Auto Trends

Let’s see here, we’ve got the Eco-pedal that will tell us exactly how fast we are allowed to drive by pushing up on our accelerator pedal. We’ve got the Insurance premium gadget that will monitor our driving like a tattle-tell to our insurance company and rate our premium by how good of a driver we seem by our acceleration and braking rates.

We’ve got vehicles that will monitor our health while we drive to see if we are fit enough to be on the road… and now we have a new mother-in-law alert (Ford Smart Intersection) that will whine at us at every intersection if we come at it too fast. Most of us have one of those that comes every year at around Christmas time. Do we really need one 24/7.

Well, research shows that we perhaps do, approximately 40 percent of all vehicular accidents occur at an intersection when we are not paying attention. It appears as if we are often too distracted by all our gadgets… such as MP3 players, phones, GPS, DVD, Eco-pedals, health monitors, etc…

If they keep putting this stuff in our vehicles… pretty soon we are going to need a co-pilot just to take care of all those little things, while the other person can actually concentrate on driving. It is interesting to think that much of this problem is caused by the increasing amount of car gadgets… and yet they think they can make everything better, just by adding another car gadget on top of the rest.

But we’ll get off our soap box and get down to the facts. The Smart Intersection will work by warning the driver with a flashing red light and alert or voice command (“Hey dummy… stop!”) if they are approaching an impending danger at an intersection, such as another driver.

Using GPS technology, which is already quite abundant right now, the computer system will monitor where all the vehicles are, when the lights are going to change, etc., and decide the appropriate action for the driver and let them know if it senses they are deviating from the plan. Ford is busy working on this idea… so we could start to see more of this come to fruition in the coming models!

Technology, love it or hate it… is what is driving the world and giving us lots of stuff to report on every day!

Just when you thought that you had everything, MIO comes out with an original idea that makes everybody say, ‘now why didn’t I think of that…’ or possibly more like, ‘how stupid’. But either way, any eighties baby should remember the original Knight Rider series, starring none other than the infamous David Hasselhoff.

  But more importantly, you should remember the black 1982 Pontiac Trans-Am named K.I.T.T. with the cool T-tops and sweeping red lights running across the sleek front end bumper, letting everybody know that this wasn’t no ordinary Pontiac.

Okay, so maybe this GPS isn’t quite as cool as the original K.I.T.T. car, but for $270 we’d say you weren’t getting off too bad for a fully functioning GPS with a one of kind theme. Looking at the unit at a glance, it doesn’t necessarily appear a whole lot different than any other in-car GPS unit. That is until you notice the two sweeping red lights on either side of the sleek black casing.

Turn the unit on and out pops that old familiar voice of actor William Daniels that says, “Hello Michael, where do you want to go today?” Then you type in your destiny and that same familiar voice will guide you to your next great adventure, weather it be to the local grocery to buy some cantaloupe, or maybe even the gas station to battle the high prices of oil these days.

Here is a list of the main features you will get with the Mio™ Knight Rider™ GPS Portable Navigation Device :

• 4.3 inch TFT color LCD display with anti-glare touchscreen
• Preloaded map of the U.S. and Canada, plus over 4 million points of interest (food, gas stations, museums, etc.)
• Directions, turn-by-turn voice guidance, and Greetings provided in the voice of K.I.T.T. (William Daniels).
• Knight Rider’s voice synthesizer lights move during navigation instruction and initial greeting
• Unique interface design offers the look and feel of the original K.I.T.T. unit (well, not really, but we’ll let that slide)
• KITT recorded voice files includes 150+ male & 150+ female names to select from for the greeting… (yeah, you won’t have to put up with K.I.T.T. Calling you “Michael” for the duration of your time together)
• Voice guidance comes in 16 languages, including English, French and Spanish… (We always wanted to know what a French K.I.T.T. would have sounded like)

Once your done laughing at what a ridiculous idea this is and tell your friends that only a moron would buy this, you can go over to Radio Shack and get your name on the list with the rest of us Knight Rider fans!

Continuing from our list of the best used cars from 1998 and up, we come to the letters T through V of the manufacturers alphabet:

Toyota 4Runner-

Toyota Avalon-

Toyota Camry (except ‘07 V6)-

Toyota Camry Solara-

Toyota Celica-

Toyota Corolla-

Toyota Echo-

Toyota Highlander-

Toyota Land Cruiser-

Toyota Matrix-

Toyota Prius-

Toyota RAV4-

Toyota Sequoia-

Toyota Sienna-

Toyota Tundra (except ‘07 V8 4WD)-

Here’s a good place to drop in a truck as a highlight. The Toyota Tundra is a refined workhorse from its aggressive design, size, and raw muscle (5.7 liter V-8, 381 horsepower). The Tundra is infamous for being the first import full-size truck to step up to the big three American truck giants (Chevrolet, Ford, and Dodge), as they snickered amongst themselves that it was probably just a Camry hiding in a half-ton’s clothing, and offer itself as an actual work capacity truck.

While it was exactly ushered to the front of the line for real hard core truck users, recreational users soon became enamored by the trucks actually respectable capabilities. So maybe it wasn’t quite up to the par of some real heavy duty bruisers the big three offered… but how many consumers really need all that bulk and mass to tow a small boat to the lake for a weekend.

The Tundra couldn’t have debuted at a better time, right smack during the entrance of the new millennium, which left people open to something new. They weren’t exactly taking all that big of a chance, Toyota practically takes up one quarter of this list, because their cars are so darn well put together. The Tundra was refined, smooth, powerful, reliable, and by all sense of the word, practical.

While in its early 2000 stage, the Tundra’s 3.4 liter V-6 (190 horsepower, 220 lb-ft torque) and 4.7 liter V-8 (245 horsepower, 315 lb-ft torque) were certainly smooth running, they were just not exactly powerful. This is where its common misconception formed that the Tundra is nothing more than a moderate recreational vehicle. That all changed in 2004 with the arrival of the double-cab, and then again in 2005 with the unveiling of their all new and improved powertrains, a 245 horsepower 4.0 liter V-6 and 282 horsepower 4.7 liter V-8.

Since then, the 2007 model has optioned the Tundra with a 5.7 liter V-8, with not only 381 horsepower, but also 401 lb-ft of torque. This has placed the Tundra in line with some of the heavier pulling half-tons in its class and has opened the eyes of some of those hard-core users to take a second look at Toyota.

This is a truck that anyone can afford, starting with a 2000 V-6 at around $4,300, on up to a 2007 5.7 V-8 fully loaded at $40,000.

Volvo S60-

The old Volvo S60 standby has become a great used buy in the price range of $8,000 to $20,000. This is one car that is much more recommended as a used vehicle than a new one, just because it hasn’t been redesigned in so long, you really aren’t getting anything worthy of a new car price. Not when there are so many other highly refined decisions out there to choose from.

In 2001, the S60 replaced the Volvo S70, offering a humble 2.4 liter (168 horsepower), a 2.4 Turbo (197 horsepower), and a 2.3 liter 5-cylinder (a.k.a. the T5) with 247 horsepower. 2002 saw the introduction of all-wheel-drive into the 2.4 T S60 as well as traction control and computerized engine management system.

2003 opened quite an impressive bump in performance with the introduction of the Volvo S60 R (pictured above). It featured a sport-tuned adaptive suspension, performance rated tires, 18 inch alloys, xenon lighting, and about 300 horsepower.

The R has since been discontinued, but it would make quite an interesting find for the sports enthusiast looking for that special something a little bit different than your average run of the mill BMW M3…

No, Volvo’s aren’t always ‘Grams’ and ‘Gramps’ cars.. they just sometimes look that way!