Four and a half years. That’s how long it’s been since I served as a cross-country delivery driver for TTAC reader doctorv8‘s 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Talisman.
As the more eagle-eyed of the Best & Brightest noticed earlier this week, that same Fleetwood is now for sale after a $10,000 freshening. So let’s catch up on what’s happened with the car, and the characters, from that once-in-a-lifetime trip.
Australian chef Matt Moran made a video to highlight the dangers of leaving children unattended in cars during the holidays — and for the rest of their summer — by cooking lamb in the car, according to Australian newspaper The Age.
The video was produced for Kidsafe Australia, a group that highlights the dangers of leaving children in hot cars. Moran calls the car his new “unconventional oven.”
The lamb was actually overdone in the 90 minutes it baked in the sweltering heat near Bondi Beach. (Read More…)
Myron Benford has been delivering toys on Christmas Eve to children around Detroit for more than four decades. The 71-year-old man converted a Dodge minivan to look like a sleigh, complete with reindeer welded to the front, that seemingly “floats” on snow. He hands out 200 to 250 toys to children who need Christmas, he told the Detroit Free Press:
Oh, it’s a year-round commitment. People think it’s just for one day. I’ve been preparing for this all year long. The day after Christmas I start packing up more toys, trying to wrap up more toys. Trying to find closeouts and so forth and all. So that when I come here, I’m ready to service any kid I see out there on the street.
Benford is Santa.
From DNF to DNS, the Nissan GT-R LM project has finally been retired.
That, and it’s lights out for some Crown Vics, the UAW just wants to talk, Hyundai will spend more to lend more, and more … after the break.
After a week in which I was burned in effigy by some “autowriters” who didn’t much care for my editorial about their complete and total lack of ethics (don’t worry, fellas — I still won’t send you a bunch of web traffic, er, I mean, name names), I found myself in a situation that Alanis Morissette would call “ironic.”
I was going to spend the weekend in Philadelphia at the glorious Hotel Monaco, right in the Old City across the street from Independence Hall. Thanks to a last-minute deal, I got a magnificent rate of $100/night, but there was still the specter of the $43/night parking rate looming over my head, not to mention the difficulties of finding parking elsewhere in the city once I actually retrieved my vehicle from the valet.
As a result, I decided to go without a rental car for the four-day weekend, instead depending entirely on Uber and the city’s taxi services to squire Mrs. Bark and me around the City of Brotherly Love. This was the perfect way to test out the only viable theory that some of my colleagues in the automotive journalism (not that there’s much journalism going on, but that’s another subject for another time) game put forth as to why some writers don’t own cars.
“It’s too difficult and/or expensive to own a car in the city,” they said. As somebody who was born in the Greater New York City area, but has spent most of his life in the Midwest and the South, I was eager to see if I, too, would make the choice to go carelessly carless on the eastern seaboard.
Now it can be told: Perhaps the most cringe-worthy moment of my life was my own “Affluenza” episode, otherwise known as “The Time I Wrote A Poem About Not Getting A BMW 2002 For Christmas.”
I was eighteen years old and busy failing to fulfill my potential at university. I was already on my second car, the infamous Red Marquis, having unceremoniously crashed my 200SX on my first unsupervised day as a temporary-license holder. During one of our brief telephone conversations that fall, my father asked me some questions about “old BMWs,” with particular focus on the 2002. My fevered imagination had grasped that straw and run with it until I was honestly surprised to get two sweaters and a couple of shirts on the blessed morning of the 25th.
I went back to school early so I could mope in private and write a poem about it, the worst couplets of which I’ve retrieved from memory for your amusement:
I’m not entirely sure why, but most products from Mercedes-Benz have never appealed to me. Perhaps the buttoned-down, staid appearance of the cars and their owners didn’t match my own self-image? Anyhow, I recall walking through various car shows as a kid, completely ignoring gorgeous vintage Pagodas and Fintails to admire leaking British roadsters.
The lack of manual transmissions is likely a factor. Even the spectacular SLS, SLR and AMG GT are missing a third pedal, a turn-off for me. And the one Mercedes that really appeals to me, the 190E 2.3-16 Cosworth, is not a realistic family ride.
