TTAC commentator Juniperbug writes:

I live in Montreal. Currently I have an old, unreliable sport bike as a recreational summer vehicle, doing most of my commuting via a mediocre public transit system. I’m considering buying a newish car for work and play. I’m 25, single, full-time employed at a moderately-paying job, and going to be studying part-time to boot. I love heel-toeing just about anything I get my mitts on, and am looking for driving pleasure and not outright speed. Spaciousness is not a priority for my current lifestyle (but is appreciated), but reliability and cost-efficiency are. A 2006-ish Miata seemed to be a great candidate, but while searching the classifieds I noticed that there’s a whole slew of RX-8’s available with around 20k miles for similar money as the Miata.

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I remember when I was 16 years old, one of my friend’s dad had a near-new Toyota Celica All-Trac. It was gorgeous. The black paint was svelte and flawless. The leather pristine. It was a true work of art. Except it had one tiny little flaw on the vehicle. The VIN was not ‘authentic.’ It had been taken off another vehicle from ‘far far away.’ This was in the bad old days where odometer rollbacks (which still happen) and washed titles (ditto) were still common. Today? Well, I’ll put it to you this way, even a finance company with as many computers as NASA was screwed seven ways from Sunday by a bunch of Nigerians using an old lady’s information. The clunker auditors are going to have to keep their eyes REAL open in this ‘information age’ to catch these snakes . . . and it won’t be easy. Here’s just a small slither of stealth that can happen just on the trade-in side of the equation.

What can happen once a vehicle is traded in? An awful lot. For starters it can be sent abroad. Really. Really. Cheap. It got so bad that the Mexican government (one of many destinations) decided to allow only ten-year-old cars to be registered that came from Yankeeland. It didn’t matter in the end though what the government’s ‘official’ position was. The business of bribery continues to this day on both sides of the fence, and cars found their way into the system regardless of what the laws were. By the way, Mexico is just one place where a ‘clunker’ won’t be missed.

What does this mean for cash for clunkers? It means there isn’t much stopping a recycling center from stripping off the VIN’s. Giving the requisite pictures and evidence to whoever needs it, and making private arrangements to send the vehicle outside the US. The percentage profit would be somewhere between a title pawn and meth distribution, and the governments ability to track it down through paperwork alone would be zero. So long as the VINs match, the people are genuine buyers, and the people involved keep their yaps shut, it will just be a nice four figured profit per vehicle. No questions asked. But this is just really a very small slice of ‘trade-in’ paradise. A far bigger one?

Open up your local newspaper and look under the ‘auction’ or ‘impound’ section. You’ll see hundreds of vehicles with their VIN numbers displayed in all their glory. Most of these cars come from folks who don’t want or need their clunker anymore. They may be as poor as dirt, taking drugs, out of work, or in jail, but they still technically own it. The price to buy one of their clunkers at a public auction? If it’s fit for the crusher, the cost today is about $100 due to cheap commodity prices. The prior owner has to be notified before the sale and this information is often in turn given to the new owner of the vehicle.

Many of these vehicles are never put into a new name. If it’s got even a breath of light, it can be ‘flipped’ and sold with the paperwork intact. No questions asked and no profits traced. There is absolutely no auditing for the transfer of ownership in most states. Just the proceeds from the sale. With a very small level of computer knowledge (or bribery) you can also find out practically everything about the person.

Since ‘Cash for Clunkers’ doesn’t require that the person have insurance for the vehicle before trade-in, there’s no stoppage that can occur there. Big mistake. A lot of folks who get their vehicles sent to the impound/tow lots usually move, involuntarily, without a forwarding address. In turn a lot of apartment complexes will request the towing of a vehicle from their property if the vehicle has anything from an expired tag to an eviction.

