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The 2017 Dodge Charger Pursuit will always watch your back

Police cruisers spend the majority of their life parked and idle, waiting for the call to action. A parked car is a vulnerable one, especially when there may be incentive to disable or destroy that vehicle. FCA has worked with InterMotive, Inc., to supply safety technology that will detect movement behind the vehicle through the combined use of radar and the rear-view camera. Even better, FCA is putting this tech in every 2017 Dodge Charger Pursuit at no extra cost. According to InterMotive, the Officer Protection Package is designed to help awareness with an officer is parked and working inside the vehicle. The system will provide an alert if there is anyone moving behind the vehicle to ambush the officer. The system plugs into the OBDII port and is secured under the dash. The device can then be manually switched on. This triggers the rear parking sensors to activate and. If any movement is detected, the officer can look behind the car through the rear-view camera. The system will automatically lock the doors, roll up the windows and flash the taillights. No word on how much the system will cost for non-2017 vehicles, but it is available for order right now. Related Video: News Source: FCA Dodge Technology Police/Emergency

Race Recap: Rolex 24 at Daytona was fast and feisty

Let the record show that victory at the 2015 Rolex 24 at Daytona went to the No. 02 Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates Target/Ford EcoBoost Riley DP driven by Verizon IndyCar drivers Scott Dixon and Tony Kanaan and NASCAR drivers Jamie McMurray and Kyle Larson. The winner did 740 laps to cover 2,634.3 miles in 24 hours and 57.667 seconds. That's a statement to this year's pace in spite of 18 cautions, two more than last year: the Michael Shank Racing Ligier got pole with a time of 1:39.194, slower than last year's pole time of 1:38.270; however, the winning car last year only did 695 laps. The fight for top honors was shaved to a four-car battle over the first third of the event. The No. 02 Ganassi car took the lead on the first lap, swapping it well into the night with the No. 01 Ganassi car, the No. 10 Wayne Taylor Racing Corvette DP, and the defending champion No. 5 Action Express Corvette DP, all of them staying within about 20 seconds of one another. The Action Express car had a fuel connector come loose and lost three laps getting towed back to the pits to have it reattached, but was back in the lead 18 hours in. The No. 01 Ganassi car dropped out with recurring clutch problems 22 hours in, retiring not long after. A race-within-the-race is where the concluding action happened, a seven minute, 30-second dash from the end of the last caution to the checkered flag. During the penultimate pit stops with an hour to go, Dixon was in second place followed Jordan Taylor in the Wayne Taylor Racing DP into the pits but beat him out, taking the lead. The Action Express car was in third. In the last pit stops of the race, Dixon gained even more time, getting a four-second advantage over Taylor. Then a full-course caution came out twenty minutes before the finish when a Prototype Challenge car hit the wall and caught fire, bunching up the field. That closed the pits, but the Wayne Taylor Racing car had to pit during that yellow because of a miscalculation of driver time. No driver can be behind the wheel for more than four hours in a six-hour period but Jordan Taylor was going to go over, so he came in to swap out for brother Ricky. That cost the team any chance of second place, since they took an additional drive-through penalty for entering closed pits. When the track went green again, Sebastien Bourdais in the Action Express car stayed all over Dixon for the final five laps but couldn't get around him.

What's the deal with Chrysler demanding colleges crush their Vipers? [w/video]

Students and teachers at a Washington community college are up in arms following an order from Chrysler that it must destroy the pre-production Dodge Viper that was donated to the school's automotive technology program ten years ago.
The Viper in question is said to be the fourth off the production line, based on its VIN, and has had its emissions controls disabled, allowing its ten-cylinder engine to produce 600 horsepower, according to a report from Yahoo! Autos. As one of the first Vipers ever produced, the school's AT instructors claim it could be worth $250,000 in a museum, while a local news report purports that Jay Leno once tried to purchase the car, but the sale was prevented by Chrysler.
As pointed out by our friends at Autobytel, though, there are a lot of things in this story that don't quite add up. Immediately noticeable from the news report embedded below - which shows the car at South Puget Sound Community College - is that the car in question is not a 1992 model. When the Viper went on sale in 1992, it was only available as an RT/10 with a (flimsy) soft top, like the red car shown above. But the car featured in the report from KING5 News (inset image) is clearly a hardtop Viper GTS, which didn't enter production until 1996. And even if, as reported by a local newspaper, the hardtop featured is a prototype, it doesn't explain the lack of another iconic feature of the first Vipers - their distinctive side pipes. This kind of pokes holes in the school's argument that this is the fourth Viper to ever roll down the line. At best, this appears to be a pre-production Viper GTS.