There are many great reasons to be happy to be a Baby Boomer. We may be getting old but we misspent our youth in some great decades. We had the iconic cars and lots of drive-ins for a custom fit with an increasingly relaxed moral code. We only had AM radio, but it played some of the best music ever heard in a car. But mostly we (or at least I) had Tom McCahill.

Tom McCahill was a god to me; the guy who made me glad that I’d learned how to read. Tom appeared in my home every month as a feature writer and test pilot for Mechanix Illustrated. He drove every car like he just stole Don Corleone’s personal ride. Very little was off limits to Uncle Tom. He put test cars through a hellacious torture sessions, proving the engineering mettle of over 600 vehicles, over the course of several decades. And he lived to talk about it.

A lot of his test vehicles were only a few decades removed from Model T technology. A Tom McCahill hell-drive put these dinosaurs at the very edge of extinction. Or, in some Uncle Tom tests, over the abyss.

One of the funnier McCahill tests involved a 1966 Dodge Coronet 426 Hemi convertible. Uncle Tom coaxed the beast to 144 mph on an oval track. He pinned the car despite a promise to keep his foot out of the test. At the “pedal meets floorboard” pinnacle of his test flight, the Dodge’s fabric roof looked like a pup tent during prime time Katrina. McCahill’s only regret: the roof kept him from achieving even more insane speeds. The man had brass and balls in no particular order.

McCahill’s prose sparkled. In fact, he never met a metaphor or simile he didn’t like. The AC Cobra was “hairier than a Borneo gorilla in a raccoon suit.” The 1957 Pontiac’s ride quality was as “smooth as a prom queen’s thighs.” The ’59 Chrysler Imperial was “as loaded as an opium peddler during a tong war.” The ’57 Buicks handled “like a fat matron trying to get out of a slippery bathtub.” His writing style made him famous, but testing cars made him a decent living, and McCahill liked to live large.

One of my favorite McCahillisms: “idiot lights.” He used the term for Detroit’s cheap-ass replacement for gauges to show high water temperature and low oil pressure. A lot of them had plenty of both problems, and idiot lights usually came on shortly before the patient died.

The zero to sixty sprint was the most famous Tom McCahill automobile test feature. Some of the dogs he tested (not including his beloved Labrador) required an hourglass. We still measure performance by the McCahill meter.

Tom wrote during an era of big cars which became even bigger cars. I always liked his measurements for roominess, which included sticking his large hunting dogs or his trusty photographer in the trunk for a photo shoot.

His November 1959 MI preview of the 1960 cars illustrated his belief in the big boys, despite the birth of Big Three compacts in that model year. Uncle Tom felt that “America is basically a big car country with big car needs.” His personal favorites included a series of late 50s and early 60s Chrysler Imperials which presumably provided a few acres of room for Uncle Tom and the mutts.

Uncle Tom had an obvious affinity for Mopar, particularly in the torsion bar period, where Chrysler’s legendary letter cars moved muscle and mass with surprising agility for the era.

As a journalist, McCahill was a force to be reckoned with. After testing the first post-war Oldsmobile (the 1948 Futuramic 98), Uncle Tom said that hitting the gas pedal “was like stepping on a wet sponge.” Olds dealers were livid. History has it that McCahill’s review “inspired” Olds to fit the 88 with the legendary Rocket V-8 .

Eventually every Mechanix Illustrated came equipped with an added feature called “Mail for McCahill.” It was an information Q and A hosted by the always quotable Uncle Tom. Every now and then some bozo would poke the lion with a sharp stick with a cheap shot. The net result was always the same: Tom would take the guy apart, immortalizing his antagonist as another idiot run over by a fast moving McCahill one-liner.

As a car guy, Tom McCahill will always be my favorite non-related Uncle Tom. Detroit didn’t really love the guy, but they had to listen to him when he complained about handling and performance issues. Why? Because the man preached from a very big pulpit in car world. And we loved the sermons.

[Note: TTAC is now the only car site with both father and son writers (Paul and Edward Niedermeyer) and identical twin writers (Jim and Jerry Sutherland). For more of the latter’s work please visit mystarcollectorcar.com.]

The mainstream media tends to fumble the metaphorical football on the symbolic goal line. With fewer than twenty-four hours left before General Motors files for Chapter 11, the MSM is set to go back, Jack, and do it again. Instead of excoriating GM’s management for not taking in more money than they spent, they’re parsing the American automaker’s bankruptcy as a “sign of the times.” Leading this electronic charge of the heat without light brigade: P. J. O’Rourke. Writing for the Wall Street Journal, O’Rourke paints GM’s dissolution as confirmation that America’s love affair with the automobile is, finally, dead. Rubbish.

Quick digression: Yesterday, I was looking for something to healthy to eat at Six Flags New England. As you might imagine, I’d have had better luck trying to win an enormous Tweety Bird by tossing small plastic rings at the necks of custom-made, ring-aversive milk jugs. As I consumed a greasy hot dog on a butter infused bun, I thought, well, that’s the way it is.

If these teeming throngs wanted a healthy salad or a chilled fruit cup, Six Flags would sell them. The vast majority of their coaster-lovin’ customers want fried foods and sugary drinks. Six Flags has a business to run. So they give their customers what they want. Tough luck for me. The same inescapable economic logic applies to the manufacturers of P. J. O’Rourke’s diss-missed automotive “appliances.”

Contrary to the prosaic pistonhead’s rant, no one forced Americans out of their charismatic, high horsepower barges into boring and bland vehicles. Truth be told, the average consumer wanted personal transportation that they didn’t have to think about it. The automakers who best provided these vehicles thrived. The ones who could not do so, both consistently and profitably, did not.

It’s one of those ipso facto deals. If American car buyers didn’t place reliability above all, they’d still be driving union-built be-finned rust buckets that required constant mechanical attention. The fact that Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai are solvent, while GM is not, is a simple reflection of the transplanted automakers’ ability to give the people what they want.

Never mind the bailout or O’Rourke’s pining for more “adventurous” times. The free market has spoken. GM must die.

Was this desire for aesthetically neutral four-wheeled appliances nurture (roadside stranding, lousy dealer service, inconvenience and expense) or nature (if I wanted to be a mechanic I’d be one)?

O’Rourke blames suburban ennui (i.e., car as cupholder) and “busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk.” He bemoans the end of the legacy of the swaggering, charisma-loving “romantic fools” who created America’s automotive giants. Yes, well, it was these self-same car guys that condemned GM to its ultimate fate as a tax-sucking zombie.

