Last week in Ohio, the U.S. state Senate made a move that promises to be a very competitive entry in this year's "Demonstrate How Laws Are Basically Just Wishes" contest. They passed an anti-texting bill that will make all texting while driving illegal. That's nothing new - they'll be the 38th state to do that, if it passes. It's the bill's other provision that would make Ohio different - the one that says drivers under the age of 18 cannot use any electronic devices whatsoever. Not for calling, not for texting, not for status updating, not for anything. This is a total ban on device use for kids under 18 and an across-the-board ban on texting for everyone.

Well, it's an across-the-board ban on texting except that it does not include built-in voice recognition texting systems that play incoming messages out loud and send messages that users dictate. Why does it specifically exclude those? Perhaps because the Ford Motor Company, which has a huge assembly plant and six manufacturing plants in Ohio, said "please." Just putting that out there.

Read more after the jump.

Every so often, a car comes along that is so special in so very many ways, it immediately stakes a claim to becoming an instant classic. The 2012 Fisker Karma is just such a car. Although there are persistent rumors that the start-up manufacturer is in financial trouble, the same type of rumors dogged Tesla from the very beginning. Both companies are still around and both are producing some very interesting cars.

For the record, the Fisker Karma is a luxury plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), one that promises approximately 400 horsepower and an all-electric range of some 80 kilometres (50 miles). The Karma is similar in concept to the Chevrolet Volt in that both are considered to be "range-extended EVs" - its otherwise electric powertrain is supported by a range-extending gasoline engine.

In the case of the Karma, however, its 2.0-litre 4-cylinder engine is not connected to the drive wheels and serves only to recharge the dual electric motors of the car's EV drive system, whereas the range-extender on the Volt can power the drive wheels directly in some circumstances.

Read more after the jump.

The recent kerfuffle over David Mulroney's car is a strange one, mainly because the kerfuffling car in question is a Toyota Camry, a vehicle that seems mostly unlikely to offend anyone. Though perhaps that was part of the problem. In case you haven't heard, Mulroney, Canada's Ambassador to China, recently posted pictures of his silver Camry on Weibo (sort of a Chinese Twitter), looking quite fine in its Camry-ish way. The response he received was basically a collective appalled gasp, followed by wave upon wave of mockery. Apparently, if you drive a Camry in China, you're expected to hide it like a shameful secret... until someone else outs you on Weibo, anyway. But you don't out yourself. That's crazy.

Read more after the jump.

At this year's North American International Auto Show, Bentley unveiled something quite incredible - a V8 version of its Continental GT sports coupe that is an estimated 40 per cent more fuel efficient than its 12-cylinder brethren.

With the ever-increasing emphasis on the environment, tailpipe emissions and fuel reserves, it's no wonder that alternative-fuel vehicles are seen as the answer to a solution that is very much needed in the foreseeable future. However, it's also worth noting that there are some pretty sharp minds out there working on optimizing the performance of the good ol' internal combustion engine - and the 2013 Bentley Continental GT V8 provides ample proof of this fact.

The entire Continental line, starting with the original GT coupe introduced in 2003, has only been offered with one type of engine: the twin-turbocharged W12. Over the years, this engine has been modified and tweaked to produce more power, more torque and more performance.

Click here to see how the V8 stacks up in our review.

While it's true that BMW may appear to be a little late in joining the electric vehicle (EV) brigade, it's also true that the Munich-based manufacturer has been hard at work behind the scenes on electrification for years now.

Their efforts began in earnest with an electric version of the MINI Cooper, dubbed the MINI E, which was given a trial run by 500 early adopters in the U.S. and the UK in 2009. The plan was to gather feedback and use the information to drive improvements.

Some two years later, these same test drivers were encouraged to trade in their MINI Es for the BMW ActiveE, an electric version of the BMW 1 Series Coupe and the next step in the company's electrification process.

See how it stacks up after the jump.

No one would deny that distracted driving is a real problem. Everyone is familiar with it - it's that thing that happens when other people try to text, drink coffee, shave, apply mascara, and discipline their children all at the same time. Oh, and drive. Not you, though. You're an assiduous driver, right? It's all the other bozos out there who need regulating.

And regulated they will be. Earlier this week, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) held a hearing to discuss its proposed restrictions on built-in technology in cars, asserted as contributors to the problem of distracted driving. The U.S. NHTSA is looking to restrict three main categories of technology: dashboard instruments and controls, navigational systems, and Web access.

With regard to the first category, dashboard instruments and control, members of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers - which includes the 12 biggest automakers (except Honda, strangely enough) - has been operating according to voluntary guidelines for the past decade. One of these guidelines already includes dashboard operations with a design requirement to limit "manual-visual" operations - tuning the radio, adjusting climate controls, etc. - to no more than ten two-second glances. The proposed federal regulations would cut that to six two-second glances. That seems reasonable; it didn't provoke much protest from the automakers - an Alliance study already showed the mean number of glances away from the road scene for the radio tuning task is less than 7, anyway. Pretty close.

Read on after the jump.

Last year, Roderick Mackie, Professor of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois, did some research on the way cows digest grass, raising hope that biofuels will eventually power our cars without compromising the world's food supply.

The study isolated microbes in a cow's gut that break through the tough cell walls of grass, allowing the animal to get at sugar inside.

That "grass energy" is the stuff of which biofuels like corn-based ethanol are made of. Moreover, unlike alternative fuels made from corn, ethanol made from switchgrass and other non-food crops doesn't eat into the world's food supply or drive up the cost of corn-based foods. Switchgrass, after all, is basically a weed - a prolific one at that.

