“It’s nice to be liked,” my future third wife Liz Phair sings, “but it’s better by far to get paid.” When your humble author began a vigorous program of auto-media meta-criticism under the guidance of the august Robert Farago a few years ago, I expected to be hated by my peers, and I was. I expected to be shunned by the industry PR people, and I was. I even feared I might be the subject of underhanded personal attacks designed to cost me my job, my home, and my ability to feed my son, and I wasn’t disappointed in that, either. The only thing I didn’t expect was to be emulated.

Now we have the nice folks at FORTUNE doing their own meta-critical review-the-reviewers, complete with double helpings of cynicism and supposition. Their target: The new Chevrolet Malibu ECO. They credit TTAC’s own Michael Karesh with being “an early sign that consensus was building” on the car. And the verdict?

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Sometimes, the Ford Facebook pages bring you horrifying news like “We commissioned Tanner Foust, Vaughn Gittin Jr., Brian Deegan, Ken Block, and other amazing drivers to take the Focus ST through its paces against competitors for our upcoming video series dubbed, ‘ST Sessions.'”

If the thought of indirectly paying those four, ah, individuals to “hoon” by purchasing a new Focus ST hasn’t completely made you lose your appetite, there’s now some actual news regarding the car to share:

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A few years ago, a wave of internet-fueled utopian ideas were supposed to headline yet another “paradigm shift” (or whatever throwaway bullshit term you wish to substitute) as the Web 2.0 revolution made us all more “open” or “social” or “connected”. Then, most of us woke up and realized that this was all a scheme by a bunch of social maladroits to get rich using our personal data, and we all went back to living our lives.

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Browsing TrueCar’s top lease deals for July, 2012 yielded an interesting find; a lease deal on the Chevrolet Volt that specifically excludes HOV-lane qualified versions.

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When Joel Ewanick left Hyundai and signed on as GM’s marketing top gun, some people asked when he would do something like Hyundai’s warranties. Others said GM won’t dare. Announcing two new programs, GM dares, carefully. Read More >

A lawsuit filed by a Florida investor against General Motors over the age-old practice of “channel stuffing”, or sending inventory to dealers and recording it as a “sale”, so that revenue numbers can be pumped up while the vehicles languish on dealer lots. The practice of channel stuffing is universal in the auto industry, but in this case, the consequences are much broader.

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Car-shopping service TrueCar allegedly is getting disenchanted with its partner Yahoo. In January, TrueCar became Yahoo’s exclusive auto-shopping partner, for a fee. Automotive News [sub] says the price was $50 million per year over three years. AN also says that TrueCar ended that deal. Read More >

Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to take a look at our favorite automotive urination competition, the epic battle between the Chevrolet Volt, Nissan Leaf and the Toyota Prius Plug-In.

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The Wall Street Journal’s Driver’s Seat touches on the muscle car segment, and whether they’ll fall pitfall to rising gas prices in the future, CAFE regulations or some combination of the two. Among the solutions brought up in the article – by Chrysler executives, no less – is “a high output four-cylinder engine”.

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The McLaren MP4-12C may be a supremely competent and accomplished sporting supercar, but only someone with a creepy, shiny-vinyl Lewis Hamilton signature Vodafone pit-crew shirt would pick one over the Ferrari 458 or Lamborgini Gallardo. It’s a bland, generic-looking wedge that was named after a secret “performance factor” number using calculations known only to McLaren. Not since Pontiac named a car the “6000STE” has nomenclature been so uninspiring, and since the Audi R8 offers twice the visual drama for about half the money it’s easy to see why the MP4-12C isn’t exactly setting the world on fire. The old SLR “McMerc” may have been a claustrophobic sauna that was frighteningly vulnerable to its much cheaper SL65 AMG sibling in a straight line and at risk from the even more prole-oriented SL55 AMG around a racetrack, but at least it looked like something interesting.

Just like the SLR, however, the MP4-12C is being top-chopped to pique a bit of consumer interest. It must absolutely grind the gears of the faceless androids working at the McLaren Technology Centre that they have to add eighty-eight pounds of folding hardtop to their marquee road car, just to make sure the average Russian gangster puts one in the garage next to his Aventador, but as the English say: “Needs must when the devil rides”.

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Bloomberg is reporting that General Motors and Facebook are talking again, in an attempt to get GM to resume advertising on the social network. Meetings between GM CEO Dan Akerson and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg were being reported.

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You can tell it’s a slow news day when something like this gets so much traction across the blogosphere. Puritalia, a brand-new Italian company which claims to be able to build, like, whatever car you could imagine, has taken the wraps off a picture of a “427” roadster. Although they claim to be inspired by Shelby, there’s another possibility which is in no way undermined by the odd fin-and-gill-like structures on the fender. Read More >

Right before AIDS and Reagan ruined the party, the early 1980s were a time of meaningless random sex, 20% inflation, sub-100-horsepower midsize sedans, Quaaludes, and— most of all— mountains of white powder (in imagination, not in the reality of the ’81 recession). This ad for the 1981 Ford Mustang captures the spirit of its time. Read More >

News of the next Alfa Romeo Spider sharing its technology with the Mazda MX-5 led to some speculation that the Spider would be a more expensive version of the MX-5, perhaps with a bespoke powertrain and styling. Not quite.

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I come to bury Motor Trend’s Scott Evans, not to praise him. Scratch that: Jalopnik’s Matt Hardigree already dug and filled Mr. Evans’ grave with a double sprinkling of schadenfreude. It’s old news. Not that I don’t personally chuckle every time GM deliberately stacks their event with yes-men and useful idiots, only to see one of those puppets smash the Chinese wheels right off one of their press-trip whips, but it’s happening often enough now that it’s no longer particularly interesting.

Rather, I have a more noble purpose in mind: I want to make sure that the average TTAC reader won’t ever trash a car on the street the way Evans did. We’ll examine Scott’s version of the events, consider the likely truth of that version, and explain how he could have prevented the accident.

Before we do any of that, however, I have an extremely unusual story to tell: it’s the one about the journalist who backed off from the edge and didn’t wreck the car.

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