Women and minivans, women and minivans. They don’t quite go together like a horse and carriage, but it’s possible to be just a little more romantic about either when the location is right. I fell in love with the revise-and-retouch 2011 Chrysler minivans during an epic Northern California trip, as detailed in my first-drive review, […]
Answer quickly, without pondering: Does Mercedes-Benz make reliable automobiles? For most of us, the immediate answer is “No.” Perhaps it’s because we’ve owned post-1995 Benzes, perhaps it’s because we’ve heard horror stories from our neighbor’s first-gen ML or W210 E-Class, perhaps it’s because it’s easy to see that recent M-B products simply don’t seem to hold up or stick around the way the old ones did.
Now imagine how your friends and family would answer the same question. Again, the “nays” are probably going to outnumber the “yays”. Thirty years ago, everybody thought that Mercedes-Benz built the best automobiles in the world. Today, very few people do. It’s common knowledge now that the three-pointed star has been affixed to plenty of cars which were underdeveloped at best and utter garbage at worst. You can’t really trust a Mercedes-Benz, can you? Not like you can trust a Lexus.
There’s only one problem with the above statements: there is a group of people who have learned, firsthand, how durable, reliable, and flat-out awesome a Nineties Benz can be. You know them, I know them…
Where were we? Ah, yes. I was fleeing Nashville in defeat after my mystery car ate its water pump on Mile 417 of a 1,210-mile journey. But what was that mystery car? I couldn’t reveal it at the time, for reasons which will become apparent shortly, but now it can be told: I was driving a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special “Talisman”. For the bargain price of about $14,000 (think $54K today, about the same as a loaded 335i or middling Audi A6) the most discerning among us could purchase the ultimate in full-sized luxury.
In the week after my return to sunny Powell, Ohio, the Firestone shop in Franklin, Tennessee swapped the water pump, thermostat, a few hoses, and the blown-out valve cover gaskets. All was in readiness for me to fly in Saturday, July 2, and pick up where I’d left off. Drama McHourglass promised she would pick me up at the airport:
I will be there. with bells on!
Honestly, dear readers, I had my doubts, particularly given my arrival time of 8:45am, but as I rolled my SKB Strat case through the big glass doors and out into BNA’s Arrivals area, I saw her ’96 Taurus in the lane ahead. She was radiant in a nearly sheer peasant dress and as I took my seat next to her, she said, “You see? Bells.” She wiggled — no, she shimmered — and I heard the strings of bells draped over her wrists, and I felt the solid ground drop away beneath me, the way it does when you hit the coping and tumble all the way down the halfpipe, or hear the jury read your verdict, or fall desperately in love. (Read More…)
Chevrolet cars have outsold combined sales of trucks, crossovers and utilities in April, May and June of this year – and are expected to represent 47 percent of the brand’s sales for the first half of 2011. The last time cars led Chevrolet’s sales for three consecutive months was in May, June, and July of 1991. That year, cars represented 52 percent of Chevrolet sales.
“Chevrolet has always been known for building great trucks,” said Alan Batey, U.S. vice president, Chevrolet Sales and Service. “Today, we are in the middle of transforming the brand with a strong lineup of cars that match the appeal of our trucks and crossovers.
“That transformation is clearly bringing new customers to the brand – as passenger cars and four-cylinder engines are driving Chevrolet’s growth this year,” Batey said. “We expect that momentum to accelerate as Chevrolet introduces three new cars over the next two years – the Sonic, Spark, and next-generation Malibu.”
And no, that isn’t necessarily a code-phrase for “our truck sales are in the toilet.” Sales of Chevrolet cars and trucks are up this year. The most interesting part of the PR release quoted above, however, relates to engine choice…
How user-serviceable should a car be? Should special tools be required to perform basic tasks? If the car in question is a sporty car, should there be less effort on the manufacturer’s part to ensure serviceability (because it’s a “toy” and more likely to be owned by people with multiple cars) or more (because sporty cars tend to have longer in-service lifetimes and have a more self-service-oriented owner base)?
After performing most of the 30,000-miles service on my 2004 Boxster S “Anniversary Edition”, I believe I’ve become a little more passionate about my answers to the above questions.
Man, I wish I’d thought of that “Godwin’s Law” thing before Godwin did. The closest I’d come was “Baruth’s Law”, which in its early form stated “Any museum which showcases the infinitely desirable, super-cool Messerschmitt 262 will eventually be forced to include an exhibit on the Holocaust, just to keep impressionable pre-teen boys from pretending to be Luftwaffe pilots during recess.” Here’s a newer version of “Baruth’s Law”: As the length of a discussion concerning automobiles and fuel availability increases, the possibility of some Manhattanite or Portland-dweller making an absolutely uniform, uninformed, completely ridiculous statement regarding mass transit approaches 1.
I know. No zing. I don’t know any other way to put it, however. Mass transit is wonderful, as long as the mass of people involved is dense enough. The response to the preceding statement is always something along the lines of, “Well, then, people should move out of flyover country.” This is one of those bits of advice which works for individuals but would cause bloody chaos if everybody decided to follow it at once. Perhaps, in the distant future, we will all dwell in fabulous Fullerdome arcologies while machines toil to grow our food in the blasted wilderness outside.
