Porsche answered the prayers of its long-suffering enthusiast base today by introducing a low-cost, low-content, no-frills Cayman to finally bring value and performance to its model line.
Ha! Made you look! Just kidding!
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Posts By: Jack Baruth
You could look at the accident one of two ways. The first way to look at it was that the backhoe was at fault. It backed out halfway across the northbound exit ramp to Bethel Road from Ohio SR-315, forcing my brother to take too rapid of an avoidance maneuver, spin his pristine Porsche 944, […]
Regular readers of automotive luminary Mike Spinelli’s Twitter account were informed yesterday that his employer, 0-60 Magazine, is ceasing publication. Is this the canary in the print-rag coal mine?
Just when you thought that Ford was winning the compact-sedan mileage war, the Cruze ECO 1.4L Turbo manual-transmission model has claimed a 42/28 rating for highway and city mileage. How’d they do it?
More news this morning about the best Mustang yet: Ford’s going to give owners a chance to “computer tune” their own cars, and some training to try to keep them out of the local Armco.
Why did we have an eleven-year-old, scratch-and-dent, no-maintenance-records, twelve-cylinder Jaguar on our lot? Blame our naive sales manager, who always paid top dollar for trades. In his haste to revolutionize the way people bought and sold luxury cars in Dublin, Ohio, “Steve” tended to ignore the established car-sales playbook. At the time, I thought he […]
Seventy-four dollars and eighty-four cents for seventy-two hours and unlimited mileage. I paid the man, took the escalator, and walked to the “Mid-Size” sign. Choose any car, they’d told me, and I had nine sad, deeply tired choices before me. Dirty and dented, scattered across the concrete tier. Welcome to Dollar Rent-A-Car.
NPR reports that
Tyson developed a diesel fuel made from chicken fat and food grease. It’s opening a plant Monday in Louisiana that can turn out 75 million gallons of the fatty fuel a year.
At the same time, they’re calling the federal government’s subsidies on ethanol… well, chicken.
As TTAC readers know, the city of Houston kicked its red-light cameras to the curb in Tuesday’s election. Another city, Baytown, voted in a clever ordinance that requires the physical presence of a police officer at any intersection where red-light ticketing is taking place. The voters have spoken… but the municipalities in question may not listen. At least not yet.
My local Porsche dealer, Midwestern Auto Group, doesn’t bother to offer an oil-change special. Why should they? We all line up to pay $249 or more to have it done, since only a fool would give Porsche Cars North America a chance to deny warranty coverage. The 15,000-mile service on my Boxster S was $789, and from what I hear, that’s a reasonable price. The 60,000-mile service on my 993 was $2420, but since the old airboxer is out of warranty I had it done at an independent shop and saved a grand.
This newest special, pictured above, has me concerned, because it implies that someone is a bit fuzzy on how these German wundercars actually work. Does brake fluid really have anything to do with the engine? It could be a system like the one found in the Citroen SM. If the headlamps in your SM stop auto-leveling on your way down the road, it’s the first and last warning you might get that you’re about to involuntarily lower your ride height from now until the moment you end up in the Armco.
My friend, driving instructor, and fellow racer Brian Makse occasionally plays at being a Canadian auto journalist. Being a Canadian autojourno is very possibly the bestest job available, because even the third-tier guys get free cars and first-class flights to Europe. Right now Brian has a new Jaguar XJR in his garage. Unlike Mr. Makse, I owned a Jaguar when the company was British-owned and fiercely independent, not merely a pawn in various Asian financial shell games.
In an effort to write a better article than Makse’s upcoming Jag XKR review, I’ve decided to talk about a car that is so much cooler than the TataJag that a double shot of vodka placed on its bonnet would immediately freeze. I’m referring to a British automobile of such impeccable pedigree that even Bristol owners nod in its general direction with grudging respect. Ladies and gentlemen… the Lynx Eventer.
Last week, I reported on my decision to use E85 fuel in my 2009 Town Car for a week or so. How’d it go? Well, as it so happened, I accidentally veered off the road while texting and killed a
After this week’s article on Sergei Rachmaninoff and his connection to the world of automobiles, I thought it might make sense to look around to find other interesting music/auto combos. I ended up constructing a mental two-axis graph in my head, where X was musical ability and Y is driving talent. Some people, like Damon Hill, are close to the left side of X and pretty far up on Y; others, like noted collector and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, are the reverse. I think of myself as being more than halfway up Y but less than halfway along X; you can decide for yourself where the autojourno group Exhaust Tones would place.
Since this is a car blog and not MOJO magazine, however, we’ll focus on the best driver we can find with musical cred, and that is… Force India stalwart Adrian Sutil.
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The enthusiasm of Sikorsky’s men, who had worked for weeks without pay, was at its lowest, and the workforce dropped to a mere handful. The few dollars that could be raised by selling stock in the company were spent mostly on food… After about a half-hour visit, Rachmaninoff said, ‘I believe in you and your plane and I want to help you.’ ” The composer sat down and wrote a check for $5,000 (approximately $100,000 today). With a smile, he gave the check to the stunned Sikorsky and said, “Pay me back whenever you can.”
That’s the famous story of how composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff became a Sikorsky vice-president, as told in the Sikorsky Archives. Although he was widely considered to be a rather dour and bloodless man, even by his contemporaries, Rachmaninoff was passionate about fast machinery. In fact, one of his signature pieces was composed for a very familiar reason: he wanted to buy a car.
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s piece on police “training” and ability, the always-amusing Ray LaHood has chimed in on the subject.
His position: The use of cell phones and other mobile devices should be absolutely banned for American drivers, on the federal level if necessary, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Unless, of course, you’re a supercitizen, I mean, police officer.
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