The original Santa Fe used a 2.7-liter V-6 that was supposedly developed by Porsche — and the joke went that the Germans traded that engineering for the Santa Fe’s styling so they could “Design” the Cayenne.
That story no longer applies. The new Santa Fe has homegrown world-class engines and styling that beats the Porker six ways to Sunday.
The scrum of journalists and wanna-bes around the Viper has been consistently packed for two hours now. We have some impressions from Byron Hurd and NASA instructor Jeff Stutler for your consumption; later on in the show I will wander over, sit in the thing, and try to correlate it with my experiences of the previous Vipers.
“Imagine,” Ford’s marketing wunderkind Jim Farley suggested, “if your service advisor knew your name? If he knew your preferences? What you wanted?” Well, as a former owner of two Phaetons, I don’t need to imagine that. Everybody in VW service at my local dealer knew my name, my wife’s name, our weekend plans, and which one of the dealership’s loaners I liked best (“Blackie”, a Passat 2.0T). That’s what happens when you sell cars that require frequent servicing and have nobody on staff in the entire country who can perform said servicing in even a marginally competent fashion.
Farley, of course, wasn’t talking about 5400-pound German crapwagons. He was talking about treating Lincoln buyers to the finest dealership experience available.
Earlier today, Derek expressed his hope that we’d be seeing the Impala t the show in a color other than black. No such luck. Live shots from Julie Hyde and commentary from Byron Hurd below.
Grizzled automotive veterans of the VRA (that’s Voluntary Restraint Agreement to you whipper-snappers) often wake in the night screaming about “ADP! ADP!” That’s “Additional Dealer Profit”, a little markup sticker found on everything from Accords to Z-Cars in the Reagan era. Honda dealers were perhaps the worst offenders, adding as much as three thousand dollars’ worth of pure markup to vehicles which often had MSRPs below ten grand.
There’s no “agreement” on the books that limits the number of Elantras that Hyundai can import from the far-off land of Alabama (or, in the case of this Touring model, Korea) but it looks like at least one dealer has decided to revive the glory days of automotive “stealerships”…
…when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — G. Santayana
Wide-light Rabbits. As a child, I firmly believed that there were two kinds of VW Rabbits. There were awesome Rabbits, with round headlights and narrow taillights, and they had all been assembled in the Fatherland by white-lab-coated Germans who, prior to taking jobs on the hospital-clean Rabbit production line, had all been Messerschmitt 262 pilots or actual rocket scientists. Then there were awful Rabbits, with dopey-looking amber turn signals and thyroid-condition, reflector-pregnant asses, which were created by drunken Pennsylvanians who used eight-pound sledgehammers to install body-side molding and who aligned the doors by hanging on the hinges until even the most sausage-like of fingers could pass comfortably through the gap between crooked window frame and mis-welded unibody.
Keep in mind that I couldn’t drive, and that nobody I knew even owned a Rabbit. I received all this wisdom osmotically, hyperbole passing from the diarrheic prose of the Tony Swans and David E. Davises of the day directly from the page to my mind. German Rabbits good. American Rabbits bad. And when VW finally gave up and closed Westmoreland, didn’t that validate what the scribes had scribbled?
Time passes, and we are told that the new, “Americanized” Mark VI Jetta is a disgrace, a stain, a repudiation of all for which the fabulous Emm Kay Five stood. My drive of the current Jetta didn’t quite square with the conventional wisdom. Still, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that Volkswagen deliberately chose to repeat its history, that it made a conscious effort to once again dive whole-heartedly into the American market with products that are locally assembled and directly targeted at us. So far, it’s been a success, but the Bowdlerized History Of Cars fed to us by the color rags cheerfully omits the fact that the original American Rabbits were popular, too. The death of American Volkswagen production had a lot more to do with dismal dealers and champagne-priced, poverty-specced product than it did with Pennsylvania production.
Time to cleanse my palate a bit. Hertz still rents Mark Five Volkswagens, so I requested one and drove it 931 miles over the course of approximately forty hours. A final chance to figure out the truth, before the conventional wisdom becomes fact, before what everyone knows becomes the only thing anybody knows, before history repeats itself.
Give the crew at Motor Trend some credit: they aren’t even pretending to be anything other than an advertising outlet for the automakers. Witness this particularly succulent bit of bragging by Ladyboy-Editor-in-Chief Edward Loh, published yesterday:
Ever wonder what it might cost to borrow a brand-new Nissan GT-R Black Edition for a year? Try 33,482,741 views. What’s that, you say? As of this writing, that’s the total number of views of the top 16 GT-R related YouTube videos Motor Trend has produced.
Until recently, Motor Trend at least kept up the mildest of facades that its million-dollar fleet of brand-new vehicles served some purpose that would be beneficial to the mixture of waiting-room residents, caged parakeets, and ESL students that makes up approximately 99.97% of its readership. That facade has now been thrown aside with a shameless flourish worthy of Messalina. Motor Trend, in its agent as an advocate for Nissan, has produced at least sixteen promotional videos for the Nissan GT-R. They have been duly rewarded with a one-year lease of a $106,000 car, something that would probably cost the little people out there in Readerland four or five grand a month if they wanted to have the same car under the same conditions.
