Ford has emerged the clear front-runner of Detroit's Big Three carmakers: It avoided taking government bailout money and having to file for bankruptcy, and it's been putting out some great vehicles of late -- including the Fusion, which just won Motor Trend's Car of the Year.

And, in a move that suggests it intends to stay one step ahead of the competition, the company has teamed up with the University of Detroit Mercy to develop a seven-course electric-vehicle program. The initial goal is to train 2,000 engineers over the next 10 years, to give them the specific skill sets necessary to build the next generations of electric vehicles.

Despite supercar maker Koenigsegg dropping out of a Saab deal at the last minute -- and severely handicapping the latter brand's viability in the process -- a state secretary at Sweden's Industry Ministry has said that GM is still holding out hope that a deal can be done for the brand.

First, of course, a buyer would have to be found -- especially as on Tuesday, after the Koenigsegg news, Sweden nixed the idea of giving bailout money to the manufacturer.

Toyota Motor Corp. is recalling 110,000 Toyota Tundra pickups for the 2000 to 2003 model years after reports that rusted frames in cold weather may cause spare tires under the truck bed to break loose and fall onto the road.

Corrosion of the rear cross-member, which supports the spare tire, also eventually may affect the rear brake line and lengthen vehicle stopping distances, increasing the risk of a crash, Toyota said in a statement Tuesday.

There's a good post over at the Wheels blog on The New York Times' site dealing with the Environmental Protection Agency's recent report that gas mileage has gone up (and for the fifth consecutive year), asking the question: Why didn't it go up more?

And it's true that the gain, at a mere 0.4 mpg, is minuscule; since 2004, in fact, overall U.S. vehicle fleet fuel economy has gained an anemic 1.4 mpg.

The article looks at some reasons, including advertising (people are driven to buy the wrong car), incentives (gas-guzzlers were favored with heavy discounts), and good old shortsightedness on the part of the automakers. Dan Baker at the Center for Auto Safety says, “Gas prices went up every single year from 2002 to 2008, yet auto companies continued to produce vehicles that guzzled gas. People couldn’t buy fuel-efficient vehicles because the automakers didn’t make enough of them.”

Toyota Motor Corp. said Wednesday it will replace the accelerator pedals on 3.8 million vehicles involved in the company's largest recall ever.

The models involved are:

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, might be my first stop, or maybe Union Square in Manhattan: anywhere that green-minded urban hipsters congregate, so they can flip out over the MINI E.

 

BMW’s electric-powered MINI Cooper rolled down my Brooklyn street on a flatbed this morning, ensuring that its 573-pound, lithium-ion battery pack was fully juiced for my test drive. (Wouldn’t want to run out of power in the Holland Tunnel.) The company has 450 MINI Es up and running in a field trial in Los Angeles, New York and New Jersey.

We picked this up yesterday, from Consumerist, but the story has been unfolding for a while now -- in fact, all the way back to 2006.

To sum up: Freya Svennson of Pasadena, Calif. (by way of Sweden), bought a Volvo XC70; after only 61,000 miles, the transmission failed. It was fixed under the extended warranty, but the problems -- slamming into gear, uncontrolled revving during acceleration -- continued. The extended-warranty company told Svennson that despite repeated attempts, they were never able to duplicate the problem, and therefore were unable to replace the transmission. That is, until the extended warranty ran out, at which point (of course), they were suddenly able to duplicate the problem, and wanted, then, to replace the transmission -- not under warranty, of course, but rather at a cost of more than $5,000.

Well, that's when Svennson went nuts -- in the good sense of the word. She went all viral-marketing on the company in order to get the word out there that Volvo was acting unfairly. She put on a viking helmet; she started a blog; she created videos for YouTube (see one after the jump); she printed up business cards with the name of her site and stuck them on the windshields of other Volvos to get their owners to help take up the fight.