Former GM CFO and ex-CEO Rick Wagoner is [rightly] blamed for pissing away billions on ill-advised acquisitions. He merits condemnation for refusing to man-up and declare bankruptcy when the company could have done so under its own steam. And he deserves his place in infamy for handing the keys to the executive washroom to the federal government. Still, ultimately, the beancounters didn’t kill GM. The car guys did.

The car guys failed to commit the company to designing and building the small range of bland, reliable, competitive, cost-effective automotive products it needed to survive. They were drunk on pickups. High (and mighty) on SUVs. When it came to more pedestrian metal, GM’s senior (i.e., divisional) car guys threw whatever they had against the wall to see what would stick. Not much did, and they didn’t care.

Don’t tell me that Wagoner and his predecessors tied the car guys’ hands behind their backs, forcing them to accept badge-engineered mediocrity. They were happy enough to go along for the ride. And why not? They were hugely compensated cogs in a corporate culture where failure was impossible, gorging on unimaginable riches simply for keeping the status quo. Speaking of which . . .

It should never be forgotten that Car Czar Bob Lutz squandered GM’s last remaining chance at a genuine, product-led turnaround. Lutz doubled-down on a half-assed redesign of GM’s trucks, imported sales stinkers and commissioned poorly-developed niche-mobiles without a hope in hell of mass success. Lutz’ highly-touted Chevrolet Malibu was a singular vehicle; it was also too little too late.

Here’s the funny, horrible thing: you can hear echoes of Bob Lutz in O’Rourke’s paradise lost essay. Like Lutz, O’Rourke believes that American car culture is practically dead. Both men mistake the end of a certain kind of enthusiasm—their own—for a wider malaise. They don’t understand that automotive enthusiasts will always be a relatively insignificant minority of the American public; tens of millions of motorists want cheap, reliable, comfortable, practical, safe, not-too-thirsty, not-ugly transportation.

No one’s asking P. J. O’Rourke to respect appliance drivers. But GM’s inability to do so was, in the final analysis, the death of them.

Malcolm “Call Me Malcolm” Bricklin and I had our little chin wag this morning. As expected, the serial  entrepreneur dominated the initial conversation. Less predictably, Bricklin began by bludgeoning me with Google-sourced biographical data. “I know about the Subaru [flying vagina] thing,” Bricklin pronounced. “You’ve got balls. I assume you’re not just saying all this stuff to be controversial.” After admitting his own insanity, Bricklin started recounting the entire history of the Yugo. His no-word-allowed-in-edgewise tale included the Cadillac Allante’s inhibiting effect on X1/9 production and Henry Kissinger’s contribution to the car that launched a thousand jokes. At some point, I interrupted Bricklin to ask about his latest venture: hydrogen. Turns out I got it wrong. Bricklin isn’t proposing a societal switch to hydrogen fuel. He’s got one of those 100mpg carburetor things. Only his creates “hydrogen-on-demand.”

Bricklin’s latest, perhaps last baby: a 4″ X 6″ X 8″ box that bolts onto an internal combustion engine, turns water into hydrogen and squirts it in with the gas. Bricklin claims the technology will increase ANY engine’s mileage by 50 to 100 percent. He also says Visionary Vehicles has licked the three problems that have prevented hydrogen-on-demand from being hydrogen-in-demand: overheating, blowing out the engine’s O2 sensors and corrosion of the stainless steel housing unit.

So, specifics? Nope. No demos. No names of scientists or companies who’ve worked on the device. No link to the company that’s supposedly field-tested the system. Nada. “We’ll have a car to show the public in 90 days, Bricklin promised. And that’s it.

Note: car. Not device. (Although, ever the salesman, Bricklin tried to convince me to fit my Odyssey with his “bumblebee”.)

While you and I might think that developing and licensing a miracle mpg generator would be enough work in the current economic climate, Bricklin has bigger plans. He wants to buy the output of one otherwise shuttered GM and one wanna-be defunct Chrysler plant, equip their vehicles with his hydrogen-on-demand system, tweak ’em a bit, and sell them to GM and Chrysler dealers as a “Visionary GM” and “Visionary Chrysler” products. “Like a Shelby Cobra,” Bricklin suggests.

Details, schmetails. Bricklin couldn’t care less which automotive models get the gizmo and wear the company badge. “I’ll let the dealers decide,” he insists.

Meanwhile and in any case, he’s got his eyes on the prize: the $25 billion Department of Energy retooling loans. You know, the loans for building more fuel efficient vehicles that were, at one time, the be all end all of the feds’ Motown meltdown bailout billions. Bricklin reckons the DOE money will pave the way for his visionary Visionary Vehicles.

Mind you, that doesn’t make Bricklin a bailout booster. When I tell him about the Small Business Administration’s new dealer floorplanning guarantees, the automotive Maverick goes ballistic.

“Holy Crap! How the hell did we ever come to this?” Bricklin demands, rhetorically. “All this bailout money is crazy. I never thought this would happen. Never.”

Nor, apparently, did Bricklin foresee that China’s Chery would screw him on his deal to import inexpensive, Chinese made plug-in hybrid electric vehicles into the US market. “We had $200 million set aside for the project,” Bricklin says. “We were all set to import the cars by ’07. Then Chery went around us and cut a deal with Chrysler for $275 million. I guess that didn’t work out so well.”

On the other hand, “This complete stupidity is the only reason something like my hydrogen-on-demand system will ever be considered.”

Clearly, Bricklin likes to believe that everything happens for a reason. His current media campaign reflects this philosophy. He wants the world to consider his abortive, eponymous Canadian car factory and his recent Chinese misadventure as pre-ordained events, preparing him for this, his life’s crowning achievement. He really believes he can fix the “aura of a scam” surrounding hydrogen-on-demand devices (not to mention the devices themselves) and realize the country’s fuel-saving dreams.

“We already have a working prototype,” Bricklin asserts. “We’ve got it down to the size of a coffee cup.”

Bricklin also thinks the timing is right. “It’s easier to start a car company these days. With the majors on the ropes and the technology changing. Companies like Tesla and Fisker are going to be around for a long time.”

With Malcolm Bricklin’s history of ups and (a lot of) downs, the septuagenarian’s indefatigable spirit comes as no surprise. What I’d like to know is what lies beneath Bricklin’s irrepressible dreams of brand building. Is ego all, or is Malcolm Bricklin honestly trying to make the world a better place? If so, well, good luck with that.

“To live outside the law,” Dylan sang, “you must be honest.” And so we come to the final part of a series that has offended some and delighted others. Just to provide some value to the querulous quislings of quaint quotidian travel, I’ll pass along one tip for the highway cell-phone snitch. Most highway patrol operations discount singular drunk-driving phone-ins, but they are not permitted to ignore reports of brandished firearms. Don’t like the speeder who just blew by? Call him in for waving a gun. Use a prepaid phone for this, as most cops have little patience for being used in this fashion. Some would say that snitching is bad; didn’t our mothers tell us not be little snitches? Still, you know what’s best for others, so go ahead and make that call.

