Does the above car look familiar? It should; we tested it earlier this year. I noted the IS-F’s desire to step sideways in wet conditions when the eight-speed autobox clunked through the gears, but honestly I thought it was more annoyance than danger.

Turns out I was wrong. Yesterday, a journalist put a halt to the fun of the “International Motor Press Assocation” Monticello track-and-buffet-day when he crashed on his very first lap. When my spies at IMPA (as you might suspect, I’m not a member, the same way I’m not a member of the Midwestern association) told me about the crash, I was surprised. Not because some hammerhead drove off on his first lap to the track — that’s virtually mandatory at these events — but because there’s almost nothing to hit at Monticello. That track has been engineered in a cost-no-object fashion to prevent even the biggest idiots from stuffing their cars into a wall.

Oh well. Make something idiot-proof, and IMPA, MAMA, or (especially) TAWA will engineer a bigger idiot. Apparently the rest of the event was conducted with a maximum speed of sixty miles per hour. A maximum speed. Of sixty miles per hour. On a racetrack that I drove in wet conditions and saw speeds of 140+, while I had a helicopter flying overhead. Why bother to have journalists on the track under those conditions? Which leads to a better, broader question: Why are journalists on a racetrack at all?

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Give any long-haul truck driver enough beer to loosen his tongue, and he will tell you something you don’t really want to know: that tractor-trailer drivers are both fully aware of their ability to murder their fellow motorists with impunity and occasionally desirous of doing so. This simple fact — that in a collision between car and truck, the truck always wins — is the basic premise behind Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film, Duel. Originally produced as a made-for-television “Movie Of The Week”, Duel could easily have been forgettable garbage, a simple thriller, or a plodding drama.

Instead, with just one minor change from what was already a conventional formula, Spielberg created a truly great movie. The change? It’s simple: we never meet the truck driver. (More) spoilers ahead…

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Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes. Robert Farago didn’t invent the idea of telling the truth about this business, but he made it possible for me, and others like me, to bring that truth forward. At this very moment, there are several “respected journalists” flying business class to Europe where they will be fêted and pampered like kings in five-star hotels along the Spanish coast. There, they will pretend to be the customers for cars they will never be able to afford as they attempt to drown the still, small voices of their stunted consciences with free alcohol. Best of luck to them.

Back here in the United States, one East Coast autowriter received the following email and decided that the best, the most fitting, the most ethical thing possible would be to forward it to me, so that I, and all of our readers, can see “how the sausage is made.”

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It’s here: after much talk, hype, third-party conversions, hand-wringing, and other drama, Toyota has finally announced the plug-in Prius. It starts at $32,000 plus destination… but the one you really want will cost you a cool forty G. Click the jump for availability, specs, and some personal hand-wringing.

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The Chevy’s steering is light and reacts quickly on turn-in. Handling eventually gives way to understeer…

Hmm. Is this a review of the Corvette Z06 Carbon? The new Camaro ZL1? Perhaps a lucky journalist has been permitted to hack a C6.R around Road Atlanta for a few laps? Nope, it’s from Car and Driver‘s recent powder-puff piece on the 2012 Sonic.

You know, the Sonic. The fourteen-thousand-dollar subcompact.

Handling, apparently, “eventually gives way to understeer” in a fourteen-thousand-dollar subcompact. Amazing. I’d figured there would be some kind of hideous snap-oversteer swing-axle murderball hidden inside that bitch. What a joke. Here’s a hint: any time a writer appears to be surprised by understeer in a modern mass-production street car, assume that writer is a moron and close your browser page lest you accidentally catch the stupid through a dirty keyboard or something.

‘Twas not always the case, however. In this article, and a sequel to follow shortly, we will discuss a few things: what understeer really means, why you want it, why it is now the default handling behavior for all “regular” cars, and how making it the default handling behavior is accomplished. Boring stuff, sure — but when you’re done reading it, you will be more qualified to review the Chevrolet Sonic’s handling than the guy who actually got paid to do it.

