Isegoria

American cars are getting hip again. From 50 Cent Makes Pitch to Get 2006 Charger:

“I need to know what I gotta do to get that Dodge Charger first. I need that,” 50 Cent told Myles Kovacs, publisher of auto customizing publication Dub Magazine, in a telephone message last week made available to The Detroit News.

Chrysler is rushing to get 50 Cent what he wants, as it did last summer when rapper Snoop Dogg asked Chrysler division chief executive Dieter Zetsche for a Chrysler 300 sedan. The Snoop Dogg connection brought the automaker welcome cachet in the youth market.

I’m not sure that the 2006 Dodge Charger captures the spirit of the original.

Consumer-electronics companies have learned that arbitrage cuts into their ability to price-discriminate. From Electronics With Borders: Some Work Only in the U.S.:

Some consumer-electronics companies are designing products so they will work only in the U.S. For example, some of the latest printers from Hewlett-Packard Co. refuse to print if they aren’t fed ink cartridges bought in the same region of the world as the printer. Nintendo Co.’s latest hand-held game machines are sold in the U.S. with power adaptors that don’t work in Europe.

Such measures prevent thrifty foreign consumers and gray marketers — traders who sell goods through channels that haven’t been authorized by the manufacturer — from taking advantage of the decline of the dollar against the world’s major currencies to buy lower-price products in the U.S.

The Age of Egocasting notes that television remotes go way, way back:

A 1955 version of the remote, called the “Flash-Matic,” was wireless, using a beam of light aimed at photocells in the corners of the television set to change channels and adjust volume. Advertisements for the Flash-Matic pictured a woman, transfixed before the television, her right hand clutching a remote control that is directing a sci-fi laser beam at the TV. Unfortunately, the supposedly sophisticated photo cells on the television were unable to distinguish the remote control’s beams from sunlight, and frustrated Flash-Matic owners found their television tuners oscillating to nature’s rhythms rather than their own.

In 1956, a Zenith engineer named Robert Adler solved this problem by using ultra-sonic technology to create the Space Command 400 Remote Control. This remote, which Adler patented, used aluminum rods and tiny hammers to create the pitched sounds that the television set interpreted as “off” or “on” or “channel up” or “channel down.” The sounds emitted were inaudible to humans (although not to dogs, which were known to howl painfully as the Space Command went about its business) and the device itself required no batteries.

It took a long, long time for remotes to become common though:

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, it was 1985 before more televisions were sold with remotes than without. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, 99 percent of all television sets and 100 percent of all VCRs sold in the United States came with remote control devices, and infrared and digital technology had replaced Adler’s miniature ultrasonics. In 2000, the average household contained four remote controls.

One reason remotes didn’t catch on was that there were so few channels:

The original purpose of the remote control, as Zenith’s president put it at the time of its creation, was to “tune out annoying commercials.” But it was a federal regulation many years later that made the remote control the indispensable household object that it is today. The Federal Communications Commission?s 1972 “Open Skies” decision deregulating satellite communications allowed cable television to become a popular reality in the U.S., as it rapidly did. As one observer noted, “the only people who had an inarguable, demonstrable need for an RCD for their television before the 1970s were the debilitated.” But with the rapid increase in television channel offerings, we all needed the remote simply to navigate television’s many new options. Cable television dramatically increased the range of choices, but it was the remote control, according to James Walker and Robert Bellamy, which “made it easier for viewers to be choosy.”

Do Hybrids Have Legs? looks at Honda’s new Accord Hybrid:

No backdoor effort to give Honda more “eco-cover,” the Accord Hybrid is, in fact, Honda’s fastest, most powerful production car, combining its superb 3-liter, 240 horsepower V-6 with a12-kilowatt electric motor. Unlike the Prius, in which the gasoline engine and the electric motor more or less share tasks, the Accord employs the electric motor mainly to enhance the gas engine’s performance. Honda calls this IMA or “integrated motor assist,” boosting the car up to 255 horsepower.

Although the hybrid’s $30,000 base price is $3,000 more than the standard Accord V-6, the car is loaded with goodies like leather seats and XM satellite radio mated to a 120-watt sound system.

Honda claims 37 miles per gallon on the highway and 30 mpg in city driving — whopping 38 and 23 percent improvements over the regular Accord V-6. The economy is delivered not just from the electric motor but from the use of “variable cylinder management,” Honda’s name for a system that shuts down three of the Accord’s cylinders at cruising speeds