Class Counsel are correct in asserting that Peters’ demand for access to the fruits of discovery as actually a thinly disguised effort to use the discovered material to assist Peters in ‘begin[ning] a cottage industry of representing consumers or selling her $15 CD to them’.

Whoa, that’s a convoluted sentence, courtesy of the judge who mediated the settlement in the Honda Civic Hybrid class-action case. However, it more or less reflects the sentiments of the appeals court which just ruled Honda’s appeal of the $9,867 small-claims settlement granted to attorney and Civic owner Heather Peters. What does it mean? Click the jump for a helpful graphic.

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““This looks just like golf cart fires we have down here… I’ve worked homicide scenes with less secrecy. There have to be about 15 engineers down here working on this one.”

So spoke Fort Bend County, Texas, chief fire investigator Robert Baker, in the course of blaming a brand-new Fisker Karma for a house fire that did “over $100,000” worth of damage to a brand-new, completely tasteless stucco-pimple monstrosity of an “upscale home”.

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An Open Letter To The People Who Make Decisions At Cadillac

Dear Cadillac Decision-Making People,

I hate you. Yes, you. You’ve stolen something from me. More specifically, you’ve stolen Cadillac from me. As a child, I was driven around in perhaps the last unapologetically great Caddy — the 1979 Eldorado — and I dreamed of the day when I would be able to buy a Cadillac of my own. While I was dreaming, and working, and anticipating that day, you, and people like you, shit all over the greatest brand in America in every way possible. You built and sold cars that were too poorly conceived and built to even earn the title of “garbage”. Every few years you would bring out some deformed-looking crapwagon, your bought-and-paid for press lackeys would drool all over it, and the name “Cadillac” would be further degraded in public like a heroin-addicted actress caught turning a trick outside a K-Mart by a giant movie-premiere spotlight.

Since the last real Eldorado died in 1985, you’ve built spacious cars, fast cars, plastichrome Tahoes, economical cars, and even somewhat reliable cars. You just haven’t bothered to build any Cadillacs. What is a Cadillac? It is, simply, a vehicle that is exemplary and desirable.

Now we have the ATS. Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? Do you really think anybody wants this car? Do you really think anybody is willing to pay more for it than they would for an equivalently-powered BMW? Is this vehicle exemplary and desirable? The answer to these questions: Of course not. This car, along with every other vehicle you sell, should be summarily discontinued and replaced with actual Cadillacs. You’d be better off buying the tooling for the 2003 LS430, welding fins on said LS430, and selling that. It would be closer to the idea of “Cadillac” than anything you have now.

It’s too late to fix all your mistakes, but I can fix this ATS thing right now, at minimal cost, and it will save the car from the sales scrapheap of history. It is not too late to save Cadillac. I’m not doing it for you, or for GM, or even for the poor American taxpayer who financed this whole boondoggle. I’m doing it for me, because I want my Cadillacs back.

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Why should the superstars of cone-chasing hog all of the B&B’s attention? Today we will see some of the worst autocrossers to ever exit a course backwards, hit a tree, or strike a corner worker. The fun begins with the above video, which proves that some people just can’t operate a Mustang, but’s it’s far from the worst incident on our parking-lot hit parade…

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Bentleys making booty calls in public-housing projects? General Motors sucking on the public teat like a corporate version of Marilyn Chambers and receiving a billion-dollar money shot in return? Sex bloggers turning the walls of the Seattle W’s finest rooms into something that, when viewed with ultraviolet light, looks uncannily like a Jackson Pollock painting? It’s all too much!

Let’s scrub our minds clean with just under three minutes of great footage from last weekend’s SCCA National Tour autocross, complete with a top-notch video course description from one of the best technical drivers out there. Seriously. This is one to watch, if only to see the absolute truth with which every cone in every slalom is properly anticipated and pre-dialed.

Now, if we can just keep Bertel from putting any more big-eared auto show girls above the proverbial fold, we might all keep our jobs until tomorrow afternoon…

No sense beating around the bush on this one: TTAC won’t have a Dodge Dart review for you to read when the embargo expires later this week. We weren’t invited to the event. If you want to find out what it’s actually like to drive the Dart, you’ll have to read about it somewhere else. If you want an honest review, you will have to wait until I can rent one, I suppose.

Yesterday, Jalopnik’s Matt Hardigree teed-off on Chrysler for inviting sex blogger Jen Friel to the Dart release. Although Hardigree himself is embroiled in a long-term struggle with our own Derek Kriendler for the unofficial title of Most Interesting Young Auto Writer, a battle he cannot help but eventually lose, I heartily recommend that you check out Matt’s article when you have time, because it’s a fun read, and it’s straight out of the Jack Baruth Handbook For Dissing The Living Shit Out Of Hack Writers & The Auto Industry In General, Yo. When I read stuff like that, I feel the same way Madonna must while watching a Lady Gaga performance.

