General Motors has played with cylinder deactivation technology since the days of Carter, sometimes successful, sometimes with more disastrous results.

With Tula Technology’s Dynamic Skip Fire, GM is banking on the former.

Speed cameras are the bane of motorists, a needed safety measure for road safety advocates, and a boon to government coffers ( just ask Waldo, Fla.). Motorists in New South Wales, Australia, however, have decided to fly the two-fingered salute the only way they know how: By popping the hood.

It’s official: As of this week, select Tesla Model S owners will be able to swap battery packs in a pilot program along the route between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

This Saturday will be one of the most brutal shopping days of the year, as everyone will be trying to find that last-minute Christmas gift for their loved ones. The last thing anyone needs is to try to figure out where to park, wasting precious shopping minutes while circling the lot in their mythical brown diesel manual RWD wagon.

For those in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, there is a solution.

Plug-in vehicles may be doing well as of late in the sales game, but a study by The Research Capsule says their gameplay needs more work.

Live and drive in Iowa? The state’s DOT will soon have an app that will act as your license.

Volvo unveiled its new Drive-E three-cylinder engine Thursday, with prototype testing already underway.

The dream of the Nineties may live on in Portland, Ore., but for Uber, it’s a nightmare that’s just beginning.

Part of hydrogen becoming a viable energy option in the United States is infrastructure, which isn’t much at present. Should business pick up, however, hydrogen would need to be stored as cheaply as possible to facilitate greater adoption.

Ford is considering giving the B&B’s least favorite transmission type another go for future applications.

Transportation network companies like Lyft and Uber are making an impact on the United States livery market, particularly in cities where medallions are sold.

Were you hoping BMW and Tesla would join forces for the future of electrification? Not so fast.

Uber is having a hard time breaking into the German livery market, and not just for its business model.

Want to literally taste the future? Toyota would like for you to reconsider that notion.

Planning to work on your new car? Pray you don’t receive a DMCA notice upon opening the hood.

With major negotiations between the Detroit Three coming up in 2015, United Auto Workers president Dennis Williams has vowed to be more open before the union’s membership and the general public in his leadership.

Tuesday, the B&B made their voice known on the issues affecting them, including a set of referendums on the infamous red-light traffic camera.

NFC — near-field communication — technology not only can allow you to buy a My Little Pony: Equestria Girls doll from Walmart (or will, once Walmart et al decide Apple Pay and Google Pay are better than CurrentC), but it may soon allow you to start your car by simply tapping the ignition.

When the next-gen Nissan Titan rolls up to the stage at next year’s Detroit Auto Show, the full-size truck will have a big oil-burner with enough sequential firepower to put all on Truck Mountain on notice.

When customers arrive to pick up the 2016 Chevrolet Volt late next year, they won’t need to spend money on premium when it eventually comes time to fill the tank.

To further transparency and improve safety, Ford and Telogis have debuted a system that will gather information on a given police officer’s driving practices.

The panopticon grows taller every day, as motorists who try to learn what information is gathered by the automatic license plate readers face roadblock after roadblock, with three cases set to determine once and for all what can be seen.

Though carbon fiber is being used more extensively in new vehicles, the high costs associated with building a vehicle out of the material have kept it to the likes of the Lexus LFA and BMW i Series. This could soon change, however.

Channelling its inner Viking death metal chef spirit, Volvo has unleashed a concept 2-liter turbo-four delivering 450 horsepower with the help of three turbochargers.

Nielsen, who are better known for its television ratings system than much else, recently published a report narrowing down who exactly goes for connected-vehicle technology the most.

Short answer: Men 55 and over, college degree in one hand, $100,000 in the other.

Mazda’s green vibes must just feel right with the Environmental Protection Agency, as the agency has proclaimed the automaker has the highest fuel economy and lowest greenhouse gas emissions of any automaker in 2013.

Once the biggest thing in the auto industry in the 1980s, turbocharging is back and screaming for vengeance, with the United States market expected to see double the boost pressure over the next five years.

Aside from GPS-equipped starter interrupt systems, lenders have another tool to repossess a vehicle, with the added benefit of using the data obtained to acquire better contracts: license plate recognition.

As companies like Google, Tesla and Uber seek to reshape the auto industry in their own ways, more automakers and suppliers are beating a path toward Silicon Valley and the Center for Automotive Research Stanford to help adapt to the new reality.

Presently, V2V (vehicle to vehicle) and V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) technologies are meant to allow a vehicle so-equipped to better navigate its surroundings, and to exchange data with other vehicles like it. If law enforcement has its way, however, the red and blue lights in the rearview mirror could soon give way to the electric eye of automated enforcement.

One of the main goals of Tesla’s Gigafactory is to bring down battery pack costs to just under $100 per kilowatt-hour within 10 years. That goal may be harder to achieve, however, according to one skeptic.

From the commonwealth where radar detectors are verboten, and speeding has more in common with sex crimes than physical graffiti, a local company has developed a device that can detect the sort of signals a phone might emit when its owner is texting.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story is one I’ve been pursuing since a couple of days before returning to TTAC on the back of the Bumpasaurus Rex last October. As today is my 36th birthday, this is my gift to you, dearest B&B. – CA]

Meet Ian James Corlett and his 1966 Porsche 912. Corlett calls Vancouver, B.C. his home, where he works in the entertainment industry as a voice actor, director, producer, author and musician; his son and daughter, Phillip and Claire, also work in the industry as voice actors in their own right.