You can get these car for almost nothing if you’re a professional, develop a Fake ID with a little help and monetary dispensation, buy the car using their identity, and simply have the government paperwork forwarded to a PO Box which can then secure the taxpayer largesse. It’s easy. Unless those who audit this operation can track the VIN’s status online, which is hard since a lot of the local papers aren’t given an online edition, everything will seem picture perfect to an auditor.

But there are ways to find this information out. One would be to target the audits based on income. If a person is only earning $15,000 a year and they’re buying a car for the same price, that would be a red flag. So would contacting the county government and finding out whether the vehicle was impounded at a certain point. Court orders and impounds require paper trails and most of them can be found in a minute’s time. There is also one very strong impediment to sending these cars out of the US. That would be to have the clunker sent ‘on-site’ to a salvage auction where it could be crushed in exchange for receiving the rebate.

If the auditors are positioned there and literally see the crushing of the car, it eliminates the possibility of the car being recycled somewhere else. The system would hardly be a fail-safe at this point. But it would be a start. In the next installment I’ll focus on the dealer.

Curbside Classics takes you back to 1971 for a virtual comparison test of six small cars, based (and partly borrowed) from a C/D test.

If you were going to a speed-dating event, and were thirty-three years older than all the “competition”, you might be forgiven for wanting some quick cosmetic surgery. But if the result was a reverse Michael Jackson, you’d damn well better hope that your “experience” and “build”, and other timeless qualities are still in demand. Otherwise, your days finding willing partners/buyers are numbered, like this 1971 VW Super Beetle.

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.]

So how long before New GM fires Uncle Fritz? In the most pragmatic of all possible worlds, where the Presidential Task Force on Automobiles (PTFOA) looked out for the taxpayers’ $50 billion as if it were their own—Fritz wouldn’t even BE GM’s CEO. Henderson would have been defenestrated along with Rick Wagoner. You know: the ex-CEO who groomed Henderson as his replacement. (How hard is it to connect those dots?) Henderson has assured his place in The Peter Principle Hall of Fame, capping his career as the PTFOA’s toady. And now, best case, he should follow Old GM onto the scrap heap of history. Not a chance.

The fact that Henderson wasn’t terminated with extreme prejudice the moment the United States government assumed complete control of General Motors tells us that Uncle Fritz is no Richard Nixon; the PTFOA will have Henderson to kick around some more. I repeat: the man’s a patsy.

Fritz didn’t decide to kill thousands of GM dealers. Fritz didn’t decide which GM brands to keep. Why would he? They’re family. White collar cull? Heaven forfend! We’ll use attrition. Mr. Henderson, it’s Congressman Barney Frank on the other line, asking for a stay of execution for a GM parts distribution facility in his constituency. Mary, why didn’t you forward this to the PTFOA? If I told you once—Barney! Hi! What’s that? I’ll check. Rest assured, I feel your pain. [Joke deleted].

Anyone harboring illusions that Uncle Fritz is large and in charge should note: Henderson didn’t take the stand and tell federal bankruptcy court that New GM had to be created by July 10—or die. It was Harry J. Wilson, a heretofore unknown member of the PTFOA. “We have no intention to further fund this company if the sale order is not entered by July 10,” Mr. Wilson told Judge Gerber. “It’s better to cut one’s losses.”

One’s losses? Hey Bub, those are MY losses you’re talking about. Anyway, who talks like that? Not Uncle Fritz. In fact, let’s pay a little attention to the man behind the curtain  . . .

“Prior to joining Silver Point in 2003, Mr. Wilson was a principal in the private equity business at The Blackstone Group, where he completed a number of private equity investments and leveraged buyouts,”youthinc-usa.org reports. “Mr. Wilson began his career in the Investment Banking Division at Goldman, Sachs & Co., where he worked in the Energy & Power group on a range of merger and corporate finance transactions.”

