Archive for the ‘2009’ Category

We hardly need mention that The Lost Symbol, the long-awaited sequel to The Da Vinci Code, is now out and available at millions of bookstores and online for your reading pleasure.

We do feel compelled to point out, though, that Dan Brown doesn't know much about cars. Or at least about Smart cars. Specifically, the Smart ForTwo two-seat city car, launched in the States for 2008 but available in Europe since 1998. In chapter 32 of The Da Vinci Code, Brown writes:

The vehicle was easily the smallest car Langdon had ever seen. "SmartCar," she said. "A hundred kilometers to the liter."

Yes, well, where to begin? The proper name of the car is the ...

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air has been crashed into a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu—in a head-on frontal-offset test, at 40 mph.

The result is not only interesting viewing for our inner gawkers; it's a lesson in how far occupant protection has advanced over the years.

Watching the modern Malibu, the hood area deforms significantly but the passenger area looks almost entirely intact. Shift your eyes over to the 1959 Chevy and it’s the stuff of old highway-safety and shock-and-scare films, just melodrama and implied gore. There’s plenty of car gore though, with the Bel...

Three new sets of crash-test results released late this week by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) appear to leave very little, if any, room for improvement. All three of these vehicles—the 2010 Dodge Journey, 2010 Lincoln MKT, and 2010 Mazda Mazda3—achieved top ratings in all the major categories and were named Top Safety Picks by the IIHS.

The Dodge Journey, a crossover vehicle that had been introduced for 2009, hadn’t yet been tested by the IIHS, so results apply to both 2009 and 2010. And they’re pretty much perfect across the board. The Journey SXT all-wheel-drive model tested got top ‘good’ scores in all three primary...