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The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy tells the story of Frogstar B, pretty much the most evil planet around. Frogstar B had been a happy planet until things got just a little bit depressing… and people started to look down at their feet. They started buying shoes. They became obsessed with shoes. Designing, making, and selling shoes of increasingly shoddy quality became the primary occupation of the whole world. When the economy finally collapsed, the people of Frogstar B gave up in disgust and evolved into birds.

I found these two vehicles in a hotel parking lot yesterday. Ninety percent of the spots were empty, but these two were huddling together, perhaps for warmth. It put me in mind of a discussion I had with a PR fellow at Cadillac back around the time of the CTS-V Challenge.

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Toyota doesn’t sell the Camry in most European markets; it’s wayyy too big and powerful to find favor with our Continental betters. Instead, they offer the Avensis, which was rumored to debut a complete redesign at Frankfurt but instead only showed a minor facelift. It would be overly simplistic to call the Avensis a “Scion tC sedan or wagon” but that does more or less capture the approximate size and nature of the vehicle. The Avensis platform is normally sold with a choice of two-liter, four-cylinder diesel, turbodiesel, and gasoline engines. The 2.5, 180-horsepower four-cylinder from the tC would fit, however.

The Avensis sedan wouldn’t find too many customers Stateside; very few people want to pay Camry money and get less car in return. This little wagon, on the other hand…

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Quoth the Viper Club:

Will those guys at Generous Motors ever learn? When you play with a snake…. you eventually get bit.

They are trying to hide the news at the Corvette Forums, but like the horsepower in their supercharged small block… it’s too much to handle.

The word is out , let the crying and the excuses begin.

There’s no “official” word yet about it, but it appears that a new-old-stock 2010 Viper ACR, pulled off the floor at Tomball Dodge, has run a 7:12 “and change”.

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Do you remember what you were doing in 1978? I bet the folks at Maserati do: they were building the final production run of the Bora, the last Maserati that anybody with any taste whatsoever genuinely wanted. A tidal wave of utter garbage followed, from the Biturbo flambé and its many bizarre successors to the current Quattroporte and GranSport which rely on $999/month leases and puff-pieces from deeply unethical individuals to move the metal. The company’s mistakes, mis-steps, and misfires have rendered it almost beyond the Pale of critical appraisal; evaluating Maserati or its products honestly soon takes on a strong whiff of maliciously stomping a dying insect.

Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings: it appears that Maserati has finally decided to inflict a sport-utility vehicle on the world at large. Presumably this was because doing a Maserati “Pet Rock” was seen as being insufficiently gauche, and plans for the company to participate in “Hands Across America” fell through due to lack of organizational capability. Seriously. A luxury SUV? In 2011?

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Hey you! Do you have a fourth-generation Camaro? Are you sick of the fact that it doesn’t look like a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air? Are you willing to paint some fiberglass to make it look slightly more like a Bel Air? Do you have $5,595?

If the answer to all those questions is “HELL YEAH BUDDY,” then do I have a kit for you!

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Welcome to an unauthorized diversion from our core purpose called another episode of TTAC At The Movies. I’m your host, Jack Baruth, and this time we will be looking at a movie that is unlikely to find too much American viewership. (This is the second such review on TTAC; the first is here. Still, we are the site which had three people review the Camry.) Those who do watch it, however, are likely to be very passionate about the subject.

Quoth the Wiki:

In 2009, a poll of 217 current and former Formula One drivers conducted by the British magazine Autosport named [Aryton] Senna as the greatest Formula One driver.[2][6] He was recognised for his qualifying speed over one lap and from 1989 until 2006 held the record for most pole positions. He was especially quick in wet conditions, as shown by his performances in the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix, the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix, and the 1993 European Grand Prix. He also holds the record for most victories at the prestigious Monaco Grand Prix – six – and is the third most successful driver of all time in terms of race wins.

