer safety groups are asking the Federal Trade Commission to order Enterprise Rent-A-Car to start fixing every vehicle with a safety recall before renting them to consumers. The groups say the request highlights the lack of a requirement that rental companies must fix recalled vehicles before renting them.

Houck family Jacqueline Houck, left, and her sister, Raechel, died in a car on which Enterprise Rent-A-Car had not carried out a safety recall.

Houck family A PT Cruiser rented by Raechel had a fire in the engine compartment and then collided with a tractor-trailer.

The request comes about three months after Enterprise admitted in a California court that its failure to fix a Chrysler PT Cruiser was responsible for the deaths of two California women when it caught fire and crashed.

Shortly after that admission — and a $15 million award by a jury — Enterprise issued a statement in which the company noted its regret over the deaths but also indicated it might not immediately carry out recalls it did not consider major safety problems.

That makes it clear that the F.T.C. must act, according to Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety of Sacramento and the Center for Auto Safety of Washington, which filed the request on Monday. They were joined by Carol Houck, the mother of the two women who died.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car is part of Enterprise Holdings, which also includes Alamo Rent A Car and National Car Rental. Enterprise Holdings says those three brands “collectively lead the car rental industry with more than a third of all airport business in the U.S. and Canada.”

Under federal law, auto dealers are not allowed to sell a new vehicle without carrying out a recall, said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. The danger to consumers is that there are no such restrictions on rental-car companies, he said.

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Kevin Smith Lotus says it plans to build 25 examples of the Exos Type 125 racecar. The price tag on each: $1 million.

This week, the rarest of Delahayes, Ferraris and Jaguars will adorn California’s Monterey peninsula for the annual collector car auctions, monopolizing desire wherever they turn up. Amid such magnetic company, only a handful of automakers each year elect to unveil new models — and even then they typically exile themselves to the Pebble Beach Golf Club’s concept lawn, a roped-off refuge removed from the withering glare of flawless Bugatti Type 57C’s.

Lotus Cars, however, appears unfazed by the pomp, using the Monterey auctions to stage three product debuts leading up to this weekend’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance — most notably that of an all-new track car, the Exos Type 125, which broke cover last weekend at the nearby Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

The carbon-fiber racer, limited to 25 examples and only available directly from Lotus’s Norfolk, England, factory beginning next spring, is priced at $1 million. It is powered by a Cosworth V-8 rated at 640 horsepower, and weighs less than 1,500 pounds.

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5:03 p.m. | Updated

Gary Numan, a pioneer in New Wave music, scored a hit with the synth-driven song “Cars” in 1979. The song was based on a couple of simple repeating melodies. Mr. Numan was recently able to reproduce them with car horns in a viral video for DieHard, the battery company.

In the video, Mr. Numan in all his goth glory — black jacket, jeans, boots, hair and mascara — stands in a cubic outline of fluorescent tubes, which serve as an homage to the pyramid of light featured in the original music video. In front of him are 24 cars without batteries. After a stern glance, he proceeds to tap the keyboard, and the car horns (which have been tuned) blast out the familiar song.

If you’re interested in how this was accomplished, you can read this post on the Make blog written by Adam Sadowsky, Eric Gradman and Todd Taber of Syyn Labs, the creative engineering firm behind the video. The video was directed by James Frost, who also worked with Syyn Labs on the celebrated music video for “This Too Shall Pass” by the band OK Go.

The Make blog post gets pretty technical and involved. Fortunately, Syyn Labs also created a “Making of” video:

For months, President Obama has said he doesn’t want to hand the keys to the economy back to the Republicans. At a fund-raiser in Austin, Tex., on Monday, he repeated a punch line he’s begun using recently, comparing the political parties to the gears on a car.

“You want to go forward, what do you do? You put it in ‘D.’ When you go backward, what do you do? You put it in ‘R,’ ” he said, according to the Washington Post.

He added, “I’m just sayin’ that’s not a coincidence.”

The comparison seemed so obvious, perhaps even too obvious. In fact it was so ripe for the picking that it’s hard to believe that no Democrat had used it before — or had they?

Back in May Iowa’s Democratic governor, Chet Culver, told the same joke, reported Yahoo News. Mr. Culver said that “all you need to know about who to vote for you learned in driver’s ed: Put the state in ‘D’ to go forward or in ‘R’ to go backwards.”

But the joke goes even further back. BarryPopik.com traced it to the 2000 election, when the driving analogy was an oft-used battle cry for Al Gore’s presidential bid.

During the Democratic National Convention that year, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said “All you ever needed to know about this election, you’ve learned from driving. If you want to go backward, you put it in R. But if you want to go forward, you put it in D.”

Despite awareness campaigns from child safety advocates and substantial media coverage, the number of children dying in hot vehicles has continued to rise.

