Welcome to an unauthorized diversion from our core purpose called another episode of TTAC At The Movies. I’m your host, Jack Baruth, and this time we will be looking at a movie that is unlikely to find too much American viewership. (This is the second such review on TTAC; the first is here. Still, we are the site which had three people review the Camry.) Those who do watch it, however, are likely to be very passionate about the subject.

Quoth the Wiki:

In 2009, a poll of 217 current and former Formula One drivers conducted by the British magazine Autosport named [Aryton] Senna as the greatest Formula One driver.[2][6] He was recognised for his qualifying speed over one lap and from 1989 until 2006 held the record for most pole positions. He was especially quick in wet conditions, as shown by his performances in the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix, the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix, and the 1993 European Grand Prix. He also holds the record for most victories at the prestigious Monaco Grand Prix – six – and is the third most successful driver of all time in terms of race wins.

As with Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and a host of other notables, Senna’s already lustrous reputation was burnished by death in his prime; unlike the champions who succeeded him, most notably Villeneuve and Schumacher, nobody ever had to watch Senna plod through depressing end-of-career, back-of-the-pack seasons. (Of course, one might want to ask precious little Lewis Hamilton whether Herr Schumacher still has any fight left in him.) The documentary Senna is intended to be watchable by both F1 “anoraks” and people who are utterly ignorant of the sport. When Vodka McBigbra and I showed up to watch it on Friday night, therefore, we had a representative of each type.

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When scanning old negatives for the most recent installment of the Impala Hell Project series, I found these Ansco Pix Panorama camera shots that I took in gritty, grimy, industrial Hayward, California in 1993. They didn’t add anything to the Impala Hell Project story, so I’m sharing them in a separate post. Read More >

Fabio writes:

Hi Sajeev,

I have been asked by an uncle if I would like to his 91 Mercedes 300E (he has supplied all of his children and is now moving to the extended family). It has 230K km (140K miles) and looks to be in pretty good condition. He’s mentioned that it has been very reliable. The purchase price would be negligible and the insurance is reasonable. One of my concerns is that I would be using the car as my daily driver (it would be replacing my current 99 Grand Am (170K miles) and I wanted to get another take on that – is it reasonable, or is it not a good idea.

I’ve read a bit up on that vehicle and it seems to have a decent reputation for longevity (with the required maintenance). I was hoping if you could provide some insight as to whether this seems like a feasible idea, or would I just be better off sticking with the Grand Am.

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I find a lot of AMC Eagles in Denver, both in and out of the junkyards, but almost all of them are wagons. During a recent junkyard visit, I spotted the first Spirit-based Eagle I’ve seen in a long time. Read More >

The theme that’s emerged most clearly from my interview with Bob Lutz was, somewhat counterintuitively, compromise. Every vehicle that’s developed and built is the product of nearly countless compromises, on everything from performance to efficiency, and from weight and materials to cost. The question isn’t so much if you compromise when developing a new car, but how you compromise… as was demonstrated in our last Lutzian anecdote. And even during my interview, as the conversation bounced from GM to Chrysler, from mass-market products to niche halo cars, I was thrilled that this issue kept coming up. Why? Because this theme played perfectly into the question that was at the top of my list of prepared questions. After all, there has been a mystery haunting GM followers for some time now… a mystery that I’d never seen a journalist ever ask about. And there I was, sitting with one of the few people who was even capable of fully answering it. So I just waited for a pause, opened my mouth and asked:

Why do GM cars weigh more than other cars?

I had no idea what kind of answer to expect… but I definitely wasn’t expecting the answer I got.

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Bob Lutz admitted in his book Guts that he “possesses a certain duality of mind,” and he ain’t kidding. After all, how could someone spend a career in an industry built on “the industrial logic of scale” (to borrow a phrase from Sergio Marchionne) while trying to connect new vehicles with the lust centers of the human brain without developing a certain amount of creative schizophrenia? But, as anyone who has ever driven a Pontiac Solstice knows, sometimes compromises are made between the conflicting pulls of lust and practicality… and when those compromises must be made, Lutz tends to err on the side of lust. I confronted him about this tendency in our recent conversation, and rather than accept the criticism, he doubled down on his premise that lust-worthy design is more important than practicality. And he illustrated his point by telling the tale of a long-forgotten concept and its troubled path to production.

