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You think traffic jams are just a nuisance? Get this, it also turns out they are a major reason why we waste so much gasoline.

You know the drill. You’re driving to work, there’s an accident up ahead and the next thing you know you’re crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Well it turns out that the congestion caused by traffic accidents it a major factor in wasting fuel. According to Ford’s top safety expert Priya Prasssad, every year, traffic accidents and the traffic jams they cause waste 3 billion gallons of gasoline.

So, putting new technology in cars and redesigning roadways to reduce accidents is not just a safety issue. If we can cut down on the number of accidents that happen we could make a major dent in how much oil this country uses.

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The last time the U.S. auto industry was in big trouble, the federal government stepped up with a long list of items to help save it. Here’s what it did back then.

In 1980, the Detroit three were actually in bigger trouble than they are today. And back then, despite all the uproar about bailing out Chrysler, the Feds were a lot more open to helping the auto industry.

Under President Jimmy Carter, the government agreed to ease up on certain emission regulations. It also agreed to temporarily stop issuing new safety rules. The Treasury Department agreed to give the industry faster write-offs on all the new tooling it needed to make smaller cars. The Small Business Administration provided hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed loans to dealers. And communities that were hardest hit by plant closings were provided with millions in community aid.

Maybe the political climate in Washington will change after November, but it’s kind of remarkable to look back and see how willing the government was to help the Big Three nearly three decades ago.

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2010 is shaping up to be a pivotal year in the American auto industry. From a product standpoint there will be a lot of interesting hardware in showrooms, including range-extending EVs, plug-in hybrids, clean diesels, pure electrics, and flex-fuel vehicles running on cellulosic ethanol. But it’s also shaping up to be the year when the domestic industry will . . .

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Aftermarket tuners are going to have a field day with the new Mitsubishi Lancer Ralliart.

Mitsubishi’s new Lancer Ralliart is a fun-to-drive compact car with a turbocharged engine and all-wheel-drive. It has 237 horsepower and 253 pound feet of torque. But here’s the thing, the Ralliart shares a bunch of parts with the faster and more expensive Lancer Evolution. They have the same engine block and internals, the same cylinder head and the same camshafts. They even share the same twin-clutch automatic transmission. But the Evolution makes a lot more power, 291 horsepower and 300 pound feet of torque.

The power difference comes mainly from the turbochargers. The Evo uses a larger twin-scroll turbo while the Ralliart has a smaller single scroll one. But putting a larger turbo on your Ralliart could easily get you 300 horsepower and probably a whole lot more.

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A decade ago, GM’s electric car, the EV1, was a flop in the marketplace. But today it would attract a lot more customers.

I don’t want to come off as trying to tell General Motors what it should be doing, but the company ought to consider bringing back its EV1 electric car. When it came out a decade ago gas was a little over a dollar a gallon and people weren’t interested in a two-seat commuter car that had a 70 mile range.

But now, with gas over four dollars a gallon, it’s a completely different mindset. People are desperate to slash their commuting costs. And since the car is already designed and developed, it would be relatively easy to bring it back into production.

Reviving the EV1 would be front page news around the world. It would be the perfect complement to the Volt, and put GM’s “green cred” right up there with Toyota and Honda. Just as importantly, GM could finally shake that “Who Killed The Electric Car?” monkey off its back.

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Saturn has a problem, a big problem, and it’s not likely going to be solved anytime soon.

Saturn is a brand with one of the most beautiful line-ups of new vehicles. The Astra, the Aura, the Sky, the Outlook and the Vue are extremely competitive products, but they only have one problem. They’re not selling very well.

Yes, yes, I know the whole market is down, but Saturn is down more than the market. In fact, Saturn is down even more than General Motors is. So what’s going wrong here?

I think that in the past Saturn did too good of a job of convincing customers that it makes inexpensive, small, plastic-body cars. But today the brand has moved far more upscale than that, leaving its original owners behind. And it hasn’t captured enough buyers from other brands, and so Saturn is sinking, even though it has one of the best line-ups in the business.

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Can the auto industry save the SUV segment with hybrids?

Starting this September Chrysler will start offering hybrid versions of its biggest SUVs, the Chrysler Aspen and Dodge Durango. This is the two-mode hybrid system that was co-developed with GM, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz to split the development costs.

It’s called a two-mode hybrid because it can run on pure electric power up to 28 MPH, or it can run on only the engine or a combination of the two.

But just because it’s a hybrid don’t think it can’t perform like a SUV. The HEMI-powered Aspen and Durango hybrids have 385hp and can haul 6,000 lbs. And fuel economy is improved by 25 percent. But the starting price is just over $45,000 which seems like a lot of money to pay to try to save some money at the pump.

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Both Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce are known for using unconventional door designs on many of their cars. The former popularized the vertical-opening “scissor” door, so much so that now you can buy “Lambo door” conversion kits for just about every other car on the road; the latter uses to the old school and oh-so-cool rear-hinged “suicide” door on all of its models.

One company based in California has developed an amazing new door design. They call it the disappearing car door and it’s truly unlike anything else out there.

Video after the jump …

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Every day Chrysler LLC builds Euro-spec versions of the Chrysler 300 at its assembly plant in Canada, bolts a V6 diesel engine into most of them, and ships them off to Europe. That diesel 300 gets better fuel economy, over 30 mpg, than all the other vehicles in Chrysler’s U.S. showrooms. But it’s against the law for Chrysler . . .

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T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oil tycoon is pushing an idea to run cars on natural gas. But here’s why cars like that never caught on in the past.

There are really two reasons why CNG cars never caught on. First, the high cost of converting a car to run on natural gas. A Civic GX which runs on natural gas costs $6,800 more than the same car with a gasoline engine. Why so expensive? Most of that is the tank, a carbon fiber-wound cylinder tucked in the trunk. It also has to do with special fuel injectors and forged pistons.

The second reason why natural gas cars never caught on is the relative difficulty in finding where to fill the tank. I say relative difficulty because even though all major cities have natural gas outlets, it’s not like they’re on every other street corner. And back when gas was cheap, most people couldn’t be bothered to go out of their way to find a CNG station. Maybe that will change with gasoline at $4 a gallon, but it’s very expensive to buy a car that runs on natural gas.