If you're rich-really rich-what fills your heart with dread? Not being rich anymore. Which may explain why the ultra-wealthy are drawn to objects that suggest permanence: big, imposing houses that look like they've been around forever and big, imposing cars like the Bentley Mulsanne, which is a veritable manor house on wheels. READ MORE ››
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CARS.COM
Vehicles Affected: Approximately 19,000 model-year 2015-16 Chevrolet Sonic subcompact cars and Trax SUVs, and model-year 2013-15 Spark hatchbacks, all equipped with Bring Your Own Media radio
The Problem: The radios may fail to provide an audible warning chime when the driver fails to fasten their seat belt or, after turning off the ignition and leaving the key in the cylinder, waits 10 minutes or longer to open the door. Without audible indicators, the driver may not fasten their seat belt, increasing the risk of injury in a crash, or may leave the key in the ignition, increasing the risk of theft. This latest action is an expansion of an April 28 recall of approximately 318,000 model-year 2013-16 Sonic cars and Trax SUVs, and 2013-15 Sparks hatchbacks for the same problem.
The Fix: Dealers will update the radio software for free.
What Owners Should Do: GM did not immediately provide an owner-notification schedule. Owners can call Chevrolet at 800-222-1020, the National Highway Safety Administration's vehicle-safety hotline at 888-327-4236, or go to www.safercar.gov, for more info.
Need to Find a Dealer for Service? Go to Cars.com Service & Repair to find your local dealer.
As world travelers, our stomachs have suffered from Montezuma's revenge, but we've never experienced anything like what Harley-Davidson fans' eyes had to endure at last week's 25th annual European H.O.G. Rally: Hell's Revenge.
-Hell's Revenge is a one-off special concept based on the Jeep Renegade built by Garage Italia Customs with the help of Jeep and Harley-Davidson. Unveiled at the rally in Portoroz, Slovenia, it solves one of the biggest gripes we've harbored, secretly, about the little Italian-made Jeep ever since we first laid eyes on its upright body panels: It didn't look like it was on fire. Okay, maybe we weren't complaining about that, but if you're going to slap Harley badges the size of serving platters on the doors of a Renegade, you might as well give it a flame job patterned after those found on many motorcycle tanks.
-Garage Italia Customs didn't just apply a coat of fluorescent flames to the little Jeep's front-end and call it a day. The European design firm also lifted the suspension, installed its own “personalized” front skid plate in place of the original, fitted it with distinct wheels wrapped in chunky BF Goodrich tires, and installed two LED spotlights mounted ahead of its windshield. Inside, a flame-painted dash plus leather-and-black-denim seat upholstery complete the outlaw rider theme of Hell's Revenge.
-Sadly, no work was done under Hell's Revenge's flame-covered hood. A dead-stock (for Europe) 2.0-liter turbodiesel engine makes 170 horsepower and close to 260 lb-ft of torque while a 9-speed automatic transmission does the shifting-truly, hell's revenge to manual transmission-loving Europeans.
-It seems that Hell's Revenge remains muffled by its stock exhaust system, a pity for those European H.O.G. Rally riders who've spent the last quarter-century collectively annoying neighbors and strangers with their bikes' noisy exhausts. It's a lifestyle thing.
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It rains in France, everyone knows that. At the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which is deep in France, the only question is when it will rain. If it starts to downpour as your car is sitting on the grid on slicks, waiting to be waved off on the opening parade lap, that's very bad news for you. With the clock ticking down to the 3:00 p.m. start of the 84th running of this 24-hour classic, a slow drizzle steadily devolved into a pissing annoyance, which devolved into a full biblical deluge. And Le Mans luck, that highly fickle finger of fate, began to pick winners and losers.
-First to suffer was the No. 67 Ford GT, which the crew suddenly pulled off the grid just minutes before the parade lap, and wheeled ignominiously on its dolly into the garage. Gearbox problems, already. The transmission is a known weak point of the mid-engine megabuck GT (heck, every team has had gearbox problems over the years) but Ford engineers felt they had the problem licked. Well, that was the brave face they've been showing to the public, anyway. As the rest of the teams scrambled their tire carts, swapping their intermediate wet tires for full wets, the Ford crew poked and prodded, eventually deciding it was the shifting mechanism that had gone out of whack.
-Then, an 84-year-old race that has never started under yellow started under yellow, waved off the line by actor Brad Pitt, and running the first 52 minutes behind the safety car. As the skies cleared and the corner workers used brooms and leaf blowers to dry out the apexes, the Audi R8 safety car began to be booed by the restless crowd. Finally, at 3:52 p.m., the track went green, opening a close three-way battle for the overall lead between Toyota, Porsche, and Audi, and immediately causing a conundrum for all the teams in the four classes. As the track dried, the full wet tires were getting hot and rapidly outliving their usefulness. The pits quickly got so crowded with cars swapping their tires back to dry slicks that the No. 69 Ford GT had to wait just ahead of its pit box before it could be pushed in for the needed change, costing valuable time. Meanwhile, Ford GT #67 went out, then was back in, the crew trying to keep one of the two U.K.-based GTs in the race.
-It's been a week of ups and downs for Ford. Fast qualifying times on Thursday were answered by the ACO with a weight and power penalty on Friday afternoon. Bumping into Ford CEO Mark Fields outside the company's hospitality suite, the executive said the team had suffered a long night trying to recalibrate the car and the fuel-consumption maps to answer the power and weight changes. But, he added with a shrug, there's not much anyone can do when the ACO makes a rule, it's their race and “you have to kiss the ring.”