The rest of us can take the offramp into the suburbs and exurbian roads and practice our maximum street speed here as well. We’d like to take most marked ramps at double the marked limit or above, and this will often lead us to interface with minivans, SUVs, and hybrids for whom the yellow advisory sign reflects a terrifying pinnacle of death-defying speed. Pass ’em on the outside of the lane. There are two reasons for this. The first is that you’ll maintain a higher speed for the same G-load. The second is that if you run out of talent or grip you will exit harmlessly away from the car you are passing, instead of inadvertently re-entering their lane and “PIT”ing them.

I’ve never had anybody acquire the presence of mind to block me in time when doing an offramp pass. It’s simply beyond the program of most road users. Don’t forget to wave in a self-deprecating, thankful manner as you go by. Most people will assume you’ve made some sort of mistake.

It’s nearly impossible to reach triple digits on surface streets, but that doesn’t mean we cannot flow at beyond traffic speeds. Forget about doing a series of back-and-forth lane-changes. That usually produces the same result it did in the movie “Office Space”. Instead, use the turn lane to run up to the end of traffic and then rejoin the main flow.

I’d be fibbing if I said that I always experienced perfect success with my “last-minute faux-forgetful merge technique”. Some drivers can be stubborn. To combat this, I purchased a 1991 Chevrolet Caprice Classic woodgrain-trim wagon, known as a “bubble” in the argot of the streets, and immediately experienced the freedom to merge without fear.

When operating vehicles at speeds of about 35mph or below, most motorists are alert enough to compensate for your traffic-defying behavior, up to and including temporarily driving in the oncoming lane. When I need to do something like jump a green light and left-turn an intersection before that traffic can start moving, I find it’s helpful to clutch a deactivated cell phone to my ear, as if I were enraptured by conversation. This fits into other drivers’ preconceptions—a distracted phone user—and they fail to take direct offense to aggressive action.

The fake cellphone is also a great aid to merging into occupied lanes. Move your car over, absolutely fail to make eye contact with any other drivers, look back once the merge is complete, wave the phone apologetically, and continue on.

Sometimes we’re in a situation where traffic simply isn’t moving and a U-turn is required. But there isn’t enough room or time to do one due to a tight road or approaching traffic. What to do? The answer is the “Jarno Donut.” It works with most RWD cars. Crank the wheel all the way to the left, rev to five grand, drop the clutch. The first time you try it you may wind up doing a 270 instead of a 180, so practice at home. Of course, it’s called a “Jarno Donut” in tribute to that outstanding qualifier and vintner, Jarno Trulli, who frequently finds himself backwards in his Toyota.

To open up room for aggressive maneuvers, we can take advantage of a certain panic response in most drivers. When they hear squealing tires in the immediate vicinity, curiosity and concern will make them slow down and scan the immediate area. If we need a car to move out of a lane and the adjoining one is open, we can drive up at a higher speed and engage the ABS next to them as we sail by. This almost always produces a sympathetic brake slam and opens the spot.

Final tip: every Prius ever made will always yield its road position to an aggressive driver, as will every car on the road with more than one “Obama ’08” sticker. Good night, and good luck.

[Click here to read Part I . . . or Part II . . . or Part III . . . of this series. Note: as these editorials have triggered some strong emotions, I’ve turned off our no-flaming the website/author policy. Ish. I reserve the right to douse particularly egregious examples in an entirely first amendment friendly sort of way.]

It was just another day at the “Tail Of The Dragon” for the group of experienced sportbikers clustering around the Robbinsville, NC, gas station. Fresh from multiple high-speed runs down the famed road, they were reliving their victories when a long-haired old man in some girly convertible asked them to “show him the fast way through.”

“Fuck off. We don’t wait for old cagers,” was the reply. As fate would have it, they didn’t have to. Five of the six knee-draggers had to yield to that old man in his Porsche-with-panties before the halfway point. The sixth and fastest made a mistake, went off, and snapped his fairing into three pieces. The nice old man stopped and helped him carry his bodywork to the “Tree of Shame” at the Dragon’s end.

Contrary to what you read in Car and Driver, we can’t drive “10/10ths” on back roads. In Speed Secrets, Ross Bentley talks about the bell curve of tire traction. The more we ask from the tires, the more we get . . . but as we reach the limit of traction, the rate of slip increases. As we pass the “peak” of traction, the tires “fall off” at the same rate . . . but now we have no safety margin for gravel, road waves, animals, and whatnot.

We need to stay on the safer side of the tire-traction curve. That means we drive up to the audible squeal but not past it. To make this happen, we drive what I call the “Safe Line.” This is what I teach to novice racing students, and it’s the only “racing line” we can use on back roads.

Approach each turn at the very outside edge of the pavement. For right-handers, this means either the edge of the double-yellow or the far edge of the road, depending on your vision and personal risk tolerance. Brake in a solid, single swift motion, “squeezing on” and “easing off.” If you over-slow the car, that’s fine. Wait longer next time. But don’t re-accelerate this time. When you have completed braking, turn your head past the “clipping point” of the turn, which is either the inside curb or the double-yellow, focus on the exit, and make a single turn-in motion. Keep constant throttle until you reach the clipping point, then unwind the steering wheel before applying throttle for the exit.

Since we are not on a racetrack, we don’t trail-brake, we don’t “adjust” the car in mid-corner with left-foot braking or throttle inputs, and we don’t even think about applying power until the car is pointed properly to the exit. Most importantly, we take the absolute latest apex, which is to say that we wait as long as possible to turn the car into the corner before turning sharply. This reduces mid-corner speed, but it also reduces inadvertent corner exits.

To do this quickly, you need “traction sensing”: the ability to guesstimate potential corner speed the first time you see a turn. I can’t give that to you. You’ll have to earn it over time by steadily increasing the speed at which you approach known corners until something goes wrong.

Racetrack time doesn’t help much here. Racetracks don’t have pavement waves, big bumps, salt, gravel, dead animals, or Amish people in horse-drawn carriages. If you see any of those, you’re either on the road, or you’re at Nelson Ledges Road Course for a “Friday Funday.” Forget what you know about on-track traction sensing. You can be an SCCA champion and still finish your first Ohio backroads drive in close proximity to a guardrail or tree. Ask me how I know.

Between corners, we accelerate at full speed until it’s time to brake for the next. The exception to this is when we run “The Pace.” The concept of “The Pace” is an old sportbike maxim: set a maximum speed between corners and treat it as a hard ceiling. On the backroads group drives in which I occasionally run, that ceiling is 110mph. Go faster than that, even for a moment, and you can go home alone. No exceptions.

