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EVs: They crash well, but will their sales crash, too? Dr. Dre now fits in your dash. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is for sale. And we take you for a run in the 2012 Ford Focus.

Solid crash test results on Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt

EVs, hybrids, and the rest will be maybe 10 percent of car sales by 2016

Driving on this highway could actually make energy

Interview with screenwriter of Fast Five

CNET reviews the 2012 Ford Focus Titanium… Read more

While it's got Sync, tabs on top, and a menu button, Firefox still lacks one feature that all the other major browsers have in one form or another: the "speed dial." Originally from Opera, the feature is the visual implementation of your most recently or most frequently visited Web sites on the new tab page. Firefox add-ons have stepped up to fill the dial void, but implementation in each is uneven.

Speed Dial 0.9.5.8 (download) is the most robust of the four add-ons we're looking at today. It's highly customizable, offering the … Read more

Today we're joined by Robin Yang, a gamer that made her first CNET appearance on PreGame last year and will soon move to Seattle to work for PopCap Games, the creator of online casual games like Plants vs. Zombies, Bewjeweled, and Peggle. But before she heads out west, she's guest hosting today's show about the PlayStation hack fallout, a man arrested for singing Kung Fu fighting, the next "Terminator" film, and a Google survey about smartphones in the bathroom.

WinZip System Utilities Suite offers a one-stop shop for optimizing, defragging, and generally cleaning out your system--and it does a pretty great job, adding extras that will come in handy whenever you need to perform routine maintenance. The interface smartly mimics many of the utilities in this genre--with various tools on the left, and the main window showing the options for each tool--making it easy to clean each area of your system quickly.

Like many modern system utilities, WinZip offers the option to be as involved with the process as you want to be. From the Home screen, you can … Read more

FastStone Image Viewer Portable is a full-featured image-handling application that happens to be totally portable and totally free. It's an image file browser, editor, and converter that bundles the most useful editing tools, such as red-eye removal, lossless rotation, resizing, and color adjustment, as well as various effects, text, captions, and frames. It creates self-running slideshows, photo contact sheets, wallpaper, and other displays; downloads digital photos; converts, renames, and changes the attributes of batches of files; changes time stamps; compares images; splits and combines files; captures screen images; e-mails images; and a lot more.

FastStone Image Viewer's fully … Read more

At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) last week, messaging start-up GroupMe gave away 2,500 grilled cheeses branded with the company logo, and drained 13 kegs of Shiner Bock beer. It also saw over 2 million messages sent during groups created specifically for communication during SXSW, too, co-founder Steve Martocci told CNET.

"Things are going very well," Martocci said of the start-up's promotional efforts at SXSW, which included the "GroupMe Grill" strategically placed across the street from the Austin Convention Center for the distribution of the aforementioned free beer and grilled cheese to … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Marketers are everywhere here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, but this year they've discovered some prime new territory: private transportation. The annual geek gathering is nominally headquartered at the Austin Convention Center, but in reality sprawls all across the city's downtown, and given the amount of late-night revelry taking place, cab rides are commonplace. Luckily for this year's attendees, a whole lot of those rides are free--or cheap.

Social-networking site Tagged decided to intercept travelers as soon as they landed at Austin's airport, setting up a display for a "Tagged Wheels" … Read more

Group messaging service GroupMe launched a big upgrade last week, timed to occur right before the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, the biggest event of the year for digital start-ups looking to make it big. But that wasn't enough: GroupMe today launched what co-founders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht call "version 2.1-more-thing" in a nod to the famed Steve Jobs line.

What's new this time? Instead of making groups invite-only, groups can now be "joinable" through solicitations on Facebook and Twitter. There are also some smaller tweaks, including avatars alongside … Read more

Editor's Note: This is the second installment in a series about start-up Fast Society. Click here for the first part.

NEW YORK--The nightlife-heavy East Village neighborhood can, in fact, be very quiet and unassuming in daylight.

On this Saturday afternoon, for example, you'd never know that there was anything going on at White Noise, a bar hidden behind blacked-out windows in the space above a discount liquor store. Inside, it's Gilded Age excess meets glam rock sleaze, with black chandeliers holding red light bulbs, black vinyl couches with fake gold trim, and floor-to-ceiling velvet drapes framing dark … Read more