AutoWeek picks: Car-guy gifts for Dad

Father's Day is this Sunday, June 19. You still have some time--not much--to get a gift. Here are a few suggestions to make dear old Dad happy on his day.

Top Gear: Jenson Interceptor, Lotus T125, Demolition with Tanks & Bob Geldof

The boys enjoy a bit of house demolition - with Tanks Remarkably, we’re already almost at the end of the current series of Top Gear with this one – episode 5, series 17 – the penultimate episode. And it’s not been a bad series, whether you’re a viewer from Minnesota or the 12 year-old Miss Clarkson. This week’s higlight rather depends on your point of view – do you consider Top Gear an entertaining car show or an entertaining show with cars?

2014 Ford Mondeo testing autonomous driving technologies (video)

The Ford Fusion with its LIDAR ears allowing autonomous driving Car makers are starting to take self-driving, autonomous cars very seriously, and we’ve recently seen Mercedes testing their autonomous driving S-Class in Berlin, Volvo planning a big trial of 100 self-driving cars in Gothenberg and Tesla planning systems that will do 90 per cent of your driving within 3 years. Now it’s Ford’s turn. Ford has equipped a Fusion Hybrid (that’s the North American version of the new Ford Mondeo we still haven’t got in the UK) with its autonomous vehicle technology to conduct research in partnership with the University of Michigan and State Farm (a big group of insurance companies in the US). The test Fusion gets a system called LIDAR (light detection and range – the funny looking ears on the top of the Fusion in the picture above) which can scan the road ahead up to 2.5 million times a second and create a 3D map of the surroundings.