Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

Call us crazy, but if someone took a mobile phone, a briefcase, or a handheld GPS navigation system out of our car--even if it were unlocked--we'd call that theft.

The police in London's Richmond neighborhood take a different view.

When they see valuables left in plain sight in unlocked cars, they've been removing them and leaving notes for drivers to retrieve them at Twickenham police station.

Police say it's a tactic to tackle thefts from cars, which have risen 40 percent in the last year. And they say just 25 cars were checked, with only a single item removed thus far.

Still, British legal experts say  the practice is dubious, and the...

Cars appear in most movies, but movies about cars often don't do well. Tucker: The Man and His Dream, for instance, Francis Ford Coppola's well-reviewed 1988 biography of Preston Tucker and his effort to start a car company, flopped at the box office.

Nonetheless, Time Inc Studios is pressing on with its plans for a movie on the "later life" of former General Motors executive and car company founder John DeLorean, father of the 1964 Pontiac GTO as well as the brushed stainless-steel sports car with gull-wing doors that bears his name.

DeLorean's life certainly has movie qualities to it. The executive, who posed shirtless and lifting weights...

Last Thursday was the 50th birthday of the three-point safety harness, invented by Volvo's first safety engineer, Nils Bohlin. After we ran an item to commemorate the event, we got a nice note from the UK offering us a video clip with some Volvo safety history.

The video turns out to have wonderful historic footage of how safety testing used to be done, back in the old days. Note, for instance, the extremely apprehensive look on the face of one test driver (around 0:15 into the video).

At about the 1:35 mark, you'll find out why he looks that way: Test drivers belted themselves into Volvo 544s and actually drove them onto ramps to flip them...