How lazy are automotive journalists? Well, it appears that some of them just can’t resist putting their feet up. More details and a close-up after the jump.
Find Reviews by Make:
Posts By: Jack Baruth
The Honda Element sold 67,478 units in 2003, its debut year. Not a bad start for a car that had many of the elements, pun intended, of the “old Honda”: it was fun, iconoclastic, and extremely well-designed for some very specific tasks. When the CR-V moved into a third generation, there was no Element to match it, and when that happens at Honda, it’s usually a sign of SIDS (Special Interest Death Syndrome), a disease which affects non-boring automobiles produced by Japanese manufacturers.
SIDS struck the NSX, the S2000, and the Accord Hybrid. Now it’s claimed another victim.
Pick the name that doesn’t belong: Ken Block, Tanner Foust, Paul Walker.
Figured it out yet? It’s obviously Paul Walker, who will be entering in a real race tomorrow when he steps into one of Team MER’s Playboy MX-5 Cup cars for the 25 Hours of Thunderhill.
Paul is now officially a real racer; the other two are still pay-driving wannabes indulging in timed activities. Your humble author wanted to join Team MER for the weekend but couldn’t come up with the required scratch. Don’t look for Paul to be double-clutching like he should at this race, by the way; it’s all granny-shifting for a 25-hour race.
So check it out. I tried every approach to living, I tried it all. I haven’t tried every thing, but I’ve tried every approach. Sometimes you don’t have to try everything to get the approach the same. But… — John Mayer, rambling in a throughly demented fashion at a concert
Honda has tried every approach to selling hybrids. There was minimalist sportiness (first-gen Insight), complete anonymity (Civic Hybrid), max-power range-topping (Accord V6 Hybrid) and lolz-at-you-when-you-thought-you-were-getting-a-CRX-successor (CR-Z). For 2011, Honda is trying the final approach: save up to $611 over the course of your ownership with hybrid technology!
4:45am and I’m rolling down a chilly Ohio freeway, cruise control set to seventy-four, Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion saturating the interior with quasi-mechanical music. Up ahead is a GMC Envoy, doing perhaps sixty-eight. I pass him and return to the right lane. He speeds up. I’ve seen this movie before. Yup… settled right into my blind spot and matching my speed exactly.
I poke at the Town Car’s steering wheel and drop to seventy-one. He stays right in my blind spot. I poke at the wheel again and accelerate to seventy-seven. After perhaps a two-second delay, he’s right there with me again, invisible but for the glare in my mirror.
“F*** it,” I said, and started swerving wildly.
“Hurry up,” the woman at the counter said, “because when you get back they are waiting to take it to the auction.” The odometer read just over forty-nine thousand, eight hundred miles. It would have been temptingly romantic to think of this as a last ride on a trusty horse before it went to the knacker’s, but let’s get real: forty-nine K on an Accord is just getting started. As John Mayer once sang, it might be a quarter-life crisis. Let’s get rolling.
If you are active in the auto media, design community, or Ohio’s “foodie” clique, you may know Carl Acampado, the famous Rogue Baker. He’s well-known for his boutique cookies, but he’s also a very competent chef — enough so that I asked him to cater my Wednesday night holiday party.
After preparing a variety of dishes including a splendid steak for yours truly, Carl fired up his mint-condition 1984 Audi Coupe GT to run some cookies to another client. He never came back; if you look at the photo above, you can guess why.
The good news is that he stepped out of the car without a single scratch. To find out how, click the jump.
Lost in Ed’s announcement about the revised TTAC was the issue of just how much cold cash we’re all making here at America’s finest automotive blog. Well, I don’t know about the so-called “contributors” who make up the rest of the roster, but speaking personally I don’t mind disclosing that in 2011, I’m scheduled to receive at least one hundred and fifty thousand
You’re shopping for a new Acura TSX, and you’re the kind of young go-getter who demands to shift it yourself. Naturally you’ll want to check it out online… but something’s wrong here…
Behold: the thirty-seven-thousand-dollar minivan. Just to put that in perspective, I’m going to list some of the other whips you could roll (yo) for that kind of money: Infiniti G37. Audi A4. BMW 328i. Those are “entry-luxury” automobiles, and they cost “entry-luxury” money. You could buy two basic Japanese sedans for this kind of scratch. […]
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” The fellow from the Jim Russell School at Infineon couldn’t hear me screaming through my helmet and the rolled-up windows of my blue-and-white Challenger “392”, but surely he saw me gesturing. Let me out first! In the last ten-minute session, I lapped all the other journalists at least once and some of them twice! […]
“…hopefully, than to arrive.” Or so the saying goes. This past weekend, however, I found myself with too much travel, too much work, and too little time. The question I had to answer: Fly, drive, or… something else?
“I think it will be done… I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones. We need to do a lot more if were going to save lives.”
To paraphrase Leslie Ann Phillips on her fabulous Martinis and Bikinis album, however, Ray says “save” when he means “control”.
We’re coming to the end of KOREA! WEEK! and we still haven’t answered the question: When did Hyundai start becoming a serious player in this market? When did the image change from Deadly Sin to default-choice affordable car? One can go back as far as the second-generation Excel, which cracked the reliability equation while still being rust-prone as all get out. Alternately, perhaps it wasn’t until the arrival of the current Sonata that the brand became worthy of being chosen by the frozen Middle American masses.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, and I’d suggest that the car you see above was the true turning point. The first-generation Elantra (Lantra to the Cammy Corrigan crowd) was pleasant enough, but it didn’t even pretend to compete with Civics and Corollas. Hyundai was assumed to know its place, and that place was among the credit criminals, desperately poor, and the hopelessly stupid. Ten years ago, however, the Elantra woke up and decided that nobody was going to put it in a corner.
(Read More…)
Recent Comments