If you enter a corner too hot, straighten the wheel and apply full ABS. Chances are you will go off, but you will go off slow. If you find yourself “saving” a turn by braking in the middle, guess what? You had enough traction to make it through on the throttle.

When you are in mid-air from a “whoop,” do not hit the brakes. Relax your hands and make sure your thumbs are clear of the steering, and keep the throttle at the same place you had when you left the ground. Oh, yeah: keep your eyes up for other road users and treat ’em with courtesy, of course. Pass with care.

Part IV is the finale, in which we discuss suburban and urban techniques.

[Click here to read Part I or Part II of this series. Note: as these editorials have triggered some strong emotions, I’ve turned off our no-flaming the website/author policy. Ish. I reserve the right to douse particularly egregious examples, in an entirely first amendment friendly sort of way.]

As it struggles to find its way through bankruptcy, Chrysler Corp. has announced its most recent cut back. The automaker is eliminating turn signals from its vehicles. In a written statement, a Chrysler spokesperson said that with turn signal usage falling below 10 percent, slicing the cost from each car (estimated at $22) would save the Fiat division over $44 million a production year (based on sales of over two million cars in 2007). “Our studies of vehicle equipment usage found that sixty-five percent of drivers were unaware that their cars actually had a turn signal device,” the press release revealed. “Of the thirty-five percent that were aware of the devices, only half even knew how to use them.” To counter safety advocates’ criticism of the equipment deletion, and bolster its case for a NHTSA waiver, Chrysler released the results of a driver survey.

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The über-wealthy have many fascinating ways to speed on America’s highways, from night-vision goggles to convenient spotter planes overhead. But those of us who toil in the middle class have to earn our velocity by hard graft. Freeway speeding is the crack cocaine of fast-road driving—cheap, easy, addictive, and deadly—and nighttime freeway speeding is both more glamorous and annoying than its daytime counterpart.

Once the sun goes down, we can do a lot more of that left-lane passing which is so near and dear to the hearts of wannabe Europeans, thanks to a trick I call “Poor Man’s Takedown.” Cop cars have “takedown” lights: high beams which flash alternately. We can simulate the effect as follows: While coming up behind traffic in the left lane, switch to parking lights only. When you are a few hundred feet back, flash your brights three or four times, producing the “takedown” effect. As Billy Dee Williams would say, “It works every time,” primarily because it startles Toyota drivers into yielding the lane before their natural territorial instincts can assert themselves.

We don’t use the shoulder at night unless we have to. Confused deer, abandoned cars, and discarded retreads tend to hide out there. In the event that a lane-changing fellow motorist leaves us with no safe lane choice and no time to slow the car, it’s occasionally possible to simply split the lane on the side away from the lateral direction of the lane change. If you are swift enough with it, you might even keep your mirrors.

The time will come when, despite our best efforts to look ahead, watch brake lights, and use our Valentine Ones, we will be clocked. At this point, we have two useful options. We can pull over and wait for the nice policeman, right there across the road from his clocking point (this will sometimes earn us some goodwill), or we can run.

It isn’t really “running” until the cop is directly behind us with his lights on. That’s a felony, and I advise against it. Until then, it’s merely additional speeding, spiced up with some unwarranted direction-changing. When we decide to perform said additional speeding, we need to absolutely abandon the idea of getting where we were going. That’s no longer important. Instead, we need to perform three important tasks.

Task one is breaking visual contact. As long as the cop can see us, we are toast. So it’s time to boogie. Most police sedans with light bars can’t break 120 mph, so we want to get to that speed or better immediately. We look ahead, not behind, or we will surely drive right into the back of a lane-wandering minivan full of multicultural children stroking crippled kittens and singing “Kumbaya.” We can check our mirrors in the gaps between traffic.

With Task One accomplished, it’s time to multiply possibilities. The police handbooks indicate that fleeing drivers almost always turn right. So we get off the freeway and turn left. If we have enough clear air and we aren’t driving something like a lime green Audi S5 or other memorable car, we can cross the median and join the lawful traffic heading in the other direction. If that’s too much to ask, get off the freeway . . . but do it quickly. We keep our speed up, using the techniques I’ll cover in Part III, and we make multiple direction changes.

After a few of these, it’s time to abandon the whip. We get out of the car and walk away. A gas station is fine for this, a restaurant is better, a car lot is best of all. If you have, ahem, a new Ford Flex, why not drive into a Ford dealership and park in a line of them?  Then get away from the car. Guess what? If they can’t prove we were driving the car, we have a fighting chance in court.

If the police manage to catch us, we say we didn’t see them and that we always drive like a maniac. This abject confession of putative stupidity saved, um, a friend of mine from a beating after he led the Ohio Highway Patrol on a 120+ mph chase down Route 71 in a Lotus Seven clone. Sorry, officer! Didn’t see you back there! Gimme the ticket, I’ll sign it!

In cities, we return to the scene of the crime. Police search in an outward circle that expands with time. The one place they won’t be is the place where the search started, so we go there, using left turns. Needless to say, we don’t go speeding with weed, Ecstasy, firearms, or illegal immigrants in the car, because one felony charge at a time is enough.

In Part III, we will learn how to drive back roads at outrageous speeds.

[Click here to read Part I or Part III of the series. Note: as these editorials have triggered some strong emotions, I’ve turned off our no-flaming the website/author policy. Ish. I reserve the right to douse particularly egregious examples, in an entirely first amendment friendly sort of way]

I realized I was airborne when my steering inputs had no effect on the direction of my Carrera. At the point the ass-engine configured rocketship started its atmospheric re-entry, several things went through my mind. If the rear-end breaks loose, do I keep my foot down? What happens if I lose it? Am I going to crash? When the rear tires made contact with terra-nürburg, and I was able to counter steer in a brilliant fashion (what really happened was Porsche Active Stability Management once again made me a driving god), all thoughts of impaling my Porker into the Armco ceased. Once again, I was driving the dream and having the time of my life on the most legendary driving circuit in the world, the Nürburgring Nordschleife.

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Once upon a time, I commissioned Guy Broad Jaguar to build an XK120 from the chassis up. From the breakaway steering column to the oversized (though Jag-sourced) six, it was my idea of what an XK should be. She was built with as many upgraded repro parts as possible, by non-union labor. Before I could fettle the machine for something akin to drivability, I spun her on black ice and took out a small English village. (Come back Colleen, all is forgiven.) By the time the car was re-re-built, divorce had claimed my most beautiful asset. But I’ll never forget the consternation the car caused amongst the cognoscenti.

