The navicular, or scaphoid, bone, is a little bone in your wrist. About fifteen years ago, I broke both of mine during practice for a BMX National. Since my father was flying in to see me race that day, and since I didn’t want him to travel a long way for nothing, I wrapped duct tape around both my wrists and went out for the first heat anyway. When I landed the first jump, a modest fifteen-foot gap with a steep face to the landing, I nearly vomited from the intensity of the pain. Needless to say, things went downhill from there and as a result I’ve had trouble with my wrists ever since.

In the song “Twilight Zone”, Golden Earring sang, “You will come to know / when the bullet hits the bone.” I have come to know when I’m about to re-break one or both of my wrists. As I went flying through the air at fifty kilometers per hour, a tumbling snowmobile behind me and a hard sheet of ice ahead, I knew what was about to happen…

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One hundred miles per hour. The once-fabled “ton” which my 1990 Volkswagen Fox struggled to indicate on its outrageously optimistic speedometer is now a commonplace, ho-hum event. Many modern cars will get there in ten or eleven seconds. Even heavy-duty pickups have no trouble pushing their Maximum Overdrive front fascias into the triple digits nowadays […]

“Am I the only one,” one of my Twitter friends-I’ve-never-really-met wrote, “who looks at Gadaffi and sees Renee Zellweger in ten years?” I used to get Renee Zellweger and Joey Lauren Adams confused, at least until “Mallrats” when it was revealed that Ms. Adams was closer to Twiggy than Sophia Loren. Ms. Zellweger, on the other hand, had that fabulous scene in “Bridget Jones’ Diary” where she was “deliberately chunky”, possibly a size 8 instead of a 4.

Where was I? Oh yes. Ford’s announced that the EPA will certify the Focus SFE PowerShift at 40 highway MPG. That means that if you are looking for an automatic-transmission car in this segment capable of hitting the magic mark, you now have two choices: this, and Hyundai’s Elantra.

If you’re a brontosaurus, and you’re reading this, then your hindbrain is just now finding out about mommyblogger Crissy Kight Page and her refusal to spread (the good news about Toyota) for ten bucks. Well, there’s more news about Toyota out there now, and rather than wait for poor Tiffany Lewis of the recently deceased “Mommy Networks” to get the word out, I’m going to put my own money into this new publicity effort.

Mommybloggers, read on to find out how you can earn a $20 Amazon gift card, courtesy of yours truly,this very afternoon!

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Ford’s Jim Farley is well-known among autojournos for off-the-cuff remarks, but as he stands in a Laguna Seca garage, facing approximately twenty members of the Press As A Whole, he manages to deliver a real bunker-buster, one which speaks directly to this humble writer’s heart. “This car… it isn’t meant to be stored in a […]

Thanks to embargo issues and a mild amount of player-hating among my so-called peers in the auto media, I cannot disclose my current location. I can, however, note that I had to fly there. I’ve come to utterly detest air travel in the modern age. As a child, I bounced around L-1011s and 747s, indulged by my parents and pinned with Eastern “junior pilot” wings by fresh-smelling, gorgeous young women, often flying alone among urbane, well-dressed fellow passengers, and being greeted by relatives right at the gate.

Today, of course, the story is very different. Modern commercial flight combines two of my least favorite experiences from the 1990’s: being processed into a municipal jail and riding an old Greyhound bus. In fact, air travel nowadays is exactly like prison processing followed by bus travel, with one critical exception: if somebody takes a picture of your, ahem, rooster in the county jail, you are about to be on the payoff end of a lucrative civil case. In the past year I’ve had my genitalia photographed so often I’m starting to wonder where my residual checks might be.

You get the point. Consider the baggage issues, the utter lack of personal hygiene displayed even by business-class passengers, and the fact that one must arrive 90 minutes before the flight to have a fighting chance of making it on board, and it’s no surprise that more and more people are telling me that they’d rather drive.

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They say blogging doesn’t pay, but in this case, it pays. When the incomparable Bertel Schmitt wrote his Toyota exoneration story, none of us knew that he was just one quick sex-change operation away from scoring a $10 Amazon gift card. It’s true. A marketing organization with no connection to Toyota (chuckle) has decided to comp “mommybloggers” free gift cards for getting the word out about Toyota’s exoneration.

Details, and a photo of the mommyblogger who blew the whistle on the whole sordid operation, after the jump.

