Over the past four years, the Lexus Eco Challenge has inspired and empowered more than 20,000 middle and high school students to learn about the environment and take action to improve it.  For their efforts more than $3 million has been awarded to students, teachers, and schools across the nation.  This fall, students are invited to participate in the fifth annual Lexus Eco Challenge for a chance to win part of $500,000 in grants and scholarships. Lexus has teamed up with Scholastic Inc., the global children’s publishing, education, and media company, to create the eco-friendly educational school program.

The Challenge has two distinct elements:

- Standards-based supplementary educational materials – encourages teachers to integrate creative lesson plans into their classrooms to help teach students about the environment.

- Competition to reward environmental action – helps young people apply what they’ve learned in class through the program and empowers them to make improvements in their community by participating in the environmental team challenges.

The Lexus Eco Challenge registration opens September 26, and will conclude with the announcement of the first-place and grand-price-winning teams in Spring 2012. Middle and high school teams are invited to participate in one or both of the two initial challenges, each addressing different environmental elements – land/water and air/climate.
For each of the challenges, teams define an environmental issue that is important to them, develop an action plan to address the issue, implement the plan, and report the results. For more information about the Lexus Eco Challenge or to sign up, visit the Scholastic Inc online.

The Chrysler brand has been named the Most Ideal Popular Brand in AutoPacific’s 2011 Ideal Vehicle Awards based on owners’ ratings of their 2011 cars and trucks.
Additionally, three Chrysler Group vehicles also earned awards as the Most Ideal vehicle so of their respective classes.  The Dodge Challenger, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and Chrysler Town & Country were named Most Ideal Sports Car, Most Ideal Mid-size SUV and Most Ideal Minivan, respectively.

The Ideal Vehicle Awards are based on owner ratings of 15 key attributes of their 2011 vehicles. Measures evaluated by customers include power and acceleration, ride and handling, interior roominess, and cargo space. More than 72,000 vehicle owners were surveyed by AutoPacific and asked if they would change their vehicles.

“It’s an honor for the Chrysler brand to be recognized by AutoPacific,” said Olivier Francois, President and CEO, Chrysler Brand. “Recognition by the customers who buy and evaluate our vehicles proves we take consumer input very seriously in all the vehicles we design and build at Chrysler.”

Sebastian Vettel, Formula 1 champ, is endorsing Infiniti’s newly redesigned crossover vehicle, the FX50 concept. Sebastian helped design this car as you can see from the video below and chose to endorse this vehicle because he says it has room for his mountain bike.

The new concept has 390-horsepower, oversize wheels, a carbon fiber rear spoiler, and LED driving lamps. The official unveiling of this vehicle by Sebasitan Vettel and Infiniti will be at the Frankfurt Motor Show on September 13th.