Adherents to the Church of Original Jaguar XK considered Colleen a heresy. Her existence diminished the eight billion man hours they’d spent researching, sourcing and replacing rusted engine parts. And the two thousand hours spent by the roadside—or in a shed—trying to coax their XK to life. Colleen’s adoring fans were restricted to those who didn’t know what she was and those who couldn’t fathom spending a year in provenance. 

This month’s Octane magazine offers another type of litmus test: a Lambourghini Jota repro.

All I remember about Lambos of that era: you couldn’t see anything and they’d roast you alive while you were looking. And deafen you for your trouble. And kill you for cornering. [NB: You, not Stirling Moss.] They were the world’s fastest hair shirts.

Obviously, I never drove the one and only V12 Jota. Whoever did made short work of it. Octane reports, “Its career was exceptionally short-lived; after being sold to Italian company Interauto in February 1972, it was heavily crashed and subsequently written off.” Heavily crashed. Don’t like the sound of that. Nor am I enamored with the idea of an overly-faithful recreation of the Jota’s spam-in-a-can character. 

Before I share writer Mark Dixon’s prose on the nouva Jota, you may or may not know that this sort of work is OK (an exception, if you will) with the keepers of the authenticity flame. Ish. That’s ’cause it’s a repro of a car that you can’t restore—’cause there ain’t any. The “shark-nosed” Ferrari 156 projects are the perfect illustration. And still the faithful argue about the proximity of the repro to the original, right down to the engine bolts. (I swear.) So, Jota.

You sit low and casual in the Jota, legs spread as if slouched in your favourite TV-viewing easy chair. The screen sweeps around in panoramic Stratos fashion and the broad sills, each of which contains a 60-litre fuel tank, create useful elbow room on either side. There’s lots of black-painted sheet alloy, blue Dymo labels with evocative Italian descriptions, and a total absence of anything soft or forgiving.

The foot pedals are reassuringly large and well spaced, their broad metal treads looking as if they’ve been lifted from one of Cavaliere Lamborghini’s tractors, but it’s impossible for the driver to release the handbrake without brushing an elbow against the rear bulkhead. That’s a mistake you make only once: after being cooked for a couple of hours by four litres of tuned V12, that sheet of alloy gets as hot as the baking tray under your Christmas turkey. 

If I remember my Pleistocene Era buff bookery, this is the part where the reviewer says “But on the right road…” Not quite, old chap.

But the clutch is surprisingly light and you can trickle the Jota away on a whiff of throttle – just as well, for the sake of the hearing of anyone standing within 40 feet. The steering is light, too, despite the 9.5-inch section front tyres (the rears measure an incredible 12.5 inches across). Rearward vision is non-existent, of course, but otherwise the Jota isn’t difficult to drive. It does make a fantastic sound. 

Ah, the sound of old supercars. Are you up on your Greek mythology? Sirens. Not the sound of the police come to save you from yourself. The sound of orgasmic women luring you to your death.

Forget all the usual niceties of induction hiss, valve train chatter and the other nuances that journalists like to use to pep up their copy: the Jota is simply raw, animal, noise. It’s loud at idle and it just gets louder as you pile on the revs. At low engine speeds it sounds as though someone is blowing a tuba straight into your ear; then at around 3000rpm the brassy blast becomes a little ragged, as though the two banks of cylinders have got out of synch; but get past that and it sweetens into the most glorious, red-blooded howl you can imagine. 

And… that’s it. No mention of handling, for some reason. Anyway, I’ve got no problem with this car—except that I do. If you know what I mean.

The brutal sun finally started setting as I headed up the Grapevine. Since my plan was to go for broke, I had opened the taps. According to the speedometer, I was pushing 75 mph. It had only been 50 miles since Bakersfield, but with the gas leak and increased RPM I decided I needed to refuel one more time before making the big downhill home to Los Angeles. This of course meant engaging in my own personal stupidest act of 2008: adding gas with the engine still running. I found a nice, empty looking station near Gorman. Long story short, I’m still here. And the drive into LA turned out to be cathartic.

Anyway, I’d done it. Obviously, there’d been much discussion between me and Murilee regarding the prospect of just saying “hell no” and sending the cash back to Prague. Especially after the Chrysler refused to start. His argument was, “You need to do this. Every car guy needs to have an adventure like this with a beater in the middle of nowhere.” Cruel? A bad friend? Insane? A little of all three, sure. But also wise. I did need to do this. As an automotive journalist, how could I not? Like Camus said, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.”

There is something near-magical about cruising Los Angeles at dusk in a gigantic American convertible. The provenance is spot on. Whatever other reasons there are for this car’s existence, they’re little more than hollow echoes. The Chrysler was as at home as any of the palm trees lining the freeway. Passing Dodger Stadium I actually felt near human again, after six hours of (sweaty) suffering. But you see, this was just a trick of time and circumstance. The damn Chrysler was cursed.

I drove the behemoth to a deserted street and called my lady, “Pick me up. Come pick me up, now!” Honestly, I wanted to pour gas over the 300 and strike a match. At least beat on it with a hammer. She got me home, I showered, and quite honestly forgot about the horrible car for the next few months.

Well, tried to forget. See, the Czechs still wanted the blasted thing. The problem, or precisely one of the problems, was the shipping facility’s hours are Monday through Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. Not exactly a convenient time frame, especially since it would take two drivers to tango. Also, by then, I hated the 300. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it; it’s able to produce more headaches-per-mile than any car, well, ever. Still, I had to hold up my end of the bargain and eventually blocked out a day when both me and my poor, sweet, innocent fiancée were free.

After forty-five minutes of wrenching, hammering and straight-up cussing (plus jumper cable), the once mighty 440 turned over. Victory! Now all I had to do was pilot the ship 20 miles down to the port and wash my hands of the evil bastard forever. Ha ha ha! As I began gaining speed I heard a “thwap thwap thwapping” sound. I thought it must be the roof, but it got louder as I went faster. I pulled over and — voila! — the good ole bias-ply tread had separated from the tire. At least I live two blocks from a tire shop, right?

Oh so wrong. Not only didn’t they have a suitable tire in stock, but they couldn’t think of a single tire shop in town that would stock such a size. Even the competitors three blocks away. Pricks. Well, I’d simply drive. Just kidding! The damn 300 refused to start. Then the shop monkeys told me I couldn’t park there. I’ve rarely felt so violent in my life. I raised the white flag and called AAA, explaining that I needed a flatbed. Forty-five minutes later I get a call, “Our driver’s down at Figueroa and 45th street. He can’t find you.” As calmly as possible I explained that the Chrysler was broken down on the corner of Figueroa and 45th AVENUE, you retarded motherfuckers! Come get us, now. 