As for his 912, it may appear to be no more than a beautifully restored vintage Porsche, but as you’ll soon discover, there’s more than meets the eye with this particular sports car.

All photos provided by Ian James Corlett, Brendan McAleer and Wikipedia.

Though Ford is going all in on aluminum for its upcoming F-150, with General Motors following suit soon after, one supplier believes lightweight steel can be just as effective as the alloy best known for holding beer and keeping turkeys juicy in the oven.

Looking for an EV that doesn’t cost Tesla money or resemble a jelly bean? Then Kia might just have what you need with its electrified version of the Soul when it arrives in showrooms later this year.

Though Ford, Lincoln, BMW and others have mastered the art of parallel parking in tight spaces for their customers, it turns out the systems used do it too well, prompting Ford to give “unparking” a go.

After months of wondering as to where Tesla’s massive Gigafactory would end up, an answer could come as soon as 4 p.m. Mountain, when Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and the automaker plan to hold a joint press conference in Carson City.

Uber users living in or visiting Berlin, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Munich or Frankfurt, Germany may be waiting a while for a low-cost ride: A court ruling has banned the San Francisco-based transportation network company’s UberPop from operating within the entire nation.

Not too long ago, we brought you news of the U.S. government and a handful of automakers coming together to bring vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems online by 2020 at the earliest. Though the government is excited to make your vehicles more connected, running the show is a task the feds simply cannot afford to do.

In the entire time Google has been working on delivering an autonomous future upon the driving populace, only one accident was reported, and was caused by human error. That said, the tech giant would prefer you not to know that or of any similar future incidents.

Though Ford and General Motors may be exchanging their iron fists for aluminum gloves in this upcoming battle atop Truck Mountain, Ram plans to remain beholden to the steel until 2020.

With as many as 26 million vehicles recalled by General Motors alone thus far in 2014, consumers may have a hard time determining if their vehicle needs to be repaired. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has come up with a tool to help, however.

In an effort to convince governments that its services are key to making transportation “as reliable as running water,” transportation network company Uber has hired the man who helped Barack Obama become President of the United States in 2008, David Plouffe.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration unveiled its plan to institute minimums regarding vehicle-to-vehicle communications in an effort to bolster driver safety.

It’s already hard for a transportation network company out there, yet Uber apparently wants to make it harder for the pink mustache plushies of Lyft through a high-stakes game of Ding-Dong-Ditch.

Though the Tesla Model S is one of Consumer Reports’ recommended darlings, the premium EV garnered its share of reliability blemishes during long-term testing.

The Republican Party — both halves, presumably — are doing for Uber what they’ve done with Tesla by throwing its support for the way the ridesharing service is disrupting the status quo of ferrying passengers to and fro.

Do you live in New Jersey, but travel around states where a traffic enforcement camera could ruin your day? You may soon be able to put that fear aside, thanks to a new bipartisan bill going through the state’s legislature.

Silicon Valley startup bros looking to trade in their Teslas and Prii for FCEVs and Mirais will soon have two fueling options available from gas giant Linde North America.

The recall parade led by General Motors since February of this year may need to make room for another float, as the automaker’s own recall website provided incorrect information to some affected consumers.

In a few weeks, at WOOT (the USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies — an academic conference where security researchers demonstrate broken stuff), a team from the University of Michigan will be presenting a lovely paper, Green Lights Forever: Analyzing the Security of Traffic Infrastructure. It’s a short and fun read. In summary, it’s common for traffic light controllers to speak to each other over a 5.8GHz wireless channel (much like WiFi, but a dedicated frequency) with no cryptography, default usernames and passwords, and well-known and exploitable bugs. Oh boy. And what can we do with that?

It’s almost official: Panasonic and Tesla will enter into a basic agreement where the former will supply the latter with battery-production machines for the automaker’s up-and-coming Gigafactory.

In June, Nissan announced that Leaf owners could obtain a replacement battery pack for $5,500 upon trading in the old unit. While a boon to said owners, the automaker is losing blood on the deal every time a pack is sold.

CVT haters, rejoice: Audi’s latest set of Multitronic CVTs will be the automaker’s last.

As reported earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to put automakers through real-world testing of their MPG claims. However, the agency is asking this be done on the track instead of the highway.

If any legislators were hoping banning cell phone use behind the wheel would cut down on accidents and fatalities linked to distracted driving, it may have been all for naught according to a handful of studies on the matter.

Those who just ordered their Tesla Model S may need to wait a bit, as the premium EV automaker has idled its California factory in order to tool up for the upcoming Model X SUV.

Once thought to be the possible next CEO of Microsoft after his time as CEO of Ford drew to a close, Alan Mulally has instead turned up in Mountain View, Calif. as Google’s newest board member.

Amid touring the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center in McLean, Va. and having a go at a driving simulator based upon a Saturn SL, President Barack Obama talked about connected vehicles and increasing highway funding before reporters in attendance Tuesday.

Jaguar Land Rover is bringing a duo of augmented-reality HUDs to its respective brands, each with a different take on the technology.