Can you drive 1,000 miles in your car and spend less than $60 on fuel? That's the beauty of the Volkswagen Sportwagen TDI diesel, which averaged 43 mpg. It runs forever on a gallon of fuel, entertains you while under way, cruises comfortably at speed, and holds tons of gear. The wagon, which I tested, and the Jetta TDI sedan, belong on your new-car shopping list if you do a lot of highway driving. They'll hold their own against hybrids that do best in city driving.

The 55-mile route from my house to the Lakewood, NJ, baseball stadium came up as 125 miles on the car navigation display. Why? I made a mistake programming the route. Can you see above what the mistake was? Me, neither, for the longest time. Now, look at the Toll Roads button in the lower left corner. If you look carefully, you'll see the icon is a slightly different shade of gray than the others.

That means I hadn't selected the option "allow toll roads." So it tried to route me North, West, South, and then East to avoid the Garden State Parkway toll road to reach my destination that was to the Southeast. Maybe responsibility for this gaffe should be shared: me for not initially seeing the nuance of shading, the interface designers for not thinking clearly. Fortunately, I did catch the error before leaving the driveway, but it took five minutes of head-scratching.

SIRIUS XM Radio and Volkswagen have announced that buyers of SIRIUS-equipped, "Certified Pre-Loved" (no joke) VWs will receive a complementary three-month subscription to the satellite radio service.

Beginning with the 2007 model year, SIRIUS is standard on the GTI, GLI, Eos, New Beetle and New Beetle Convertible, Passat and Passat Wagon, and Touareg SUV. It's part of certain trim levels on the Jetta, Rabbit, and Tiguan SUV.

Just last week, SIRIUS XM Radio and Toyota announced that the service would appear as standard equipment on 2010 Toyota Camrys with the premium audio system.

What to do when your navigation product costs almost as much as a cheap portable navigation device but requires a laptop for use in the car? Bring out a version with a simpler, USB key GPS module. That's Microsoft Streets & Trips 2009 with GPS Locater. It's just over $50 street price, vs. $65-$90 for the same software with a GPS module on a long USB cable.

The software works just the same as on other versions of Streets & Trips 2009 that we've reviewed earlier in the year. It's a great convenience on a laptop and has some benefits over online trip planning software. It also has some quirks that have crept into recent versions of S&T. For instance, zooming is much less precise than in versions from the middle of the decade: Now, you press + or - keys to zoom, rather than grab the area with your mouse and zoom to the precise size of the bounding box.

Lexus is the top brand for initial new car quality once again, while American automakers are improving faster than the competition. Who knows - by the time they're out of business, the not-so-Big Three could be the best in new car quality. This is based on the 2009 J.D. Power Initial Quality Study, a beauty contest kind of survey that measures how well a car holds up in the first three months of ownership. The answer is: pretty well, thank you. The top five brands had less than one problem per car in those first three months. And the results suggest that cars with lots of technology aren't particularly trouble-prone. In fact, they're more likely to above average on initial quality; only two high-tech brands finished in the bottom half.

You'd think Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz, with all their technology wizardry, would have unleashed online technology to build first-class websites. Guess again. As best as we can tell, there's virtually no link between technology savvy on four wheels and tech savvy in websites. That's according to the results of the semi-annual Manufacturer Web Site Evaluation Study by J.D. Power & Associates, which surveyed 11,000 would-be buyers. Honda was tops this time around with a score of 863 out of a possible 1,000. Among those techie German automakers, only Porsche at No. 2 and Volkswagen (No. 20) made the top 20. Mercedes-Benz was just above average, BMW was just below, and Audi was No. 32 out of 36 brands.
In fact, there seems to be little correlation between quality of website and country of original, car quality, sales increases, brand excitement, or level of tech savvy in the car brands. The top 10 comprises five Japanese brands (but don't they seem to win most every J.D. Power survey?), two U.S. brands with big-time sales woes (Jeep, Dodge), one German brand, one British/German brand (Mini), and one Korean brand (Kia, not up-and-coming Hyundai). Then there's cachet and funky brand appeal: Among brands with a lot of sizzle, you've got Mini at No. 3, Scion at No. 35, and Smart dead last at No. 36. Go figure.