Hang on; the same Blackstone Group that competed with Cerberus to buy Chrysler? Yup. Although my wife destroyed my tin foil hat whilst heating-up some chicken nuggets, it’s clear that’s a cabal of investment bankers—led by Steve Rattner and Ron Bloom—are deciding the fate of the artist known as the world’s largest automaker. While Barack Obama has publicly stated his intention to “let GM run GM” [presidential paraphrasing], nothing could be further from the truth. Uncle Fritz is so not The Man.

So why keep him around? First, remember that the general public couldn’t give a damn who’s running GM. In fact, they’ve never heard of Uncle Fritz. If they see him on the tube, well, he looks nice. Avuncular. Credible. Non-threatening. So why not?

Second, as GM’s former CFO, Henderson is an excellent pencil pusher. If you were a member of the PTFOA and wanted to grab some numbers upon which to base your otherwise uninformed decisions about the automaker’s fate, Henderson’s the go-to guy. He couldn’t save GM if his life depended on it, but Uncle Fritz knows his onions.

Most importantly of all, Fritz is a terrific fall guy. If/when GM’s NA sales fall [further] into the trash, the PTFOA can throw Henderson on the pyre. The President has taken new steps to put General Motors on the path to profitability; a management shake-up is on its way!

The PTFOA should, of course, dump Henderson now. What better way to celebrate New GM’s birth, to draw a line under Old Skanky GM, than offing the bureaucratic bumbler who helped bring The General to the brink in the first place? Passing the torch PR, and all that.

Yes, well, who would replace Uncle Fritz?

As TTAC’s Ken Elias has pointed out, there are only a handful of auto executives capable of running GM, even in its truncated form. The number who could turn the ailing American automaker around is even smaller. And none of these talents is likely to do so for $500,000: the salary cap dictated by Congress for TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) recipients. Also, any CEO who’d take on the job (for real) would want independence from the PTFOA. And the PTFOA can’t have that, now can they?

So Uncle Fritz will soldier on. Or not. Either way, GM is unlikely to receive the one thing it needs to survive: leadership.

TTAC snark-master Frank Williams writes,

My A4s both have a really bad problem with brake dust on the front wheels. Sometimes the wheels look almost like they’re black chrome instead of alloy. I’ve seen advertisements for dust shields that fit between the brake and the wheel that are supposed to keep the wheels clean (Kleen Wheels is one brand). I’ve always been wary of these, as I feared they might impede brake cooling and could result in damage to the rotors or even brake failure.  Have you or any of the readers had any experience with these? Do they really work, and are my fears of brake damage unfounded? And most importantly, do they look dorky – the automotive equivalent of a pocket protector?

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Flashback: Last time, Bernd Schäfers, Herr S. of Volkswagen and his gang, and yours truly were on a mountain top at the southern tip of Spain, out of luck and out of film. Pulling a daredevil stunt, Bernd had somehow saved me from being slaughtered and fired.

What now?

As the sun kept rising, we collected our equipment and our thoughts. We drove down the mountain to our base in Sotogrande. In the back seat, Herr S. lectured his Spanish-speaking assistant again why we had to abort the movie making: “That light, despite looking beautiful to the untrained eye, would have ruined the whole shot.”

We had lied to him. I yearned for Maalox or something stronger.

Down behind the secured gates of the Sotogrande golf course, Bernd and I went into a private crisis meeting: Read More >

Hey. RF here. How’s it going? I’ll tell you how it’s going: it’s going well. Piston Slap has been an entertaining and informative addition to the TTAC cannon [sic]. Sajeev has proven himself a diligent and insightful advisor to the mechanically challenged amongst us. I fully expect The Divine Mr. M to syndicate Piston Slap nationwide, pouring tens of dollars into TTAC’s coffers, wetting our corporate beak. OK, so, now, the guy needs questions. Grist for his mill. Please take five minutes out of your busy day to pepper Mr. Mehta on the mysteries of mechanical malfeasance. Send your queries to mehta@ttac.com. Remember: they don’t have to be real questions. In the spirit of this website’s name, you can ask him something about which you already know the answer—just to show him up in the comments section. Anyway, Sajeev wishes his fellow Americans a happy Fourth of July weekend, and in no way hopes that you’ll have car trouble requiring his sage advice.

