Opportunity doesn’t always knock; sometimes it breaks down the door with a crash. When my daily driver became the caboose in a rush hour conga line gone bad, I found myself in that placeless place where car reviewers go when the press fleet is permanently out to sea. To the chagrin of Saturnistas everywhere, I passed on the Ion proffered by the perky rental car desk jockey. At the appropriate moment, I gratefully grabbed the keys to a 2006 Mazda3 sedan. The four-door filly had been ridden hard and put up wet, bearing 16k miles. Another TTAC road test had officially begun.

I was making my way through my morning paper recently when my progress was interrupted by a paean to perfection by automotive journalist Matt Nauman. Normally, I don’t pay much attention to the local paper’s car reviews or features; thanks to wall-to-wall dealer ads, these syndicated features are about as independent-minded and critical as a stage mother watching her daughter perform Grease on a high school proscenium. Of course, pistonhead that I am, I still scan them. And Nauman’s work stopped me in my tracks. The subject of his unadulterated adulation, you see, was the Toyota Corolla.

I'm fresh back from a Mazda marketing boondoggle called “Zoom-Zoom Live." Ford's Japanese brand conducted these ride 'n drives in major markets across the US: DC, Boston, New York, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago. I attended the San Francisco event [actually on a decommissioned Naval air base in Alameda, but the SF skyline was visible]. These kind of "bring the consumers to the product and let 'em loose" deals are supposedly the wave of the future, "high-touch" marketingspeakwise. Unfortunately, car companies seem to have a very strange idea of what "let 'em loose" actually means. 

Why do we come here? Why do we visit this site weekly, daily, hourly, or every couple of minutes when we can spare the time? I began to consider this question in the wee hours this morning, not at all displeased to be trading valuable sleep time for an issue with absolutely no life relevance.