American Honda Motor Co. has overhauled the look of its fuel cell concept cars, unveiling a futuristic, lightweight three-seater. 

The design study concept is inspired by supercar levels of performance through low weight and a high-performance, electrically driven fuel cell powertrain. What’s with the rear side? The extended rear houses cooling radiators for the fuel cell stack. You likey?

Toyota rolls out its first Venza wagon. Toyota Motor Sales USA will price the five-person wagon between $25,975 for its V-4, front-wheel drive model, and $29,250 for the V-6, all-wheel drive model. The V-6 model will hit dealerships in early December, with full production and sales of both models starting in January. How do we say this lightly? Looks like a Camry with a little more junk in the trunk.

The Venza, which is built in Georgetown, Ky., on the platform of its mid-size Camry sedan, will be sold exclusively in North America.

It’s official! The nation’s public transportation systems logged a 5.2% jump in ridership in the second quarter, according to industry figures released this week, as record-high gas prices pushed people to take millions more trips on buses and rail systems.

It’s too bad that higher ridership doesn’t necessarily translate to higher revenue for districts. The national surge in riders is straining many agencies that don’t have the funds to expand service. Many systems are struggling just to maintain the service they already offer because of their own rising fuel costs.

What are some American cities planning? New York City officials are planning to experiment with seatless subway cars next spring to squeeze in more riders. In Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is using longer trains on the T and increasing the frequency of some bus and rail services. In Washington, they’re pushing for bus-only lanes as a way to encourage people to ride buses and relieve pressure on the crowded subway.

Perhaps it’s time to adopt some of Japan’s alternatives and hire subway attendants to literally push and squeeze extra passengers into the subway cars.

To make up for revenue loss, GM’s brlight idea is to increase prices of their smaller cars.

When General Motors Corp.’s new global small car hits the U.S. market in mid-2010, the company is expecting it to fetch a better price than Honda and Toyota get for their small cars. Chevrolet General Manager Ed Peper said GM needs to get more money per vehicle than its prime Japanese competitors, Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp.

GM is banking on a big step up in price as it tries to make up for revenue lost when the U.S. market shifted rapidly from more profitable trucks and sport utility vehicles to more efficient smaller models.

Sigh… Just build quality cars! Goodluck against your Japanese competitors.

The Toyota Lexus had 120 problems per 100 vehicles compared to the industry average of 206 problems.

Lexus once again stands alone atop a closely watched list of vehicle dependability after Buick slipped from the No. 1 spot it shared with the Japanese luxury brand last year. It’s the 14th straight year Toyota Motor Corp.’s high-end brand has held the highest ranking in the annual study, which measures problems experienced by the original owners of vehicles after three years. Lexus had 120 problems per 100 vehicles, down from 145 last year.

Ford Motor Co.’s Mercury brand ranked second, followed by General Motors Corp.’s Cadillac. Toyota was fourth, and Honda Motor Co.’s Acura luxury brand was fifth.

Behold!!  The Honda FCX Clarity

Honda Motors Co. has started production of a car that runs on hydrogen fuel rather than oil, marking the first time a commercial vehicle will produce zero emissions. The FCX Clarity, which was introduced two years ago as a concept car at the Tokyo Motor Show, runs on electricity made from an onboard hydrogen-powered fuel cell battery. It will be available in July as part of limited lease program offered in California.

In May, the thrifty Honda Civic became the best-selling vehicle in America.

The Honda Civic became the best selling vehicle in America - car or truck - and both it and the Honda Accord outsold the once-invincible Ford F-150 pickup trucks.

Among the world’s automakers, Honda has long behaved as if the world is indeed running out of all kinds of resources, including oil. Its relentless focus on thrift and conservation, which seemed like eccentricities 20 or 30 years ago, today make Honda the leader of the environmental pack.

While the Detroit Three plus Toyota were getting hammered on the showroom floor in May, with sales down anywhere from 4.3% for Toyota to 27.5% for General Motors, Honda posed a stunning 15.6% sales increase.

Rocket science this isn’t. They aren’t making any more oil so, over time, you had to figure it was going to get more expensive and more scarce. So why weren’t other manufacturers able to see the road ahead as well as Honda?

 1. They got sidetracked by the easy profits available in big SUVs and pickups. During the 1990s, the last golden age of the American auto industry, the combination of cheap gas and high-profit big vehicles seduced automakers into believing the good times would never end.

2. Honda’s tightly-knit corporate culture and long time horizon made it uniquely able to wait for events to move in its direction, rather than chasing fluctuations in the marketplace.

3. The other automakers became distracted by their own corporate imperatives. Nissan compounded its problems by starting its own passenger car horsepower race. The Detroit Three, at times, seemed to get their jollies by reviving models from 40 years ago — Mustang, Challenger, Camaro — because of the short term jolt they got in the marketplace, rather than formulating any kind of long-term strategy for a resource-constrained world.

A Personalized Crest Just For You

Toyota likes to think of its quirky, boxy Scion as a unique expression of the young, hip person who Toyota hopes is driving it. Toyota will let Scion owners design their own personal “coat of arms” online, a piece of owner-generated art.

In making their personalized crests, Scion owners can choose from among hundreds of symbols, all designed by a professional graffiti artist. The symbols range from an eagle, a jester, a king’s crown and a worker’s fist to Japanese anime-style flowers, a three-person family and a yin-yang circle. Customers can download their designs and have them made into window decals or take them to an auto airbrushing shop to have them professionally painted onto their cars.

This touch of personalized art doesn’t come free. Scion enthusiasts must pay for the auto shop renderings of their design, an indulgence that can cost thousands of dollars.

When It Comes To Naming Car Models, Who Takes The Cake?

Japan! The best part of this research, however, was the process of combing through the names of cars sold in Japan with odd English titles…  Daihatsu Motor Naked; Honda Life Dunk and That’s; Isuzu GIGA 20 Light Dump and Mysterious Utility; Mazda Motor Bongo; Mitsubishi Delica Space Gear and Pistachio; Nissan Fairlady Z and Prairie Joy; Rickman Space Ranger; Rinspeed X-Dream; Suzuki Cappucino; Toyota Motor Deliboy and Toyopet; Volkswagen Thing and Volugrafo Bimbo.

If we can criticize American automakers for putting hundred-dollar names on ten-dollar cars, so to speak, we must also applaud Japanese automakers, who tend to endow their Japan-only cars with such delightfully puzzling names as Honda Motor’s Life Dunk.

Americans dominate the lists of the best and worst car names, mostly because we can’t fault certain European names for getting lost in translation. The Invicta Black Prince Wentworth?! Then there are just inexplicable misspellings, such as the Chevrolet Luv truck. Ditto for the Pontiac Aztek.

Alphanumeric names are not particularly memorable, meaning that with a piece of this nature, you can skip over everything in the current rosters of Acura, BMW, Jaguar, Volvo, Saleen, Hummer, Infiniti, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz. Notice a pattern there? The brands that give their cars numbers and letters for names tend to be upscale. (Some upscale manufacturers don’t use alphanumeric names. Rolls-Royce and Bentley are famous for bestowing their cars with such poetic names as Silver Ghost and Azure.) For more favorite Japanese car pics, check out Engrish.com for laughs.

If You Or Someone You Know Has A Murano OR EX35, Send It Back

Nissan has announced the recall of 16365 2008 Infiniti EX35 and 2009 Nissan Murano vehicles due to a faulty software in the passenger airbag control unit. The software glitch may cause the passenger airbag to not deploy when the battery level is low. The recall will begin sometime this month.