"Lightning rod" no longer suffices to suffice to describe the platform for controversy that the Chevrolet Volt has become in its two-year history on the market. Maybe someday Volt will simply serve as its own metaphor for a brilliant but troubled car — like "DeLorean."

That's not to say that it's not successful — indeed, the Volt has expanded its lead, as Bloomberg reports, "as the top-selling U.S. rechargeable car this year as Toyota expanded plug-in Prius deliveries and Nissan said it's working to boost electric Leaf sales." Chevy sold 2,851 Volts in September; Nissan sold 984 Leafs; it wasn't clear how many of Toyota's mearly 19,000 Prius sales were plug-ins, but certainly it was a small percentage.

Even so, Chevrolet CMO Chris Perry is having to defend the recent ramping up of sales incentives that the brand is using to entice consumers and dealers into moving more units of the plug-in hybrid nameplate.Continue reading...

Discerning bicycle enthusiasts with a taste for the finer things in life are in luck. Both Audi and DeLorean are producing cycles worthy of some attention. While the DeLorean sticks to the conventional man-made energy source, Audi’s concepts will provide a motorized option to help any cyclists who get a little bored with the continued cranking.Continue reading...

When 1985’s Back to the Future blew the doors off of the box office (eventually pulling in $303.87 billion), two sequels were automatically set into motion and released in 1989 and 1990. And somewhere in there, someone got fully turned onto the joy of product placement. 

Back to the Future II was particularly chockfull of brand names, including Pepsi, Texaco, Mattel, Pizza Hut, Black and Decker, The Weather Channel, 7-Eleven, and AT&T, among others. But fans salivated most over the special shoe that Nike designer Tinker Hatfield created for the film, the Nike MAG shoe, with its glowing LED panel and an electroluminescent “Nike” for Michael J. Fox to wear as the film’s hero, Marty McFly.

Sneaker aficionados had been begging the company for years to release the same shoe to the mainstream. So in a highly-publicized eBay auction in September, Nike made only 1,500 to auction off on eBay to raise cash for Michael J. Fox’s Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. The result was $4.7 million from consumers, which a matching initiative doubled to $9.4 million.Continue reading...

According to a user on Reddit, the above DeLorean made of sand is "being used in an upcoming Old Spice commercial." Looks rad. The 1980s-ness of the DeLorean makes it a favorite for those looking for a little bit of iconic absurdity of the era. Indeed, we most recently saw the DeLorean brand, with monster tires, in that epic Hahn Beer ad.