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Here are a few of our automotive guilty pleasures

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. The world is full of cars, and just about as many of them are bad as are good. It's pretty easy to pick which fall into each category after giving them a thorough walkaround and, more important, driving them. But every once in a while, an automobile straddles the line somehow between good and bad — it may be hideously overpriced and therefore a marketplace failure, it may be stupid quick in a straight line but handles like a drunken noodle, or it may have an interior that looks like it was made of a mess of injection-molded Legos. Heck, maybe all three. Yet there's something special about some bad cars that actually makes them likable. The idea for this list came to me while I was browsing classified ads for cars within a few hundred miles of my house. I ran across a few oddballs and shared them with the rest of the team in our online chat room. It turns out several of us have a few automotive guilty pleasures that we're willing to admit to. We'll call a few of 'em out here. Feel free to share some of your own in the comments below. Dodge Neon SRT4 and Caliber SRT4: The Neon was a passably good and plucky little city car when it debuted for the 1995 model year. The Caliber, which replaced the aging Neon and sought to replace its friendly marketing campaign with something more sinister, was panned from the very outset for its cheap interior furnishings, but at least offered some decent utility with its hatchback shape. What the two little front-wheel-drive Dodge models have in common are their rip-roarin' SRT variants, each powered by turbocharged 2.4-liter four-cylinder engines. Known for their propensity to light up their front tires under hard acceleration, the duo were legitimately quick and fun to drive with a fantastic turbo whoosh that called to mind the early days of turbo technology. — Consumer Editor Jeremy Korzeniewski  Chevrolet HHR SS: Chevy's HHR SS came out early in my automotive journalism career, and I have fond memories of the press launch (and having dinner with Bob Lutz) that included plenty of tire-smoking hard launches and demonstrations of the manual transmission's no-lift shift feature. The 260-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder was and still is a spunky little engine that makes the retro-inspired HHR a fun little hot rod that works quite well as a fun little daily driver.

Artist imagines eerie world where cars have no wheels

The wheel ranks right up there with the telescope and four-slice toaster in the pantheon of inventions that have moved humankind forward. But what if a circle in three dimensions had never occurred to anyone, and we all had just moved on without it? Perhaps we'd be driving around in Lucas Motors Landspeeders with anti-gravity engines. Or maybe we'd have the same cars we do today, just without wheels.
That's the thought experiment that seems to have led French photographer Renaud Marion to create his six-image series called Air Drive. The shots depict cars throughout many eras of motoring that look normal except for one thing: they have no wheels. The models used include a Jaguar XK120, Cadillac DeVille (shown above), Chevrolet El Camino and Camaro, and Mercedes-Benz SL and 300 roadsters.
Perhaps one day when our future becomes our past, you'll be able to walk the street and see with your own eyes the rust and patina of age on our nation's fleet of floating cars. Until then, Monsieur Marion's photographs will have to do.

Meet the mother-daughter team that's worked on almost every Chevy Volt

It's Mother's Day, and we're soft enough we love our mothers enough to share a new video from General Motors with you. In it, we meet Monique Watson (left) and Evetta Osbourne, a mother-daughter team that works at the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly where GM makes the Chevy Volt (along with all of GM's other plug-in hybrids: the Opel Ampera, Holden Volt and Cadillac ELR). The two work side-by-side and have installed the lithium-ion battery pack on almost all of those vehicles - nearly 80,000 of them - since GM started making the pre-production Volts in 2009. In a prepared statement, Watson said that she likes working next to her mom, day in and day out, and they the two are totally in sync when it comes to putting the 400-pound, 16.5-kWh packs into the vehicle undersides. They two can also share stories throughout the day, and Watson said, "The arrangement has absolutely improved our relationship." Osborne started working at Detroit-Hamtramck in 1999, Watson since 2006. If you're driving a Volt today, you probably have them to thank for doing a bit of the work putting your car together. See a short video of them in action below. It's Always Mother's Day for Detroit-Hamtramck Duo Mother, daughter install lithium-ion battery pack in nearly all GM electric vehicles 2014-05-08 DETROIT – For Detroit resident Evetta Osborne, every day is Mother's Day. That's because she literally works side by side with her daughter, Monique Watson, at General Motors' Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. They have installed the lithium-ion battery pack on nearly every Chevrolet Volt, Opel Ampera, Holden Volt, and Cadillac ELR since production began. In fact, apart from vacation days and an occasional sick day, the mother-daughter duo has installed almost every battery pack since the Volt was in pre-production in 2009. The ELR launched earlier this year. All told – including Ampera – that's more than 80,000 electric vehicles. "We're a good team and our relationship is secondary when it comes to performing our jobs – but it's great to work alongside my daughter, said Osborne, a mother of five. Because the battery packs weigh more than 400 pounds each, automatic guided vehicles – robotic carts that use sensors to follow a path through the plant – deliver them just as the vehicle body structures glide into position overhead. The carts then lift the T-shaped packs, and Osborne and Watson guide them into the chassis and secure each one with 24 fasteners.