In the wake of JD Powers’ Initial Quality Survey, several other lesser-known awards are giving OEMs a whole new reason to cobble together a press release touting their top place, improvement or mere presence in one of these meaningless satisfaction surveys. And why not? It’s summer, and things (sales, in specific) are slow. And the award fandango is win-win. The awards allow OEMs to ridiculously inflate the importance of their results, while publicizing the research firms that created the awards. Case in point, the Dodge Ram.

The Ram got top full-size truck honors in the “Strategic Vision Total Quality Index,” a result that prompted the Chrysler Blog headline “Ram Ranked as Best Truck Ever (No Exaggeration).” Except that the survey (like so many meaningless surveys) only gathers impressions of quality and satisfaction from owners of 2008/2009 models, providing a less-than complete picture of “total quality.” In other words, yes exaggeration. But by embracing subjectivity and endless categorization, the awards dance keeps shuffling along.

“We know Total Quality is strengthened by delighting customers and getting them to love you. We stand ready to include love in all the work that we do since measuring love is the next step in discriminating between winning and losing in today’s competitive environment,” explains Strategic Vision’s Darrel Edwards.

But how do you measure such an ineffable emotion with any reliability? As the Bard put it, “love is not love which alters when it alteration [Ed: or awkward panel gap] finds, Or Bends with the remover to remove. O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark.” In short, who doesn’t love their new car? Finding out whether a car lives up to its owner’s expectations is more a measure of the owners than the car.

“Vehicles that score highest in the Vehicle Satisfaction Awards hit the mark with their buyers by delivering value and satisfaction across a wide range of attributes,” says George Peterson, of Auto Pacific, and grand pimp of the 2009 Vehicle Satisfaction Awards. “The winners perform well in 48 separate categories that objectively measure the ownership experience.”

Leaving the challenge of “objectively measuring satisfaction” aside for a moment, that’s 48 freaking categories! Which means every OEM is guaranteed to have at least one “class-leading” vehicle to brag about in press release which backhandedly legitimizes the award. Which is the whole point.

Not that such circle-jerkery is necessarily an inherently bad thing. People often buy cars for irrational reasons, a fact that has gone a long way towards making the auto industry what it is today. If consumers want to factor an aggregation of opinion and after-the-fact purchase justification into their decisions, so be it. But it’s not like either partner in the awards fandango acknowledges that the data in question is scarcely an improvement on a single random opinion of a given car.

“In a year that promises to be the toughest in more than a decade, car buyers are being especially prudent, and the data we’ve analyzed for the Vehicle Satisfaction Award will help this year’s customers make wise purchase decisions,” says Peterson of his award. “We’ve found that more than 25% of respondents are positively influenced by awards like the VSA when deciding on a car and this trend will certainly continue given the economy.”

But wise purchase decisions have nothing to do with it. These awards are little more than marketing information, to be overemphasized by marketing departments. To the consumer, a test drive will tell you more about your likely satisfaction with a given vehicle than any survey can (incidentally,whatever happened to the 24 hour test drive?). Meanwhile, despite slow sales across the industry, every OEM has at least one “winner.” And therein lies the real problem.

The proliferation of meaningless awards contributes to what is already one of the banes of the auto industry: attention span drain. Just as most consumers would be hard pressed to match every automotive brand with its OEM, the public is so inundated with quality survey awards that it’s impossible to expect consumers to seperate the wheat from the chaff. And the wild divergence in results only adds to the confusion.

Jaguar/Land Rover and Volkswagen, for example, may rank towards the bottom in more objective long-term quality and reliability testing, but a press release based on the opinions of buyers who have yet to experience engine sludging or electrical issues conveniently allows them to tout their quality and out-publicize their negative results.

