Thanks to all who entered the contest that asked “Does the American Muscle Car Have a Future?” Far be it for Justin and I to declare a winner of that debate, but we can submit the three top finalists’ arguments on the subject for your delectation. Frank Rogers has a very narrow definition of the genre, and he ain’t shy about sharing it: “Transmission wise, a proper stick or a traditional slushbox is all that’s needed at muscle beach…paddle shifters here would be akin to vein augmentation surgery. And sorry, Dodge Charger. Sedans have no place in musclecardom. Leave the four door bruisers in the hands of coppers.” Addressing the same issues, Don Gammil sees semantics as a clear and present danger to the muscle car’s future. “If the formula can’t keep changing (and changing more than [Motor Trend’s Angus] MacKenzie allows for), the term “muscle car” will either become universally misapplied or will die.” And Jared Petroske considers the muscle car as a uniquely American “hands-on” experience. “But what was so great about these muscle cars wasn’t their design or their power… but rather their simplicity. With an engine compartment roughly the size of my first apartment, we could literally climb inside the Impala and take apart its carburetor or adjust the throttle control, the air filter, or whatever part was rattling around this week.” Good points all, but there can only be one winner (of a subscription to Octane magazine). Cast your votes– I mean vote– now!

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The first time I met an American muscle car, my friend Ben was encouraging me to carve the donut in the Sears parking lot just a little tighter and give it just a little more gas. He wanted to hear the 1977 Chevy Malibu’s big block snarl like he knew it could when you pressed the pedal all the way to the floor boards.

Sounding every bit as superficial as the redneck poseur he portrayed, the expression on actor Warren Oates’ face as he uttered those words in the 1971 cult classic “Two-Lane Blacktop” spoke volumes about what a muscle car was and what it was built for.

Yes, you little nimrods! The American muscle car does have a future! Detroit simply needs to stick to a few basic principles. The first thing it mustn’t forget is that any muscle car worth building will have a V-8, expensive fuel or no. To any camel admirers ready to start preaching the gospel of turbonium and other unnatural elements, I’ll just say that no other amount of cylinders or configuration can match the distinctive presence of a V-8 – especially a good ol’ American one. Sound MATTERS. Nothing brings out the hairy chested, knuckle dragging Neanderthal in me faster than a carnivorous sounding V-8. If it’s cammed up, it’s all over. I’d be ready to run the Mille Miglia after a vasectomy.

We’ve resisted blogging the upmarket marques’ brand-extending marketing mishegos: Bentley safes and laptops, Ferrari Barbies, Bugatti thongs, Pagani pagodas, etc. But this one takes the Maserati-shaped confectionery: a Jaeger-LeCoultre Amvox2 DBS Transponder watch. “The $37,900 timepiece, the first mechanical watch that serves as a car key, goes on sale next year,” Bloomberg reveals. Christine Giotto, a spokeswoman for Le Sentier, Switzerland-based Jaeger-LeCoultre, said the watchmaker and the car manufacturer spent 18 months creating the timepiece, whose dial resembles an Aston Martin’s dashboard counters. “A DBS owner can unlock the car’s doors by pressing the watch’s face between the numerals 8 and 9 and lock them with a press between 3 and 4. The timepiece is made from materials including 18-carat gold and ruthenium.” So it doesn’t actually start the car… Is there such a thing as suckeronium?

We’ve asked this question before: what collateral can The Big 2.8 provide to secure their share of the $25b worth of federal low-interest loans offered by the Department of Energy? I mean, Uncle Sam IS going to ask for some sort of guarantee that your tax money won’t disappear down a rat hole, RIGHT? If so, what’s on the table? Ford has already mortgaged the company up to and including its logo. Aside from the Jeep brand, what’s Chrysler got that anyone wants? Minivan production for VW? As for GM, we now learn what The General had to sign over to draw-down the remaining $3.4b of its $4.5b credit facility with Citicorp and JPMorgan Chase. CFO.com reveals the list. “The collateral for the credit consists of North American accounts receivable and inventory of GM, Saturn Corp., and General Motors of Canada; plants, property, and equipment of General Motors of Canada; and 65 percent of the stock of the indirect subsidiary General Motors de Mexico.” Talk about a precedent… if GM continues mortgaging its foreign ops, a C11 will take down the whole schmeer.

