Fun Lookbacks - Classic Video


We took the 2019 Acadia Denali to explore alt mobility at LA CoMotion, then crossed the concreted Los Angeles River on the iconic 4th Street Bridge, to enjoy views of downtown LA from East LA, and to seat at a fabulous restaurant there.


We toured the 2018 Land Rover Discovery Td6 through the City Of Industry. There’s a city called Industry? Indeed. It is a crescent of warehouses east of East LA. The dynamic diesel Discovery Td6 offered us a comfy ride through it.


We whisked effortlessly along freeways crossing Los Angeles within the 400-horsepower 2018 Cadillac CT6 with its autonomous Super Cruise system engaged, keeping us centered between the white lines and away from darting vehicles.


The animated Rubberneck family opens this 2017 video report from the Detroit Auto Show (North American International Auto Show, NAIAS), where Ford's executives presented a vision of autonomous driving tech decreasing vehicle injuries and fatalities.


The 2016 Chrysler Pacifica is packed with family- and eco-friendly features, such as three-piece panoramic sunroof, powerful vacuum to keep cookie crumbs at bay, and it can run on electric-only power for up to 33 miles per charge.


Discussions and displays at the 2016 LA Auto Show, revealed to TheFamilyCar and GreenFamilyCar correspondents that the autonomous vehicle age has already dawned, raising questions about whether we are ready for to embrace it.


The founder of the Advanced Sustainability Institute, Michael Boehm, test drives BMW’s electric i3 around downtown Los Angeles during the 2013 LA Auto Show. The i3 EV has been designed from scratch for maximim sustainability.


H stands for hydrogen, the chemical element that drives the car, the Audi exec explains. His A7 h-tron hydrogen vehicle fulfills the promise offered by hydrogen and raises the question, from what source? Maybe at home electrolysis?


Reporters from The Family Car and Green Family Car attended both the LA and Detroit auto shows of late 2011 and early 2012. Click above and below for a quick touchstone to help you gauge industry progress now, a decade later.

Wild New Vid View - Rubbernecks Take A Roadtrip

The Rubbernecks are The Family Car mascot family. With Joanne (Jo) Rubberneck behind the wheel, rolling along the open road can get animated. Though Charles (Chuck) Rubberneck handles roadtrip navigation between reading his newspapers and journals, he prefers his collection of vintage maps to mapping apps. Riding in the back seat, daughter Skye's app searches fill in news and location information that her father's analog sources lack. Beside her, the family's dog, Mocha, is the color of coffee with cream and is as smart as a Jack Russell, which he (being a mutt) may be a cross with, though he believes himself to be a Golden Retriever. In the attic of the traveling house, Comfy the Cat is always up to something, while most often comfortably nestled in her basket bed. In the Rubberneck vehicle's kitchen, young Wyatt is stirring up a recipe he wants to share with his family once their day's roadtrip has ended. He is the engineering lad who helped get the family's home on wheels upgraded with solar panels, battery-filled-chassis, and electric motor. Click the image above to roadtrip with The Rubbernecks. Remember to scroll right to see more!



Family Car Matriarch - Teacher Skilled in Reading Recovery

For many years, the Ulysses S. Grant elementary school in Ferndale, Michigan, was a focus of a U.S. Justice Department desegregation lawsuit. Government lawyers found that it had, in fact, been built to segregate the school district's black children from white children. After the school district was desegregated, Mrs. Curtis was a first grade teacher at Grant, where she evolved her focus to provide one-on-one reading facilitation to first grade students who tested at the lowest reading skill level of their class, using the highly effective "Reading Recovery" tutoring methodology for Grant students. Mrs. Curtis entered her retirement years traveling to various elementary schools in Detroit in her favorite vehicle to help additional first graders learn to comprehend the English language via Reading Recovery techniques, as she does in one of our favorite videos.


The Family Carguy Goes to Aunty Lou

For over twenty-two years, Keith Turner, aka Carguy, has been a leading headlight here at The Family Car, as it was his car articles for parenting publications, that offered new vehicle reviews focused on features that families were interested in, that led to our TV series pilot. Keith came to his automotive reporting following a career as a news writer and editor, including a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial stint at the Anchorage Daily News. In our TV series pilot, we offered a segment by automotive journalist Aunty Lou. She, Lou Ann Hammond, has now won Keith's automotive review attentions. We wish both Keith and Lou Ann well. Along with Keith's vehicle reviews for The Family Car came the participation and ready camera support of his wife, children, and grandchildren. We gratefully thank each of them.


Young Wyatt Rubberneck - Exposing the Equation

The Rubbernecks took to the road due to necessity in 2008, but young Wyatt Rubberneck thrived on the many opportunities that the varied places his family visited, and the variety of people they met, offered him to learn about life, and about himself. He knows his Einstein theories and realizes he is no Einstein, but still is inclined to puzzle about the greatest physicist's musings. In fact, he is thinking at this moment about a statement of Einstein's, "We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness." Early on in their voyaging, Wyatt learned to cook. Now he prepares a veggie spaghetti sauce with a medley of veg he picked up at a farmer's market. He is at work on an equation to help combat the global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. He wants to do his part to help humanity create a shared sustainable human occupation on the planet, and enjoy zero-emission EV roadtrips!

Remembering Michael Boehm - A Sustainability Enabler

Michael had a passion for playing guitar, and for fine woodworking to create guitars. Additionally, after edu at Northwestern and Stanford, while working in the booming Taiwan semiconductor biz, he nurtured an interest in the Dao (Tao, Taoism, or Daoism, a branch of Buddhism). He continued his Dao studies in LA, where he founded the Advanced Sustainability Institute and focused his consulting work on making the world a more sustainable place. With Dean Adams Curtis, the editor of this website, Michael co-instructed core courses in a sustainability certificate program offered by UCLA Extension, including a seminar on EVs and infrastructure. True to his practice of Dao (living in harmony with the Dao, the Way), he was a Dao enabler, lovingly bringing together humans to talk, feast, jam, and to explore paths to greater sustainability.