Click here to read more after the jump.

Primus Green Energy Ltd. just announced that it has produced its first viable batch of renewable "drop-in" gasoline. The New Jersey-based company, an American subsidiary of the holding company Israel Corp, next plans to build a commercial plant in eastern Pennsylvania that will be able to produce up to 4.8 million gallons of bio-gasoline per year.

Reportedly, the bio-gasoline is produced from a blend of biomass inputs (the company cites wood pellets, switchgrass, and "herbaceous materials" as examples) and natural gas. The resulting product, if all pans out as Primus intends, will be price-competitive with standard gasoline but burn cleaner. Most alluringly, the bio-gas will be usable in standard gas powered cars without any special conversion or engine modification.

Intrigued? Find out more after the jump.

Flex fuel sounds plain cool. It's fuel and it's flexible - who wouldn't be impressed with something that's both vital and accommodating at the same time? Only hippies and professional haters, right?

As an energy source, flex fuel is by definition a mixture of ethanol and gasoline used in vehicles specifically modified/designed to accept it. And it can be any mixture; 99 per cent ethanol and 1 per cent gasoline; 1 per cent ethanol and 99 per cent gasoline or any per cent variation in between.

Flex-fuel vehicles, meanwhile, have received a lot of attention from automakers as of late - mostly the U.S.-based ones. The E85 flex fuel - a blend that is 85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent gasoline - is widely touted as new alternative-energy genius. Problem is, it's hardly new.

Read more after the jump.

Kelley Blue Book (KBB) has released their 2012 "Best Resale Value Awards." As always, these provide plenty of fodder for debate and complaint, but also for just plain geeking out. Because come on - seriously, you can control the Volt's battery recharging pace from your phone? How cool is that?!

Kelley divides its awards into three groups: best overall brand, best in category, and wild-card winners.

Based on some intricate set of calculations, a formula KBB keeps more secret than KFC's eleven herbs and spices, Kelley determines the percentage of base price that each vehicle is likely to command when resold at 36 and 60 months. This year's overall awards, presented at a special ceremony on the eve of the Los Angeles Auto Show, went to Toyota (best resale brand) and Lexus (best resale luxury brand).

Read more after the jump.

A natural extension of being a tech journalist is being a stats geek. As it turns out, nothing makes a stats geek happier than finding something wrong with someone Else's numbers. Especially when that someone is Kelley Blue Book (KBB), a cornucopia of car statistics ranging from range to resale value.

Now, we love KBB - lots of great information, insight and reviews. It's the original go-to source for "what should this lemon/diamond-in-the-rough actually cost?"-type queries. In fact, we recently posted a story about KBB's "Best Resale Value Awards," because KBB really does lead the way in generating that kind of informative repository of best and worst and in-betweens.

But sifting through KBB's archive for background info on its award-winners unveiled an odd and often-troubling lack of confluence or concurrence... something in the numbers that KBB uses for various ratings didn't always add up. We don't want to nitpick, but... actually, no, that's exactly what we do want to do. We should make clear that we haven't done any comprehensive statistical analysis, and we make no claims about KBB's methodology or overall system. We've just noticed some things that don't jive, that should jive, and that have us a bit worried.

Read more after the jump.

AMP Electric Vehicles, an entrepreneurial startup in Ohio whose new all-electric vehicles debuted at the North American Auto Show in January, has just qualified for the United States' USD$7,500 tax credit for plug-in electric vehicles. Congratulations, AMP! You're in with the big boys now! Word is that AMP was also a finalist for the U.S. Automotive X Prize in 2010. So, cool name, startup, X prize - that must be some amazing-looking car! A Jetson-mobile, maybe, or some other futuristic thing that looks like a cross between a fish and a DeLorean?

Oh. Well, that doesn't look futuristic at all. In fact it looks kind of like a Jeep. Wait ... it looks exactly like a Jeep. Umm, that's because it is a Jeep! A Jeep Grand Cherokee, to be exact, though the AMP also comes in luxury flavor: the Mercedes MLe.

Okay, so it may not look very futuristic, but AMP has figured out how to do something that few innovators have bother to try, i.e. take existing vehicles, remove the entire powertrain, and replace it with a battery and electric motor.

Find out more after the jump.

The manual transmission is not long for this world, much to the consternation of the "driving aficionado." As evidence, consider that the take rate for manual transmissions for all Lamborghini models - among the most extreme super-sports cars on the planet, mind you - is a measly 1 to 2 per cent.

For the mathematically challenged, this means that 98 to 99 per cent of Lamborghini customers are opting for the company's e-gear semi-automatic transmission over the traditional triple-pedal set-up. And the e-gear isn't even one of the best transmissions in the business.

All is not lost, though, because the latest generation of automatics can, in some cases, provide an equal measure of driving pleasure. Here's a rundown of the different kind of automatics, including those that will no doubt be propelling us forward in the future.

Set your shifter to Drive after the jump.

Most cars on the road today are designed with aerodynamics in mind, allowing each to scythe through the air like a dart while creating as little turbulence as possible - to a point, anyway - while also boasting sleek profiles, nice lines and a visceral aura of "let's roll." But put aerodynamics above all other design considerations and we'd all be driving giant, 4-wheeled saucers that wouldn't be particularly functional for transporting people and cargo nor look the least bit pretty.

Still, from grille to tailpipe, there are a number of cosmetic features on your typical ride that put form before function; style and sex appeal before the physics of drag and hypermileage lost.

From simple to garishly effective, here are three modification for your current car or things to look for in your next vehicle, from front to sides to back, that will make it a natural hypermiler.

Find out what they are after the jump.