Speaking at the Reuters 2008 Restructuring Summit, default expert Edward Altman dismissed the impact of $25b in low-interest federal retooling loans and pegged GM’s chances of avoiding C11 at 50 – 50. Or worse: 55 – 45. “A bankruptcy filing may be the best option for GM to protect its assets and further reduce costs, said Altman, professor of finance at New York University’s Leonard L. Stern School of Business. “If we have a global recession, you know autos are going to get hit and get hit hard, not just GM, and it’s looking more and more like a global recession.” To set the odds for GM’s ability to avoid C11, Altman used his “Z-Score.” The formula for predicting corporate bankruptcies pegs GM at “CCC-minus” or lower, one of the last rating categories above default. “Some [unnamed] studies have shown an accuracy rate of more than 80 percent for the Z-Score.” Which is obviously better than 50 – 50. Too bad the SEC says you can’t short GM (or Ford) until October 2. Anyway, GM responded with its usual iceberg, what iceberg? “We’ve been very clear that bankruptcy is not something that we’re considering,” spokeswoman Renee Rashid-Merem said.

While we await clarification on how the plug-in electric – gas Chevy Volt’s battery/generator/engine interface works, the stakes just got a lot higher. Automotive News [sub] reports that GM has asked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to classify the Volt as an electric vehicle. “Normally, a vehicle is run on an EPA test loop, consisting of both city and highway driving, to measure tailpipe pollutants and provide data for calculating fuel economy. But for electrics, which have no emissions, the government uses a Department of Energy mathematical formula to translate energy use into some equivalent of miles per gallon of gasoline.” And here’s the kicker: the EPA loop is longer than 40 miles. So how do you test a vehicle that– in theory– runs for 40 miles on battery power and then does, uh, something else with its gas engine? While they sort that out– good luck using politics to sway the EPA– the California Air Resources Board has given the Volt “preliminary certification” as an electric. While the prestigious Society of Automotive Engineers considers the Volt a hybrid (imagine that). If the EPA classifies the Volt an EV, GM would have an enormous marketing advantage over the market-leading (owning?) Toyota Prius, AND receive a HUGE boost to the automaker’s federally-mandated Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. [TTAC’s Michael Karesh has a proposal for a third EPA standard here.]

As we reported previously, the plug-in electric – gas Chevrolet Volt will not, as originally stated, recharge its batteries on the fly. Which raises all kinds of questions about exactly what it DOES do, how it does it, how much it will cost to do it and why they’re doing it the way they’re doing it. While GM didn’t step-up and spill the beans on this mission critical mechanical issue (they were “outed” by Edmunds), an eagle-eyed TTAC reader spotted a post-facto mea culpa at the bottom of a USA Today article on the company’s investment in Flint. “GM initially said the Volt would be able to run 40 miles on its lithium-ion batteries, with a small internal combustion engine recharging the batteries to extend the range hundreds of miles. A top executive said the same thing as recently as last week. But company spokesman Rob Peterson said Wednesday that engineers changed the design so the Volt engine will power a generator that would run the electric motor after the batteries are depleted. A small amount of power from the generator will recharge the batteries, but most will be used to directly run the car, he said. He said bypassing the batteries is more efficient, and GM did not intend to deceive people by maintaining that he motor would only be used to recharge the batteries. ‘At the end of the day, to the consumer, the vehicle will operate much the same way,’ he said.” [thanks to peteinson for the link]

And so ends another week in the autoblogosphere. Of course, the fact that I just wrote that virtually guarantees some gi-normous auto-related story is about to break. (Lest we forget, GM always dumps its worse news into the ether on a Friday afternoon, giving the Wall Street Money Men sufficient time to commit Domicide on a few million brain cells.) I apologize for not posting the three finalists’ entries for the Muscle Car writing contest last week. My best laid plans have gone awry, overtaken by the scale, scope, severity and speed of recent events. I’ll put the unedited rants up this weekend. Meanwhile, I appreciate our entrants’ patience. And your patronage. While I enjoyed writing for TTAC before we had readers or commentators, I get a huge kick out of editing our most excellent contributors’ material and reading the Best and Brightest’s take on all things automotive. The TTAC team’s fought hard to get where we are today. We will continue to maintain our standards of writing, integrity and vitriol during these strange ass days. We’ll will continue to do everything we can to deserve your valuable time, and invaluable trust.

