After a long slog through NAIAS and getting TTAC’s house in order for the new year, I was delighted to see the response to my first big endeavor of the year, my Generation Why piece. But with 174 comments and multiple tangents, I wanted to open up the floor to clarify a few things.
In the late 1980s, if you didn’t want to buy your Isuzu Gemini as a Geo/Chevrolet Spectrum, you could get it as a genuine Isuzu. I-Marks are (and were) very rare, though we have seen an ’87 in this series), and so this one with gigantic ISUZU badging has some historical interest for the true connoisseur of cheapo 80s hatchbacks. Read More >
Bruce writes:
I got my 2007 9-3 serviced at the Falls Church, VA Saab dealership. My question: They had new (2011) 9-5s for $20,000 off the sticker price. Almost half off. Are they a good deal? Would you buy one? Read More >
The Tuesday round of TTAC’s Future Writers Week ends with no new writers selected. That round definitely did not trigger mass excitement among our judges. Some even wanted to be able to assign demerits. Contestants 13 and 14 were the only halfway real entries in what otherwise was email snippets and proposals nobody wanted. Getting the most votes (from a definitely apathetic panel of judges) while running virtually unopposed does not constitute a win. Read More >
BMW’s debut of the American-spec 320i at this year’s NAIAS may have been big news for the American auto press, but up here in frigid Canuckistan, the 320i is old hat. Roughly a decade ago, BMW launched the $33,900 320i, along with an ad campaign touting its price, which was comparable to a well equipped Honda Accord.
The winners are Michael Trainor, George William Herbert, and Grant Tillery. TTAC congratulates thee. You shall drop the masks of your screen names, and step out into the harsh lights of the public, and the etching-strength vitriol of TTAC’s feared commentariat.
Previously known as Contestants 4, 7, and 1, the three garnered the lion’s share of the votes in the Monday round of TTAC’s Future Writers Week, where, in true interactive fashion, you decide who will write for you in the future, and whom you will criticize for the biased and one-sided reporting, especially on a slow news-day. It is in your hands, and it will be so for the rest of the week. Remember: Today is another day of the battle of the writers, and another day where you decide the outcome. Read More >
As a child with a 1:24 scale model of the first generation Viper constantly adorning my bedroom amongst other automotive related furnishings, my eyes were glued to the Viper television series. It was full of horrible dialogue, campy acting, and a car that transformed (I wonder where they got that idea from?) into a V10 powered, crime fighting caricature of itself. I was 10 years old when it first appeared on TV, so I didn’t care about the obvious insert of a disabled African American male in a wheelchair to appease focus groups. Nor did I care about stupid weapons which were probably taken straight from the dusty script of a failed Star Trek pilots.
In my lifetime, I have yet to see a good, live action, car themed television show. Just look at the last Knight Rider reboot or The Transporter for proof. Even worse, the movie studios want you to spend big money to watch fantastic failures on the big screen which will make you shout at inaccuracies and pine for a movie exec to get it right for once.
Outside the non-fiction genre of Senna and Ron Howard’s upcoming dramatized Rush which peers into Niki Lauda’s near-fatal accident, why can’t someone make a decent fucking car movie or television show? Read More >
After a couple of weeks of break, guess who’s back to haunt you?
Last time I gave you the best-selling models in the world, and since then a few things have happened, one of them being the end of 2012 and a plethora of new sales data and stats I have in store for you. Let’s start with the biggest market of them all, China. Simply because…an American car is in the lead of the Passenger Cars ranking for the 2nd consecutive year…
Yep. What the Yankies couldn’t do at home, they do it in China. Nice.
Discover the Top 304 best-selling models in China below the jump, or you can also check:
The Top 279 best-selling models in the USA in 2012 here
The Top 10 best-selling models in Europe in 2012 here
The Top 200 best-selling models in Brazil in 2012 here
Even though the DJ Jeep was two-wheel-drive, Coloradans must really love them. I see DJ-5 “Mail Jeeps” in Denver-area wrecking yards all the time (for example, this ’82 and this ’72). I’ve mostly stopped photographing them for this series, because how much can anyone say about the steel box on wheels that delivered our mail for much of the 1970s? However, a Jeep with a factory-installed Audi engine is interesting, so here we go. Read More >
Bryan writes:
A question I’d love to see posed to the Best and Brightest: What to do when you’re sent tickets for a car you’re not liable for?
I just got two tickets this morning, for parking infractions that occurred 9.5 years ago, under a previous owner of a car that I bought 9 years ago. I’m not going to pay them just to quell the payment demands, since I consider this extortion.
So, is it better for me to simply never acknowledge receipt of the tickets, since they’re not my liability? Or will that put a black mark on my credit rating? I’m concerned that trying to rationally explain things to the parking enforcement company will only get me stuck deeper in the problem – they don’t care about the truth, they just want to get paid.
This has happened to my parents twice before, so I think it’s a common problem – but I don’t know what the best thing to do is, and I’d love to see how the Best and Brightest have dealt with it.
Sajeev answers: Read More >
I will admit that I am a Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction fanboi. I spent last week in Detroit during the NAIAS, and thus had to skip my annual trip to Scottsdale, Arizona for their auction extravaganza, one of the greatest automotive events in this country. However, amidst all the breathless reporting about Barrett-Jackson selling the original Batmobile for $4.6M, you might have missed the story of a rare fail by the auction giant. Read More >
Somewhere above the 70th parallel
January is upon us, and with it the seasonal rise in traffic at big car sites such as TTAC. Over the past days, the load on our servers was unseasonably and unreasonably high. My unconfirmed hunch is that it is all the future authors checking their standings. We’ll never know. To address the problem, and hopefully to increase your class-leading browsing experience, the TTAC Geek Squad, billeted in an abandoned NORAD bunker in the darker reaches of Canada, decided to move TTAC to another server. Read More >
Die, sucker!
Automortal Sins will be an infrequent series about the true sins in the auto business. It won’t be the sins which some bloggers regard huge. We won’t blame lapses in styling, branding, we won’t lambast OEMs for abandoning sports cars in favor of appliances. Building the wrong car once in a while is a minor iniquity compared to the huge, most egregious, and definitely mortal sins committed by automakers every day, without the smallest amount of remorse. Here is the first one:
Read More >
The cost of doing business in Canada may be high for auto makers, but that isn’t stopping GM from looking to re-negotiate their contract with the CAW nearly a year in advance as a means of keeping production of the Chevrolet Equinox and GMC Terrain at the CAMI plant in Ontario.
I want to tell you this, although I know many of you will not believe. I want you to close your eyes and give me the gift of your trust for a few minutes, to travel through memory and dream and ambition with me. I want you to experience the “theater dim” of the interior lights. To open the throttle on the Bose-by-Nissan stereo. To feel the perfect response from the small sedan’s leather-wrapped steering wheel, to catch a slide as the four-wheel-steering kicks in at the most bizarre time during an irresponsible freeway maneuver. To pose Yakuza-style in the baddest sedan on the block, B-pillars swimming barely seen beneath the glass. To feel the 276-horsepower, quad-cam V-8 punch you back into the impeccably tasteful interior.
Then, and only then, if you can dream with me, if you can believe what I believe, then you might be able to look through the stupid Q-names and the dumb-assed rocks-and-trees marketing and the aftermarket Skyline badges and the unfocused-looking Pathfinder rebadge and the Jersey shore types crowding each owner’s meet and just hold this idea in your head:
Infiniti didn’t always suck.
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