The recipe for the original Ford Mustang was simple enough: a low price car with a trim, athletic body wearing the same sort of sexy, svelte sheetmetal of a contemporaneous European sports coupe. If you park a ’07 Ford Mustang GT next to its 1960’s counterpart, it’s clear that Ford missed the point by over two hundred pounds. But don't think of this retro-mobile as just another FoMoCo bloated barge; it's slim by Gran Torino standards. Think of the Mustang GT as a portly pastiche of pony cars past, present and yes, future.

I’ve had a thing for the BMW 6-Series ever since “Spenser: for Hire” shared airtime with Mötley Crüe. While Robert Urich had a cool Mustang, Avery Brooks had a vehicle worthy of his icy-cold demeanor: a white BMW 635CSi. Could there ever be a better vehicle in which a man could do the right thing by any means necessary? There is now. The BMW M6 has tons of M-tuned street cred and many of the right moves. Many, but not all.

There’s a torque steer conspiracy afoot. Apparently, several mainstream manufacturers have decided to boost their front wheel-drive models’ fuel efficiency by throwing their drivers at solid objects each and every time they dare to accelerate with authority. Thankfully, not all carmakers have joined the secret scheme; many wrong wheel-drivers maintain manageable directional stability under maximum thrust. Of course, these vehicles aren’t powered by a 5.3-liter can of whoop ass, like Chevrolet's latest Impala SS. If ever there was a front wheel-drive car that discourages hoonery, this is it. 

Left Coast do-gooders? Take a hike. East Coast intellectuals? On your bike. The Chevy Silverado doesn’t give a damn about you and your fancy gas electric cars. GM’s new[ish] pickup is a rolling tribute to the working class people who form the backbone of our country– as defined by the musical stylings of John Cougar Mellencamp. More to the point, a good old Harvard boy named Rick Wagoner says his company’s turnaround depends on the Silverado. So are its flat-bedded shoulders strong enough to support the world’s America’s largest automaker? 

Buzzwords like “breakthrough”, “paradigm” and “integration” are management Viagra. They give ignorant execs and clueless PR folk the power to appear talented. But no word sets the flack-talker’s soul afire like “synergy.” And no other word was deployed more often to justify the merger of Daimler-Benz with Chrysler. But what happens when you synergize top-dollar Mercedes underpinnings with Chrysler engineering and sell it for the price of a Camry? I’ll give you 300 guesses.

Last year’s Zephyr was the automotive embodiment of all that’s wrong with Ford and Lincoln. The barely badge engineered Ford Fusion hammered yet another cheaply gilded nail into the once mighty Lincoln brand’s coffin. So now Ford has given the Zephyr a new name, engine and front end; an MP3 audio jack and [available] all wheel-drive. Is it enough to lift the Lincoln into some semblance of dignity, or does Lincoln still need to reach higher?

What became of the ninth-generation Lincoln Mark series? Somewhere in the Lincoln brand's twisted nomenclature there is a missing link: a connection between the rip-snorting Mark VIII and Lincoln’s cute-ute Mark X. I mean MKX. While no one at Lincoln's brand-awareness roadshow bought this Houstonian's sly attempt to realign the disjointed Mark series, they still handed me a set of keys to their latest crossover vehicle and told me to go play. Well fair enough.

As part of the evaluative process, I cracked open the ES350's owner’s manual. Check it: there’s a "Lemon Law Guide" to help customers find legal recourse should their Lexus fail to, well, anything. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be a particularly useful part of the program. After all, under its swanky skin, the Lexus ES350 is little more than a reliable, durable and, let’s face it, forgettable Toyota Camry. Does that make the ES350 an example of the kind of badge-engineering that this site regularly condemns as lazy, cynical and brand corrosive? No, no and yes.

Remember the dorky kid who aced college, landed a great job, maybe even got married, but still never got a firm grasp on how to enjoy life’s rich tapestry? That’s the Lexus GS450h. For all its hybrid gee-whiz engineering, swanky trimmings and performance credentials, the Lexus GS450h is only really a great idea on paper. […]

Ford’s in trouble. Headlines talks of cuts, cuts and more cuts; and new product that might bring the automaker back from the brink. Meanwhile, mad props are in order for the party responsible for not killing the venerable Lincoln Town Car. This website has long argued that Ford’s failing car business isn’t about new product. It’s about neglecting existing product. Whether or not a resurrected Town Car aids an ailing FoMoCo is an open question, but refraining from reinventing the wheel at every regime change is the short answer.

Albert Einstein posited that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. The Mercedes Benz CL65 AMG provides a new definition: energy equals horsepower at the speed of light for squares. Relativity speaking, the big Merc’s top end is significantly less than the cosmic speed limit of 670,616,629.384 mph. Subjectively, that number feels about right. In fact, the CL 65 is Die Grosse Bang on wheels, an automotive event that warps the time space continuum to the point where I swear I wrote this review tomorrow.

Saturn was born “A different kind of company, a different kind of car.” Talk about post-modern irony; GM created the Saturn division to copy Japan’s products, management techniques and manufacturing dexterity. Needless to say, it worked. Friendly Saturn dealers created devoted customers with a “no dicker” sticker and a pretty good range of plastic-paneled cars (the S-Series). And then… nothing much. After leaving Saturn to twist in the wind, losing billions in the process, GM eventually spiked the brand’s independence. And now, finally, the Saturn Aura is here to revive GM’s "import fighter."

In his own ew-inducing sort of way, Oedipus defined the Tragic Hero. His story teaches us that character is fate; the arrogant King can no more escape his destiny than a bad guy on a cop show. And so it is with the Ford Taurus, a vehicle named for either the constellation of the same name (minus the Ford) or the Zodiac sign ascribed to it. According to pseudo- science, Taureans are practical, reliable, patient, affectionate, competent, ambitious, determined, lazy, jealous, inflexible, greedy and stubborn. And some people wonder why the model took twenty years to die an ignominious death…

Somewhere between the proud homeowner and carefree apartment dweller lives the best of both lifestyles. Who wants to throw money away on a rented apartment or deal with the hassles of home ownership? Enter the townhouse: smaller bills and fewer hassles than a full-size home with more usability than a mere apartment. Just like a townhouse, the mid-size pickup combines attributes of rigs both big and small. And ever since its inception, the Toyota Tacoma has been living large in the mid-size pickup penthouse.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a less-than-flattering Buick Lucerne review would score me a road test reprise on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Thanks to an internet-savvy Buick flackmeister determined to show me the light, the deal went down. Of course, RF pointed out that a junket courtesy of a diss-missed manufacturer was not without its dangers: brow-beating, brainwashing, alcohol poisoning and/or failed brakes. So I brought my Mom.