Distance driving can be mind-numbingly boring, but looking away from the road to text or change songs is a life-or-death gamble. Plus, buttons embedded in the wheel only control a fraction of a car’s functionality. Now German researchers have a wheel prototype that puts everything within reach — no glancing needed.

“If you have gestures on the steering wheel, you spend more time looking at the street,” said Albrecht Schmidt, a computer science professor specializing in human-computer interaction at the University of Stuttgart in Germany who worked on the prototype.

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Toyota says it is recalling a total of more than 1 million vehicles, including some late-model luxury cars, due to a pair of safety problems involving defective airbags and faulty windshield wipers.

The announcement comes during the same week the maker confirmed it regained its title in 2012 as the world’s best-selling automotive manufacturer.  But Toyota also had more vehicles recalled than any other automaker operating in the U.S. last year – the third time it has captured that dubious distinction in four years.

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Not that I would not love to own any of them.  It’s long been known as “America’s sports car.” But as Chevrolet gets ready to roll out the latest version of the Corvette, that’s clearly no longer good enough for the General Motors division.

When the all-new model, known to aficionados as the C7, debuts at the Detroit Auto Show next January, Chevy is clearly hoping to deliver the sort of sports car that can challenge global leaders like Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini.

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from the 60′s!!

This is a first for me!  A published poem about a junkyard! For Hoppe, that means the poems in his newly released book Diamond Plate (Obsolete Press, $10.00) should appeal as much to the mechanics he grew up with in the Michigan Rust Belt as to his peers in the Austin poetry scene. Hoppe will read poems from Diamond Plate Wednesday at an Austin Community College event that is free and open to the public.

Having worked a bevy of blue collar jobs, actively participated in the punk poetry and ‘zine scene, converted to Buddhism, raised a son and joined the English faculty at Austin Community College, Hoppe gives off the impression of a man whose eclectic life has mellowed to a gentler rhythm.

The poem “Junkyard Thaw” does just that. “Today’s adventure / finds me at the junkyard / where icicles give car grilles / vicious fangs,” he writes, capturing the surreal beauty of abandoned car parts in a section of the book called “The Persistence of Machines.”

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Many DYI’ers want the option of pulling their own parts from auto salvage yards for even more savings!!

It takes a lot for an industry with more than 8,000 businesses and $22 billion in annual sales to change direction. That’s what’s happening now in automotive recycling, where self-serve salvage yards that permit customers to remove their own parts from scrapped vehicles are beginning to supplant traditional full-service operations.

Thus far, there are only about 200 pure self-service yards, estimated Dimitri Gerontis, principal at S3 Software Solutions, a Salt Lake City provider of software for self-service auto salvage operators. “But there are probably upwards of 400 to 500 of what would be considered a hybrid yard, bordering between self-service and full-service,” Gerontis said. “And everyone’s looking in that direction.”

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Hyundai Motor Co is recalling some Santa Fe SUVs and Sonata sedans for separate air bag issues, U.S. safety regulators said Monday.

In the United States, Hyundai is recalling 199,118 Santa Fe SUVs from the model years 2007 to 2009 that were made from April 2006 through July 7, 2008, because the front passenger air bag may not deploy in a crash, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a filing.

Separately, Hyundai is recalling 22,513 Sonata sedans in the United States for the model years 2012-2013, made from January to June this year, because the side air bag may inflate, to the surprise of the driver.

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This is the kind of negotiating that a car buyer could get used to. Through Monday, eBay is selling at least 10 new cars per day in a very unique way: The asking price for each vehicle starts at MSRP—and then drops by $500 every hour until somebody buys.

Starting on Thursday at noon ET, eBay Motors launched what it’s calling a “New Car Revolution Devolution Sale.” It’s an auction, though not like the typical eBay auction in which prices rise with each new bid.

Instead, prices get cheaper the longer the auction goes on. Each car is first offered at the sticker price, and each hour that passes in which no one purchases the car, the price is lowered by $500. The process will continue until someone clicks the “Buy It Now” button. By 3 p.m. on Thursday, for example, a 2012 Ford Escape was listed at $24,452—$2,000 less than the initial price ($26,452)—because no one had bitten yet.

Toyota has long been the world’s largest automaker, but it might not be the most valuable. A new report from market research group Millward Brown suggests that BMW has overtaken Toyota as the automotive sector’s most valuable brand. The new ranking comes from a report called BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands.

To determine brand value, Millward Brand takes into account earnings from branded products, the value of the brand itself, and how much impact the brand has on a company’s earnings. The company also interviews over two million consumers in more than 30 countries to help determine their impressions of some 50,000 product brands.

The study says that BMW’s brand value rose ten percent year-over-year to $24.6 billion, while Toyota’s brand value sank ten percent to $21.8 billion. That’s something of a shake-up: Toyota was ranked as the most valuable brand from 2006 to 2009, and in 2011. BMW temporarily nabbed the top spot in 2010.

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