Breaking America's dependence on foreign energy supplies and suppliers who often don't like the U.S. is a driving force behind the search for alternative fuels. That includes electric cars, which wheezing Detroit has finally realized it needs to produce. But at Detroit's International Auto Show this month, the excitement surrounding the Big Three's announcements that they're shifting from gasoline to voltage has been tempered by another realization: most of the lithium used to make the batteries for ...

Correction Appended: February 24, 2010 What's wrong with Toyota? Not much. At least not from an engineering, mechanical or even a quality point of view. You don't reach the top gear in the global auto industry unless you make outstanding cars, which Toyota does — most of the time. Though cars are familiar machines, they are also highly complex ones. To create a modern car, a company has to design, engineer, build, buy and then assemble some 10,000 parts. ...

More than 60 years after the end of World War II, an 89-year-old retired auto worker from Ohio went on trial in Germany on Monday in what many are calling the country's last Nazi war crimes proceeding. That's not the only reason the world is watching the trial closely: John Demjanjuk is also No. 1 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted war criminals, accused of being an accessory to the deaths of at least 27,900 people. Then there's the added drama of his ...

Angry workers beat to death a human resources vice president after he laid off 42 employees at an auto-parts manufacturing company in southern India, police said Wednesday.

This is the summer of Auto-Tune. No matter how hard some people -- notably Jay-Z --have tried to kill the trend of musicians using computers to make their voices sound like whiny robots, Auto-Tune technology continues to ride a cultural high. Now the voice-altering effects are migrating from recording studios to YouTube and mobile phones. An iPhone app called "I Am T-Pain" lets people manipulate their voices to sound like the popular rapper and Auto-Tune advocate. The Gregory ...

Indian tourism authorities will be holding English classes for auto-rickshaw drivers in New Delhi as the city prepares to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010. More than 40,000 natural gas-fueled auto-rickshaws, or motorized three-wheeled taxis, run on the Indian capital's dilapidated roads, according to the city government statistics. The city is expected to host around 100,000 tourists during the Commonwealth Games scheduled from October 3-14 in 2010. About 9,000 athletes and officials of 52 Commonwealth countries are likely to participate. ...

President Barack Obama will call for quicker action on financial reform during a speech Monday that coincides with the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, the White House said. Obama will discuss plans to reduce government involvement in the financial sector, and urge reform and global coordination to prevent another financial crisis, administration officials said. "We've had to do some extraordinary things ... to rescue the financial system, to ensure that our domestic auto industry didn't go out of ...

In the closing days of Cash for Clunkers, car dealers were turning buyers away, the government website crashed trying to keep up with the paperwork, and even the purple cars were selling. So, what does it tell us about our national character when the most popular government program in years is an economically dubious, environmentally negligible, politically lazy handout from 99% of the population to the other 1%, all aimed at reviving the economy from its vegetative state? ...

President Obama took his health care message to talk radio Thursday, telling listeners of Philadelphia-based host Michael Smerconish that he wants to overhaul the nation's ailing health care system out of necessity rather than politics. Appearing with Smerconish for 30 minutes on a broadcast from the White House, Obama faced some of the persistent questions of conservative Americans and others concerned that overhauling the nation's health care system will unnecessarily expand government authority and drive up the deficit. The questions ...

Spend a day in this tiny town about 23 miles or so from where President Obama will be holding a town hall meeting on Friday, and it's easy to see why his health-care push is facing big problems in Big Sky country -- even from the people he's trying to help. I arrived here a couple of days ahead of the president in order to get a better read on his reform effort by talking to people like Sonja McDonald, ...