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Let’s face it: the Lincoln Town Car is the best car in the world, and that’s why at least two TTAC staffers are Panther owners. Unfortunately for Ford, however, production of new Town Cars is completely dependent on a rare earth. Well, it’s actually dependent upon Rare Earth, the band, which generates a mineral known as “awesomtonium” every time they play “I Just Wanna Celebrate” in public. A dearth of recent appearances by the band, the members of which are now all over one hundred and ten years old, means that Ford has been forced to schedule the end of Town Car production for this fall.

What can Lincoln do in a circumstance like that? The honorable thing to do would be for every employee of the brand to publicly apologize to America right before committing ritual suicide. I’m told, however, that an internal vote regarding that topic ended up strongly on the side of “seeing our children again”. In that case, the only thing left to do is to make a new Town Car, lest the Manhattanite Masters of the Universe be forced to ride the subway.

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His mother was the first of them, leadfooting her big Buick coupe across intersections with a big-block push that pressed him into the velour and blurred the terrain around him. He tossed around in the flat seat, clinging to the sky-blue safety belt. “I was a rally driver,” she would say. Later, he would find out that she’d been a rally navigator, not a driver, and that the rally-driving boyfriend was long dead. It seemed reasonable that she might have inherited the boyfriend’s skill. Women, he realized, absorb us, becoming who we are or wish them to be, viewed through a glass darkly, or through his rearview mirror, leaving home for the last time.

She took his crutches and put them in the back of a new Corvette-engined ’88 Camaro. “So glad to see you out of the hospital. I wanted to do something nice for you… take you for a ride… we’re going to do, like, a hundred miles per hour in this IROC.” She drove with the carelessness of Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker, looking away from the road while she swerved down the freeway and reaching over to touch him through his thin shorts.

“This IROC-Z… it’s… awesome,” he managed to say, “did you just buy it?”

“Oh,” she replied, “it belongs to a… friend, I guess you could say.”

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Quoth the release:

The official Porsche Facebook fan page reached a social media landmark, when it welcomed its one-millionth fan recently. Especially for its one million devotees Porsche invited them to sign-up via Facebook to have their name inscribed on a special Porsche model. More than 27.000 Fans decided to have their signature on a real Porsche. This vehicle, the 911 GT3 R Hybrid, will be displayed as part of a unique exhibit at the Porsche Museum in February 2011. Enjoy a special Porsche model with a personal touch.

For a look at the car, and for a special photo-illustration of what a Panamera signed by all its “fans” might look like, click the jump.

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Good news! The 2012 Acura TL has had a beak-ectomy. I was so personally affected by the super-Accord’s gorgeous front end that I spent a full hour talking about it to the, ahem, auto-show professional assigned to said entry-luxury sedan. She was quite knowledgeable, and when she wore her heels we happened to be exactly the same height.

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Imagine, for a moment, you are a plant. Well, not just any plant. You are Robert Plant, and everywhere you go, people want you to sing “Stairway to Heaven”. I’d rather not, you tell them. Never liked that one much, to be honest. We’ve a much better song that I’d much rather sing. Called ‘Kashmir’, […]

General Motors may have sold its heritage, but Ford has a better idea: sell copies of archived photos, keep the originals, and profit.

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O Brave New World, that has such automobiles in it! Welcome to the twenty-seven-thousand-dollar, mainstream-brand, non-specialty-model compact car. Open the door. All but the most perversely sybaritic will find their list of requirements fulfilled. A direct-injection engine teams with a twin-clutch transmission to deliver up to forty miles per gallon. We grip a steering wheel […]

Our not-quite-colleagues at AutoWeek are between a rock and a hard place nowadays. Back in the dinosaur days of the biz, subscribing to AW made sense. The writing was usually auto-weak, and there wasn’t much insight to be found in the reviews, but it was far more timely than the rest of the color rags. If you wanted up-to-date news on the auto shows, the press-preview events, and European rallies, there was only one magazine with the goods.

Needless to say, the Mandel clan’s rather cozy little empire ran into an Outside Context Problem when the World Wide Web arrived on their shores, chock-full of Jalopniks, Autoblogs, and TTACs. I can’t think of any reason to subscribe to AutoWeek, and judging by the increasing desperation with which they are soliciting me as a subscriber, neither can anyone else.

How, then, can Dutch and company keep the lights on at AW headquarters? I dunno… how about renting press cars?

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