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It's all anyone could really talk about in the paddock at Le Mans. On Friday, as teams were doing last-minute checkouts and tweaking before the Saturday, 3:00 p.m. local time start of the 84th running of the 24-hour classic, competitors in the closely watched and hotly contested GTE class were waiting for a final ruling from the organizers on the all-important BoP calculations, or balance of performance.
-Ideally, BoP uses exhaustive performance data from previous races and track sessions to selectively add weight or diminish power from some cars to create closer competition in highly varied classes such as GTE, the fastest of Le Mans's two production-based groupings where Porsche 911s and Ferrari 488s compete against Corvettes and Ford GTs. In reality, BoP manipulation is a black art practiced by the French (as well as other sports car sanctioning bodies at different races) to their own peculiar rules.
-Last week's pre-race testing sessions at Le Mans saw the Corvette C7.R dominate the lap times, but a BoP change implemented after that severely handicapped the Corvette and Porsche teams, they say, and produced disastrous qualifying times for them in the final pre-race session on Thursday. The Corvettes were more than 4.6 seconds off the pace, with the 911s far back as well, while both the new Ford GT and the Ferrari 488 got instantly quicker. Insinuations immediately flooded the Le Mans paddock that the French were manipulating the BoP formulas to recreate the classic Ferrari-vs.-Ford battle at the expense of Le Mans stalwarts such as Chevy and Porsche.
-Porsche's GT racing honcho, Frank-Steffan Walliser, was so upset by the latest BoP change that in an emotional press conference on Friday he choked up when asked about it. “We need BoP, we don't need this kind of BoP,” he said. “We will fight.” Cornered by reporters, Corvette racing chief Doug Fehan was said to be fairly apoplectic as well, but both Walliser and Fehan said they would still race no matter what.
-For his part, Ford Motorsport boss Dave Pericak was careful not to gloat, saying of the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO), which runs the 24 Hours of Le Mans, that “they've said over and over that they reserve the right to make a change right up to the dropping of the flag.” However, Pericak did say that the Corvette times were “suspicious,” implying that the Chevy team may have sandbagged a little to try to appear more highly wounded than reality and thus curry a more favorable BoP formula from the ACO.
-All of the teams were called to a meeting on Friday afternoon, where yet another change to the BoP formula was unveiled. In a move highly unusual for being so close to the start of the race, the ACO slapped the two leading turbo cars, the Ford GT and Ferrari 488, with token weight increases (22 pounds for the Ford and 33 pounds for the Ferrari), but, much more significant, cut the Ford's power output by 1.3 percent through boost pressure regulation at certain revs. The Ferrari boost was left untouched, while the leading non-turbo teams, including Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Porsche, all got breaks through increases in their intake restrictor sizes.
-The problem: Tomorrow's impending race start means there's no time to test the changes in further practice or qualifying sessions, so the ACO may have inadvertently lopsided the results yet again, giving one team or another an advantage. The other big problem is that no matter who wins on Sunday, the last-second dickering with the BoP means the taint of hasty and possibly unfair meddling by the organizers could forever hang over the results.
-Still, a lot can happen over 24 hours, and with driver mistakes, pit mistakes, and weather being only a few of the uncontrollable variables, the BoP may prove to be no factor at all. We'll know on Sunday at 3:00 p.m.
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CARS.COM - A Texas toddler died after he was trapped in a hot car by a feature intended to keep children safer. Three-year-old Evan Trapolino apparently walked out of his house on Thursday afternoon, climbed into a car parked in the front yard and then couldn't get out because the child-safety locks on the doors were engaged, according to a report by Houston TV station KHOU.
Related: Do Child-Safety Locks Disengage in an Accident?
His death is a tragic reminder of the dangers of in-car heatstroke and of the need to keep unattended vehicles locked to protect active, curious kids. Children are more vulnerable to heatstroke than adults - their temperature can heat up three to five times faster than an adult, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Parents Central safety website.
There have already been 13 in-car heatstroke deaths this year and from 1998 through 2015, 661 children died from heatstroke. The most common incidents during that period were children left in the car by a caregiver (54 percent) or parent (17 percent), NHTSA reports. About 29 percent have been incidents like the one in Texas - a child playing in an unattended vehicle.
Among safety tips from NHTSA: Never leave a child alone in a parked car (even with windows down or air conditioning on), always look in the rear before walking away, and always lock your vehicles doors and trunk and keep the keys or fob out of a child's reach.
The Texas boy, who may have been going after a toy in the car, was found pale and not moving, and could not be revived. Firefighters told KHOU he died from cardiac arrest. Houston was under a heat advisory with temperatures hitting 96 degrees but NHTSA warns that a car can be dangerous even when temperatures are in the 60s.
CARS.COM
Vehicles Affected: Approximately 98,000 model-year 2006-12 Kia Sedona minivans manufactured between June 15, 2005, and Aug. 14, 2012, and originally sold or currently registered in Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin or the District of Columbia
The Problem: The front lower control arms may break due to corrosion from saltwater exposure, such as that occurring from road salt use; this could result in the loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash.
The Fix: Dealers will replace the front lower control arms on 2006-07 models. On 2008-12 models, dealers will either replace the front lower control arms or apply additional anti-corrosion coating.
What Owners Should Do: Kia will begin notifying owners on July 25. Owners can call the automaker at 800-333-4542, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's vehicle-safety hotline at 888-327-4236, or go to www.safercar.gov for more info.
Need to Find a Dealer for Service? Go to Cars.com Service & Repair to find your local dealer.