And it’s with this attitude toward the Tri-Star that I turned on Netflix for some inspiration from three English buffoons who loved the AMG sedans for the massive, tire shredding power.
Imagine it’s 1992 and you’re shopping for a sporty convertible: Do you get an Australian-built front-wheel-drive Mazda based on the 323 … or do you get a Miata?
Exactly. (Read More…)
The fine, fine reporters at Yahoo Autos have learned that Ford and Google will announce next month a joint project to build self-driving cars.
According to the report, Google and Ford would spin off a separate company for the project, and Google would still shop around its technology to other automakers.
Both Ford and Google wouldn’t comment on Yahoo’s report, which said three sources familiar with the plans divulged the relationship ahead of their announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. (Read More…)
Nissan announced Tuesday that its 2016 Titan XD would start at $41,485 (including $1,195 destination) for the S Crew Cab 4×2 model. The top-of-the-line Platinum Reserve Crew Cab 4×4 will start at $61,715.
The pricing places the diesel-powered Titan XD firmly in the middle between the Big Three’s light-duty and heavy-duty trucks. For example, Ram’s 1500 Tradesman Crew Cab 4×2 with its 3-liter diesel engine costs $36,940, according to Ram. A heavy-duty 2500 Ram Limited 4×4 with a 6.7-liter diesel engine starts at $64,215.
The Nissan Titan XD is a heat-seeking missile aimed in between truckmakers’ light- and heavy-duty offerings, apparently. (Read More…)
Mazda North American Operations CEO Jim O’Sullivan on Monday announced that he will retire at the end of the year and will be replaced by Mazda global sales chief Masahiro Moro. O’Sullivan has led Mazda for more than a decade, out from under Ford ownership and into a small, independent — but growing — U.S. automaker.
O’Sullivan took over in 2003 and helped guide the company during its split from Ford five years later. He also led Mazda through the recession and helped raise money for its facility in Mexico, which opened last year.
Moro is a longtime Mazda employee who first joined the automaker in 1983, according to the company. Most recently, Moro was responsible for global sales and marketing and has been vice president for marketing in Europe. Moro also served as director for Mazda in Australia between 2012 and 2013. (Read More…)
So I got up behind a Dodge Grand Caravan the other day and I started thinking about my youth. This is because, in my youth, the Dodge Grand Caravan was an acceptable vehicle to drive, and not something you were stuck with when Enterprise ran out of full-size sedans.
There are two reasons for this: 1. Back in the day, the Dodge Caravan didn’t really have any competitors, so we didn’t really know that there were better options out there. Honda had the hinged-door Odyssey. Toyota had the weird-ass Previa. It was a mess; more importantly, 2. There were so many different versions of the Dodge Caravan that you were pretty much stuck buying a Dodge Caravan even if you actively avoided buying a Dodge Caravan.
Volkswagen’s simple, effective and direct slogan “Das Auto” ist kaput after about a decade of ruining our logic and grammar.
That, and BMW gets spanked by NHTSA, drive like it’s 2008, and more … after the break. (Read More…)
Our friend Mr. Baruth is on a bit of a motorcycle kick lately and, while he’s not quite ready to cruise the interstate highways on a Honda Gold Wing, he recently described the Wing as “one of those brilliant products that both defines a market segment and then comes to utterly dominate it.”
The same could be said for another two-wheeler, though one that couldn’t be more different from the Gold Wing. I’m talking about the Vespa scooter: Introduced in war torn Europe in 1946 and used as basic transportation by Italians rebuilding their country, the Vespa scooter became a bit of a fashion statement by the 1960s (and an essential accessory for the Mod craze in England). It’s been adopted by the developing world as basic transport in the decades since then, and is once again becoming a fashion statement in the 21st century. Virtually every motor scooter made in the last 70 years has followed the Vespa’s template.
This post, however, isn’t about a Vespa scooter. It’s about a Vespa car. (Read More…)
It’s easy to see why some automakers resist putting premium features in mass market models. All you need to do is look at that luxury showroom to the right. In the quest to differentiate, say, the Ford Fusion from its Lincoln counterpart, or the Toyota Avalon from the Lexus ES, and so forth, manufacturers limit the options and luxuries available […]
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