The “fun” starts at about 11:00 in, where the former Car and Driver Editor reveals that Ziff-Davis fired him for not apologizing to Blaupunkt for dissing their products. Throwing his trademark deference to the wind, Autoline host John McElroy then asks Davis (11:43) if “they canned your ass too, another time?” Which inspires David E. to continue his tirade, chronicling the birth of Automobile, launching a no-holds-barred attack (14:55) on his “protege” (and former welder) Jean Jennings. Davis paints her as a back-stabbing nutcase, and wishes her well (15:47): “I sometimes dream of a FedEx flight on its way to Memphis flying over Parma where she lives and a grand piano falling out of the airplane and whistling down through the air, this enormous object, and lands on her and makes the damnedest chord anybody has ever heard; this sound of music that has never been heard by the human ear. And the next morning all they can find . . . [are] some shards of wood and a grease spot and no other trace of Mrs. Jennings.” Apparently, Davis’ splenetic venting proves that Autoline is about “getting to the unvarnished truth.” Never seen an unvarnished piano.
Category: Media
Experian’s AutoCheck has thrown down the gauntlet to its competitor, CarFax. AutoCheck says it’s better at providing the accident information car buyers want. This morning’s press release is all about diss and dat. “A new quantitative analysis conducted by Pipal Research, an independent, custom research firm, comparing AutoCheck and Carfax vehicle history reports, demonstrates that AutoCheck holds significant competitive advantages by reporting twice the number of accidents . . . By having access to more reported accident information when stocking their inventories and at the time of sale, dealers are better equipped to bring higher quality used cars onto their lots and be able to demonstrate that quality to consumers who place high value on this information.” CarFax is having none of it. “We’ve had claims like this made us against us in the past,” Communications Director Larry Gamache says. “Show me the study.” Gamache has no doubts about the supremacy of his company’s accident data. “We have 22,000 sources of information and 6.5 billion pieces of information in our database. CarFax is bar none the absolute best provider of vehicle history information. Period.” Ball’s in your court AutoCheck.
Caution: The sycophancy and silicone in this paint-by-numbers preview may make you want to hurl. Note to Mr. Piven: those who went before salute you, albeit with a single digit. Yes, the silver screen (or flat panel HDTV) has a long history of amoral, blood-sucking, lying, cheating, scumbag car salesman. As Slate’s Matthew DeBord points out, “Don Ready” isn’t the usual sad sack salesman. A distinction without a difference? Anyway, DeBord has a nice little rundown on nine (I’ve subtracted four) automobile-selling assholes. So which one was your fave? Any additions? And have you ever met a real world car salesman to rival any of these?
During the last three weeks, our WordPress software has [wrongly] interecepted some of our Best and Brightest’s comments as spam. While we sympathize, we really have no control over what e-mails get flagged this way. Perhaps you participate on another blog that uses Akismet and that blog has misidentified you as a spammer. If so, Akismet will identify your username, e-mail address and/or IP address as a spammer and hold your comments for manual approval. We manually release all such comments—once we check the filter. One of the admins has to do this, so it may take some time before the comment appears under the post. If you resubmit the comment, it only compounds the problem; we have to tell Akismet, “No, Not Spam,” for each submission and then manually delete the duplicates. If your comment doesn’t appear immediately, please have patience. We’ll eventually get to it and release it into the wild. Thank you for your understanding.
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The Wall Street Journal shows TTAC some love in a piece titled “Americans Renew Their Love For Cars—Online.” Acerbic? Us? We’ve changed, we swear!
The Detroit News reports that GM is removing its “Mark of Excellence” badges from its entire lineup, starting with the new Chevy Equinox. “We are just really focused on the four core brands and this provided us with another opportunity to make sure they were at the forefront,” say GM spokefolks. “Plus people on Twitter were making fun of them.” Okay, so the last part is made up. Still, about time, no? As industry commentators never tire of mentioning, consumers don’t buy GM as a brand, they buy Chevys, Buicks, Cadillacs and GMCs. Okay, they buy Chevys. Anyway, what’s the point of having four separate versions of every platform if there’s a badge reminding everyone that they’re all basically the same? Don’t answer that, it’s a rhetorical question. Instead, hit the jump to learn how to de-Mark of Excellence your ride.
The board of GM convened on Friday to finally decide Opel’s fate. The board did as expected: It did nothing. They left everybody hanging. The board decided to not decide anything.
According to Reuters, the GM board desperately needs critical information from the German government. To wit: What state financing would be available if GM would sell Opel to their darling RHJ International, and not to Magna, which is favored by Germany.
Excuse us?
