Welcome to Two Minutes Hate, in which we, the TTAC staff, will choose some hapless writer and/or industry person and then flog that person with all the verbal viciousness we can summon up. Complaints about “negativity”, “hatefulness”, and “substandard caviar served during the press dinner” are not welcome here. This is Two Minutes Hate. Thank you — JB

Did you know that there is an “ascetic populism [added to] to the inherent machismo of the engine-revving manual transmission”? My mother, who was a Palm Beach deb prior to driving a lifetime’s worth of stick-shift MGs, Honda, Nissan trucks, and Mercurys even while suffering from advanced sarcoidosis, apparently never got the memo on that. Same for my ex-wife, who used to flog an SRT-4 around Nelson Ledges once a month or so until the vacuum hoses performed their inevitable high-boost seppuku. Come to think of it, the number of women who have daily-driven a manual-transmission must be in the hundreds of millions, particularly given the fact that many developing markets still don’t have slushbox volume models.

In today’s edition of Salon, however, David Sirota attempts to make the case that driving a stick shift is, like, totes manly. He devotes a few paragraphs to how he “can’t let go of [his] love for the stick” using language that wouldn’t be out of place in the inevitable “tween” edition of Fifty Shades Of Grey. Having convinced himself, at least, that choosing a particular transmission is just about as manly as dunking over Akeem The Dream while simultaneously using one’s toes to digitally violate Rihanna, Sirota then comes to the inevitable conclusion: stick shifts are bad, mmmkay?

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Even though the BMW 1 Series M Coupe is gone forever, performance-minded 1-Series customers must  have a high-end performance model, even if a lot of them don’t even know if the car is front-drive or rear-drive.

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Michael writes:

Love the website. Here is my conundrum:

My wife and I have two cars. A 2007 CR-V that I use mostly for a 75 mile round trip commute several days a week to San Francisco and a 2004 Infiniti FX35 with 52,000 miles. While the CR-V has a ton of utility, I am tired of driving it. It has quite a bit of road noise, the sound system sucks and frankly it’s kind of a female car. The plan is to keep the CR-V and let my wife drive it, and use it as our family car while we sell the Infiniti and I get something for that daily commute. The Infiniti was purchased from a friend and is in great condition, but I feel like it is a ticking time bomb and want to sell it now to take advantage of high used car prices. Plus the mpg is horrific, it doesn’t have satellite radio and the tires are still original and will need expensive replacing shortly. (Read More…)

Chery has asked the Chinese government for its blessing regarding a joint venture with Jaguar Land Rover worth $1.9 billion.

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Exports have been mentioned before as a way to help improve Opel’s precarious near-term fortunes, and now one of Germany’s state-level Prime Ministers is throwing his support behind the export plan.

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It is this power, combined with amazing precision—its tolerances are measured in thousandths of an inch—that gives the Fifty its far-reaching utility. It has made essential parts for industrial gas turbines, helicopters, and spacecraft. Every manned U.S. military aircraft now flying uses parts forged by the Fifty. So does every commercial aircraft made by Airbus and Boeing.

So says The Atlantic in a fascinating short piece about the rehabilitation of the Alcoa Fifty. In one of those examples of government-industry collaboration that twists the knickers of libertarians and ultra-liberals alike, the United States Government sponsored a “Heavy Press Program” after World War II so American industry could forge massive aircraft parts. The presses were paid for with public money then used by private companies such as Alcoa. Having been brought back to life after a shutdown, the Fifty will now make parts for the Joint Strike Fighter and operate for at least thirty more years.

Russia has a 75,000-ton press, and the Chinese are working on an 80K monster. Without a press of the Fifty’s scale, it is impossible for an individual nation to build large-scale aircraft without outside assistance.

So… if large-scale government intervention and engineering assistance has made the Jet Age possible, why couldn’t something similar be done for American industry?

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You would have to travel far to shoot (bad boy as you are) a Bali tiger. Germany’s Auto, Motor und Sport Magazin did not have to travel further than the Golfanlage Schloss Nippenburg to shoot themselves a Macan. Macan is Indonesian for tiger, better known as the name for Porsche’s upcoming SUVlet. (Read More…)

The fellow had spent nearly three hours on the road. Just to drive a 10 year old Isuzu SUV.

Traffic cones. Construction. Stalls and accidents. By the time he got to my lot he was already emotionally spent, and it was only 10:00 A.M.

Then he saw it.

The front passenger tire was flatter than a Ford Festiva going through the crusher. I was at the bank when he called. Hadn’t even opened the lot yet. Finally when I got there I noticed that an old Lincoln Mark VIII had two tires flat as well.

It wasn’t a coincidence.

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In case you have surplus cash sitting around, doing absolutely nothing, hang on to it until the end of 2013. This is when Porsche finally wants to crank up production of its Über-Porsche, the 918 Spyder. Porsche has finished the initial prototypes, which are cleverly camouflaged: If you see something whizzing by, and you think to yourself: “This looked just like a Porsche 917 race car,” then you actually saw a 918 in drag. (Read More…)

Need an excuse for getting fat for lack of exercise?  Buy Honda’s latest invention, and you won’t even have to walk to the bathroom anymore, assuming a barrier-free environment. Honda presents the UNI-CUB, the first vehicle you steer with your ass. (Read More…)

Car sales in China have become headline material the world over. However, numbers are often reported without checking, and even more often reported erroneously. Yesterday, we were tracking two reports  of Chinese car sales, January-April. One set of data was from China’s official manufacturer association CAAM, the other from Reuters.  They did not quite match. A day later, the confusion is even bigger. (Read More…)

Minutes after Ally Financial, the bs-artist formerly known as GMAC, took its Residential Capital bankrupt, David Shepardson tweeted to his followers that all is fine:

“GM owns 9.9% of Ally Financial Inc, while @USTreasuryDept owns 74 percent” (Read More…)

Dayna Hart, GM China’s Director of Communications, and resident of Shanghai, has been shanghaied as a spokesperson for an amazing new weight loss product on Twitter. (Read More…)

As TTAC’s official reviewer of all things “emerging market cast-offs sent to Canada”, I’ll be busy again in Q4 2012, when I get my hands on a Chevrolet Trax.

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Infiniti has characteristically taken the path less travelled. The original Q45 was styled to express Japanese culture (rather than imitate the Germans), tuned for drivers, and infamously advertised with video of rocks and trees. The brand finally hit its stride thirteen years later with the compact rear-wheel-drive G35. It jumped on the crossover bandwagon with […]