Steering Wheel

Calling all multitaskers: In the future, you may be able to drive and check your vitals at the same time. German scientists in collaboration with BMW Group researchers have come up with a device that allows drivers to do quick healths check while in the car, provided their hands are on the wheel. Using technology that integrates sensors into the steering wheel, drivers can find out such things as their heart rates and oxygen saturation levels of their blood while on the road.

Not content with introducing to North American audiences a complete revision of one of the most iconic sports cars of all time, Porsche used the L.A. Auto Show to unveil a beast of quite a different nature. Yet ostensibly, the company sees it in a similar light as the new 991. It's the Panamera GTS. GTS is a moniker the automaker has used as a designation of sport-tuned characteristics paired with a naturally aspirated engine. It was last seen on the final iteration of the departed 997, but also used on an earlier version of the company's Cayenne SUV. (Go way back into Porsche lore and you'll find that the Porsche GTS was also a street-legal variant of a race car made in 1964 and 1965, but let's not tell this new Panamera GTS about that, lest it suffer an identity crisis.)

Here are some of the other 23 victims of unsolved homicides related to the L.A. riots. Click for an interactive map of the riots deaths to learn more about all of the incidents: Howard Epstein , 45, was shot and killed April 30, 1992, near Slauson and 7th avenues in Hyde Park. Epstein, who had flown from his Northern California home to check on his South Los Angeles metal manufacturing business, was struck in the head by a bullet apparently fired from a pickup truck that had pulled alongside his car. His car careened into a liquor store parking lot, where a crowd quickly gathered.

Does the "cheap" Mercedes-Benz C230 hatchback sports coupe, with a sticker price of about $25,000, drive like a real Benz? I found the answer while chasing a motorcycle on a side road high up into the Santa Monica Mountains. The cyclist was attacking the S-curves so hard he almost scraped the leather off his pants at the knee, but I kept pace with him in the C230 for about a mile and the race sold me on the car.

Paige Adler honed her driving skills long before she was licensed to drive. Adler, a 17-year-old Laguna Niguel resident, first grabbed a steering wheel at age 7, spinning circles with her father and older sister at Adams Kart Track in Riverside. Her racing abilities grew sharp enough that at 15 she earned a scholarship from Ford Motor Co. to attend the Lyn St. James Driver Development Program at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Many a time, we've woken up to the sound of squealing tires. So it was difficult not to feel like a jerk as I cranked hard on the wheel for a tight left turn one evening, careening around my neighborhood traffic circle doing donuts in a new Nissan Juke. The Juke responded with compliance, hugging the curb with little effort. There's nothing like an adrenaline appetizer before dinner. With the Juke, Nissan Motor Co. is introducing a new concept: a "sport cross," or small, SUV-style alternative to the many compact hatchbacks that are coming on the market to lure tight-fisted, forcibly downsizing consumers.

You're driving down the Hollywood Freeway and you see a guy in a two-ton SUV, somehow holding the steering wheel while texting at 65 mph. A few minutes later, you pull off onto Sunset Boulevard. While you're waiting at a signal, a skinny guy on a four-pound touring bike speeds past and runs the red light. Which of these two men is the greater threat to public safety? To me, the answer is obvious. But to many of my readers, it's the guy on the bike who's the menace. "I, personally, find most cyclists on the streets of Los Angeles to be perfectly obnoxious," Liz White, a resident of the Village Green, wrote to me last week.

Eleven years ago Monday he was playing golf, drinking and then trying to drive home. He reached for the cell phone, the car veered off the road, he noticed a bridge ahead, he made a quick correction and the car flipped over and over as it rolled down a 50-foot embankment. The roof jammed his head into the steering wheel, damaging the fifth, sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae and paralyzing him from his neck down, and as the story goes now in racing circles, Bill Shoemaker was told that day, "Blink once if you want to stay alive, twice if you would like to die."

Ray Nachtwey may be the only person motoring around Mar Vista on seven wheels. When he goes out for a spin, there are two wheels on his motorcycle, one on his sidecar and four on his wheelchair. Nachtwey, 27, who has been a paraplegic since his spinal cord was severed in a 1981 motorcycle accident, boards the vehicle via a folding ramp extending from the sidecar. Then he straps the wheelchair in with a seat belt.

In the summer of 1946, the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, the Angels were in the Pacific Coast League, the Rams were preparing for their first Los Angeles exhibition game and Primo Carnera was wrestling at the Olympic. The hottest ticket in town? The mighty midgets, race cars in miniature. In one week in August, the noisy little thunderbugs drew 65,000 in the Rose Bowl on a Tuesday night, 17,000 at Gilmore Stadium on Thursday night and 65,128 in the Coliseum on Saturday night.