What a remarkable 10 years it's been. Luxury car sales in America have roared back setting all time sales records and surprising even the most jaded analysts. The three U.S. car companies, once poised for extinction, have turned around and made another remarkable recovery. Automotive quality and styling have improved beyond belief, making about every other car you now see on the road look visibly dated - much like 1930s automobiles would have looked in the 60s.Read more

It was just another day in early 1908 in Dearborn, Mich. Henry Ford had plenty to do, with his new Model T about to be introduced; but for whatever reason he gave an employee, Charles Van Auken, the time to talk him out of some of his money. Van Auken would use it to build an airplane out of wood and tubing, and would use the new engine designed for the Model T to power it.Read more

The brothers spent their boyhood in the small town of Niles City, Mich., in the decade after the Civil War. In today's romantic vision, coming of age in that era meant barefoot boys with close-cropped hair, whitewashing the widow lady's fence for a few coins to jingle in their worn dungarees' pockets. To a degree, that's an accurate picture; Horace and John did go barefoot - their father Daniel, a machine shop owner, couldn't afford to buy shoes for his children. That wasn't so bad during the warm Michigan summers, but the two brothers dreaded walking to school in the bitter winter months, feet wrapped in nothing more than old rags.Read more

We either make too much of technology - mostly because we believe it's new - or we simply take it for granted. After all, if asked when anti-lock brakes were first put on automobiles, few would guess correctly that Chrysler used it on the 1971 Imperial as a three-channel, four-sensor system. Ford had beaten Chrysler to the punch the year before, offering anti-lock brakes on the Lincoln Continental's rear brakes as an option. Yet that incredible automotive safety breakthrough would take 25 years to go mainstream.Read more

A question asked in numerous stories a week ago was put best in a headline at the Atlantic: "Why Don't Young Americans Buy Cars?" A year or so ago, of course, the question was why young people don't read a newspaper; and before that it was something else young people don't do that we seem to expect them to. While it's been a great while since I sat inside dealerships to see exactly what the demographical makeup of their buyers was in any given month, it was fairly obvious decades ago that the makeup of car buyers was changing dramatically.Read more

Long before the Crusades, Islamic scholars had begun scientifically to investigate how medicines and physicians could cure man of diseases and better our ability to treat wounds. Few realize that the world's first serious works on medicine came out of the Middle East; translated into Latin, they were used in European universities throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. (Today a rare copy of the Latin translation of the Islamic Canon of Medicine still resides at the University of Texas Health Care Center in San Antonio.) Fewer still remember that hospitals for the sick came out of the Islamic Golden Age.Read more

A few weeks ago the automotive world was all a-flutter with the news that, as part of the first step toward finding ways to solve its financial problems in Europe, General Motors was taking a 7 percent stake in France's Peugeot Citroen. Not mentioned in those stories is that competitors in the auto industry have been doing joint ventures for decades, but so far these very expensive plans have failed to yield much of value. More to the point, however, although it's been the joint venture leader over the past 17 years, all GM has to show for it is the Duramax diesel engine.Read more

Twenty-two years ago the California Air Resource Board decided to enact a new mandate that would have required that a large percentage of any vehicles auto manufacturers sold in the Golden State have zero emissions at the tailpipe - and CARB officials were adamant that this would be accomplished in less than a decade. Every major manufacturer understood this to be a demand that they sell mostly electric cars out west. Only Honda took it to mean that, if its emissions could be reduced to nothing, a gasoline-powered car could be sold in California. Of course, just to hedge its bet, Honda delivered the EV-Plus electric car in order to meet the new rules.Read more

Today's Boomers may not be able to appreciate the quantum change between the world that existed before 1876 and the one that was in place by 1896, the one in which we still live. One hundred years after America created itself, extraordinary macroeconomic events were propelling the world into modern times. The Industrial Age, for example, certainly changed manufacturing worldwide and led whole populations to migrate from rural agricultural communities for cities. But, though it set the stage, it didn't change the average American's life - or standard of living - as dramatically as we might think.Read more

In the spring of 2005 Gary Cowger, then president of General Motors North America, asked me to write down what I thought would be the future for hydrogen fuel-celled vehicles. My analysis ran around nine pages, and Cowger told me he circulated it among GM's top executives. And shortly thereafter, although I take no credit for it whatsoever, GM Vice chairman Bob Lutz announced that their research on fuel-celled automobiles had led them to conclude that electric cars would be far more practical.Read more