Meanwhile, the awards keep on coming. There are infinite paths to an ill-advised vehicle purchase, but awards purporting to measure intangible attributes using questionable methodologies continue to be the best publicized of the bunch. Deluding consumers and OEMs alike may be good for business, but not in any meaningful or sustainable way.

Consumers, in particular, would be well served to ditch the annual awards and focus instead on methodical, long-term reliability studies such as Consumer Reports or True Delta. If emotional reactions to a vehicle are (for some reason) important to your buying decision, even online forums offer a broader range of reactions and dialogue than an awards aggregate. The truth is out there, but only if you look past the press releases touting useless awards.

General Motors is launching a fourth of July sale: “Buy and Say Goodbye.” From July 1 to July 6, the bankrupt automaker’s offering 0% financing for up to 72 months on “most” of its dead brand walking Pontiac models and “some other vehicles.” More specifically, “select 2009 and 2010 vehicles in dealer stock including Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra regular, extended and crew cab light-duty pickups; Chevrolet Suburban and GMC Yukon XL SUVs; Chevrolet Impala; and the Pontiac models: Vibe, G3, G5, G6 and G8.” But wait! There’s more! “Many other vehicles will have reduced rate financing of 0 percent for up to 60 months for well-qualified buyers. A full list of current offers, conditions, and eligible vehicles, is available at: http://www.gm.com/shop/currentoffers/.” Not yet it isn’t. So that’s number six on our list of reasons why this sale is dumber than toast. Counting down . . .

5. Blowing Bubbles — Isn’t this exactly the kind of fiscal irresponsibility that led to GMAC’s 11th hour, backroom bailout, not to mention the previous, company-killing new car bubble? In its defense, GM says the “Buy and Say Goodbye” sale’s six year loans are reserved for “well qualified buyers.” Yeah, right. What are the odds that beleaguered/doomed GM dealers are going to turn away the last possible customers for moribund metal? Anyone for anyone with a pulse deals again? How about rolling that backwards SUV into the deal! Sure! Look how well that worked out the first time! Or is the old “bait and switch” routine? Sorry, you don’t qualify for zero percent, but let’s talk. Either way, is this how a federally financed, [soon-to-be] taxpayer owned automaker should behave?

4. Damp Squib — Yes, GM’s got to do something to get rid of the dealers’ “rabbit in the python” inventory problem. If they can goose their sale numbers so that the newly nationalized automaker smells less like crap coming out of bankruptcy, so much the better. But wouldn’t it have been more effective if GM had offered cash on the hood—OK, lots more cash on the hood—than trying to entice car buyers with cheap loans? Hello? Consumer confidence is lower than an ant’s abdomen. Didn’t GM get the memo about Hyundai and Ford’s “if you get fired” guarantees? The exact same people who want/need six year loans are either how-low-can-we-go FICO folk or shit-scared of losing their jobs. So . . . good luck with that.

3. Another Bottom Line Boondoggle — The “Buy and Say Goodbye” sale reaffirms GM’s rep as America’s discount car company. To paraphrase Robin Hood’s merry men in Shrek, that’s bad; that’s very very bad. Still, it can’t be helped. More importantly, the sale continues GM pattern of obfuscation (an obfuscatory word for “misleading”). As Buickman has ranted for years, GM has so many special offers it’s virtually impossible for dealers to ascertain which discounts apply to what vehicle for whom. The bottom line: nobody knows the bottom line. Zero percent on what? This gimmick may mop up the remaining four-square suckers, but it runs completely counter to CEO Fritz Henderson’s transparency pledge. No surprise there.

2. The Timing Sucks — While car companies and Fourth of July sales go together like Rick Wagoner and a Gulfstream G4 (Dammit, I miss that plane!), now’s not the best time for GM to launch a Fire Sale, however fleeting. Surely someone at GM knows it has one chance to draw a line in the public’s mind between “Old GM” and “New GM.” Oh, wait, they’ve already done it! So, if the New “reinvented” GM is already a-born, whose sale is this anyway? Is it New GM’s garage sale or Old GM staggering to its grave? And why is it only 72 hours? What’s New GM going to do with the old vehicles that Old GM doesn’t sell? Not discount them? Sorry, guys, your customers are trained. Once again, GM shows its propensity for feeble half-measures.