“If the Lexus feels like it’s being pushed out of the way by a 130-kilogram NFL lineman on his way to get a fresh libation from a scantily clad Budweiser girl, the Nissan feels like said Budweiser girl is his girlfriend and he smacked you, full-force, upside the head with a telephone book because he thinks you’re hitting on her.” The writer here is not Dan Neil or Jeremy Clarkson. And in case you hadn’t figured it out already (and I know you had), the scribe is Canadian. While the rest of David Booth comparo in the National Post doesn’t ascend to greater heights than this excerpt, his summary’s rhetorical hammer hits the proverbial nail on the metaphorical head. “The IS-F is as sporty as Lexus can make it without sacrificing one iota of luxury; the GT-R is as luxurious as Nissan can engineer it without sacrificing even a bit of performance. The IS-F is a slightly softer competitor to BMW’s M3; the GT-R is a stiffer, more committed alternative to Porsche’s 911 Turbo.” Well, that makes it easy to choose. Porsche Turbo please.

“Are contracts between local governments and a private, for-profit entity inherently void as against public policy, where the contracts require the private entity to be principally responsible for vital law enforcement-related tasks, including generating, processing and defending in court the sole evidence of an alleged violator’s guilt, and the entity’s compensation is based on the number of criminal convictions obtained?” Is it true that “Such contingency agreements are condemned, particularly in the criminal law context, because even if they never result in actual harm, by their very nature they tend to invite corruption, and thus undermine the public’s faith in the fair and impartial administration of justice?”

As my five-year-old daughter’s learning, a joke’s just not as funny the second time ’round– especially if you tell it to the same people immediately after you told it to them the first time. But I guess Alex Nunez’ live-blogging of Knight Rider— lauded in these parts for its pithy candor– wasn’t supposed to be a joke. Why else would Autoblog promise to do it again? And again. And again. Until NBC’s axe falls mercifully upon the Hoff’s legacy. Page views? While AB doesn’t have a view counter, I’m guessing that the most vanilla of auto blogs appeals to an enormous coterie of Knight Rider fans. And that’s a deeply scary thought. Anyway, AB shares the viewing data for the new Knight Rider, episode one. “Robert Seldman who writes for tvbythenumbers.com tells us that the 18-34 year old demographic was even more interested in watching America’s Next Top Model than Michael Knight, and that includes both males and females.” Does that mean car porn is not as appealing as soft porn to single people? Did I just ask that question?

As GM’s “captive finance unit,” as a division in which GM still holds 49 percent, GMAC’s arterial spray of red ink is causing all kinds of “challenges” for The General. For one thing, GMAC has been forced (by its own profligate ways) to raise floorplan costs to beleaguered dealers, driving a large number of said stores to the wall. And that’s just the good news. The bad news for the lender– whose ResCap mortgage unit wrote enough bad paper to Christo Rhode Island– is very bad indeed. “While Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke try to sell the [$700b bailout] package to Congress, Detroit-based GMAC is burning through cash and its bonds have fallen to a record low,” Bloomberg reports. “The biggest drain is GMAC’s Residential Capital LLC home-lending unit, which lost $1.9 billion in the second quarter — 2-1/2 times more than the auto loan unit.” The situation’s so bad, Mortgage Banking Solutions’ David Lykken’s almost been reduced to swearing. “Internally, everyone’s got to be hoping like heck they make it into the bailout program. That is probably the only option they have at this point.” Meanwhile, GMAC is more or less out of the leasing game, and GM can’t depend on them to offer zero percent financing to anyone with a pulse anymore. Hoisted. Petard. Own.

Yes, yes. The Evora isn’t for sale yet. But if Forbes could award the Lotus-based Tesla Roadster its 2006 “New car that best lived up to the Hype” award before a single lithium-ion-powered sports car was in production (they are in production, right?), well why not give the prospective Lotus Evora a gong for its aluminum construction?  [NB: we were going to go to the International World Trade Fair ‘Aluminium 2008’ at Messe Essen in Germany, but just couldn’t get the hang of saying “Al Lou Minny-Um.”] And if I read this press release correctly, the Evora deserves the shiny statuette– at least in theory. “The Lotus Evora employs a composite roof as a stressed structural member to give an exceptional vehicle stiffness of 26,000 Nm per degree, thanks in part to the seatbelt anchorage frame’s secondary function as a roll over structure, and partly because the high-tech composite body panels are stressed items… To deliver this high performance structure, bonded and riveted high grade aluminium extrusions and simple, elegant folded sheet elements are used in the lower structure, which complements the stressed composite roof upper structure. Attached to the high strength central tub are sacrificial energy absorbing subframes of extruded aluminium at the front and lightweight welded steel at the rear.” And that’s how you add lightness. I think.