John Markoff:

Cars that can park, brake at a sign of danger and navigate in traffic are on their way to dealers’ showrooms, turning science-fiction fantasies about consumer-owned self-driving vehicles into a new reality.

But as private investors have been pushing ahead to develop the systems needed for these new robotic machines, one crucial innovator has been largely out of the loop: the United States military.

The armed forces have lagged on deploying their own versions of unmanned road vehicles, despite goals to create new machines that could be used in place of “boots on the ground” in conflicts. Restrictions on government spending and technological challenges have left the military with virtually no chance of meeting the goal set by Congress to have a third of the military’s combat fleet consist of unmanned vehicles by 2015, military experts said.

The military’s failure to lead the way in self-driving ground vehicles is ironic, given that today’s commercial advances have their roots in research originally sponsored by Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s advanced technology organization. A decade ago, Darpa offered a series of “grand challenges” to private researchers, which helped push the technology forward.

Steve Johnson:

On an equal-weighted basis, US equity funds recommended by consultants underperformed other funds by 1.1 per cent a year between 1999 and 2011, according to analysis of 29 consultancies accounting for more than 90 per cent of the market by a team from Oxford university’s Saïd Business School.

“The enormous power wielded by consultants is not matched by their performance,” said Jose Martinez, one of the authors of the study.

“In US equities, one of the largest asset classes, investment consultants as an industry appear to add no value in fund selection,” added co-author Howard Jones.

Associated Press:

It carried hippies through the 1960s, hauled surfers in search of killer waves during endless summers and serves as a workhorse across the developing world, but the long, strange trip of the Volkswagen van is ending.

Brazil is the last place in the world still producing the iconic vehicle, or “bus” as it’s known by aficionados, but VW says production will end Dec. 31. Safety regulations mandate that every vehicle in Brazil must have air bags and anti-lock braking systems starting in 2014, and the company says it cannot change production to meet the law.

Although output will halt in Brazil, there should be plenty of VW vans rolling along for decades if only because there are so many, and they are so durable. VW produced more than 10 million Volkswagen Transporter vans globally since the model was introduced 63 years ago in Germany, though not all resemble the classic hippie machine. More than 1.5 million have been produced in Brazil since 1957.

The VW van is so deeply embedded in popular culture, it will likely live on even longer in the imagination.

Tara Siegel Barnard:

“People’s attitudes are shifting,” said Philip Reed, senior consumer advice editor at Edmunds.com. “The car is being seen more as a commodity to be used and then returned. Ownership was a big part of the World War II generation — people wanted to own their house and own their car. They were taught that was financially responsible.”

There are reasons certain people might want to lease (the first one being you have extra money to burn). But for the rest of us, the financial consequences are worth re-examining, especially when you have a slew of competing financial priorities like college tuition, retirement or even a nice vacation.

So let’s start with the hard numbers. Mr. Reed looked at three ways you could acquire a four-door Honda Accord EX: buying a new 2014 model, leasing the same 2014 car, or buying a used 2011 Accord with 36,000 miles. (Many people in the New York area are paying about $28,211 for the new car, including tax, title and registration.)

The analysis looked at the cost over six years, since the average person owns a car for that long, and it incorporated typical buying patterns: the new Accord is purchased with a five-year loan, the used car is financed with a four-year loan, and the person who is leasing must take out two consecutive 36-month leases. (The rest of the assumptions are detailed on the accompanying chart.)

Gillian Tett:

The danger with addictions is they tend to become increasingly complusive. That might be one moral of this week’s events. A few days ago, expectations were sky-high that the Federal Reserve was about to reduce its current $85bn monthly bond purchases. But then the Fed blinked, partly because it is worried that markets have already over-reacted to the mere thought of a policy shift. Faced with a choice of curbing the addiction or providing more hits of the QE drug, in other words, it chose the latter.

In many ways this is understandable; the real economic data is still soft. But as investors try to fathom what the Fed will (not) do next, it is worth pondering a timely speech made recently by former UK regulator Lord Turner. As he told Swedish economists last week, and repeated to central bankers and economists in London this week, the real story behind the recent dramatic financial sagas – be that the market dance around QE or the crisis at Lehman Brothers five years ago – is that western economies have become hooked on ever-expanding levels of debt.

