Full disclosure: your humble author is a Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) shareholder. Seriously, I think I have, like, ten shares. So you should view the above headline and video with suspicion and the proverbial shaker of salt.
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Note: I’ve used the title “Avoidable Contact” for years now to denote my editorials in which I’m discussing general automotive issues. With the publication of the new issue of R&T, that title is now in use there. For the foreseeable future, I will be writing two types of editorials here at TTAC. The good-cars-and-bad-women content that has traditionally gone under “Trackday Diaries” will continue to do so, while the stuff that used to be “Avoidable Contact” will now be under “No Fixed Abode”, with a nod of the head to the departed Iain M Banks — JB

The year was 1986 and I, a six-foot-three fourteen-year-old rendered insubstantial by vertical growth and sleepless nights, was chasing my eight-year-old brother through the moonlit woods behind the house of my father’s friends. He, in turn, was pursuing a child somewhere between our ages, who was running after a firefly, or a frog, or perhaps nothing. The noise of a party was fading behind us as we sprinted, hot and sweating in the summer evening, screaming wordlessly ahead, until we burst from the trees into a clearing and fell silent as a group. There was a woman seated in a chromed Everest&Jennings wheelchair, thin, sad-eyed, facing a detached garage and the long, battleship-grey Pontiac parked in front of it.
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Last year, Jalopnik’s Travis Okulski wrote an article debunking the Pepsi MAX Test Drive commercial. This year, he got a chance to star in a remake — and if Mr. Okulski is to be believed, he didn’t receive any advance notice of his star billing.
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Challenge me, will you? Daddyblogger, mommyblogger, whatever. The B&B should consider itself empowered to call me a “daddyblogger” for the foreseeable future. The important thing is that none of us in this business take it too seriously. We’re all just writing about cars, you know? If you want respect as a journalist, do some of this stuff.

P.S. Please, everybody, don’t follow-request me. All I do is talk about my guitar collection and flirt with aging girljournos. You don’t want to read it and neither does anyone else.

Here at TTAC, we have a job that consists solely of standing behind me every day and whispering “Remember, you are pro tem.” The EIC of Autoblog, John Neff, had no such reminder, but when he “retired” he turned out to be kinda pro tem anyway. His replacement is Sharon Silke Carty, who refers to herself in her Twitter caption as someone who “balances the glamor of auto reporting with the glamor of motherhood.”

When Carscoops’ John Halas referred to her as a “mommyblogger”, however, he learned in a hurry that there are some lines you don’t cross.
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New Mexico can be a wonderful place, the kind of place where you can find everything from the “Octopus Car Wash” to your future wife. But for David Eckert, one particular night in New Mexico was a nightmare — one for which the settlement has finally arrived.
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Just when you think you’ve seen it all… you haven’t, apparently.
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Don’t let anybody tell you the economy’s tough nowadays; when our beloved, game-changing Managing Editor, Derek Kreindler, posted in a Facebook auto-journo group offering cash money to anybody willing to write a pro- or anti-UAW piece for this esteemed publication, only one of the several hundred members even bothered to contact him about it. I don’t know about you, and I don’t know about me, but the bacon-and-buffet junketeer crowd is doing just fine.
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So, where were we? Ah, yes. I was soliciting the opinion of the B&B on my next car. Sharper-eyed connoisseurs of the family-sedan segment will note that my son and I are standing in front of something that, strictly speaking, was not any of the listed choices. What happened?

Bad news: this is it.
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Toyota had an odd pair of recalls this week, highlighting both the increasing importance of software within the automobile and further reinforcing a pet theory held by your humble author.
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Every year about this time, the most cooperative journalists in the business start receiving their manufacturer-supplied first-class tickets to Geneva. This can be as much misery as joy; one famous TTAC alum who now does Rutledge Wood impersonations for a major YouTube channel once publicly complained about the A/C condenser on a KLM 747 actually having the audacity to drip water on him as he was being served a Chianti with fava beans, or something like that. Poor guy. I hope he never accidentally watches Schindler’s List.

Anyway, the Geneva show is coming up soon, and that means that the new McLaren middleweight sports car is just around the corner.
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Half a year ago, we introduced the concept of the TTAC Staff byline. I had some high hopes for the idea, primarily because we had some people who wanted to write for us but who would face some potential backlash for having their names appear on these august pages. This has made a lot of people unhappy and has been widely regarded as a bad move.*

It’s also history, as of today.
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When I returned to driving, I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect, but I did everything I could to tilt the odds in my favor. I kept my trips to a minimum, during daylight hours, when traffic was light. I deliberately didn’t buy another child seat and I made it plain that I wouldn’t be doing chauffeur duty for my clone until I was considerably improved. I avoided high speeds, crowded freeways, and when it snowed I stayed indoors. Statistically, I set myself up to succeed. I was particularly cheered by the fact that I often went a fairly long time between experiencing anything that even threatened to turn into a collision situation. The odds were definitely in my favor. Hundred to one.

But the tricky thing about hundred-to-one situations is this: there’s still that one.
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At a business function in London in 1968, David Brown was approached by an old contact and friend, who asked him if it would be possible as a favour to purchase a new DB6 at cost price. It was common knowledge that sales were going through a slow patch at the time.

David Brown replied that he would be delighted to oblige, and several days later the friend received an invoice for £1000 more than the published list price for the car. Embellished story or not, it is certainly true that in this era, craftsmanship took priority over profit.

That’s the legend of Aston Martin, straight from the company website. You can’t beat it; it positively drips with British charm. There’s Sir David Brown himself, the brilliant and driven man who combined hereditary wealth and self-made ambition. There’s the clubby atmosphere of Ye Olde England, neatly evoked with the image of an old school or business “chum” asking a “favour”. The Kamm-tailed DB6 itself, the deliberate evolution of the mass-market popularized DB5 into something a bit more refined and interesting. The anecdote ends with the brilliant revelation that Brown lost money on each one! What could be more fascinating, more desirable, more wonderful than a monstrously expensive automobile that still lost money for its maverick namesake? It’s a brilliant, lovely, immensely charming tale — and it might even be true.

Those days, however, are long gone. Thanks to the recent news of Aston’s accelerator pedal recall, we all now know that the legend of David Brown’s labor of love was long ago replaced by a Chinese-manufacturing nightmare straight out of the Banksy-directed opening for “The Simpsons”. Corners were cut. Profit was maximized. Mistakes, as they say, were made. And now comes the reckoning.
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