Archive for the ‘fuel economy’ Category

Vehicle history provider Carfax has partnered with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to introduce a new Clunker Check service.

The simple Carfax query page allows you, merely by entering the vehicle identification number (VIN) of the suspect vehicle to check whether it was written off for salvage as part of the federal government's Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), better known as the Cash for Clunkers program, earlier this year.

The Clunker Check service is free, and independent of the company's Vehicle History Reports. And it includes the VINs of all vehicles traded-in as part of the program.

In less than 30 days this...

Creeping along from red light to red light on your way from a major sports event or concert, or stopped by every red light on the way home late at night, on empty roads, you've probably wondered why traffic lights in the U.S. aren't a little more adaptable.

The short answer: they're not at all smart, and at least here in the U.S. they're horribly outdated. The typical U.S. traffic signaling system is (sorry, fellow GenXers) 30 to 40 years old. And the result of these inflexible geezers signaling traffic is a lot of needless idling and the lack of easy adaptability in most cases to either sudden events like traffic accidents or even daily...

We’ve been here before. The government mandates more fuel-efficient vehicles across the board, yet the American public continues to gravitate toward what’s big and powerful.

Barring this era of greater responsibility and restraint, which might pass like a fleeting fancy with the recession, why not pick the bigger or more powerful car, we say?

A lot of things are different this time around, though. Perhaps most remarkably, quite a few executives of automakers and major auto-supplier companies are voicing out in favor of higher fuel taxes—of more rigorous regulation of what types of vehicles can be built and sold—as a way of reducing our...