Small cars have never been big players for Detroit, to put it mildly. But with more Americans downsizing into compact and even subcompact cars, it’s critical for General Motors and Chrysler (and, to a lesser extent, Ford) to change their small-car offerings from bottom feeders to market leaders.

 

For GM, the 2011 Chevrolet Cruze is the latest bid to erase bad memories of crapulent Cavaliers and mediocre Cobalts. At a dinner in New York with Jim Campbell, Chevy’s general manager, journalists pored over a spiffy pair of Cruzes parked outside. And at a standstill at least, the Cruze looks to have the right stuff to finally put Chevy in the game against the perennial small-car sales kings, the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla.

 

The Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport recently reclaimed the title of world's fastest production car, with an average top speed of just over 267 mph -- an impressive feat, to say the least, but one that is shattered by (drum roll, please) an old-school yellow school bus. The kiddie-mobile topped that 267 mph speed by a whopping 100 mph at the Vectren Dayton Air Show in Ohio last month.

Obviously, the school bus was hardly a production vehicle, unless the world's most awesome school superintendent somewhere has been ordering fleets of buses powered by a General Electric J-79 jet engine with 42,000 horsepower.

Check it out after the jump. 

According to findings from both Honda and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an improperly installed cable has been detected in a small number of 2010 Honda Pilot crossovers. The problem -- a shifter cable in the manual transmission assembly that may not be properly attached to the shift lever bracket -- could cause the Pilot to operate in a gear other than what the driver selected, which could lead to operational issues and possible accidents.

Only about 585 Pilots from the 2010 model year have been targeted, though the issue is serious enough that Honda has issued a stop-sell order to keep other vehicles from leaving the lot before the issue is fixed. 

Saab's new Dutch owner, Spyker Cars NV, intends to spin additional models off its new Phoenix platform after it yields a redesigned Saab 9-3.

Saab dealers will receive the latest 9-3 in 2012, Spyker founder and Saab Automobile AB Chairman Victor Muller said Thursday at the CAR Management Briefing Seminars in Traverse City, Mich.

The dealers, who have been starved for product as former owner General Motors attempted to sell or liquidate the brand, also will obtain a Cadillac-based 9-4X crossover when it goes into production in April 2011 in Mexico.

 

Those who argue that there are better alternative fuel sources for automobiles than electricity likely never imagined something like the Bio-Bug, a Volkswagen New Beetle modified to run on converted methane gas -- the type that's found in abundance at sewage plants, meaning the Bio-Bug essentially runs on, yes, human waste.

The project was envisioned by Wessex Water, a sewage treatment company in England, and the waste-powered Beetle was built by the Greenfuel Co., which converts gas-powered cars to run on liquified petroleum gas. The methane itself must also be treated through biogas upgrading, a process that separates carbon dioxide molecules. (GENeco, a company owned by Wessex Water, provided the necessary equipment for the process.) 

Scion vice president Jack Hollis is a former Stanford and AAA baseball player who, but for an injury, coulda been a contender, coulda played in the show.

He's not one to boast--he didn't tell us of his baseball days, we got it from someone else. Nonetheless, you'd imagine the 6-foot-2-inch auto exec would have a pretty good self-image. But when trying to describe his conduct in meetings with executives in Japan, he knows exactly who he looks like.

"Who's that kid in Welcome Back Kotter," he asks. "The one who's always raising his hand and saying, 'Ooo, ooo, ooo!"

Horshack?

"Yeah, that's the one, I'm like Horshack raising my hand saying, 'Ooo! Ooo! Rear wheel-drive, rear wheel-drive!"

 

Fans of the Chevrolet Super Sport package, you're out of luck with the upcoming Cruze: Jalopnik has confirmed with marketing exec Jim Campbell that Chevy won't offer the SS badge as an option for the 2011 model.

Despite some comments in the past that Chevy would put more focus on the SS badge in a return to its performance roots, the Cruze will max out with an RS version -- not exactly the pavement-screamer that many Chevy fans have been waiting for. 

[UPDATE: Not sure what's going on with the embed code, but it's tossing up an unrelated video. Find all the crazy over at Jalopnik's source article.]

As Jalopnik points out, the context of the video below is not perfectly clear. What is clear is two British police officers bashing the ever-living hell out of an old man's Range Rover -- an old man, it should be noted, who was pulled over for not wearing his seat belt, never exceeded the speed limit, and was under the impression that the lit-up squad cars were following him (after he had been previously stopped for said seat-belt infraction and left thinking everything was under control) because, as he had told officers earlier, he was in a rush to get home and take his heart medication. The officers in question, on the other hand, claim that 70-year-old Robert Whatley struck an officer during his prior stop -- something Whatley denies.