Spied: new mid-size Jaguar with stunning looks. All welcome to apply. Please. Soon.

DaimlerChrysler's smart car is a star again. But after appearing alongside Tom Hanks and that awful hair in The Da Vinci Code, shouldn't it find a better agent?

Friends of Ford, be encouraged. The Edge is the real deal. We'll take ours turbocharged via SVT, please.

Elsewhere in not-so-good Ford news, the founder of Chick-fil-A is mourning the Taurus and celebrating his unbelievable waffle fries in one fell swoop. Really, will the Koreans at Kia be able to top this?

Los Angeles' auto show wants to upstage Detroit. One way they're doing it? A Design Challenge that pits automakers against each other and with the environment. Check out the way-cool VW Nanospyder sketches and you'll see why we're ready for 2050.

Lexus wants you to be in on the hybrid living lifestyle. Think passive-solar granite flooring and recycled Crane stationery, if you can stand yourself for knowing about them already.

Finally this week, we're so damn glad to be done with all the BMW 3-Series Convertible spy shots. Now we can totally focus on getting the new Benz C-Class out in public and shutting down that spy-shot money machine.

"Here's an extra ten euros. Make sure it's washed and if there's more than ten miles on it when I get back, I'm sending Sister Mister T after you."

Eh what, guv'na? There's a new London taxi hitting the streets! Anyone betting on how long it takes Ford or the Chinese to buy up the rights to it?

Like we predicted this summer, the recent drop in gas prices is turning into a rebound in pickup and SUV sales. Nutty Americans, our memory's about as long as our patience.

We spotted the next Jeep Liberty last week, and there's word a full canvas top is on the options list. While they're at it, why not throw in a HEMI? See item #3.

The Prius and Civic hybrids topped the EPA's list of fuel-efficient vehicles. In an unknown coda to the survey, the very same vehicles also topped the list of those parked at the civic center during the annual DragonCon geekfest.

Two for one: buy Land Rover, get Jaguar free! Or something like that.




In a jet-lagged fit of pique, Mark Fields falls off-message and insists that Ford must "bust a move" back to profitability.

And finally this week, TheCarConnection expresses sympathy in advance for long-suffering Tigers fans who must sit out the next few home games in 40-degree weather. Hey, at least you're not in Tampa Bay! Wait...that doesn't sound quite right.

It’s no contest: former child star Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense) has pleaded no contest to drunk driving and drug charges in a July 20 incident in which he razed a mailbox. The 18-year-old Osment, an Academy Award nominee and blower of a 0.16, will undergo 60 hours of rehab and will pay a $1500 fine for the incident, during which cops found a stash of pot in his car. Now, we’re not ones to make fun of people with car wrecks and injuries — okay, maybe we are, because Osment was driving a ’95 Saturn and hit a mailbox. A little career advice: take the best from Lindsay Lohan and Todd Bridges and roll your Benz SL on the way to holding up a Blockbuster store. It’s a great career move — and you can write it all off on taxes as a DVD signing!

From the Playboy Mansion to Vatican City: Volkswagen’s long, strange trip is making a special stop this week to the House of Pope for a special delivery blessed, perhaps, by God himself. (How would we know? We’re Buddhist.) Today in Italy, Volkswagen Chairman Bernd Pischetsrieder handed over the keys to a specially outfitted Phaeton sedan to his holiness, Pope Benedict XVI. A long-wheelbase car, the Phaeton gets black paint and a 450-hp W-12 engine. Undisclosed “comfort and privacy” equipment is included, and we’re betting all our Mehmet Ali Agca playing cards they’re not talking about an Xbox. Completing this wandering entry, we’ll conclude with a one-liner you’ll never hear at VW HQ again: Benedict? Heck, I nearly broke it. Thanks, Mom. You’re a classy dame for that one.

Sometime next week, the Ford Taurus will roll into history. Another instance of Ford dumping a good nameplate, perhaps — and 21 years of history and seven million copies shuffle off into memory with it.

Count me as one of the people double-whammied by the Taurus’ departure. As a former Taurus owner, I have no regrets over the demise of the once most popular four-door in America.

Tauruses had terrible automatic transmission durability, and when we sent ours to its final resting place — CarMax — it was one of the stricken, shifting with great hesitation. But I didn’t have any. The egg-on-wheels tumblehome meant I hit my head every time on the roofline. The seats stank — a weird chemical smell that came from time passing, not from human interaction. The cupholder had long ago broken and a replacement part was worth more than 50 Starbucks visits.

I left the Taurus unenchanted, but it didn’t start that way. In 1991 when I started writing about cars, some would say professionally, the Taurus was being rebaked. That was the model year that the Taurus would become the best-selling car in the U.S., with more than 410,000 copies sold. And it was a decent makeover: a new dash for airbags, a new front end for smoothness, but no sign yet of the over-ovoid silliness that plagued our 1996 model and hundreds of thousands after it. Not until 2000 did Ford correct those bad styling choices executed under Alex Trotman in 1996 — and by then it was too late.

The other stinging blow is to my hometown. When Ford closes up shop next week, it loses a WWII-era plant in Atlanta with one of the company’s highest quality, most productive workforces. Where’s the logic in losing that? It’s a slap that makes no sense to a town that once revolved around its two big employers, Ford and Delta. The plant site might well be absorbed into our behemoth airport, which lies just to its west. Or it could be sold off to real estate developers. But most of us will remember Hapeville as “where Ford used to be.”

Ford’s made plenty of mistakes with the Taurus. It’s still the company’s best-selling passenger car and yet that alone isn’t enough to save it from extinction. Styling killed it with retail buyers. Marketing killed it for them, too. And the Camry and Accord killed it in reliability and progressive image.

But it didn’t have to be this way.