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The little Kia moves up in the world.

Like the U.S., where roughly 70 percent of new cars sold are black, white, or some shade of silver or gray, Korea’s automotive landscape is almost exclusively grayscale. This may have been why the locals gave us funny looks as we drove from downtown Seoul to the country’s east coast in a bright red 2012 Rio5 (U.S.-spec, of course). Or maybe it was the pace at which said red Kia was racing from one well-marked speed camera to the next.

Keep Reading: 2012 Kia Rio5 SX – Short Take Road Test

For years, members of California’s EV community have been whirring about in their golf carts, Th!nks, GEMs, and other electric runabouts (until 2003, that included a bunch of GM EV1s), and parking in a limited number of public spots equipped with charging stations at malls, airports, and the occasional Mickey D’s. But the promise of more plug-in vehicles from several automakers—tens of thousands in the near future, and possibly many more in the long term—has prompted a new wave of policy discussions.

The current hot topic in the Golden State is the short, simply-worded California bill AB 475, which is backed by General Motors and currently sits on Governor Brown’s desk awaiting action. It would allow not only EVs, but also E-REVs and plug-in hybrids, to use public charging stations in designated parking spots. More important, though, it would require the vehicles to actually be plugged in and using the spot for its intended purpose, and not simply because it’s close to storefronts, airport terminals, or the like. Unless an EV is actively being charged, it should be parked in the main lot with the rest of us, the law says. Violators would face a fine or towing.

Someone’s Charging, Lord, Kumbaya

What’s got the EV community in California particularly riled up is that there are currently more EV spots than actual charging stations to serve them, which has resulted in a practice called “plug sharing.” This occurs when the cords of one or more plug-in vehicles can reach a single charging station that’s already in use; the driver of the late-arriving vehicle unplugs the one that was there first—without the knowledge of that vehicle’s driver. The “plug thief” may or may not know if the first car was fully charged yet, and if they are especially low on electricity, likely won’t care.

In a small, tight-knit community, plug sharing can work. But even the most gracious EV driver must concede that plug sharing relies solely on human decency. As a matter of statewide public policy, relying on good samaritan behavior is totally unworkable, especially if the outcome can immobilize another motorist. What happens when someone intending to “share” a charger for 10 minutes forgets to reconnect the car he or she unplugged? Or if that 10-minute trip becomes a two-hour lunch with an old friend? Worse, imagine a Leaf or Tesla driver uses most of their charge en route to the airport, plugs it in before take-off, then, upon landing, finds out that it’s been unplugged since right after they left. And then there’s the matter of allowing a stranger to tamper with one’s vehicle or charging cord at all; we’re probably not alone in balking at this idea.

While AB 475 rules out plug-sharing as a matter of general policy—even if you put your EV in a non-EV spot, borrowing the plug from an EV in a designated spot would leave that car parked illegally—it should be noted that the bill allows local communities to actually supersede state law and establish their own charger-sharing protocols, so cities that currently enjoy effective plug-sharing practices among their citizens may simply write their own policies. But as the number of EV drivers grows, so too will the number of insensitive jerks driving them. AB 475 is not perfect—it doesn’t tell lot owners what to do with the extra, non-charger-equipped EV spots, for example—but it does direct newly built lots at various facilities to install one charging station per designated EV charging spot moving forward, to help develop infrastructure and effectively render plug-sharing and all of its opportunities for abuse less likely.

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On Monday, we presented this week’s shifter and asked you to identify the make and model of the vehicle from whence it came. While the photo wasn’t of the best quality and this shifter was particularly tough, we still expected one of you internet detectives to figure it out. We were wrong: No one who commented correctly identified the shifter, which belongs to a Carbodies FX4 Fairway, better known as a London taxi.

The FX4 pictured here is from our September 1992 issue. The taxi we drove was powered by a 79-hp, 2.7-liter Nissan diesel engine. One impressive performance statistic that is perhaps more relevant to the FX4’s mission is its turning circle, which measures just 20 feet.

Kia’s yet-unnamed rear-wheel-drive concept, pictured below and set to debut at the 2011 Frankfurt auto show, may be called the Veredus. Earlier this month, the company filed a trademark application for the moniker, and the sports-sedan concept is the only vehicle in the company’s short-term plans in need of a name. Looking forward, there are plenty of other Kia products in the pipeline—the company gave us a product roadmap on a recent trip to Korea—from an EV to a production rear-drive sedan based on Hyundai’s Genesis.

Given the timing of the registration, however, as well as Kia’s history of actually using names for which it files trademark applications, we think that the Veredus name will go on something very soon. The U.S. eventually will get the Hyundai Azera–based Kia Cadenza; it’s possible that Kia will drop Cadenza for the States and go with Veredus instead, but we think it’s more likely that the appellation will be stuck to the concept car. We’ll know for sure in the coming weeks.

We went this week to witness the unveiling of the 991-generation 2012 911 at the Porsche Museum in Zuffenhausen, Germany. Against a backdrop of Porsche’s most significant racing cars and design studies—Le Mans–winning 917, the 001, a 956 mounted on the ceiling; y’know, the usual—Michael Mauer, the brand’s head designer, and Wolfgang Hatz, executive vice president of research and design, pulled the silk off what is, in person, an exceptionally well-realized if larger new 911.

We got the press materials and the official photos, already posted here, and then we pulled Hatz aside for the stuff they didn’t print in the car’s kit. Here is what he told us:

• The new seven-speed manual, confirmation of which we broke two months ago, will have a fairly conventional shift pattern: Reverse is up and to the left, gears one through six in a conventional three-up/three-down arrangement, and seventh up and to the right. There’s a lockout on seventh gear unless you’re in fifth or sixth, s no 4-7 shifts are permitted in the manual.

• The new gearbox is compact—both the PDK and the manual use the same housing and most of their internals save the second clutch and third and seventh gears—and would leave enough room for extra cylinders. “A flat-eight will fit,” he said. (We’ll have an in-depth tech feature on the seven-speed manual gearbox soon.)

• There’s also been much talk about the hybrid version of this car. Hatz was a bit cagey on this topic—not necessarily on the “ifs” but the “hows.” He merely said the 911 would need a hybrid system that suited the car’s character. When it was suggested to him that the electric front axle from the 918 would fit and would scale to other cars in the lineup, he nodded sagely.

• There will not be a four-cylinder version of the 911, even though there is precedent and the environmental pressure is on. “I don’t want a turbocharged base model,” Hatz told us. “I love the character of the naturally aspirated engines.”

• And, when asked the perennial question about how the 911 would make its way in a Porsche landscape inhabited by a new and improved Cayman on the bottom end and the rumored-and-very-likely Panamera coupe on the GT end, Hatz replied: “We have a lot of plans for this 911. It has a bright future. The 911 derivatives will increase.”

Beyond its role as Mazda’s anchor SUV, this new model is also the stalking horse for the brand’s future.

We could all live without another compact SUV; the dozen or more already on the market suit every imaginable purse and purpose. So what’s the Mazda CX-5’s reason for existing? The simple answer is that Mazda’s new bouncing baby bear is a smaller, cheaper model intended to round out the brand’s set of SUVs—well, and that the small-SUV category is a sales mine and no company can afford to sit it out. But proving that nothing is ever as simple as it first seems, the CX-5 embodies two ulterior motives: This is not only our first look at two major Mazda initiatives, it’s also an accurate preview of other models scheduled for near-term introduction.

Keep Reading: 2013 Mazda CX-5 – First Drive Review