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An embarrassment of riches this time as the 2013 BMW 750Li and Lexus LS 460 hit our garage on the same day. Some assignments are just more comfortable than others! But while both cars are luxurious, one felt much readier to cut it up on the road to my hands, and you might be surprised which.

A great Car Tech 101 in this episode, explaining the rather tricky relationship between horsepower and torque. We're conditioned to think about horsepower, but … Read more

Driverless cars could get a big boost from a new system that researchers say will increase the accuracy of in-car satellite navigation systems by 90 percent.

Researchers say the system combines conventional GPS signals with data from sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes to determine a vehicle's position within six feet of its location, a dramatic reduction from the current margin of error of 50 feet. The system can be installed inexpensively in any vehicle, say researchers at Spain's Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, where the system was developed.

"We have managed to improve the determination of … Read more

According to friends of Rodrigo Diaz, they were all going ice skating. Diaz was driving the car, and they were going to pick up one more skater.

They pulled into a driveway, which their GPS -- at least, according to one of the friends -- told them was their destination.

Then, as WSB-TV Atlanta explains, this tale took a troubling turn.

According to Yeson Jimenez, 15, one of the passengers, Diaz pulled into a driveway; then 69-year-old Phillip Sailors peered out of a window of the house.

He allegedly came out, went back inside, then emerged again, firing a gun … Read more

We need to get something out of the way.

Croatia is not Belgium. Neither is it in Belgium. Nor was it ever, in some strange historical time before America existed, Belgian in any way.

This does not seem to have prevented a Belgian lady from trusting her GPS enough to end up in Zagreb, Croatia's capital, when she was actually trying to go 90 miles from her home in Hainault Erquelinnes to Brussels.

Both, remarkably, are in Belgium.

I am grateful to Gizmodo for sending me several thousand miles to Spain's El Mundo, for there is a report … Read more

Irritated by your car's built-in GPS? You're not alone.

More car owners are less happy with their factory-installed navigation systems than in the past, says a report out today from J.P. Power and Associates.

A survey of drivers conducted late last year found satisfaction with their navigation systems down 13 points from the prior year. The level of satisfaction was down in all of the six factors measured, but ease of use was the biggest complaint, dropping in score by 25 points.

The other five factors included in the study were routing, navigation display screen, the speed … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Locator devices that let parents keep track of their kids are nothing new. Evado Filip decided to do things a little differently with the VivoPlay, a watch geared for the 5- to 12-year-old crowd.

Many parents don't want to cough up a real cell phone for their little dears until they get pretty close to being teenagers. The VivoPlay includes GSM, so parents and kids can get in touch when necessary, but it's not a full-blown cell phone with all the related texting and possible cyberbullying issues. This feature elevates the watch from a location device to a communication device.… Read more

LAS VEGAS -- There's life yet to be found in the portable navigation market. Garmin has just pulled the wraps off of its new line of Nuvi GPS navigators at CES 2013. We were able to get a brief hands-on with what appears to be the best Garmin Nuvi models yet.

Before we get too carried away, the new Nuvi models largely behave like the old models, but there are a few new features that bear mentioning. Most interestingly, the new Nuvis boast a feature that Garmin calls Real Directions, which augments the standard turn-by-turn directions and text-to-speech spoken … Read more

We are all driven by compulsions.

They circumvent our normal thinking systems. They propel us toward the objects of our desire. They force us, at times, to pay a terrible price.

Please, therefore, offer sympathy to Richard Almaraoui, a 35-year-old man from Norfolk, U.K., who appears to be driven to steal other people's things.

So much so that after a previous offense he was ordered by a court to wear an electronic tag.

These things tend to monitor your whereabouts in a fairly accurate way. Perhaps, then, it's best not to burgle a stranger's home, as … Read more

As the father of 9-year-old twins, I often find myself telling them about tech products and innovations that I didn't have growing up. All parents do it: trying to get their kids to understand how much tougher life was in the old days.

In my case, the old days were in the 1980s -- not that long ago. But the range of change in our lives continues to impress me and make my children roll their eyes.

Yesterday, I posted a photo on Instagram (see above and on my Sreenet account), saying the NYC subway's next-train arrival guides … Read more