It has been a long time since anyone had to settle for the retrofitted gasoline engines that General Motors Corp. passed off as diesels in the 1970s fuel crisis, but that image lingers.The technology has taken such a black eye from its dirty past...
MIAMI BEACH - It's appropriate that the folks at General Motors Corp.'s Pontiac-GMC Div. chose the trendy, hard-packed sands of south Florida to put a bunch of fashion-deprived journalists in the new 1999 Grand Am.It's important to look good down...
Since the appearance of the first automotive internal-combustion engine, there's been an ongoing quest to obtain readily available fuel to pour in and burn.Going into the second century of internal combustion, nothing's really changed except our...
We've been told, in not so many words, that EVs will be the savior of the 21st century, a virtual modern-day Messiah. Maybe we shouldn't be so ready to accept on blind faith.We've been told that in the battle to preserve the environment, all...
The drawings and one-of-a-kind prototypes one sees of alternative "engines" like fuel cells, gas turbines, flywheels and fancy electric motors usually are pretty and impressive. That these alternative engines exist almost exclusively as drawings...
If director Mike Nichols were to write a sequel to his 1969 classic The Graduate, the career-counseling mantra offered to a present-day Benjamin Braddock might well be "fuel cells" instead of "plastics."In less than a year, this formerly esoteric...
VW's Passat: a diesel delightPenny-pincher alert: It has cost WAW about $700 in fuel to drive almost 30,000 miles (48,280 km); assuming $1.10 per gallon for diesel fuel, Volkswagen's Passat TDI travels a mile for just half a nickel's worth of fuel...
When Richard Snell became the new chief executive of Federal-Mogul Corp. in November 1996, he arrived with a bitter pill for the company to swallow.In the end, the medicine he prescribed would not only save the automotive supplier from a painful...