Jay Nagley:

Possibly the greatest cinematic celebration of cars and youth, American Graffiti, celebrates its 40th anniversary this month.

The story of California teenagers’ lives revolving around their cars rang true once but would seem hopelessly contrived if made today. Nowadays, increasing numbers of teenagers across the developed world don’t even bother getting a driving licence, let alone a car.

Car manufacturers are starting to fret that young people – the car buyers of tomorrow – are falling out of love with their products. Given the ageing populations of developed countries, car companies are desperate to woo as many young buyers as possible, and the thought that the crucial youth market might dry up is giving bosses sleepless nights.
To see how bad things could get, just look at Japan, where the pheno menon was first noted. A stagnant economy for the past 20 years, serious congestion and a youth market focused on products with plugs, not petrol, has led to a collapse in the Japanese car market. It peaked in 1990 at 7.7 million, and then fell steadily to a low of 4.2 million in 2011, before recovering slightly to 5.0 million in 2012 (mainly because of government incentives).

Joseph White:

BMW AG is launching production here on Wednesday of its new Project i cars, the first large-scale test of whether building cars out of carbon fiber and plastic instead of steel can overcome the obstacles to adoption of electric vehicles.

The BMW i-Car project—including the $41,350 all-electric i3 city car, the $135,000 i8 plug-in hybrid sports car and more models in the future—aims to become the first high-volume supplier of the ultralight vehicles. Proponents of the idea say electric cars can be more competitive with internal combustion vehicles if car makers use exotic, lightweight materials, such as carbon fiber reinforced plastic, to reduce the weight the batteries have to propel. Plastic materials also would allow for a radically simplified body assembly system.

All car makers are under pressure from regulators around the world to move toward electric vehicles. In California, New York and several other U.S. states, BMW could face constraints on sales of its most popular models, such as the X5 sport utility or 3-series sedans, unless it starts selling zero emission cars and building up clean air credits.

Matt Phillips:

Anyone who keeps an eye on the US economy knows that the automotive business is going like gangbusters right now. In September US auto sales jumped to an annualized rate of 16.1 million, the best since December 2007.

How is this possible, given the relatively muted gains that US consumers have seen in their incomes?

Credit.

Take a look at this chart from Deutsche Bank, which shows the breakdown of issuance this year of different types of asset-backed securities (meaning bundled loans that lenders sell off to investors in the secondary market).

Lyra Kilston:

Michael Light often snaps his photos from a two-seater plane — at a bumpy 70 mph — that he pilots himself at the same time, but you’d never know it from his well-composed aerial shots. From swimming-pooled suburbs in Phoenix to razed hills awaiting their luxury homes in Nevada, Light has been documenting the western U.S.’s unique topography from the air for the past decade.

In his series on Black Mountain, Nevada, Light’s photos put viewers in the plane with him as he glides over 640 acres of dynamite-flattened hilltops, carved through with pristine roads and cul de sacs linking graded house foundations. But there are no houses. No lawns, no pools, no sidewalks. No guard-staffed gates. This is the site of the Ascaya luxury housing development, which has lain dormant since the economic crash of 2008.

“Once they get built, it’s hard to un-build them,” says Light. From the air the sculpted earth reads like a strange code cut into the brown hills.

Gavin Green:

A fleet of BMW i3s silently lugged foot-weary hacks from hall to hall at the vast Frankfurt motor show, that biennial techfest that celebrates the global dominance of Germany’s car industry. It’s not often that the most important new car at a show also doubles as journalist taxi.

I had my go, impressed by the lack of any intrusive B-post (so easy egress and ingress), the uncluttered son-of-iPad instrumentation, excellent all-round visibility and the usual electric car whisper-quiet whirr and whoosh. The wood trim on ‘my’ car looked a little out of place – can you imagine an iPhone in walnut veneer? – but if there is one car that summed the cutting edge of the global (i.e. German) car industry, 2013, it was the i3.