1970 Chevrolet Nova -- on 2040-cars

Auto blog

800k car names trademarked globally, suddenly alphanumerics seem reasonable

What's in a name? This cliched phrase probably gets tossed out at every marketing meeting that happens when a new car gets its nomenclature. We know the answer, though: everything. The name of a car has all the potential to make or break it with fickle customers that are more conscious than ever about what their purchases say about them.
That's giving headaches to marketing folks across the automotive industry. "It's tough. In 1985 there were about 75,000 names trademarked in the automotive space. Today there are 800,000," Chevrolet's head of marketing, Russ Clark, told Automotive News. Infiniti's president, Johan de Nysschen, echoed Clark's sentiment, saying, "The truth of the matter is, across the world, there is hardly a name or a letter that hasn't already been claimed by one car manufacturer or another. You can go through the alphabet - A, B, C and so forth - and you will quickly see that almost all available letters are taken."
What has that left automakers to do? Get creative. In the case of Infiniti, it made the controversial move to bring all of its cars' names into a new scheme, classifying them as Q#0 for cars and QX#0 for SUVs and crossovers. So the Infiniti G, which was available as the G25 and G37, is now the Q50. The FX37 and FX50 are now the QX70.

Mother's Day Suggestion No. 2,506

With Mother's Day coming up, we're always looking for new gift ideas to celebrate the occasion, but hot laps around a track might not be the best suggestion for Darius Khashabi. In a video posted on YouTube, Khashabi straps his mom into the passenger seat of his C6 Corvette Z06 for some laps around Sonoma Raceway (formerly Infineon Raceway) at "60 percent" with comical results.
Now this isn't the first time Mama Khashabi has gotten seat time in her son's car around a track, as his YouTube page shows him pulling a similar stunt - with similar results - around Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca last year. Scroll down for the video, but know that the action really gets going at around the 1:40 mark.

Watch how Corvette Racing's new collision-avoidance radar system works

When it comes to technology used in racecars, we generally expect it to trickle down to production cars, not the other way around. Well, Pratt & Miller has developed a new rear-facing radar that operates in a similar fashion to what we're used to in modern blind spot detection systems, only it is also capable of tracking cars as they approach and relaying vital information to the driver via a large display screen.
The innovative radar system debuted at last weekend's 12 Hours of Sebring for Corvette Racing, and this system makes perfect sense for endurance races like this since the cars sometimes have to drive through the night and in poor weather conditions.
The radar can detect cars even with poor visibility, and uses easy-to-distinguish symbols for the driver to identify.