It’s not just cars that are safer nowadays, but grown-ups too. Imagine telling your nine year-old, “Son, we’re sending you off to a farm to drive tractors for a family our cleaning lady knows.” That’s what my parents did, and I barely survived to tell the tale. 

February’s sales figures are in. Ford continues to sing the blues. While FoMoCo’s spinmeisters invite us to savor the consistency of their domestic market share and clock their lessening fleet business, The Blue Oval’s retail sales are still slumping. The situation hovers somewhere between serious and six feet under. What’s worse, the domestic automaker’s execs seem bound and determined to shoot themselves in the feet, repeatedly. First, the numbers…

Herbie Hancock is a jazz pianist with a lesser known passion for all things electronic. After trading his sublime Steinway for some cutting-edge synthesizers, Hancock’s musical career Rockit-ed into interstellar space. It’s unclear why Honda reversed Hancock's career path for their eighth generation Civic. Here we have a machine that harkens back to the time when funk-fusion hit the airwaves and flying wedge concepts littered the world's design studios. What’s up with that?

OK, here it is. And it's already evolving. Our web gurus, Mark Madden and Kyle Morton, are on the case. We've increased the font size. They're going to decrease the column width within the Review pages (as already bitched about). The search box will be restricted to selecting makes (the current search engine is basically worthless). The stats and stars arrive tomorrow. There will be lots of tweaks in the days ahead, as we move towards integrating True Delta data and adding video and, well, stuff. Now, before you let rip, try to keep in mind our goal: to make the site user-friendly for mainstream car buyers while maintaining our full editorial and review mojo for the faithful. OK, the floor is yours.

Whenever a new medium appears, it frees the old one to reinvent itself. When TV arrived, radio dropped soap operas, fragmented its audience and developed new formats (e.g. talk radio). Now that the internet’s here, magazines are free to evolve. Only someone forgot to tell the magazines. Take Car and Driver (C&D) and Road & Track (R&T). Someone should. With sinking circulation and disappearing ad dollars, the car mags (and their buff book brethren) are up against the wall. Rather than pursue creative reinvention, their owners have embarked on a by-now-familiar strategy: whoring themselves.  

I once drove off the road, screaming, at 80mph. Why? I was in love. When love turns blind, men do irrational things. As far as healthy, loving relationships go, the one presaging my off-highway excursion was a malignant tumor wrapped in an iron lung. I imagine that owning a Pontiac Solstice GXP is a similar affair. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury; the prosecution calls her a “femme fatale on wheels.” I ask you: how could something this beautiful be so damn dangerous?