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Honda scores big in Automobile Advertising of the Year Awards [w/videos]

This year the Detroit Auto Show didn't just celebrate the automobile, it celebrated how we find out about the automobile, too. Partnering The One Club, this year introduced the 2014 One Show Automobile Advertising of the Year Award to Cobo Hall, celebrating winners in five different categories of advertising: broadcast television, online, interactive, experiential, and print/outdoor. Winners in those categories were judged by 50 creative directors and journalists, while a Public Choice category was chosen from among nearly 20,000 online votes.
Honda walked off with three of the six awards, its Hands spot taking Broadcast honors, its Sound of Honda getting the Online category and Illusions winning Public Choice. Hyundai made the grade in Interactive with Driveway Decision Maker, Fiat captured Print/Outdoor with its "Letters" ad, and Toyota's Tundra Endeavor Campaign spot and BMW's A Window into the Near Future were co-winners for Experiential.
You can watch all of the press release and winning videos below or check out all of the finalists, announced last month, for a refresher.

Toyota and Suzuki are looking at an R&D partnership because they admit they're behind

The Chairman of Suzuki Motor Corporation, Osamu Suzuki, and the President of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, have convened at Toyota's Tokyo offices to declare plans to join hands regarding research and development. According to Toyoda, Toyota "hasn't been good at creating alliances," and its partnership with the small carmaker Daihatsu has been the most well-known collaboration so far. Perhaps the comment has a tinge of regret from Toyota and GM's NUMMI days in Fremont, especially as the statement released by Toyota says that "Toyota is conscious of the fact that it may be behind competitors in North America and Europe when it comes to the establishment of standardizations and partnership with other companies." But as different technologies advance at breakneck speed and it is difficult for companies both big and small to stay competitive, let alone ahead of the game, Toyota is accepting the need for collaboration. Toyoda referred to passenger safety, environmental issues, automated driving, and hydrogen technology, all of which are key challenges for any carmaker looking to stay relevant, and all expensive to experiment with. Spreading the cost over more vehicles should help. "We received an offer from Suzuki regarding collaboration possibilities on advanced and future technologies such as in information technology. Suzuki made a frank proposal to us, and in understanding that Toyota is facing the challenges which I had mentioned earlier, we thought that with the relationship between both companies, there is an opportunity for a business partnership to help solve such challenges. As such, we decided to explore such possibilities together," said Toyoda. In the future, Daihatsu will still be Toyota's tool in emerging markets, but now Toyota could have access to Suzuki's small-car know-how. Osamu Suzuki acknowledges that "Suzuki's current business focuses on minivehicles in Japan and India," as Suzuki withdrew from the US and Canada in 2013. A joint effort will help Suzuki remain relevant, and as a manufacturer of predominantly small vehicles it has been focusing on competitive pricing more than cutting edge technology. Related Video:

Solid-state batteries: Why Toyota's plans could be a game-changer for EVs

Word out of Japan today is that Toyota is working on launching a new solid-state battery for electric vehicles that will put it solidly in the EV game by 2022. Which leads to a simple question: What is a solid-state battery, and why does it matter? Back in February, John Goodenough observed, "Cost, safety, energy density, rates of charge and discharge and cycle life are critical for battery-driven cars to be more widely adopted." And risking a bad pun on his surname, he seemed to be implying that all of those characteristics weren't currently good enough in autos using lithium-ion batteries. This comment is relevant because Goodenough, professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin - it so happens, he turns 95 today - is the co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, the type of battery that is pretty much the mainstay of current electric vehicles. And he and a research fellow at U of T were announcing they'd developed a solid-state battery, one that has improved energy density (which means a car so equipped can drive further) and can be recharged more quickly and more often (a.k.a., "long cycle life") than a lithium-ion battery. (Did you ever notice that with time your iPhone keeps less of a charge than it did back when it was shiny and new? That's because it has a limited cycle life. Which is one thing when you're talking about a phone. And something else entirely when it involves a whole car.) What's more, there is reduced mass for a solid-state battery. And there isn't the same safety concern that exists with li-ion batteries vis-a- vis conflagration (which is why at airplane boarding gates they say they'll check your carryon as long as you remove all lithium-ion batteries). Lithium-ion batteries may be far more advanced than the lead-acid batteries that are under the hood of essentially every car that wasn't built in Fremont, Calif., but as is the case with those heavy black rectangles, li-ion batteries contain a liquid. In the lithium-ion battery, the liquid, the electrolyte, moves the lithium ions from the negative to the positive side (anode to cathode) of the battery. In a solid-state design, there is no liquid sloshing around, which also means that there's no liquid that would freeze at low operating temperatures. What Toyota is using for its solid-state battery is still unknown, as is the case for the solid-state batteries that Hyundai is reportedly working on for its EVs.