Here’s a tip: If you ever find yourself in a situation where the leader of a local street-racing/coordinated-driving-tractor-trailer-theft gang ever decides that you owe him a twelve-second car, an old W-body Buick Regal GS Supercharged is a good place to start. You’d be amazed how much power those old crapwagons can twist out. Just make sure you’re holding on to the steering wheel with both hands.

If, on the other hand, you’re just looking for a nice mid-sized sedan, GM’s pricing announcement today is likely to be of more interest. We have two models: the GS, which comes with a six-speed manual and may be kind of fast, and the eAssist, featuring a low-feature approach to hybrid tech which may leave the green crowd a bit furious.

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“TWO HUNDRED BUCKS? Are you serious? That doesn’t sound like enough money.” No, dear readers, I wouldn’t last ten minutes in the “World Series Of Poker”. I can’t bluff and I usually speak my mind before using that mind to think about the consequences of what I’m saying. In this case, however, it didn’t matter. […]

The auto world was rocked — ROCKED, I tell you! — yesterday by allegations that Carroll Shelby did all sorts of bad stuff recently. We here at TTAC have no opinion about this kind of thing. We don’t know any of the people involved, we don’t have access to any inside information, and we’re really not qualified to dive into the deep waters of rape, privacy, violation, money, power, lawsuits, and whatnot.

Luckily, our friends at Autoblog aren’t so shy.

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If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. —O’Brien, in “1984”.

O’Brien was wrong. The picture of the future is a picture of you: completely naked, with your privacy invaded, taken as you walk along the street, sit in your own vehicle, or pursue your own private business. You will be recorded forever, your movements will be marked, your possessions will be noted, you will become completely subservient to a government you may not even remember electing. Eventually, you may die of cancer, moaning out a final cry of drug-addled defiance as you are culled — in a quite humane fashion, of course — to prevent excessive healthcare costs.

The company helping to bring you the above future is called, without irony, “American Science and Engineering, Inc.”

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Sorry for the delay on this one… Eight days ago, the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission approved the Ford Transit Connect for immediate use within NYC. Taxi-conscious TTAC readers will remember that this board rather controversially approved the Nissan NV200 as the Taxi Of Tomorrow a few months back. At the time, a source within Ford told me that “the battle isn’t over yet,” and this appears to be proof.

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Fifty feet away and I was already furious. The oh-so-chipper Enterprise rep was leading us towards a Ford Fusion — and that is not a full-sized car in the Enterprise universe. Fusions are mid-sized. I’d specifically booked a full-sizer for this trip around Utah and Idaho. My hope was to receive an Impala, thus benefiting […]

When the E90/92 335i was introduced and every tuner in the world promptly released “chips” or reflashes that enabled the twin-turbo straight-six to belt out four hundred horses or more at the rear wheels, BMW became very indignant about the idea of “chipping” their cars. Time and again, we were assured that BMW was extracting the maximum safe performance from their engines, and that retuning them could only lead to sorrow.

Oops! Turns out it’s probably just fine, as long as the tuner in question is BMW itself.

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The 2012 Chevrolet Impala may have the oldest “bones” of any current production sedan, but it’s not quite ready to put those bones in the graveyard yet…

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What are we looking at here? Well, it’s a Camry, that much is obvious. In the window is a sign for “Educators Against 5.”

What’s “5”? It’s a bill, recently passed in Ohio, which prohibits collective bargaining by public employee unions on issues such as health insurance, sick leave and pension benefits. Needless to say, it is massively unpopular among unionized public-sector workers in said state, many of whom view it as the first step towards “union-busting”.

The actual merits of the law are probably best discussed elsewhere. However, this is the third car I’ve seen in two days carrying the “No 5” sign… and all three have had a little credibility problem.

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This list, published by the State of California, lists the vehicles which will be eligible for unlimited carpool-lane access from now until January 1, 2015. Sharp-eyed TTAC readers will notice that there is just one readily-available, non-battery-powered, car-form-factor vehicle on the list: the Honda Civic GX.

If you’re interested in cutting your Cali commute time without plugging into a “charging station”, and you like Civics, this is good news. If you’re a Civic GX owner looking to sell, it’s even better news. If you have a new Toyota Prius, this is probably frustrating news.

