Rotating alone on a turntable: the Subaru BRZ. Looks good, if you ask me. Unfortunately we couldn’t touch the dashboard for all of you dash-touchers out there… more shots after the jump.
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Posts By: Jack Baruth
Since its introduction, the Bentley Continental GT has been a fascinating lesson in how “luxury” operates. Fundamentally identical to the VW Phaeton, the Conti sold for twice as much — and did volumes between ten and thirty times what the uber-VW ever managed in the United States.
This platform is about to celebrate its tenth year in production. How do you revitalize it when there are plenty of $70,000 used Contis out there? Simple: you turn down the power.
You’re looking at the Q3 Vail. Named in honor of a place where the self-important meet for a little apres-ski, the “Vail” features a butched-up body kit and all sorts of technical details that, let’s face it, have nothing to do with the Q3 your mom will end up asking you about leasing in six months. More photos from Zerin Dube of Speed:Sport:Life after the jump.
“You know,” Mark Templin of Lexus told the press, “the first time I saw this car, I was speechless.” I know I have that quote correct, because it was in the copy of the speech handed out after the press event.
Speeches about speechlessness aside, however, this is the new styling direction of Lexus. That much is obvious from the pinched grille. What else can we learn about it?
The new 3! All new! And it looks like it finally has some decent brakes. About three and a half inches longer, it’s also now finally available in Audi “Atmospheres” the Sportline / Luxuryline / Modernline trim levels that BMW has used, in one fashion or another, in Europe for Averylongtime.
What you see before you will be the best-selling Porsche 911. It is sad but true: in the watercooled era, the convertible has generally outsold the coupe. For that reason alone, Porsche was eager to introduce a droptop 991. Add all-wheel-drive and a PDK transmission, and you have a sickening parody of Butzi Porsche’s original 901 concept a great way for high-net-worth people to get to their yoga lessons.
What don’t you know about the Dart? I will tell you something: it is spacious inside. The rear seat is no-kidding suitable for full-sized adults In fact, it’s quite nice to sit in, front and back. Click the jump for some comments from Speed:Sport:Life’s Byron Hurd:
Our Chevrolet event coverage comes to us courtesy of Byron Hurd and Speed:Sport:Life. Take it away…
There’s been no shortage of Fusion coverage this week, but now we have the car itself. The verdict? In the metal, it almost looks more like a four-door Aston than the Rapide. And let’s not forget the October Surprise of a plug-in hybrid, which Ford sources at the show told me will be on dealer floors in 2012…
Sherman’s father had always taken the subway to Wall Street… It was a matter of principle. The more grim the subways became, the more graffiti those people scrawled on the cars… the more determined was John Campbell McCoy that they weren’t going to drive him off the New York City subways. But to the new breed, the young breed, the masterful breed, Sherman’s breed, there was no such principle. Insulation! That was the ticket. That was the term Rawlie Thorpe used. ”If you want to live in New York,” he once told Sherman, ”you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate,” meaning insulate yourself from those people. The cynicism and smugness of the idea struck Sherman as very au courant.
— Tom Wolfe, “Bonfire Of The Vanities”
As the United States slouches towards Rio to be reborn as a place where one can only live in the one-percenter heaven or unemployed, lower-class hell, insulation has become a concept with validity far outside Manhattan. The latest manifestation of this sans hoi polloi attitude: “The Gallery”, where “high-net-worth” individuals can meet their next status symbols without the offensive presence of regular people.
Nobody stays the same forever. It seems impossible to believe that I used to attend the NAIAS every year at the Charity Preview, spending $800 so I could eagerly discuss my next $100,000 German ooober-mobile purchase with a variety of vacant-eyed, soulless salesmen. No more. Nowadays I travel on foot and by foot it’s a slow climb, but I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.
TTAC is changing as well. For the first time, we are going to bring you the Detroit show as it happens. We will have a representative at each and every press conference, including — ooh! the scandal! — a well-known autojournalist from another firm publishing under a nom de plume. We will be reporting on the outrageous journo parties and perks. If there’s enough Ketel One in my system at the time, we may try a brute-force Panther invasion of Porsche’s “summer bar-be-que” media handjob in Greektown Monday night.
I’m excited. We are excited. It’s our goal to bring you the best coverage yet. If you are so inclined, click the jump to read a few reasons why it’s difficult for even the most jaded among us to be truly cynical about the stationary trainwreck known as the North American International Auto Show.
Somebody broke an embargo somewhere. It wasn’t TTAC: everybody knows better than to send us this stuff. So here’s the Dart, and the initial details are reasonably encouraging for Mopar fans. Did somebody say Turbo? Did somebody say manual transmission with all three engines?
Dave Barry once wrote that “Corporations have meetings because they cannot physically masturbate.” One might also say that auto magazines give meaningless awards because they cannot actually get the automakers’ proverbial todgers down their proverbial throats. Giving an award accomplishes pretty much the same thing, plus it sends the right message: we are perfectly compliant cogs in your public relations machine, and we celebrate your entire catalog of automobiles. The public ignores the awards, everybody is happy, the party continues.
Time for AutoWeek to get its knees dirty, and it turns out they are no choosier than a heroin addict occupying a bathroom stall at the Troubadour.
The Ariel Atom: first a “race car for the road” in Europe, then a road car that can also be raced in a spec series. Like the Lotus/Caterham Seven and a variety of other thousand-ish-pound kit-style cars, the Atom has a very different set of dynamic capabilities from what one would find in, say, a Corvette. As a former owner of a Lotus Seven clone, I can attest that it’s easy to get in trouble on the street when driving a lightweight vehicle sans electronic helpers, and the penalties for making mistakes are higher than they are in an Escalade or Phantom.
Want proof? Look no further than the AutoGuide report that a journalist has been killed during a European test drive of the Atom 3.
Quick: What does the Chevy Sonic have in common with the original Bugatti tourers? Simple: they were built to go, not to stop. Well, the Sonic isn’t necessarily built to “go” as such, but you get the idea.
In its continuing effort to make life easier for burned-out TTAC headline writers, General Motors announced their latest “Mark Of Excellence” today: a recall campaign covering 4,873 Sonics sold in the United States and Canada. What’s wrong with these Sonics? As John Mayer would say, something’s missing…
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