The difference between “bold” and “foolhardy” is not always apparent at first glance. While I was driving the GLI around Volkswagen’s Virginia test loop (insert standard narrative devices here: 11/10ths, drive like the wind, straining the limits of machine and man, et cetera) I saw a tall, lithe young woman by the side of the […]
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Posts By: Jack Baruth
Everybody agrees that the Volkswagen GTI is a great car. Except for the US-market MkI, which was underpowered. And the Mk2, which was really underpowered. Don’t the forget the Mk2 16V, which was wayyy overpriced and over-complicated. And the MkIII, which had no business calling itself a GTI, not with that chunky VR6 under the […]
Anybody here ever go to Catholic school? I sure as hell did. About six of them over the course of seven years. I learned really quickly how to distinguish the nuns who scolded from the nuns who slapped, paddled, or punched. (Sister Andrea! What’s up?) I also learned that kids rarely attend Catholic school alone. […]
The music world is going nuts over the Federal Government’s second major raid of Gibson Guitars in just two years. Agents stopped production at Gibson’s facilities and confiscated massive quantities of wood, unfinished guitars, and finished products. This article covers the basics, including Gibson owner Henry Juszkiewicz’s decision to defy the federal government and continue shipping finished guitars to retailers after the raid.
Why would the government use armed agents to attack one of the few major manufacturers of anything remaining in the United States? The political motivations for such an action are outside the scope of this article, but the justification for the action is the Lacey Act, which regulates the importation of plants, animals, and products thereof into the United States. The Lacey Act effectively permits wooden musical instruments to be seized indefinitely, without compensation, and places the burden of proof on the owner, not the government. Do you own an $11,000 2011 Gibson Eric Clapton Edition Les Paul? Want to take it to Canada and back? You’d better be prepared to document the source of all materials to the government’s satisfaction upon your return, or you could lose it indefinitely. If you thinking documenting that is tough, what if you’re ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons returning from an overseas tour with your real 1959 sunburst Les Paul, for which you’ve already turned down at least one $5,000,000 offer? Good luck documenting the wood from a fifty-two-year-old guitar.
Very few TTAC readers travel with guitars, particularly across the country’s borders, so I don’t expect this to worry you personally. If, on the other hand, you want to drive across the Canadian or Mexican border in your own car — or even a rental — consider this: The same law that allows the Feds to raid American manufacturers and seize the possessions of Americans without compensation applies to cars, too.
On Wednesday, your humble author had the opportunity to drive several of the newest Volkswagens on an identical 14-mile loop around rural Virginia. By adding a few unauthorized extensions to this loop, I was able to walk away from the day with a reasonable understanding of a few different VW models. Naturally, the four most […]
“I mean, this car is dead, right? The only people who bought the last one were fifty-year old Sally Schoolteachers, and they’re all sixty years old now. There’s no volume in this car. Can’t be any volume. The buyers are almost dead. And it isn’t fun to drive AT ALL. What would you rather have, […]
Here at TTAC, we read the press releases so you don’t have to. Well, that’s an exaggeration. To begin with, we don’t read them all, because most of them are boring. And sometimes it’s most expedient to simply repackage the press release for your consumption and earn a buck/free trip/free car/logo-branded polyester apparel for our trouble. Most press releases are pretty simple and read something like these:
New Color Options For Slow-Selling Car In Final Year Of Production Expected To Generate Spontaenous Ejaculation In Rats, Soccer Dads
More Powerful Engine For Boring Sedan Increases The Chances Of Fatal Accidents Among Future Fourth Owners, Innocent Bystanders
Concept Vehicle Bearing No Resemblance To Any Future Vehicle Is Sole New Item At Critical Auto Show As Competitors Debut Fresh Lineups
Auto Designer Known For Single Successful Design Moving To New Automaker, Expected To “Design” An Utter Knockoff Of Original Success
Exciting New Marketing Alliance With Foust, Pastrana, Block, And/Or Limp Biskit To Reach Vital New Demographic Of Basement-Dwelling Mooks Whose Parents Occasionally Purchase Pre-Owned SUVs
Those are the usual suspects, and although they are all banal at best, they are not actually evil. The press release of which you are about to read, however, is different. Be warned. You are about to cross the line beyond which there is no return. Clicking the jump may, in fact, summon the Elder God itself, the horrible, animate survivor of the distant aeon…
Some time ago, I made the unpleasant discovery that Oprah Winfrey publishes a magazine devoted entirely to herself. It’s called “O!” and every month there is a photo of Oprah herself on the cover. It’s almost impossible to imagine the kind of people who would buy such a magazine, but the same could be said about a variety of products from Kenneth Cole’s Indonesian garbage shoes to “Four Loko” alcopops.
The Chevrolet Volt is TTAC’s Oprah. Not only is it overweight and despised by most right-thinking people (in a few senses of the phrase), it appears on our front page more than any other car. We’ve reviewed it at least three times, discussed it endlessly, and even attended an owner’s gathering.
We’ve recently heard that GM wants to be like Apple. Here’s the problem: GM already is like Apple. Not the current Apple, mind you, but the divided, contentious, collapsing (Cr)Apple of the early Eighties. That company had a “Volt” of its own. It was called “Lisa”, and I was there on the day it was unveiled.
