Well, here I am — just a contributor again, and no longer the EIC. It’s freeing. Reminds me of when I was just a fresh-faced twentysomething doing competitive pin-and-plate shooting back in the days of the Clinton Administration. Back then, I had a good friend who worked at the best of the local gun shops and who sold me a lot of the equipment I used to participate in dominate various events. Then as now, gun shops are notorious for being a place where people discuss ridiculous theories or misinformation, and it was a particular and oft-sampled pleasure for this fellow to stand impassively with his hands on the counter for as long as it took for a customer to get it all off their chests before saying, “You’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why.”

When Jalopnik’s Raphael Orlove did us the courtesy of promoting my Malibu rental review, a few people brought up the usual chestnut that “you shouldn’t review rental cars, it’s not fair to the car companies” and so on. Well, those people are wrong, one of them in particular, and I’m going to tell them why.

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Tomorrow will be my last day as the Editor-In-Chief pro tem of The Truth About Cars. This was always meant to be a temporary situation, despite what some of the B&B thought. Given some of the differences in opinion I have recently had with TTAC’s owners, this is a good time for us to call it quits. I will not be replaced; the site will be managed by the leadership team at VerticalScope in Toronto and Derek will continue in his capacity as Managing Editor. There will be other changes, detailed below.

I made some promises to you, the readers, and I’d like to discuss whether or not those promises have been kept. But the tl;dr crowd can best understand the situation like this: TTAC is basically Fleetwood Mac.
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Exterior photography by Rachel Gibbs What did the American people get for the fifty billion dollars they spent and the eleven billion they lost on the General Motors bailout? Well, they got stability, they got the retention of perhaps a million jobs, they avoided what might have been a last straw in what a posterity […]

Five seconds: that’s the lap time difference between the V6 Challenger Track Pack and the SRT Hellcat around PIR. How much money do you save by being willing to take it a bit slower?

This doesn’t feel like something I should admit in public, let alone in the electronic pages of this august publication, but I always had a tiny little problem with the Challenger SRT8, way down in my super soul.

Getting decent conclusions from very limited data is the sort of thing of which Nobel Prizes are made. What you’re about to read won’t be Nobel-worthy; however, I believe it will help you understand how fast the Hellcat and how it compares to both the other Challengers and the external competition.

To some degree, it’s about the number, right? Seven hundred and seven. The Dodge people certainly made the point again and again about how the Hellcat stacks up to everything from the Z06 to the Murcielago. Mine’s bigger than yours. And that other number — 10.9 seconds with drag radials and 11.2 without. That actually […]

A Challenger on the front page of TTAC is like a blonde on the cover of Maxim: it gets all the nerdy dudes excited. Self included. So here are some of our most exciting Challenger reviews from years past!

I have been to the mountaintop! Well, I’ve been to Portland International Raceway, anyway, and I’ve met the 707-horsepower Hellcat. The embargo lifts Tuesday at 12:01 AM, so you’ll get a traditional review of the Hellcat here just the same time you’d get it anywhere else. But I have more, and better, things for you than that.
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The use of the word “petrol” should clue you in a bit here.
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How is it that one man can play a Brecker Brothers tune all by himself, but Volkswagen can’t match Kia’s profitability and Acura can’t manage to sell cars? Could it be that the more talented people you put together in a room, the fewer good ideas come out of that room? But if that’s the case, how do you explain the Brecker Brothers in the first place?

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For about half the price of a new base Fiesta, you can roll in a right-wheel-drive, manny-tranny (OH STOP IT) not-so-fast Ford.
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You have to love the auto world. It’s a world where a Cimarroned-up version of the RAV4 is a sure-fire winner and an affordable FT86 competitor is a waste of time. The Russians get cheap Datsuns and we get expensive Volts. Meanwhile, the one-percenter train rolls on, now with additional boost for the V-12.

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Last year, my pals at Third Rock Events threw a brilliant rooftop party in Charlotte, NC for about five hundred of their closest friends. Even constant rain didn’t stop the show. I’m still trying to figure out how I went back to the hotel alone from that one; the women were all gorgeous and highly inebriated. Oh yeah, I remember now: because Bark made me stick around to help clean up.
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A hardcore car disappears, a softcore one is on the way, the bus goes upscale, Red Ink Rick has a fan!
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