As with Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and a host of other notables, Senna’s already lustrous reputation was burnished by death in his prime; unlike the champions who succeeded him, most notably Villeneuve and Schumacher, nobody ever had to watch Senna plod through depressing end-of-career, back-of-the-pack seasons. (Of course, one might want to ask precious little Lewis Hamilton whether Herr Schumacher still has any fight left in him.) The documentary Senna is intended to be watchable by both F1 “anoraks” and people who are utterly ignorant of the sport. When Vodka McBigbra and I showed up to watch it on Friday night, therefore, we had a representative of each type.

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The automotive world has been eagerly awaiting the Camaro ZL1 ever since it was announced earlier this year. This stunning riposte to the 2007 Shelby Mustang could easily become the HHR to the Mustang’s PT Cruiser. In its excitement, however, Chevrolet forgot to invite TTAC to the media event in which the Camaro ZL1 specs were introduced. Therefore, what you are about to read will be stolen quoted entirely from Eric Tingwall’s post on the Automobile blog last night.

To make it worth your while, however, I will make a few snarky comments in-between quotes. Click the jump and help us pay the bills around here!

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It’s been a bit of a meta-critical and navel-gazing week or so here at TTAC. We’ve been reviewed and discussed by other media sources, we’ve reviewed and discussed a few media sources ourselves, and we’ve even had a delightful piece by Brendan McAleer which sort of reviews our own reviews of someone else’s review of us.

It’s safe to say that we will probably be taking a break from this sort of thing for a while so that we can bring you some more of the authentic TTAC content you’ve come to know and love. Clinical, yet strangely erotic, descriptions of trunk space. Callous disregard for human decency in the last of the Ford full-sizers. Chinese business news. That sort of thing.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, we will continue to encounter “content” from our colleagues in the business which is mendaciously conceived, shamelessly produced, and incompetently edited. Which leads me to my question:

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Sorry for that crappy music. I didn’t put the music in there — JB

Once more in the Panamera breach, dear friends;
Or close up the blog with our press-car dead.

We (meaning I) have been awfully tough on Porsche’s Panamera this week, what with the Frank Greve article on corruption in the autojourno game and my own confessional regarding my Panamera experience.

To balance out the karma of the Porsche universe, I’ve found an article, published today, where the auto review for Canada’s National Post experiences a blown turbocharger in a Panamera Turbo S.

What happened, it was found out later, was that the right turbocharger (the Panamera has two) let go, pouring oil into the exhaust system. Unfortunately, the exhaust side of a turbocharger routinely reaches temperatures of 900C. Since oil burns at 500C, we had our impromptu car-b-cue. Covered in a fine patina of bromine (the fire retardant in portable extinguishers), clad in scorched bumper and dripping hot oil out its tailpipes, the Turbo S was a sorry sight and had to be medivac’d back to Toronto.

What the shill toady unbelievably corrupt pawn of people who consider him to be basically a robot who can be programmed to spew crap for a lower-middle-class wage journalist, David Booth, writes next may shock you, but it will almost certainly make you laugh.

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The publication of Frank Greves’ article in American Journalism Review served as a rude reminder to me how time really does fly. Mr. Greves describes the fallout from my less-than-fawning review of Porsche’s Panamera and Panamera Turbo. What follows is the story he didn’t tell: how Porsche tried to keep me out of the car, how they tried to “correct” my review after the fact, and the fractious relationship I’ve had with Stuttgart’s PR people since then. I’ll also provide links to the original review and video review of the car, so you can decide for yourself how wrong, or right, I was.

A serious warning before you click the jump: Sex, violence, skullduggery, harsh words, and excessive alcohol consumption are described in semi-graphic detail below. This is not for the faint of heart, the excessively moral, or the uncritically Porschephilic. It’s also not a short story. You’ve been warned.

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