The flatbed grabbed us and dropped us off without incident. Of course, seeing as how that Chrysler is for evil, the port facility had no record of the car or the buyer. Another 90 minutes of frustration right there. My girl and I did get a great tour of the shipping joint’s “good stuff” that was waiting to be sent off to Europe. But even that wasn’t worth the heartache of this Chrysler. Have I learned my lesson? You betcha. I’m looking at a 1969 Ford Torino Convertible in the morning, but this one “runs good.”

[Click here to read Pt. 1]

My Czech buddy “Bob” asked me to go on up somewhere north of Fresno and grab a 1969 Chrysler 300 Convertible for him. Low pay and the distinct possibility of bloody knuckles? Yes! Yes despite the fact I really dislike the whole middle man thing. In fact, just like the 1981 Corvette, the seller of this Chrysler “needed” the money in cash because he’d heard about internet scams involving the Czech Republic. Never mind the fact that I– a good patriotic American– would be handing him a cashier’s check from BofA. Nope, must be dead presidents, and in the flesh so to speak. So, with forty $100 bills burning my pocket, I hopped a plane up to Oakland where Jalopnik’s Murilee Martin picked me up.

Why Murilee? First I needed a ride. Second, the boy knows cars. You know when people donate their cars to charity as tax write offs? He used to have a job fixin’ what got donated. We arrive at the seller’s home and ask if we can take the car for a spin before I hop in and drive it 300 miles back to Los Angeles. Bad idea. The seller immediately begins accusing us of trying to scam him and he nearly comes to fisticuffs with Murilee. I calm things down. That is until we try and start the car. See, it won’t start. This leads to more screamin’ and cussin’ and accusations of, “I’m been working on Mopars longer than you’ve been alive!” It was lovely.

Running a wire straight the battery to the coil fires the fairly healthy 440 right up. The problem then is obviously in the ignition and more specifically has something to do with the meth lab-special wiring job (in defense of the seller; he’d purchased the car just a few weeks earlier and hadn’t done a thing save replace the battery). A trip to the hardware store later and Murilee’s all set to rig a switch that’ll allow me to get started without the key when he notices that an electrical plug on the firewall is loose. Push it back, and the old Chrysler fires right up. Of course not only is the alternator too small (90 amps instead 120) but it doesn’t seem to necessarily be connected to the battery.

“I need to warn you,” the seller says. “The bias-ply on the left rear is starting to separate. So I’d stop in Fresno and buy a new tire.” No problem I tell myself. “Also, the fuel gauge is broken, but I’d guess you’ll get around six mpg.” Did he (or Murilee) know how big the tank was? Negative. Working on Mopars your whole life, huh?

Having no clue how much gas was in the tank I proceeded to “drive” straight the nearest station. Drive is in quotes because terms like “float” or “lumber” or “slothfully crawl while rocking” would be more accurate. Hey, at least the top (somehow, miraculously) worked. Of course it was 115 degrees in the middle of the day in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. Best to leave it up.

Twenty miles later and I’m ready to commit suicide. Any semblance of an HVAC system had eaten itself decades ago. As such, nothing but hot air blew into the cabin, and the haggard cloth top did little but add heat. Down goes the roof and good thing I brought a hat. Cooling air is now passing over my sun-roasted body. I’m worried about going much over 65 mph because of the ailing tire. This can’t be worth the money.

I find the tire shop and — JOY! — they’ve got the tire in stock. “Sir, there’s a problem,” the friendly tire guy says to me. “All five lugs are seized. And you’re leaking gas.” CRAP! We put a wreck bar into the end of tire iron and really wrenched. Nothing. Seized, totally seized. And gas was dripping from the tank. No cell phone reception, either. I eyeball the tire. It doesn’t look that bad. Just a little chunk missing. Must press on. Of course it was only later I learned that all pre-1970 Mopars (and Fords) are left hand threaded on the left side…

Figuring that the big 300 with the top down and the leak is (hopefully) getting three mpg, I stop after just 90 miles to fill up. But it won’t start. Dead battery. Turns out the alternator wasn’t connected to the “brand new battery.” Ha ha ha. Well, no biggie, as surely someone would mench up and give me a jump. An hour and fifteen minutes later when AAA finally shows I’m ready to light all of Bakersfield on fire. Despite the rapidly degenerating tire, sunburn, heatstroke, gas leak and mushrooming anger, I decided to press on. Not only press on, but I wouldn’t be switching the engine off until Los Angeles.

To be continued….

I live in Michigan. Not on the Detroit side of things, around here it’s mostly suppliers. I’m an engineer. As I write this, I’m off on unpaid furlough. I don’t work in the auto business; my company is in an industry about 10 bailout levels down. But around here, it all looks the same. Two years ago the Delphi fuel injector plant was shut down; two months ago the big GM stamping plant was stamped for extinction. Winter even came a bit earlier this year. It’s cold, damp, gray, and we got some snow before Thanksgiving. Not unheard of, but not exactly welcome. I think it was P.J. O’Rourke who remarked while flying over the “liberated” but still depressed Eastern Europe, “Communism is the only form of government you can see from 30,000 feet.” This economy is like that. You can see it of course, but it’s also cold and gray and it hangs in the Michigan air.

I sit on the couch and watch the TV news shows. I choose a network based on who I want to be mad at. It’s pretty easy to know what they’re going to say. They easily find experts who can easily toss out solutions based on villains that are easy to find. I can blame the UAW for greedily grabbing as much as they could with no thought to the future. Or I can change the channel, and blame the management for the same thing. It’s easy for me to pick my side and find a commentator or a website to validate my choice.

Feeling validated always makes me feel better, but I want things to be like they were. I’m mad at these people for screwing up my plans, screwing up the status quo, screwing up my life. But way deep down, there’s a quiet voice in my head that says, “this is life… this is how it goes.” Newton may have said, “an object in motion tends to stay in motion”, but he wasn’t accounting for friction. In life, there’s friction.

The voice tells me that maybe I’ve been ignoring the friction. I work hard… I “put in the hours”. But I do the work to pay for silly conversations on cell phones. I watch silly shows on cable TV. I pay credit card bills for too much silly shit. Maybe I wasn’t ignoring the friction; maybe I just focused on the wrong friction. When life is in motion at its usual pace, when there’s no obvious crisis, no worthy antagonist, I lose focus. I get caught up in the silly stuff.

I’d like to believe that the leaders of GM, the UAW, or the government don’t get caught up in the silly stuff. They’ve been vetted and validated. They’ve risen to the top through a series of tests that predicted these problems and revealed their solutions. But again, I hear the voice and it reminds me that just isn’t true. All these organizations are simply made up of people like my colleagues, like my neighbors… like me. And since the fate of the country rests with the likes of me, I look back out the window at the depressed economy and become, well… depressed.