1. Worst. Sale. Name. Ever. — “Buy and Say Goodbye”? WTF? The marketing geniuses at GM decided to meld their Fourth of July fire sale with a pitch for Cash For Clunkers custom. Hence the “Say Goodbye” bit. But who’s going to make that connection? And even if they do, the more obvious meaning remains: Say Goodbye to GM. Quick! Buy a car ’cause we’re about to take a dirt nap. Alternatively, “Buy A Car and Piss Off.” In fact, “Buy and Say Goodbye” has to be the worst name for a marketing campaign in the history of the world, ever.

As any recovering entrepreneur will tell you, there’s only one way to run a “going out of business sale”: discount the merchandise by a fixed percentage across the board. And call it by its real name. That GM’s suits couldn’t grasp this fact tells you all you need to know about their future prospects.

TTAC commentator Patrickj writes:

I have a 2006 Ford Freestyle with about 75,000 miles. I like it well enough, including the CVT, and it has been very reliable, but I can’t say I love it. Biggest current issue with the car is wear on the interior, especially carpets. The high depreciation is a sunk cost, and I’m not going to decide anything on that basis. Problem is, there’s nothing else I’m particularly eager to drive that has the cargo room, comfort for a big driver (6 feet, 230 pounds), and any better gas mileage for my long commute.

Several Piston Slap posters basically said that the CVT was something to run away from, and that I’ve already pushed it well beyond its expected lifetime. I had the fluid changed by the dealer at 55K miles.

Am I committing the car ownership equivalent of driving on the wrong side of the interstate? Is the expense of CVT repair that high and that imminent? At 3 years old, shouldn’t I be able to get a transmission from a low mileage wreck if it does fail?

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Curbside Classics takes you back to 1971 for a virtual comparison test of six small cars, based on (and partly borrowed) from a C&D test.

Was a car ever born with the odds so stacked against it? Its name is defined as “a small gnome held to be responsible for malfunction of equipment.” Its design was penned on an air-sickness bag during a (bumpy?) flight. It carries almost sixty percent of its weight over the front wheels despite being RWD. Its steering has six turns lock to lock. And it looks exactly like what it is: a perfectly normal-looking sedan that had its rear end amputated by a cleaver. The Gremlin would have had to create a pretty major malfunction in my PC (and C&D‘s typewriters) for it not to end dead last. Read More >

TTAC commentator Detroit-Iron writes:

I am in the process of buying a new car (despite Steven Lang’s admonitions). I would like to get a 2009 after the 2010’s come out, maybe a Legacy or Ralliart. My problem is that there is zero information on the specific month that a given manufacturer is going to release the 10s. I can understand the manufacturers and dealers wanting to keep that info under wraps considering the inventory but I would think that a journalist or consumer advocate would have it, but I can’t find anything.

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In general, today’s cars don’t put us in mortal peril (by themselves) or strand us miles from home. They don’t require any special driving or mechanical skills. As always, progress has come at a cost: it’s eliminated the character-building experiences that helped guys of my g-g-g-generation become “car guys.” Yup, I come from a time without cell phones, GPS navigation, OnStar, and vehicles that can breeze through 100,000 miles with little to no fear of meltdown. A time when cars offered a shorter shelf but more human – machine interaction. When car guys could look under the hood, see a problem and correct it. On the spot. I’m not bragging, so don’t put me down. Not yet, anyway.