Okay, it's not quite the Blackberry Storm 2, but today Research in Motion announced a new accessory for its ever-popular smartphone line. The new BlackBerry Visor Mount Speakerphone lets users stream music from their handset wireless to their car's speakers. Better yet, the thing is designed to help you not crash your car, streaming call to the stereo, as well.

The device is Bluetooth enabled and clips to your car's visor, as advertised. It's available now for $99.99 from BlackBerry's retail site.

In-car GPS navigation systems are undeniably useful. But at $1,500 and above, they're pretty overpriced to begin with--especially when compared with today's $150 portable GPS units and $10-per-month cell phone GPS services. So it's usually no fun to find out you need to shell out another few hundred dollars every time you want to update the maps in your car.

To take at least some of the pain out of the process, Volvo and Navteq have unveiled MapCare, a free map update program, for the automaker's full lineup of cars. The program will offer two free map updates to buyers of any new 2010 Volvo C30, S40, V50, C70, V70, XC70, S80, XC60, or XC90 with a navigation system. The program is available to all North American buyers, as well as several countries overseas, beginning this month. Hey Volvo, while we're at it, how about we drop the price of the navigation systems, too?

Pioneer has unveiled three in-dash navigation systems at its Road Show in Long Beach, Calif., today. The flagship $1,600 AVIC-Z110BT offers simultaneous map and route guidance info, iPod and iPhone connectivity, Bluetooth, HD and satellite radio, and voice control, all with a 7-inch motorized LCD screen. With an optional MSN Direct tuner, the unit gives updated traffic, weather, and local event info.

Meanwhile, the 5.8-inch, $900 AVIC-X710BT and $1100 AVIC-X910BT are mid-range units and include three sets of RCA outputs and a 50 watt x4 amplifier; the X910BT includes 3D landmark icons in the display and a built-in MSN Direct tuner. The low(er)-end, $599 4.3-inch AVIC-U310BT is a 2-DIN unit with voice-controlled turn-by-turn navigation, wireless Bluetooth, and iPod and iPhone control.

Help Concepts, the company behind Help Alerter, likes to advertising its product with newspaper clippings about roadside slayings--and I suppose that really does help drive the point home. The Help Alerter device is a flashing signing with the word "HELP" that sits behind a driver's license.

When a driver gets stuck on the side of the road, he or she unscrews the license plate, and the Help Alerter goes to work. That's pretty much it. The sign is constructed out of heavy-gauge plastic and has its own built-in battery. Even when its exposed, the license plate is still visible, hanging just below the sign.

BMW's Z4 roadster (convertible) sports car employs technology that belongs in lots of cars, not just $50,000 two-seaters. The double-clutch transmission smoothly combines the power and performance of the manual gearbox it really is with the ease of an automatic (no clutch pedal). And the transflective LCD display is unaffected by sunlight. In fact, the more sun shines down, the brighter it gets. The iDrive controller finally works, and well. HD Radio is now free (some models) but the iPod adapter remains an overpriced option. It's a great car if your stock portfolio is fully recovered. 

Imagine being able to tell your car where you want to go in a few words, or pick out your music without taking your eyes off the road. That's what BMW promises this fall with its new voice control system. BMW (and the rest of the car world) is playing catch-up with Ford's Sync system. It's possible BMW has passed Ford on the navigation side; some of the new BMW audio input controls still seem stunted and cumbersome, at least based on what BMW is disclosing now. It's available on 2009 BMWs worldwide, the company says.

BMW calls it a "truly innovative, cutting-edge technology for voice control" because a single voice command lets you give your car the entire address. In BMW's example, after you've started the voice command by pressing a button on the steering wheel and then after you've summoned up the navigation module, you say something as simple as, "Berlin, Willy-Brandt-Strasse 1", and you go straight to the Federal Chancellery. Assuming you're not in Boston at the time.

That's on top of BMW's ability to send map information from Google Maps to your car. Mercedes- Benz also has a send-to-car feature. It's a nice way to preload a bunch of vacation destinations and can also be helpful if your rich but technically inept brother-in-law can't make navigation work in his new 7 Series; you can do it for him.