What Matt doesn’t realize, however — or doesn’t say, at any rate — is that Chrysler’s decision to effectively replace TTAC with Ms. Friel isn’t an anomaly. It’s the arrow-straight path to the future,and it is part of a bigger trend that affects everyone from your humble author to the New York Times. Here’s why.

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We all know Google’s evil hivemind constantly scans your GMail and targets advertisements to your recent mail threads. As a result, I’ve seen stuff from “Reliable Pregnancy Testing” to “Hundreds Of Collings Guitars In Stock” over the past few years, but what I saw this morning — “Check Out The Features Of The 2011 Lincoln Town Car” — intrigued me.

Why is Ford paying good money to direct people to the website pictured above?

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We live in the YouTube era. If it isn’t recorded, it didn’t happen. Now, Ford’s making it even easier for buyers of the exciting new Focus ST to accidentally provide prosecutors with compelling evidence for conviction.

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The year was 1987; the place was the bleak suburban landscape of central Ohio. My friend Woody had decided to buy a mid-Seventies FIAT Spider, one of the over-bumpered 1756cc models, in plain white with a black vinyl interior. It was way cool, and it seemed considerably faster than his previous car, a Celica of similar vintage. We just didn’t how how fast it really was. “We need to test the 0-60,” I suggested.

Essington Drive was the straightest, flattest, least police-infested road we could find for this. Slightly over nine hundred feet long. I held the stopwatch. Woody revved the FIAT to about three grand and dumped the clutch. There was a modest squeak and we were off. Essington seemed awfully short as the speedometer swept past the 30 mark, dallied past 40, and meandered by 50.

“Don’t give up!” I called out. “We can do it!” It was just about possible to read the individual letters of the stop sign ahead when Woody yelled,

“Sixty!” and hauled the Spider down to an unevenly-calipered stop. I looked at the digital stopwatch, which indicated 14.1.

“Fourteen seconds. I might have hit it too late at the end. It could be, like, really, thirteen and a half, probably. ” There was a pause, and then we both said,

“NOT BAD!”

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The nice people at BEST Motoring have produced another one of their entertaining pseudo-races. This one features the GT86/BRZ twins vs. the current Miata. It can be watched and enjoyed solely on its own merits. If that isn’t enough, and you want to hear some thoughts regarding the setup of the race, the performance of the respective vehicles, and the showmanship involved, click the jump.

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TTAC alum Justin Berkowitz has been checking out the trademark applications lately, and he’s uncovered what looks like a change in name for Lamborghini’s ridiculous shopping trolley for Russian May-September rent-a-rides.

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Many years ago, I decided that I would buy any record on which Pat Metheny played, even if I didn’t know anything about the other artists involved. Sometimes the results are solid (Wish), sometimes they are frustrating (Sign Of Four), and sometimes it’s a really sexy Eastern European girl singing over what sounds like a chorus of little people from “It’s A Small World” (Upojenie). In general, however, the rule has served me well.

The same is true for autojourno Alex Nunez; even when he’s writing for soul-sucking blackholes like Autoblog, he’s still a great read. This past weekend, Alex noticed an interesting story coming out of the Speedvision, er, Speed, er, Pirelli World Challenge race at Miller. Warning: race spoilers ahead if you click the jump.

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It was thirty-eight degrees F outside, with a light misting of rain, as I pulled my newly-purchased 1975 Honda CB550 up to the stoplight, next to my ex-wife’s 2012 Edge. My son waved cheerfully from his monstrous child seat.

“We only have eighty-two miles left to go,” I shouted through my chinbar, “and I want to beat the worst of the rain. I think I’ll be okay taking the freeway.”

“It’s fine with me, either way,” she replied. This didn’t suit my opinion of the risk I was taking by chucking an unproven, thirty-seven-year-old motorcycle into high-speed tractor-trailer traffic at near-freezing temperature, so instead I pretended that she had given me the response Trinity gives Morpheus when he suggests taking the freeway: “You said it was suicide.”

“Then let us hope,” I told her, ignoring the completely confused look on her face, “I was wrong.”

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The Portland city council two years ago put in place regulations that force limousine and sedan services to charge a $50 minimum for rides to and from the airport, and at least 35 percent more than taxis for trips to any other destination. And these transportation companies cannot pick up customers until at least an hour after the customer calls for a ride… “The main thing is that you don’t want the Town Cars to take all of the best fares, which are to the airport, and not leave any for the taxi industry,” [a city official] said. “That’s why there’s a minimum fare and a one-hour wait requirement.”

That’s right: the city of Portland is attacking the Lincoln Town Car, by name, in legislation and public speech. To the diminishing community of people in the United States who give a damn about the so-called “Constitution”, that’s called a “bill of attainder”. Nor is it empty talk: the city recently fined TownCar.com $635,500. Why?

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Big news today; the Ford Shelby GT500 apparently packs 662 horsepower in addition to its 200 mph top speed. The big question now is “why?”

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