Some Canadian drivers would give up sex for cars

A model stands beside Aston Martin V8 Vantage during a special media opening of the Beijing Auto Show on April 23, 2010 in Beijing, China.

I’m just re-reading that headline, and it makes us look like a nation of prostitutes.

Well, that’s not what I meant. What actually happened is that the World Wildlife Federation did a survey leading up to bike-to-work week (May 31 to June 4) that revealed some very interesting information about Canadian drivers.

Asked what they’d give up rather than hand over the keys, the True North Strong and Free said that 36 per cent would give up junk food, 14 per cent would stop drinking coffee, six per cent would turn off their televisions and two per cent would happily wave goodbye to nookie forever.

Interestingly, those most likely to go without sex were a) women and b) from Ontario. So there you go: one more reason to skip straight from Manitoba to Montreal.

More electric cars means finding new standards to measure fuel efficiency

It used to be easy to know whether a car was a glutton for fuel. Federal standards defined miles per gallon and laid out precisely how the statistic should be measured.

But with the dawning of what enthusiasts hope is an era of electric cars, federal regulators are struggling to come up with a definition of auto efficiency for the next generation of technology. This year, two major auto manufacturers, General Motors and Nissan, will bring to market cars that plug in.

"There's no clear answer for how we should be informing the public about the efficiency of these new cars," said Mike Duoba, a research engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, outside Chicago. "The language we have been speaking -- mpg -- isn't sophisticated enough."

To fill the gap, researchers and Environmental Protection Agency officials have been conducting vehicle tests, researching driver habits and even running focus groups toward informing consumers about which cars are energy hogs.