But then, deep down, I’m forced to acknowledge that voice. Maybe it’s Newton again, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” But maybe it’s more along the lines of “we finally have a worthy antagonist…we have something to do.”

I easily conjure up more pundits, prognosticators, and keyboard jockeys that shout down the voice with an overwhelming onslaught of facts and scenarios describing insurmountable dooms. But I can’t quite drown it out. “Sure these guys may be a bunch of ass-clowns, unfit to lead during a real crisis…but it’s the crisis that will produce the real leaders. The vetting and validation can take place now. There can be focus.” I’d like to dismiss the voice as jingoistic pabulum. But still, it’s hard to ignore it.

It’s in my culture. Sure, people like to say “work is for suckers”…but most of them hear a voice too. They don’t respect any side that tries getting something for nothing. They don’t shy away from “putting in the hours”.

It’s in my DNA. My parents were immigrants. You can’t leave your whole life behind and not be willing to take a risk. If you were afraid of the worthy antagonist, you’d still be back in the Old Country.

So I just can’t ignore the voice. I have something to do. I have focus. Despite shouts of what may be the worst economic disaster we’ve ever faced… I can still hear the voice saying in it’s best Ed Harris / Gene Krantz imitation, “With all due respect, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.”

My personal highlight of Last year’s Dallas Auto Show was watching Sajeev work his magic on GM’s regional marketing director. He’d met her at the Houston Auto Show some weeks earlier, where they’d had a productive conversation. Apparently the Powers That Be within GM didn’t think that was a good idea. She was talking gaily with other scribes when we approached her. When she turned to greet us, her face darkened the moment she recognized the dashing Mr. Mehta. Visibly agitated, she hissed, “I can’t talk to you,” spun on her heels and scurried away. After a moment of stunned silence I asked TTAC’s lonely lothario, “Do you have that effect on all women?”

My, how I do love telling that story. Sadly, work commitments kept my friend, Don Juan Mehta, in Houston this year. So I flew solo at the 2008 DAS.

To put things in perspective, the press preview day at the DAS draws about twenty print journalists and a couple of local TV crews. Meanwhile, the press preview for the North American International Auto Show in Detroit lasts three days and attracts some 6000 media people from around the world. More than one-hundred new products were “revealed” at NAIAS. I counted one at the DAS. Celebrities, industry big wigs, and politicians vie to be seen in Detroit. In Dallas, all I saw was a small group of aging, overweight, balding, vertically challenged, writers wearing sensible shoes.

While less of a spectacle, the intimacy of the DAS provides far greater access to the objects that we’re all there to see: the cars. Aston Martin would never allow thousands of clamoring critics crawl all over their lusty DBS. Yet they are perfectly willing to permit twenty of us to sit behind the wheel and fantasize about violently ordering all 510 horses to the rear wheels, stat!

A few moments of solitude behind the wheel of the DB9 Coupe found me awed by authentic interior materials and old world craftsmanship. The aluminum instruments and bezels are actually aluminum, not plastic (plastichrome). The clock crystal is crystal, not plastic. Wood accents are really wood, not plastic. The headliner is suede, not plastic. The leather upholstery is leather, not plastic (vinyl).  The sense of luxury was so powerful that I forgave the car’s narrow foot wells and niggling ergonomic design flaws.

With Aston Martin still fresh in my mind, I wandered to Cadillac and sat my butt in the XLR-V. The home team didn’t fare well in comparison. Despite the marked improvement by GM’s flagship brand, it’s clear how far Caddy still needs to go before it has a truly world class interior.

While both marques employ leather, AM’s cows certainly have a better dermatologist. I suppose it’s unfair to compare an exclusive hand-built car to one rolling off a mass-production assembly line.  But GM chose to play in the $100K end of the pool and right now they’re in over their heads.

The only hint of controversy on the day came at the Hummer press conference. I meekly asked how Hummer planned to combat the rising drumbeat of accusations that the planet is being ravaged by enormous gas-guzzling SUVs, of which the H2 is the poster child. “Or is Hummer content to say ‘screw you’ to the rest of the world.” Okay, maybe that part of my question came out a little harsh.

Like a seventh-degree judo black belt, GM’s mouthpiece, a third-tier marketing manager, skillfully parried the question and deftly avoided giving me anything interesting to write about-– some unapologetic diatribe about customer satisfaction and that their customer’s don’t care about being perceived as gluttonous.

My surprise came from the woman who stepped up beside me. To the satisfaction of Mr. Goodwrench, she began a vigorous defense of Hummer, citing its excellent fuel economy relative to others in its class.  At first I thought the interloper was another GM hired gun. But the shabbiness of her appearance confirmed that she was, in fact, another journalist. I wouldn’t have minded her input if a group of us were having drinks and sharing war stories. But I was at the press conference to hear what The General has to say, thank you very much.

Perhaps this is further evidence of the enmeshed relationship between automotive news makers and the [supposed] watchdogs in the press corps. Or maybe this was just a run-in with a mad old cow with an irrepressible impulse to rudely butt in and speak for companies with whom she has no affiliation.

And thus ended another DAS press preview day.  I left with a bag of swag (including a jar of Super Hot HEMI Powered Barbeque Sauce), a camera full of hi-res pix, and memories of a few new cars for cubicle daydreaming, both mine and yours.

[Click here for William C. Montgomery's DAS Pixamo photo gallery ] 

Wiki.answers.com challenges visitors to ask a question, any question; from “What is the meaning of life?” to “Dude, where’s my car?” Realizing that the site’s Google-style entry bar may prove a tad daunting, the webmasters also provide a list of 20 categories for intellectual exploration. Enquiring minds can click on a relevant area and then drill down to see if someone’s been there, asked that (via unfortunately worded questions like “What’s the best food to eat with diarrhea?”). As you’d expect from a wiki site, you can also switch to “Answers” and put questioners out of their intellectual misery. I decided to apply my expertise to the automotive arena. And down the rabbit hole we go.

After signing-up as an expert, I received my first shock: volume. My inbox received 100 automotive questions per day. And then the aftershock: the questions. 

“Why won’t my (insert a car name here) start?”

Dozen of surfers sent me this question. Daily. I could have written a long list of possible explanations, starting with the blindingly obvious (a dead battery), working my way to the completely implausible (alien energy abduction). But I was dumbstruck by the idea that hundreds of thousands of people somehow never “got” the basic methodology underpinning “20 questions,” yet still managed to learn how to type.

“Where do I put the oil in a [insert car name here]?”

