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F1 champ Nigel Mansell is selling Mitsubishis in Jersey

Formula One drivers have a pretty short shelf life, so when they're done racing in grands prix, retired pilots can have a whole second career ahead of them. Jody Scheckter, for example, runs an organic farm. Niki Lauda started an airline. Most move on to other racing series, provide television commentary during race broadcasts, or start their own racing teams. But not Nigel Mansell: he's got a Mitsubishi dealership. Situated on Jersey – not New Jersey, but the British channel island – Mansell Mitsubishi is run by Nigel and his son Leo. It grew out of the service station the Mansells opened fourteen years ago, and out of the Mansell Collection, a used car dealership based in an old Art Deco movie theater, but recently expanded into selling new cars recently with the acquisition of a franchise. The Japanese brand may seem a bit of an odd choice, especially now that it's getting away from performance models and putting more emphasis on plug-in electrics. After all, Nigel won his 1992 Formula One World Championship in a Renault-powered Williams, before that raced for the likes of Ferrari and Lotus, and won the CART title on his debut season in a Lola-Ford. But the Mansells are adamant that they wanted a volume brand, not to deal with the high-priced exotics with which the name might be more readily associated. After all, there are only 100,000 or so people residing on the isle of Jersey, which wouldn't make for a very big customer base for high-end machinery. He and Leo (with whom he raced at Le Mans a few years back) even participated in a two-day training session for new franchisees, where few initially recognized the former champ. And they've got plans to expand as well. But the biggest draw may very well be the star factor, and the Mansells haven't shied away from playing it up, displaying memorabilia from Nigel's racing career around the showroom. After all, the prospect of being taken on a test drive by a former F1 champion may be enough to bring new customers into the showroom who might not have otherwise.

Self-driving Mitsubishis could use adapted missile technology

Mitsubishi is a big company made up of many different divisions and subsidiaries. Yeah, we tend to focus on Mitsubishi Motors, but the sprawling company also manufactures steel, builds televisions – we all knew someone in the 1990s with a hulking Mitsubishi "big screen" – and even screws together fighter jets and the missiles they carry. According to a report from Automotive News Europe, Mitsubishi Motors is hoping to leverage the capabilities of its sister companies to catch up to the competition and get driverless cars on the road by 2020. That means adapting millimeter-wave radars, sensors, and cameras built for missiles to automotive uses. As Mitsubishi sees it, having the development work done on this tech – albeit for a radically different application – gives it a big advantage over the competition. "All we have to do is to put together the components that we already have," Katsumi Adachi, the chief engineer for Mitsu's auto equipment division, told ANE. "None of our competitors have such a wide array of capabilities." As ANE goes on to explain with the help of Tokyo-based IHS analyst Goro Tanamachi, this is no plug-and-play application. That's largely because of the different economics of the automotive and defense industries. In the former, the bean counters have a tremendous say. There are cuts and cost reductions and all sorts of other stuff designed to maximize profit margins. The defense industry, though, is the land of sparing no expense – that, according to Tanamachi-san, could make adapting missile tech to autonomous vehicles a possible, but potentially very pricey proposition. "Cost-cutting requests are much more severe in autos than aerospace," Tanamachi-san told ANE. "I wonder if it's possible for them to bring down the cost of the systems to the levels manufacturers can use for cheap, low-end cars." Related Video: X

2014 Pikes Peak Hill Climb: Practice Day 3

Greg Tracy's MiEV Evolution III topped the time sheets almost 14 seconds ahead of third-place Monster Tajima.
On Thursday, qualifying times for six categories were set on the bottom-section switchbacks of Pikes Peak: Electric Modified - near-unlimited showcases of electric-vehicle engineering; Electric Production - electric vehicles "readily available to the public;" Open Wheel - single engine, open wheeled, open cockpit, single seat vehicles; Open - based upon a production or approved-aftermarket-replica vehicle; Exhibition - a prototype or pre-production vehicle limited to one year of eligibility in this class; and Vintage - vehicles and drivelines from 1990 or earlier.