Janette Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars.org, said 28 children had succumbed to hyperthermia in automobiles through the end of July. Ms. Fennell said that number was a record for the first seven months of any calendar year.

While about half of those deaths occurred because children were left behind in parked cars — often inadvertently — the rest had come because children entered parked cars and then fell asleep or couldn’t open the door.

Like a number of other organizations, KidsAndCars.org offers recommendations intended to help prevent child hyperthermia deaths. The suggestions include keeping vehicles locked at all times, never leaving children alone in or around cars, and putting a reminder on the floor in the back seat when transporting a child — something you’ll need when you reach your destination, like your cellphone, handbag, employee ID or briefcase.

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John Harrelson/Getty Images Juan Pablo Montoya, left, leads Marcos Ambrose around a turn during the Sprint Cup Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at Watkins Glen International in New York.

After falling short of winning the last two races, Juan Pablo Montoya finally ended a 113-race winless streak on Sunday by winning the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at The Glen race at Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images Montoya broke a 113-race winless streak on Sunday. His other win also came on a road course.

“It’s about time,” said Montoya, whose only other win in the Sprint Cup also came on a road course. On Sunday, Montoya led 74 out of 90 laps and finished nearly five seconds in front of Kyle Busch. Marcus Ambrose was third.

Montoya, a former Formula One driver, has improved his oval racing skills, and recently he came close twice to winning only to be foiled by poor pit strategy at the end of the race.

“We’ve lost a lot of them, gave away a lot of them,” Montoya said. “It gets frustrating, everybody fighting. There’s so many things I have to learn. I still make a lot of mistakes.” (The Associated Press)

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Honda is recalling an additional 384,000 2003-4 models after a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into whether two earlier recalls for the same problem covered all the defective vehicles.

The new recall covers some 2003 Accords and Civics as well as some 2003-4 Elements. The problem is that a defect in the shift interlock system could allow the vehicle to be turned off and the key removed without the vehicle’s automatic transmission being in Park. That could allow the vehicle to roll away.

Two previous recalls,  in 2003 and 2005, were for the same problem. The 2003 recall covered 570,000 vehicles and included the 1998–99 Honda Accord, the 1999 Odyssey and Acura TL as well as the 1997-99 Acura CL. The 2005 recall covered almost 487,000 vehicles and included the 1999-2002 Accord, the 1997–2001 Prelude and 1999–2000 Acura TL.

The total number of vehicles in the recall for the defect is 1.4 million. A Honda spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Late in 2008, the safety agency opened a “recall query” to determine whether the earlier recalls covered all the vehicles with the shift interlock problem, because consumers whose vehicles were not covered by the 2003 and 2005 recalls complained about the problem.

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From our colleagues at Business Day:

DETROIT — Chrysler said on Monday that it narrowed its loss in the second quarter to $172 million and recorded its second consecutive operating profit as sales and revenue increased, reports Nick Bunkley in The New York Times.

The company earned $183 million in operating income, which excludes one-time charges, an improvement of $40 million over the first quarter. The overall loss, primarily attributable to interest payments on Chrysler’s government loans, was $25 million less than in the first quarter and far smaller than its fourth quarter loss of $2.7 billion.

Revenue rose 8.2 percent from the first quarter to $10.48 billion. Results in the years before Chrysler’s April 2009 bankruptcy filing are not public.

Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance Best of Show in 2009 was a 1937 Horch.

Car collectors and aficionados will cast their eyes toward the Monterey Peninsula of California in the coming week, as the annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance and a host of shows, races and auctions take place. In Sunday’s Automobiles section, Jerry Garrett writes about driving three collectible classics that will be auctioned next week.

The Times will have more coverage from these events in the days ahead, with reports from the auctions and the concours. And we’d like to see and hear what’s happening from readers who will be there.

You can submit photos here. We’d love to see your pictures from any of the events.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into an old problem: failing ignition coils on Volkswagens.

The agency says the investigation is looking at an estimated 199,000 Passats from the 2002-3 model years after receiving 16 reports that faulty ignition coils caused either fires or a loss of power on 4- and 6-cylinder engines.

“The vehicle was traveling at 60 m.p.h. on the road and then it started to shake and lost power,” one owner complained to the agency. “The incident nearly caused an accident as others vehicles were trying to avoid collision with this car. The defect was the ignition coil for cylinder number 2.”

The agency says some consumers complained that even the replacement ignition coils failed.

The Passat investigation is called a preliminary evaluation. If N.H.T.S.A. finds evidence for concern, a more serious engineering analysis would be undertaken.

Kerry Christopher, a Volkswagen spokesman, said the automaker was aware of the new investigation, took the matter seriously and was cooperating.

Ignition coils produce the high-voltage current that fires the spark plugs, and VW uses one for each spark plug. If a coil fails, the spark plug will not fire and the engine will lose power.

