2003 Honda Ex on 2040-cars

Auto blog

180,000 new vehicles are sitting, derailed by lack of transport trains

If you're planning on buying a new car in the next month or so, you might want to pick from what's on the lot, because there could be a long wait for new vehicles from the factory. Locomotives continue to be in short supply in North America, and that's causing major delays for automakers trying to move assembled cars.
According to The Detroit News, there are about 180,000 new vehicles waiting to be transported by rail in North America at the moment. In a normal year, it would be about 69,000. The complications have been industry-wide. Toyota, General Motors, Honda and Ford all reported experiencing some delays, and Chrysler recently had hundreds of minivans sitting on the Detroit waterfront waiting to be shipped out.
The problem is twofold for automakers. First, the fracking boom in the Bakken oil field in the Plains and Canada is monopolizing many locomotives. Second, the long, harsh winter is still causing major delays in freight train travel. The bad weather forced trains to slow down and carry less weight, which caused a backup of goods to transport. The auto companies resorted to moving some vehicles by truck, which was a less efficient but necessary option.

Automotive April Fools' joke roundup [w/videos]

Happy April, everyone. And we all know what this first day of the month means: April Fools' Day. Today is a national holiday for pranksters with the Internet acting as a serious enabler, and it's always fun to see what kind of vivid imaginations exist out there in the automotive world. The abundance of fake news gets a little old as the day rolls on, but we did manage to get in a few chuckles thanks to a handful of major automakers and automotive news outlets that got into the pranking spirit this year
Some of our favorites this year includes Subaru showing what happens when you combine a bunch of rumors, a Corvette some may have already thought was a joke or Honda providing some in-car innovation circa the late 1980s. Honestly, we're still waiting for official confirmation from Mitsubishi that the recently introduced 2014 Mirage is an elaborate April Fools' joke using a failed design intended for the 1995 Geo Metro. We dug up as much "official" OEM foolishness we could find, as well as some of our other favorites, and posted them all below.

Fire up your 3D printer! Honda releases data for several of its past concepts [w/video]

Futurists have been treating 3D printing like it is the second coming of the Industrial Revolution for years. Everyone will have a 3D printer in their garage and be able make practically anything at home before you know it, right? Well... not quite.
While we can imagine a piece of trim breaking on our car and being able to download the file to print a new one at home, the reality is that 3D printing is still in its earliest stages as a consumer device. Still, Honda is capitalizing on the technology by allowing people to make models of its concept cars at home.
The Honda 3D Design Archive currently consists of five models based on the Fuya-Jo, FSR, Kiwami, Puyo, and NSX concepts. The printer files can be downloaded from the web and carry Creative Commons 4.0 licenses, which allow them to be freely shared. Honda promises that more files will be added to the archive soon.