Again, a popular question. I’ve got one: when did American consumers decide that car owner’s manuals are coated in powdered anthrax? Imagine hundreds of pages of questions with the word “RTFM” next to them. I did.

“Can you drive with a broken radiator?” 

Yes but not very far. Back in the day, a TTAC editorialist lamented the precipitous decline of domestic garage skills. He pointed out that the trend had a catastrophic effect on the average motorist’s knowledge of simple mechanical repairs and upgrades. Well no shit.

Hundreds of questioners wanted to know how to change head, tail, stop, turn and dash bulbs. I reckoned it was only a matter of time before “How do I change a tire?” appeared. Equally sadly, there were hardly ANY questions about maintenance issues (changing oil, rotating tires, etc.) or relatively simple repairs (replacing shocks, etc).

How do I put double deuces on 16” wheels?

I want to see THAT buggy rolling down Woodward Avenue. Anyway, don't laugh. Think of all the people who didn't think to check their bling strategy. And of course, LOADS of people wanted to know how to remove/install a sound system. I reckon most of these questions come from midnight auto parts & accessories stores.

And then there were the off-the-wall, left field, where-the-Hell-do-these-people- come-from questions. Questions so bizarre I was constantly tempted to write equally fantastic replies. 

“What’s your rpm at zero?”

Somehow I knew that “Your rpm is zero at zero” wasn’t going to cut it. But I didn’t want to launch into a long discussion of engine function, and I couldn’t write “The same as yours” or “Idle tachometers are the Devil’s plaything.” So I simply ignored the question, and many more like it. But how can you ignore a question like…

“How can cheese get on the car engine?”

What’s that you say? You've got goat cheese on your GTO? The question raised an infinite number of possible flippant replies, slapstick routines and jackass misadventures. On the other hand, perhaps he meant the heroin-based drug that that killed a Texas teen last year. If so, a dealer may have hidden the cheese in the questioner’s engine bay to evade the Narcs. Yes, the mind boggles.

“Can right hand drive cars be imported along with their regular left hand drive cars to US to meet needs of deaf person with little money?” 

Why would a poor, deaf person want to import a right hand-drive car into the U.S.? You might suggest that they’re also dumb, but I would never make such an insensitive remark.  

“How many payments can I miss before they take my car?”

Never mind the infinite spellings of the word "repossession." Again, why in the world would anyone think I could give them specific advice on their personal situation– such as "Who took my car?"– without any specific details? Maybe there's a widespread belief that "they" control the internet; "they" already know everyone's personal details. Which is as close to common sense as most of these wiki wanderers will ever get.

Speaking of "uninformed," I went into this gig expecting to tackle questions like “What’s the difference between all wheel-drive and four wheel-drive?” and “What are desmodromic valves?” and “Who imported the Borgward Isabella?” I now realize that I’m part of an elite group of well-educated pistonheads interested in stuff that most people don’t know exists– and couldn’t possibly understand it if they did. Call me a snob/rivet counter, but one way or another, the truth hurts.

When you’re young, free and single, buying a new car is easy. You match the maximum amount of available cash/credit to the maximum amount of cool you can afford and sign your life away. When you’re married, buying a new car is a pain in the ass, right from the git-go. Which car do we sell? Who gets the new car? Who gets the old car? How practical should it be? How stylish? Whose style? How much car can WE afford? Post-nuptial new car negotiations can present anything from a small bump in the marital road to a VERY expensive write-off.

Not to stereotype, but many a husband wants more car than the couple can afford (without sacrificing that big screen TV), while plenty of wives wants a cute car with less power than a lawn mower (without sacrificing new carpets and curtains). In other words, men are from Mopar, women are from… some planet where the color of a car is more important than the vehicle underneath the paint job.

Unless you’re a perfectly compatible couple, such deliberations ultimately boil down to a simple power struggle— one of many that all couples face over years/months of marriage.

Usually, couples hammer out some kind of compromise. The guy gets the car he wants, or the woman gets the car she wants, and then one, the other or both live with simmering resentment.

Thankfully, the rise of the two income family has removed a great deal of the animus from the process– which is a bit like saying nuclear weapons have made the world a safer place. But then couples argue over money more than anything else. Cars are a couple’s second largest purchase after their home. Do the math. And then duck.

As the years roll by, a couple’s vehicular needs change: from two-seaters to five-seaters to minivans to college cars back to sedans to two seaters. But the power struggle remains. As a grizzled veteran of two world wars marriages (let’s just call the exit from the first an “honorable discharge”), I’ve experienced a fair amount of car-centric combat discord. If there’s one piece of advice I can give men facing this strife it’s this: surrender.

Let’s be honest: what guy wouldn’t like to go out and buy a new car paying scant attention to such trivial matters as cash flow? Upside-down on your current car? Heck, just go out and get a “refi” and use the equity in your house to buy that shiny-new object of your innermost automotive desire. I don’t know about you, but my spending habits are based on the simple idea that there’s no tomorrow.

Meanwhile, my [second] wife saves money like a four-handed, amphetamine-crazed squirrel preparing for The Mother of All Winters. With all my nuts safely stashed (so to speak), income stays put, while outgo is as rare as a Tiffany lamp in Wal-Mart.

After many a skirmish, I’ve come to appreciate the resolute focus my “spousal unit” has placed upon saving for the future. It took a long time, but I now understand why she thinks fast cars are a needless extravagance. Or, if you prefer, I look at homeless people of a certain age and wonder which Ferrari they used to own before cocaine turned to whiskey turned to malt liquor.

I repeat: listen to the Mrs. Cars are depreciating assets. There’s absolutely no sense in the act of taking cash out of an appreciating asset (your humble abode) to burn on something that will devalue over time (new kitchen counter tops don’t count, apparently).

It may be a quick burn, say, like the value of a Chrysler Sebring. Or, it may be a slower burn, like a Honda-something. Unless you’re buying stratospherically-priced “investment grade” sheet metal, the value of your whip will prove Newton’s theory of gravity– without the “going up” bit.

That’s not to say there is no joy in Mudville. If you both agree there’s room for a new toy in the budget, providing there actually is, life can be sweet. You can go out and enjoy the fruits of your (joint) labor. OK, you’ll probably be so old by then that you no longer have the eyesight and hand-eye coordination to fully enjoy your fire-breathing SRT-8mobile or MX-5 whippet. But financially speaking, you won’t be the loser you look like.

Of course, all this advice is predicated on the assumption that you’re not amongst those fortunate pistonheads who can afford to indulge their automotive appetites without the slightest regard to the money they’re pissing away on an endless succession of four-wheeled paramours. If that’s the case, go ahead, laugh. But here’s a message from those of us whose financial safety demands we let our better halves curb our enthusiasm: you go boy! You go!