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It’s been a bit of a meta-critical and navel-gazing week or so here at TTAC. We’ve been reviewed and discussed by other media sources, we’ve reviewed and discussed a few media sources ourselves, and we’ve even had a delightful piece by Brendan McAleer which sort of reviews our own reviews of someone else’s review of us.

It’s safe to say that we will probably be taking a break from this sort of thing for a while so that we can bring you some more of the authentic TTAC content you’ve come to know and love. Clinical, yet strangely erotic, descriptions of trunk space. Callous disregard for human decency in the last of the Ford full-sizers. Chinese business news. That sort of thing.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, we will continue to encounter “content” from our colleagues in the business which is mendaciously conceived, shamelessly produced, and incompetently edited. Which leads me to my question:

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In Part 10, the Hell Project Impala got Fiat scoops on the hood and hit the I-5 trail again. By late 1993, the car looked more or less the way I’d planned when I started the project and had become a surprisingly good daily driver (thanks to more modern brakes and a reliable, HEI-equipped 350 engine). I still planned to do some suspension and horsepower upgrades, once the early 1990s recession relaxed its grip enough for me to land a decent-paying job, but the setup I had was fulfilling my driving needs very well. Then, in the spring of ’94, Richard Nixon died, and I decided to take the Nixon-hood-ornamented car down to his birthplace and mingle with the mourners. Read More >

When bearded flip-flop enthusiast and serial-ruiner Jonny Lieberman recently wrote about his new long-term-tester fantasy ride – a stick-shifted, murda’d-out Caddy CTS-V wagon – he facebooked a prediction, “Cue the Baruth-venom in 3…2…1…” Quoth JB in response, “No venom here. In the best liberal fashion I have censured you for the ethics of it and moved on.”

Those of us in the peanut gallery goggled at the collegiality of the kaijus of contrarianism; thank goodness they weren’t going to start throwing buildings at each other again. Now Frank Greve’s AJR piece on auto-journo shillsterism has shown up, basically lauding Mr. Baruth as the Last Honest Man In Auto Journalism™ and intimating that Motor Trend is, by comparison, the painted whore of Babylon. Jeez, hasn’t Tokyo suffered enough?

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It actually comes with a little book too!

Patrick writes:

Hi Sajeev,

Avid daily reader of the site but infrequent commenter… Pony Cars and old Volvos sometimes drag me out of my shell but I have a couple questions about my wife’s car and I wanted to see what you and others might think.

We’ve got a 2007 3.5L Impala with 60,000 miles on it and it is due for an oil change and checkup:

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Traditionally, when Detroit mass-produces luxury, it stamps out heraldic crests and classy-sounding names by the ton. Back in the day, the East Saginaw Lux-U-Ree Works worked three shifts belting out chrome-plated pot-metal emblems for the Big Three, but everything had gone to plastic by the Reagan era. I had forgotten about Salon-edition cars until last week, when I spotted this one at a Denver wrecking yard. Read More >

Living in Denver gives me a great perspective on the history of the four-wheel-drive car. Nowadays, it’s pretty much an all-Subaru affair around these parts (an observer who never left Denver would make the extrapolation that Subaru is one of the top-selling— if not the top-selling— marques in the world), but there was a time when Eagles and 4WD Tercels and many others slugged it out with the machines from Fuji Heavy. Here’s an example of Honda’s nearly-forgotten four-wheel-drive wagon, finally heading for The Crusher’s cold jaws after nearly a quarter-century of work. Read More >

Having the Falcon next to it for scale makes identification of this crazy, small-block-Chevy-powered drag car much easier. It’s not the kind of vehicle you expect to see at Colorado’s Bandimere Speedway on Test-n-Tune Night. Read More >

Poor Jacqui. Her ’64 Chevelle sedan looked great with her name on the trunklid, surrounded by airbrushed vines and flowers. Then the mean tow-truck man showed up and hauled it away. Read More >

After spending some time in Israel, Botswana and Malta over the last few weeks, we are back in Asia this weekend to visit flooded Bangladesh.

If the sight of flooded streets is becoming too much for you, that’s okay, I have thought of you and prepared info about car sales in 155 additional countries that you can explore in my blog, so click away!

Now back to Bangladesh. With over 140 million inhabitants living in a country significantly smaller than Florida, you’d expect traffic jams to be commonplace, and they are indeed.

It’s just that the streets are not filled with the cars you’d expect from a country relatively similar to big neighbor India…

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