In the present, however, the immortal words of Young MC still hold sway for most of America: “Got no money/and you got no car/then you got no woman/and there you are.” Which doesn’t perfectly explain why, twelve hours after my car died in Franklin, Tennessee, I woke up in the frilly bed of a sixteen-year-old teenaged girl.
Tommy Hilfiger… My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn’t know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact what accounts for his long ubiquity.
Doing less with more: it’s been the strategy of American print magazines since Baxter, Setright, and the other legends wandered off into the sunset. It’s hard not to be envious. Consider our friends and roamin’ countrymen of AutoWeek. Charged with the task of assembling thirty pages’ worth of content — equivalent to a few days of TTAC articles — they had no fewer than eleven manufacturer-and-owner-provided cars and motorcycles to review, plus a couple of all-expenses-paid junkets to far-off places.
What did they produce? Three full-sized stories, a couple of hasty paragraphs tossed off at the other cars to justify their continued “long-term-test” status, a two-page “Father’s Day Gift Guide” full of worthless garbage, and, of course, a bizarre rant about how fat and stupid Americans are.
This weekend is HYPERFEST, the all-purpose race/drift/time trial/bikini contest/public vomiting/two-hour wait for parking enjoyed by everyone insane enough to visit Summit Point in the middle of the summer. I didn’t make it out, although my occasional teammate Angelo Dinkov set a lap record two days running in the course of winning the hell out of his races. Chances are you didn’t make it, either. So let’s kick back, relax and watch as “Mr. Shufflef**kitupagus”, above, and a whole (Formula SCCA Regional) grid’s worth of Hyperfest and Summit crashers liven up your Father’s Day! (Read More…)
Honda has a new million-mile contender coming up, and this time they are using Facebook to get their fanbase involved. With this arrival of a third well-publicized long distance voyager, however, is Honda unwittingly bringing attention to a very inconvenient truth?
This past weekend, a young man named Lucas Ordonez finished in second place in the reasonably-well-contested LMP2 class at LeMans. The video-gaming world has taken notice, because Mr. Ordonez entered racing as the winner of the PlayStation GT Academy a few years ago.
This proves the truth of what every basement-dwelling, sunlight-allergic gamer geek has been saying for years: being fast in a racing video game makes you fast in real racing. After all, if a kid from nowhere can step from his couch into a racing program and fulfill the lifetime dream of nearly every sports-car racer in the world, surely “Gran Turismo” is a genuine, realistic training tool, right?
Naturally, the truth of the matter is not so simple.
How did the company which virtually invented automotive marketing become so piss-poor at it? How did the promotion and advertising of General Motors automobiles become reduced to a series of meaningless comparisons, numbers, and statistics? We are now in the fifth decade of General Motors’ abject failure to understand why people buy imported cars. In the Seventies, GM thought it was miles per gallon, and every GM ad trumpeted the Chevette’s ability to match the Corolla or Civic gallon in fuel economy. Forget the fact that the Chevette was a genuinely horrible car which has only recently found a reason to exist (a kick-ass, single-make ice-racing series, if you must know). In the Eighties and Nineties, GM marketing flacks got a whiff of “performance” and we were deluged with claims that the Pontiac Grand Am GTXPXT-W31-442-Z34 got better lateral “g” than the BMW L7. Of course, it took a skidpad, or a glassy-smooth racetrack, for something like a J-body to even catch sight of a Bimmer’s rear bumper.
Lately, it’s been Quality, and I’m capitalizing the “Q” ironically for all you Pirsig readers. Again and again, we are told that GM matches the best brands out there for quality. Most people read these ads to say, “OMFG, that car I would never buy is almost as good as the car which has given me eight years of trouble-free service.” Customers don’t care about JD Power numbers; they care about their own experience and the experiences of people they trust. GM spat directly into the faces of those people forty years ago and they’ve been doing it ever since.
And now, finally, we have Nurburgring times. The CTS-V is supposedly the fastest sedan around the ‘Ring. Nobody seems to care. If ‘Ring times ever really meant anything to anyone beyond frothy-mouthed teenagers pounding a keyboard in skid-marked underwear, the endless controversy about Nissan’s latest GT-R has more or less killed that goose. The GT-R’s times around the ‘Ring vary by nearly forty seconds, depending on who is driving, which tires were on the thing at the time, and whether or not anybody actually checked the boost controller before the car went out. ‘Ring times are worthless, useless, forgotten. They’re as played-out as the PT Cruiser…
“I want to compete with Ally, but I don’t want to be head-to-head,” Akerson said in a recent interview. “I want to be there when they’re not in a market, but I want them to know I can come in at any time.
With the above statement, which was clearly inspired by the chorus from Billy Idol’s “Flesh For Fantasy”, the bullet-headed madman at General Motors’ rickety helm has launched a new offensive. “GM Financial”, formerly known as the subprime lender “AmeriCredit”, has just sold $500 million worth of bonds with one objective in mind: the occasionally lucrative, and just as occasionally disastrous, dealer floorplan market.
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