The rest of us will probably have just one question: What does natural gas have to do with carpooling?

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Of all the many reasons to avoid automotive press events — interminable middle-seat flights, lost income, some nagging sense of ethical obligation at the back of my mind which has yet to be fully extinguished by the sweet nectar of free alcohol — the biggest one is what I think of as the “Surf City in Hell Factor”. The alert reader will recall that, in the mythical Surf City, there are two girls for every boy. Well, at the average North American press event, there are twenty boys for every girl.

This past week’s soiree was no different. Twenty-five names on the roster. One was mine. Twenty-two others were male. That left two girls for this one boy to consider. I should note that, after some time and effort, I’ve separated all working female autojournos into three categories: Ain’t Gonna, Don’t Wanna, and Already Did. This time, the distaff entries before me were both Don’t Wannas, disqualified on the basis that they were entering middle age when I was entering kindergarten.

What to do? Was I really going to spend all evening crossing swords with the polyester-button-down crowd? Pas du tout. I picked up my battered Droid and made a call. An hour later, the maitre’d at LA’s famous “Tower Bar” was mispronouncing my name in a distracted fashion as he stared at the woman on my arm. From a distance, Miss Melisa Mae could be mistaken for Anna Nicole Smith; after years in the modeling business, she still has the height, the body, and the vicious charm to fool the casual observer. Look past the dangerous curves and the leopard-skin print outfit, however, and you will find a jaded, satirical mind. Her blog, which has made a big splash in the past year among the Twitterati and dater/hater crowd, chronicles a lifetime spent in the sexual jungle. Read it, and you’ll see that her unvarnished approach to sleeping with, and post-coitally evaluating, a nearly endless stream of contenders has earned her a healthy dose of both fans and foes. Sounds kind of familiar, right? I figured we’d be kindred souls, or at least similarly soulless.

Having tricked her into meeting me, my intentions were simple: interview her about cars and dating for a bit, drink her under the table, drag her across the street to my hotel, and show her that I was more than a match in the sack for the gym rats, firefighters, policemen, and African nationals that populate her recollections. It wasn’t the best-laid of plans, but it was a plan for the best, er, oh, just click the jump before I have to finish the joke, okay?

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By all accounts, the original Mitsubishi A6M Reisen, also known as “Zeke” or “Zero”, was a pretty decent little warplane. For a year or so, it had the edge on the porky old Brewster Buffalos and Grumman Wildcats operating, which is to say retreating, in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. The Wildcat was […]

We don’t have such a thing as “COTD”* on “TTAC”. It’s a shame, too, because without an explicit way to force readers to compete with eachother for an arbitrarily-dispensed, meaningless accolade, you readers out there just won’t grovel at our feet the way we’d like. We’ll work on creating some kind of user rating/slating system, I swear… just as soon as we fix the gallery issues, the Cloudflare business, Ed’s issue with emotional distance, my lovable but ultimately malicious immaturity, and the lack of tall, busty blondes on the staff. I mean, on the roster. Not on the staff. You know. Not that we couldn’t use one or two on the staff. If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Enough immaturity. In my Fleetwood Talisman review posted yesterday, the subject of GM’s identical B-and-C-cars came up… and a few commenters stepped up to the plate.
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Okay… you read about the Sturm und Drang involved in getting this 48,000-mile, two-owner Cadillac from Columbus, Ohio to Houston, Texas. Now it’s time to talk about the car itself a bit, and review it just the way we would review any other car here at TTAC. Problem is… how do you review a car […]

I never thought it would happen, particularly after a long few years of mercilessly criticizing every overpriced, cynically-conceived, cost-cut piece of garbage Porsche has released in the past few years, but as I stepped off the plane in Frankfurt this morning for a completely exclusive, embargo-busting preview of the 911 GT3 RS 4.0 in the Black Forest, followed by a full-throttle attack of the only racetrack in the world that really matters (the hallowed Norfschleifegarten) I knew that all had been forgiven and that I would be able to share all the details with you about the fastest, finest, just plain best 911 in the nameplate’s storied history: the awesome 2012 911 GT3 RS 4.0.
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