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40+ cars that barely avoid the gas guzzler tax

The Gas Guzzler schedule, with mpg ratings and charges that haven't changed since 1991, lays out which fuel-swillers owe what to Uncle Sam.
I started thinking about the "Gas Guzzler Tax" - considerably less well known as The Energy Tax Act of 1978 - when I was driving Dodge's new Challenger SRT Hellcat last week. Unsurprisingly for a car that can burn 1.5 gallons of gas per minute at max tilt, theoretically able to empty a full tank of premium in about 13 minutes, the Hellcat will be subject to the Gas Guzzler Tax schedule when it goes on sale.

Jaguar Race Taxis will fling you around the Nurburgring

The Germans have a word, " fernweh," literally meaning "far sickness," that describes a special kind of longing. It's a strange sensation in which you feel homesick for a place that you're in tune with, a place that moves you, but it's a place you've never actually been to before. Someone who loves cars might be drawn that way to the Nurburgring. But if you're traveling to Germany this summer to fulfill that sense of fernweh, how do you experience the Green Hell firsthand? Your rental-car company might frown on you taking matters into your own hands. But Jaguar may have your answer. The Jaguar Race Taxi experience will give you a hot lap around the 13 miles and 73 corners of the Nordschleife in the 575-horsepower Jaguar F-Type SVR and the equally powerful four-door Jaguar XJR575. You'll ride with professional drivers who won't coddle you — Jaguar promises cornering forces of 1.2g. "A ride in the F-TYPE SVR and XJR575 Race Taxi is a thrilling and truly unforgettable experience for any car enthusiast — or anybody who just enjoys going very fast!" says Phil Talboys, JLR's European engineering operations manager. "Our highly experienced professional drivers are veterans of the Nurburgring 24-hour race, making them uniquely qualified to show customers the true potential of these extraordinary supercharged V8 Jaguars." The laps are available until the snow flies in November. Taxi fare is ˆ199 ($236) per lap in either car. You'll be in and out in 30 minutes, counting the safety briefing, the hot lap and a review of the video you'll walk away with. Oh, and there's a weight limit of 120 kilos (264 pounds), so you stockier souls may want to start your diets now. Reservations can be made at the track or online here. The F-Type SVR can take one passenger, and the XJR575 will haul you and two of your screaming friends. Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.

Jaguar Land Rover and Cambridge have developed a touchless touchscreen

Jaguar Land Rover and the University of Cambridge are working on new touchscreen technology that eliminates the need to touch the screen. Counterintuitive, right? It’s called “predictive touch” for now, in part because the system is able to predict what you might be aiming for on the screen.  The video at the top of this post is the best way to understand how users will interact with the tech, but weÂ’ll do some more explaining here. You simply reach out with your finger pointing toward the item on screen that you want to select. ItÂ’ll highlight the item and then select it. HereÂ’s how it works, according to the University of Cambridge: “The technology uses machine intelligence to determine the item the user intends to select on the screen early in the pointing task, speeding up the interaction. It uses a gesture tracker, including vision-based or radio frequency-based sensors, which are increasingly common in consumer electronics; contextual information such as user profile, interface design, environmental conditions; and data available from other sensors, such as an eye-gaze tracker, to infer the userÂ’s intent in real time.” Cambridge claims that lab tests showed a 50 percent reduction in both effort and time by the driver in using the screen, which would theoretically translate to more time looking at the road and less time jabbing away at the screen. If the prediction and machine learning tech is good enough, we could see this resulting in a reduced number of accidental inputs. However, on a certain level it almost sounds more difficult to point at a screen while moving than it does to actually touch a section of that screen. Without using the tech and its supposedly great predictive abilities, we canÂ’t come to any grand conclusions. One comparison you may already be thinking of is BMWÂ’s Gesture Controls. ItÂ’s already been addressed with a subtle diss from Cambridge: “Our technology has numerous advantages over more basic mid-air interaction techniques or conventional gesture recognition, because it supports intuitive interactions with legacy interface designs and doesnÂ’t require any learning on the part of the user,” said Dr Bashar Ahmad of the University of Cambridge. Of course, this tech can be used for much more than just vehicle touchscreen control. Cambridge says it could be integrated into ATMs, airport check-in kiosks, grocery store self checkouts and more.