Over the years, many a car has left me on the side of the road. I’ve seen blown up u-joints, water pumps, transmissions, alternators and starters. I’ve been in cars with busted clutches and blown gaskets. In fact, I’ve encountered failure in pretty much every component between the front bumper and the rear bumper. Few of these experiences were accompanied by a standard-issue warm and fuzzy Walt Disney ending—unless you include Bambi and Old Yeller in the mix. But they were all powerfully instructive experiences (the movies, too).

Today’s cell phone-wielding, speed-dialing AAA members will have no idea what I’m talking about. In the olden days, a breakdown mandated an immediate, hands-on mechanical inspection. Check belts, hoses, electrical connections, etc. Look for missing pieces. Listen for strange sounds. Check for puddles. Find a tool. Adjust, tinker, experiment. Pray. Repeat.

I view some of my unscheduled roadside pit-stops as impromptu shop class. For example, I learned that’s it always advisable to grease wheel bearings when I first heard the god-awful sound of a wheel bearing dying a horrible death on my way home. The same experience taught me that extreme heat makes for a great weld on parts that shouldn’t actually be welded together.

I repeat: living in a world without the luxury of dependable cavalry, malfunctions taught me to think on my feet. And how to drive.

I once had a charging problem on a busy highway at 2AM in the morning. There were exactly two solutions to this dilemma: pull on the headlights and listen to the sound of a car in mid-stall or leave the headlights off and continue the journey.

As a teenager ninety miles from home after eight hours on the road, the choice was easy (if monumentally foolish). I kept going. I tucked in behind a semi and followed his clearance lights. The trucker was an unwilling Good Samaritan; he flicked his rear lights continuously for the first 50 miles. But eventually he gave up and got on with the program. I never met the guy, but we shared one of those life-affirming moments despite his obvious initial blind terror. 10-4, good buddy.

Now that the statute of limitations has passed, I also admit piloting a brakeless car home. I wouldn’t recommend this kind of driving to anybody, but it does train you to look down the road a lot further than the average kid with a working set of brakes.

Of course, most of my roadside education was preventable. If I’d bought into the concept of the most basic maintenance, I’d have spent less time swearing at cars, skinning my knuckles and praising the Lord when my journey continued. But let’s face it; planning ahead is a rare part of any teenager’s game plan. At least not in the non-geek component of a high school environment where most of us desperately wanted to live.

Like all kids at my age, I learned everything the hard way—including the time I found out that a 1962 Volvo may look like a VW Beetle, but it doesn’t float like one. I had a 17-year-old’s less than stellar grasp of the legal implications of his daredevil behavior and wasn’t afraid not to use it.

Fast forward and we’ve arrived in a new era, where kids negotiate the Nürburgring in the comfort of their parent’s living rooms, without once worrying about flat tires, carburetor failure, fan belts breaking, etc. And when they take to the road, they can do so with the same ignorance and insouciance.

You could say that engineering excellence has sucked the life blood out of the automotive experience. Sure, today’s cars are remarkably easy to drive. Joe Consumer no longer has to calculate his chances of getting there from here, or acquire skills to raise the odds. But we’ve lost that hands-on spirit of adventure. Plastic engine covers and restrictive warranties deflect amateur interest. A significant percentage of problems are electronic, for which a wrench is less useful than package of Hamburger Helper.

I’m not saying that the average motorist yearns for a return to the days of “car trouble” and a reasonable chance of fixing it. I’m just saying that I am.

[For more of Jim Sutherland’s work, please visit mystarcollectorcar.com]

TTAC commentator Aren Cambre writes:

I have a question about my 2002 Nissan Maxima. A while back, I had the battery disconnected for a few hours. After reconnecting, the car forgot how to maintain idle right after starting: if I don’t nudge the gas pedal for several seconds after starting, RPMs fall to 0. Internet research is conflicting. Some say it will heal on its own, others say dealer-only repair.

It’s been a few months now. How do I fix this? Is it really dealer only? If I don’t fix, will I hurt the car? (I don’t mind nudging the gas pedal–kind of like when I set the carburetor choke on my ’74 Nova.)

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