My experience with the Lexus IS-F was both impressive and rather sterile. I was put in mind of Samuel Johnson’s observation regarding Milton’s Paradise Lost: “[it is] one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”
The same might be true of the IS-F… but here’s a fast Lexus that’s not just longer, it’s wider. And taller. And just plain big.
Halfway across the stream, there was a crunch and a GRRRRRRIND and my little Freelander came to a halt, steering wheel frozen in place by a log or a rut or the Kraken or something. Immediately I heard advice from both sides of the water. “Go forward! Harder!”
“No, wait! Backwards!”
“We’ll strap you up, hold on!”
“No time for that! You’ll stall the motor! Just DO SOMETHING!” The water in the passenger compartment was three inches high and rising. I was more than ten miles from the nearest trailhead in any direction and more than two hundred miles from home. The recovery would be long, difficult, and expensive. I chose to briefly slam the transmission into reverse and give the miniature V-6 a brief moment of full-throttle before selecting low gear and driving forward into whatever had stopped me before with twice the momentum I’d had previously. Thankfully, this time the obstacle gave way and moments later I was four-wheel-scrabbling for grip up the streambank. A narrow escape. Who’s stupid enough to take a unibody CUV hardcore off-roading? This guy.
The 2.7-liter 911S was so problematic that I named it as one of Porsche’s Deadly Sins a couple years ago. Its engine failed with monotonous regularity, often between the expiration of the 12,000-mile warranty and the 50,000-mile mark on the odometer. The 1974 models usually lived a bit longer because they didn’t have thermal reactors, […]
Score one more for government control, corruption, and general silliness. New York’s TLC threw down the glove a while ago on the “Uber” application which allows taxi and “black car” drivers to arrange rides over the Internet. This isn’t the first time TLC has acted all crazy and stuff. Wait, wrong TLC. Oh well — the sentence two previous to this one applies even without the link.
You can’t fight City Hall — after all, this is the same commission which magically decided to replace every taxi in New York with Japanese minivans assembled in Mexico that didn’t actually exist at the time of the decision, and nobody said nothing, yo. No surprise, then, that Uber is leaving Gotham like Batman riding that bomb out to the ocean in the last Dark Knight film.
When our own Michael Karesh reviewed Volvo’s entry-level entry-luxury aeroback, he advised TTAC readers that the optional Dynamic Package was “…a must for anyone who cares about driving.” Hey! I care about driving! Trouble is, the rental companies don’t.
Your humble author was charmed by the regular Juke when it debuted, but the Juke-R is a very different animal and it costs about twenty-five times what the standard Juke does. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any customers…
Ferraris are expensive, Porsches (usually) less so. This is something that every kid on the street knows, right? Turns out that it is, as the song says, truer than true.
Katt Williams once famously commented on the supposed resemblance between the Chrysler 300 and the better class of Anglo-German luxury cars, and in this image from The Smoking Tire‘s Matt Farah we see a similar confrontation: the Fusion meets an AM Rapide in Beverly Hills. What say you, TTACers? Imitation, inspiration, or idiocy?
Though Porsche is sparing no expense — and leaving no corner un-cut — breaking the hearts of their loyal fanbase, not everyone is willing to ride a diesel Panamera into the bleak lease-only future. Magnus Walker has come up with a unique aesthetic for the earliest Nine Elevens. He’s made an impression with a lot of people, he’s made more than a couple bucks doing it, and now he’s made a film.
It’s been almost a year since the Internet was treated to the story of a boy, a girl, and a dodgy take on a dead supercar. The story had all the makings of a classic tale: ambition, speed, deceit, accusation, busty Asian women in leopard-skin print outfits dancing on top of cars in the desert.
Well, the story isn’t quite over yet.
Vice President Joe Biden’s net worth has been estimated to be as low as a quarter-million dollars — chump change by the standards of Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney — but surely that’s enough money in the bank to pick up a decent Trans Am, right?
Yesterday, I asked you to take a ride around Virginia International Raceway with me in the 2013 Shelby GT500. What I didn’t mention was that I had a brief dice with world-famous instructor and VIR hotshoe extraordinaire Peter Krause in his Sports 2000 racer.
We haven’t had the chance to thrash the newest M5 around a racetrack yet, but Autoblog has been granted the privilege of running “nine-tenths” around both the Ascari course (in the DCT) and Laguna Seca (in the new six-speed manual variant). What do they have to say for themselves?
Let us go then, you and I, When the Oak Tree flagger lets the blue flag fly Like a warning for the engine-bay unable; Let us go, slideways through the track-out, The supercharger shouts And restless Vettes with small-blocks spinning hard And sundry other so-called fast cars Moving to the right like a conga line […]
Volvo’s target is the lower end of the Lexus, BMW, Audi and Mercedes lines… Most experts consider the cars made by these companies engineering marvels. And Volvo, a Swedish marque with Chinese ownership, is another manufacturer that does not have the model line, marketing budget or dealer network to hope to compete.
Doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence, does it?
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