In 2003, Volkswagen had a serious problem with ignition coils on many of its most popular models, including the Passat.

Some owners complained that the automaker was not responsive enough to a serious problem. The automaker denied that and said it was doing the best it could with a limited supply of spares.

A N.H.T.S.A. spokeswoman said at the time that the agency was “monitoring” the issue.

Volkswagen carried out a service campaign to replace the faulty coils. Such a campaign is less onerous and less expensive to an automaker than a recall, which has strict requirements and legal penalties for failing to meet them.

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General Motors’ sale of Saab to Spyker Cars, a small sports car company, was a first-class cliffhanger, and it wasn’t clear until the very last minute that the deal would go through. But Spyker made a final $24 million payment for the Swedish automaker last month, and now Saab can turn its attention to producing cars and, it hopes, making a profit.

Saab’s leadership is talking numbers, specifically how many cars it will need to sell annually to be in the black.

Spyker’s chief executive, Victor Muller, said that Saab’s break-even point would be 85,000 cars worldwide by 2012. That’s down from 120,000 units while Saab was under G.M. control. But Automotive News says Mr. Muller’s number is “misleading,” because it is only possible if Saab uses expensive technology licensed from G.M.

Because the company’s product line has been stagnant, it is pinning future volume projections on the sale of new models, some of which are far from production. And it will be an uphill climb: Saab produced 94,751 cars worldwide in 2008, but only 20,791 last year.

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The 2010 Hyundai Elantra tops the Consumer Reports list for best small car for teenagers returning to school.

If you think it is easy to recommend the top vehicles for teenagers, you are so wrong.

Witness recent recommendations from Consumer Reports and Kelley Blue Book, which both have come out with lists of the best vehicles for teenagers. The only vehicle on both lists is the Mazda 3.

Perhaps this is not surprising given the criteria for choosing the vehicles.

Kelley Blue Book editors chose fun and affordable vehicles. Their choices combined new and used vehicles and kept key financial criteria in mind. The 2006 Honda Civic topped its list.  By contrast, the top three small cars in Consumer Reports’ list are the Hyundai Elantra SE, Mazda 3 and Scion xB. Consumer Reports also has separate lists for family sedans and small S.U.V.’s.

Consumer Reports made its picks based heavily on safety and reliability and mentioned that car crashes are the number one killer of teenagers. The magazine got some negative feedback on its blog about the cost of its recommended vehicles, so it came out with another list of older vehicles that were more affordable. Because the second list contains some 8- to 10-year-old BMWs (ranging in price from $6,100 to $9,600) and an eight-year-old Lexus for $9,600, readers pointed out possible issues with expensive repair and maintenance, and several people also called the choices “stupid” and “absurd.”

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- The incremental confirmation of Valentino Rossi joining Ducati for 2011 continues … (Cycle World)

- Dan Bateman, a self-described road warrior and intrepid commuter, offers some tips for riding through downhill curves. He is not a fan of trail braking (at least for the average rider):

There is a finite amount of traction available at any given time. That traction needs to be split between side force, braking force, driving force and traction reserve. Using traction in one place takes away from the traction available for the other needs.

This is just one of several useful instructional posts from Mr. Bateman, who teaches riding courses. (Musings of an Intrepid Commuter)

- What do motorcycle ads in India look like? Like motorcycle ads in America, mostly. Let’s just say that subtlety is a minor part in both. Bajaj’s 180-cc Avenger cruiser, for example, is presented with the slogan “Feel like God.” (The Bike Chronicles of India)

- On “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart and Liev Schreiber reminisced about the time that Mr. Stewart rode on the, uh, passenger seat on Mr. Schreiber’s motorcycle. Mr. Schreiber also said that he had to get rid of his motorcycle because he has children. He now rides a scooter. (The Scooter Scoop)

- At last, someone has published an English translation of a German behavioral psychologist’s book about motorcycles! In English, it’s called “The Upper Half of the Motorcycle: On the Unity of Rider and Machine.” According to the description on Amazon.com, Bernt Spiegel, the author, “draws on anthropology, psychology, biology, physics and other disciplines to analyze the theory and function of the man-machine unit.” There’s even a bemused review by Glenn W. over at Web Bike World:

If I knew what this book is about, I’d tell you — believe me I would!

So consider that before putting Mr. Spiegel’s book on your wish list. The Amazon description, meanwhile, evokes Kraftwerk, the innovative German band whose 1978 album was called “The Man-Machine” — inspired in part by the creators’ lengthy, meditative bicycle rides.

- In other bemusement news, a neural psychology experiment at the University of Pennsylvania seems to demonstrate that “viewing pictures of motorcycles activates a portion of the brain associated with seeking rewards such as sex, drugs and monetary reward.” Not sure whether that means that clicking through photo galleries of bikes (e.g., the Honda VFR1200F) can get you in trouble at work. (HFL)