The Cobo Center opens its doors wide to the media on January 9 for the 2012 Detroit Auto Show. Here's a preview:

Acura

Honda's luxury US division will use the North American International Auto Show to debut a new ILX concept saloon. The Honda Civic-based four-door saloon will be available with either a 2.0- or 2.4-litre four pot or the Civic Hybrid's powertrain (in America only).

A near-production ready second-generation RDX crossover will also be displayed that noticeably, in an automotive world dominated by downsizing, will swap the turbocharged four-cylinder engine of old for a more fuel efficient V6.

The…

Alright, I admit that winter tyres may not have been necessary as yet, though I did feel vilified in having them fitted to our long term test Golf when the temperature plummeted to zero in the middle of December. Then it decided to come back up to a balmier 14 degrees around Christmas Day...

Still, it's only the first week of January and many are predicting cold weather and snow for later this month.

However, I'm not as ready as I was, as one of the tyres suffered a puncture before the holidays. Annoyingly, it happened on the 23rd…

We do not normally cover 'celeb gets a free automobile' type stories on changagoidem.ie but this one is a little bit special!

It would appear that Rudolph will not be guiding Santa's sleigh this year with the latest news from the North Pole that jolly old St. Nick has moved into the twenty-first century. With the environmental implications of his 200,237,360km annual journey and the rising cost of the automobilerots that fuel the reindeer weighing heavily on his mind, Father Christmas will this year switch to a Ford EcoBoost powered sleigh.

The new sleigh will allow Kris Kringle to…

When advising buyers what automobile to go for, one of the first things we ask them is how they'll use it. While Irish drivers are obsessed with diesel power at the moment, petrol automobiles can make sense depending on your circumstances, especially if you're going for a small automobile and you don't plan on astronomical annual mileages. Likewise, petrol-electric hybrids are suited more to a city life than one in which you pound the motorways.

So, where does our Golf BlueMotion fit in? Well, in truth, it's driven in and around Dublin city the vast majority of the time,…

One quick thinking commentator described Enda Kenny's State of the Nation address - which seemed to prepare us for the most hard hitting and austere budget in living memory - as the pep talk you receive from the dentist before he starts a root canal. But on the face of it Budget 2012 was not as bad as we had been lead to believe. Certainly changagoidem.ie is happy that the tub of Vaseline we had to hand as Michael Noonan delivered his first as Minister for Finance has now been returned to the medicine cabinet...

Changes to the Universal Social…

We regularly bang on about winter tyres and their merits so we've put our money where our mouths are this year and fitted a set of Bridgestone winter rubber to all four wheels of the changagoidem.ie Golf BlueMotion. It gave us an excuse to have the automobile cleaned again too. It's so easy to take one of the few permanent automobiles in the household for granted when there are so many shiny new models passing through our hands.

Have to admit that the clean has really brought up the paintwork and though the Golf doesn't turn heads in black…