My 28-month-old son is a visionary. He can see things other people can’t. By “other people”, I mean “me”. He will point to the sky and say “airplane”. I see a dot that doesn’t look like an airplane to me until I realize it’s moving. He is currently very interested in garbage trucks, and he will call out “GARRTRUCK!” when the vehicle in question is swimming in the distant summer mirage of a flat Ohio freeway. I’m encouraging this interest, by the way. Trash-truck guys in New York City earn $144,000 a year. He can play a Fender Rhodes piano all night in the Village and collect garbage all morning if he wants to.
Honestly, I’d rather he be a garbageman than a race car driver. I don’t know if there will be much racing going on sixteen years from now. It probably won’t be like what we have now, with thousands of middle-class guys burning 200-300 gallons a NASA/SCCA/LeMons weekend in tow and race fuel and another few hundred millionaires running Grand-Am and ALMS. I’m not even sure how much driving we will have sixteen years from now.
Regardless, on the assumption that he is likely to drive a car at some point, I talk to him while we drive places, about what to look for, what to look at, what to deliberately ignore. It’s partially for his safety, although I don’t think driver “education” makes a huge difference in one’s chances in the big Auto Death Lottery. It’s partially so he will get places faster and with less stress. It’s partially so he will enjoy driving a bit, even if he chooses not to do it in a competitive or even aggressive fashion. And since I wish the same for all of you, I will tell you what I tell him, as we roll down the road in our broken-nosed Town Car.
Any Nineties-era German car fanatic worth his “D” sticker knows how to remove badging from the back of a car. Here’s a helpful link in case you don’t remember. A few minutes of one’s time can turn a BMW 323i or Mercedes S430 into a mysterious Autobahn machine of unknown potential puissance. Most of the time, it’s a visual improvement. There’s something nice about tidying-up one’s rear end. Ask Jessica Gottlieb if you don’t believe me.
It’s possible that the photograph above does not reflect what the Porsche “991” will actually look like in production. It could be Photoshop. It could be a guy in marketing having a laugh. It could have been a minor glitch in the prototype-production line that caused some machine to simply vomit a pound of chromey-plastic letters onto that car’s ass, and it could be pure chance that the aforementioned pound of garbage just happens to spell out “P O R S C H E 911 Carrera S”.
Don’t bet on it. Porsche clearly wants their letter-vomiting machine to spray every new 911 with a fine-mist alpha-numeric jumble, and I’ll tell you why.
Has it really been just eleven months since I rejoined the Panther posse by acquiring a 2009 Town Car Signature Limited? In that short span of time, the big Lincoln has rolled its odometer forward from the delivery mileage of 21,850 all the way to 58,933. The mathematically alert reader will note that this represents a daily average of well over a hundred miles. My current commute is a seventy-six mile round trip if I eat lunch at work; if I don’t, it’s at least eighty-nine. Plus I like to go places, you know.
The Town Car and I have had one service issue in our first 38K together: the passenger-side rear door lock mechanism started sticking in the cold, and it was replaced by the dealer under warranty. Other than that, it’s been smooth sailing on a sea of air-suspended bliss… until now.
Steinway & Sons may be the last great American brand: from 1853 to the present day, the company has built world-class musical instruments by hand in New York. Unlike their contemporaries in the guitar-making business, Steinway never went through “bad times”, even after the family sold out in 1972. (Interestingly, although CBS bought both Fender and Steinway, the paths taken by the two companies under CBS ownership were very different.) Nor have they become mere cloacae for the diarrheal discharge of Foxconn’s suicide factories the way Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Apple have. Steinway’s business model is simple and hasn’t changed for over a century. They build the pianos in the United States to exacting standards, charge premium prices for them, and everybody is happy.
The power of the Steinway brand is such that everybody from random auto reviewers to big-time ad agencies feels compelled to mention their products in an automotive context. Googling the Steinway name together with that of any major auto-media outlet will yield results ranging from dismal to pathetic. Engines, body panels, dashboards, radio switches, and brake feel are all likened to the company’s eight-hundred-pound musical gorillas. There’s something about Steinway that gets car guys excited.
Wait till they find out that Steinway was in the business of building automotibles before Soichiro Honda was born, and remains so, in minor fashion, to this day.
Divide $64 million by about 10,000. What do you get? I was a liberal-arts major, but I figure the answer is “About $6400.” That’s a lot more than $850, right? Hop into this here Silverado with me, dear reader, and let’s take a ride through another adventure in GM’s mismanaged past.
You know what I could really go for? A turbocharged Astro modified to, er, “look like a Lamborghini”. A show called “Ultimate Car Build” created such a vehicle a year or so ago. The “Astroghini” ran from 0-60 in 6.2 seconds thanks to a turbocharger sitting in place of the passenger seat. It sold on eBay in September, but the precise whereabouts of the Astroghini were unknown… until now. It sits just a few miles from a General Motors plant which closed in 1999 and nearly put the surrounding community down for the proverbial count.
Six days ago, Honda announced minor revisions to its slow-selling Accord Crosstour. They are summarized in the press release:
For 2012, new features on the Crosstour EX include auto on/off headlights, a rearview camera, Bluetooth®1 HandsFreeLink® and USB audio interface. Two new colors are also available on all Crosstour models: Twilight Blue Metallic replaces Glacier Blue Metallic, and Basque Red Pearl replaces Tango Red Pearl.
The other change: it’s not the “Accord Crosstour” anymore. Like Sting, Madonna, Ke$ha, Shakira, et al, it’s now just the one-word “Crosstour”.
I was curious as to how the automotive media would cover this important news, and how each of the TTAC contributors might cover it, given the chance. If you are, as well, click the jump.
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