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Hyundai, Buick dealer apologize in wake of Chinese baby social media incident

A very strange story out of China today, as Hyundai and a Chinese Buick dealer were forced to face allegations of using allusions to an infamous child murder on a social media site as a way of promoting the safety features of their respective vehicles.
The original sad tale goes something like this: On March 4, a man reported to police that he had left his infant child in a running Toyota RAV4 while he ran into a supermarket briefly. When he came back out, the vehicle and the child were gone. Later in the week a suspect turned himself in to the police; confessing to them that he had stolen a sport-utility vehicle, strangled the infant that was in it, and then buried the child in the snow.
As you might imagine, the gristly incident was covered massively in the Chinese media. (There was huge public outcry as well, as evidenced by the vigil scene, above.) "Changchun baby abduction" was very quickly amongst the highest ranking search teams of the China's Weibo social media site - an equivalent of Twitter in the English-speaking world.

Hyundai Veloster facelift includes new 7-speed DCT, light cosmetics

Hyundai hasn't given the Veloster the exterior overhaul that we expected, but it has outfitted the quirky, oddly doored hatchback with some new tech, at least in the Korean market. The biggest change for the Veloster is confirmation that the previously rumored seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox will replace the current six-speed unit in the Turbo. It's mated to the same 1.6-liter, forced-induction four-cylinder featuring 201 horsepower and 195 pound-feet of torque. The exterior receives a few tiny tweaks, too, with new wheel designs and slightly different silver trim around the grille, but the bigger changes are found in the cabin. Those alterations aren't limited to new materials: Hyundai has included a new engine sound equalizer for the Veloster that lets drivers select from six different engine soundtracks. The instrument cluster also gets slightly altered, and there are new two-tone looks for the seats, as well. According to a blog post by Hyundai, the price for the Turbo with the seven-speed dual clutch starts at 23.7 million won ($22,000). Unfortunately, there's no official word whether these changes are going to make it across the Pacific to the US market. We've got an inquiry in with Hyundai Motor America, and will let you know if we hear more.

Ford fights back against patent trolls

Some people are just awful. Some organizations are just as awful. And when those people join those organizations, we get stories like this one, where Ford has spent the past several years combatting so-called patent trolls. According to Automotive News, these malicious organizations have filed over a dozen lawsuits against the company since 2012. They work by purchasing patents, only to later accuse companies of misusing intellectual property, despite the fact that the so-called patent assertion companies never actually, you know, do anything with said intellectual property. AN reports that both Hyundai and Toyota have been victimized by these companies, with the former forced to pay $11.5 million to a company called Clear With Computers. Toyota, meanwhile, settled with Paice LLC, over its hybrid tech. The world's largest automaker agreed to pay $5 million, on top of $98 for every hybrid it sold (if the terms of the deal included each of the roughly 1.5 million hybrids Toyota sold since 2000, the company would have owed $147 million). Including the previous couple of examples, AN reports 107 suits were filed against automakers last year alone. But Ford is taking action to prevent further troubles... kind of. The company has signed on with a firm called RPX, in what sounds strangely like a protection racket. Automakers like Ford pay RPX around $1.5 million each year for access to its catalog of patents, which it spent nearly $1 billion building. "We take the protection and licensing of patented innovations very seriously," Ford told AN via email. "And as many smart businesses are doing, we are taking proactive steps to protect against those seeking patent infringement litigation." What are your thoughts on this? Should this patent business be better managed? Is it reasonable that companies purchase patents only to file suit against the companies that build actual products? Have your say in Comments.