Russ McBee

Today, BMW announced a pilot program in which 500 purely electric MINI's will be sold in California, New York, and New Jersey over the coming months. This ''field trial'' of the MINI E will allow 500 customers to lease the car for one year; during the trial period, MINI has agreed to pick up the cost of recharging the car. The numbers are ...

Oh my Lord. Chrysler plans to start importing Chinese cars into the US: Chrysler Group signed a deal Wednesday with China’s biggest automaker, Chery, to launch a low-cost production venture that could export the first Chinese-made cars to the United States. The first cars will reach Latin America or Eastern Europe within a year and ...

In this post, I said I was going to buy some new tires for Nigel today. I did. The car originally shipped from the factory with Goodyear Eagle RSA 205/45 R17 M+S, which is a run-flat tire. The new tires are Michelin Pilot Preceda 205/45 R17, and they're not run-flats. They ended up costing less than half what the run-flats would have cost ($183 ...

Nigel (my car) was born with run-flat tires -- Goodyear RSA 205/45 R17 M+S, to be exact. Run-flats are a good thing on a MINI Cooper S, since the car has absolutely nowhere to hide a spare tire. The car requires either run-flat tires or a AAA membership, otherwise I'm likely to be stranded God knows where with a flat I can't fix. After ...