There you have it. Editorial content, bought and paid for. But what’s this business about “meat in the face”?
THIS IS THE MUSTANG THAT JUMPED OVER A HILL okay that’s all the Jalop-channeling I can do for right now. Tonight’s episode of “Alcatraz” will feature YABCST (Yet Another Bullitt Chase Scene Tribute), only this time it looks like a Mustang chasing a Charger. You can check out a video preview here. TTAC readers, with their eye for the story behind the story, will note that, while the Mustang is a spankin’ new 2013 model, the Charger is the original, frumpy LX from a few years ago, not the sleek new one, which can be taken as evidence of Ford’s marketing involvement.
Since I posted this article in 2009, the city of Milford has settled for $2.5M with the family of David Servin, one of the victims of the incident discussed below. The police officer driving the vehicle is facing manslaughter charges. Note that manslaughter cases don’t normally drag for three years before going to trial; that’s a little courtesy that the local “justice” system is doing for Officer Anderson. Go run someone down in the street in most American cities and you will be facing a jury within six months, tops — JB
The nice folks at Jalopnik link to us so often, it’s the least I can do to begin this column by suggesting you watch this video over there. For those of you who don’t like watching videos, this particular one shows a police car operating at a velocity of ninety-four miles per hour in a marked 40 zone. At around the one-minute mark, we see the police car strike a Mazda containing two teenagers. Both are killed. The police car is not running its lights, was not operating the siren, and was not even responding to an emergency.
Here’s the best (or worst) part: the officer who killed the kids, Jason Anderson, was apparently “racing” the officer whose car recorded the video, one Richard Pisani. Pisani is traveling at about 74 mph during one part of the video. In a marked 40. I cannot find any evidence that Officer Pisani was in any way disciplined for his conduct. Think about that for a moment.
Perhaps most worryingly, the video shows absolutely no awareness, driving ability, or evidence of the vaunted “high-speed police training” on the part of Officer Anderson. It’s fairly obvious that the Mazda is going to cross Anderson’s path. We’re regularly told that by police departments that their officers have “special training”, but this is an accident that most solid NASA HPDE drivers could easily avoid. A modest amount of steering to the left would have saved two lives. Instead, Anderson simply drives right into the Mazda, with his car’s “black box” recording 100% accelerator pressure up to the crash. He was flat-out to the very end.
The good news is that the technology exists to prevent a tragic event such as this from ever happening again. In fact, the technology has existed for a very, very long time, and it could be easily installed on every police vehicle in the country. Let’s discuss.
This has to be a Photoshop job, right? Some of the pixels don’t look quite right, and I’ve seen quite a few ‘shops in my time which look similar, but most of that could be explained away by the fact that the EXIF data indicates it was taken with an iPhone, and some iPhones take awfully grainy pictures.
Alternately, it really could just be another one of these well-meaning but statistically naive attempts to get people to stop looking at their phones while they drive. You know, so they can look up and see the bumpers of all the stopped traffic ahead. Or the billboards…
Suck it, proles! While the up-and-coming, emerging-market, cheap-and-cheerful crowd enthuses over the prospect of Datsun’s return or considers the purchase of Daewoo’s Chevrolet’s latest Korean global minicar, the nice people at Mercedes-Benz have decided to cut the one percent (real or imagined) in on the action with an early release of the 2013 SL65 roadster, er, cabriolet, er, whatever the hell it is.
We were impressed with Dodge’s blue-collar Grand Cherokee when we tested it back in 2010, but we also noted that the vehicle’s success would be linked to fuel prices. Naturally, the story since then hasn’t been great: the Durango’s 2011 sales of 51,697 put it well behind the Grand Cherokee, Liberty, and Patriot. The humble Compass was only four thousand units behind, which says a lot about… something something rental fleets, I’m not actually sure what it says a lot about.
Mainstream America may no longer be willing to pay for macho street appeal with an endless supply of $4/gallon gasoline, but the public sector seems to have no such issue. Thus, we have the Dodge Durango Special Service.
At a busy intersection in the San Francisco Bay area, the team stationed “pedestrians” at crosswalks… Drivers of shiny, expensive cars were three times more likely than those of old clunkers to plow through a crosswalk, failing to yield to pedestrians as required by California state law. High-status motorists were also four times more likely than those with cheaper, older cars to cut off other drivers at a four-way stop.
Rich people behaving badly! It’s easy to imagine the kind of satisfaction the researchers from Berkeley enjoyed when their research showed that class warfare extends all the way to the concrete traffic jungle… but the other behavior they observed was probably a bit tougher to swallow.
Hot on the heels of TTAC’s article on buying a used BMW, we have KBB (via AutoSpies) suggesting that some cars, like the Subaru Impreza, are actually cheaper to own if you buy them brand-new. The numbers are subject to debate but the concept is interesting…
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