Best of NM 2012 • “A good day” means you shoveled your car out of the snow in less than 15 minutes • 20 degrees is a heat wave • 50 degrees is shorts and tshirt weather • 8 inches of snow doesn’t stop you from driving • A few inches of snow is just a ‘dusting’ a...

Features Rick Coates It is a parent’s worst nightmare, that knock on the door, that phone call with the words: “your child has been in a serious car accident.”

That nightmare happened for my family a couple of weeks ago. As I rushed to the scene of the accident on a highway just south of Traverse City, my first sight was several flashing lights of emergency vehicles.

Features Jim Motavalli

After back-to-back trips to the Detroit Auto Show and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, I’ve put together a pretty good picture of where the auto industry is headed in 2013.

The big news at CES was cars bristling with electronics to both allow them to drive themselves and to do just about anything you could possibly want with infotainment, including access the cloud. CES isn’t an auto show, but it may as well be these days—Lexus, Ford, Audi and many more were there.