Do we have a serious case of highly contagious ADD, which has befallen the complete GM board? We thought it had been made perfectly clear:
Read More >
Motor Trend has replaced its “best handling car” with a “best driver’s car” competition. Is this an opening for the Camaro? Not so much. The new SS model placed dead last in MT‘s comparo, which was won by the Porsche Cayman S. And if you think the Camaro was simply there to serve muscle car whipping post duty, check out the rave reviews that the Shelby GT500 picked up. On the other hand, the fastest car around Laguna Seca, the Corvette ZR1, ended up in 6th place. There’s just no way to hide the fact that “best driver’s car” will always be a subjective award.
Jeff Puthuff is one of our (mostly unsung) heroes: a TTAC commentator who made the leap to editor. Initially, Jeff made the jump as our resident proof reader, grammarian and style guru. Since then, he’s begun patrolling the comments section and helping us figure out how to take TTAC to the next level. This is the month that VerticalScope’s boffins will cull the cranky code created by NameMedia‘s Estonian customizers. In short, TTAC will return to a bog standard WordPress platform, with a few bells on. We will, of course, keep things nice and simple. And then adjust the site’s style and functionality according to your feedback. Meanwhile, Jeff has created a new way for you to access all TTAC reviews: click here for more direct access to our arsenal of democracy. Meanwhile redux, thought you might like to know that our stats are approaching those of the dead tree version of Car and Driver.
I’m glad Mr. Rosenbusch, of Chrysler Group LLC, found my article on Chrysler archives interesting. It’s always nice to be read. And I’m sure Rosenbusch agreed with the article when I said “America’s automakers have gone to great lengths and expense to preserve and protect the historical documents which chronicle and define their existence.” I’m also reasonably sure that Mr. Rosenbusch doesn’t dispute the fact of the closing of Chrysler’s engineering library. “One of a series of necessary steps to cut costs,” as he puts it. And I’m glad Mr. Rosenbusch saved all of the important documents resulting from that change of fortune. But I stand by my report that people on site experienced a sudden and chaotic end to a resource someone thought was valuable enough to create and fund. That Chrysler has tuned its back on its history.
USA Today re-joins the cavalcade of media outlets helping GM destroy as much Volt “buzz” as possible via premature recapitulation. Yes, it’s a recycled review of the Volt that fails to address questions surrounding the Hail Mary-shaped plug-in hybrid’s internal combustion engine (ICE). When does it kick in? How does the car behave when it kicks in? What’s the Volt’s operating range? What’s the mpg when the ICE is operative? Of course, you can’t blame USA Today for this sin of omission. GM has point blank refused to let a journalist drive the car in “extended range” mode. But you can blame the media for pretending they’re reviewing a “real” car. Of course, they always mention it at some point in the “review,” but, by then, the un-damage has been done. As for “GM and the government are discussing how to calculate a realistic fuel-economy number,” we all know how that turned out.
Tuning of the gasoline engine. It wasn’t operable in the test cars, so there was no hint of how smooth and quiet it’ll be when it comes on to charge the batteries, if needed.
TTAC recently published a Wild Ass Rumor about Buick LaCrosse wiring problems. Jim Federico breached the GM – TTAC wall to quash the suggestion that production vehicles suffered from electrical gremlins. “I can confirm there is NO truth to this RUMOR,” the LaCrosse Vehicle Line Executive/Chief Engineer wrote. So I called the man responsible for “any car on the GM Global Mid-Size platform until I retire or get fired, whatever comes first.” [Note: GM no longer uses Greek names for its platforms. Literally. Federico flat-out refused to identify the Buick’s platform as an “Epsilon.”] Federico told me GM has delivered roughly a thousand LaCrosse to dealers; only one has been marked return to sender. “It was a car with a burned-out starter,” he revealed. “We identified the problem as a defective component and contacted the supplier to rectify the situation.” Now, as for that wiring rumor . . .
I’ve crossed swords with AskPatty.com before. When the self-professed “automotive advice for women” site asked me to link to a contrived story on autos and the fairer sex (here be trolls), I replied that TTAC does not approve of sexual discrimination. The editor thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. I’m philosophically averse to AskPatty’s “Women Buy Cars, Men Have a Penis” perspective. But it’s the site’s craven kow-towing to carmakers that really sticks in my craw. And vice versa. Carmakers never met a PC website they didn’t like; they especially don’t not like this one. Normally, I’d [continue to] flank the issue. But advertisertalk.com reports that Midlands Honda in South Carolina has become the Palmetto State’s first AskPatty.com’s “Certified Female Friendly Location,” complete with an AskPatty-branded Midlands website. An unspecified number of dealer employees completed some [presumably cumulative] 90 hours of on-line training. So the question must be asked: what did they learn/pay for?
As my father would say, another myth exploded. Eddie Alterman brought David E. Davis back to Car and Driver to . . . what? Restore lost street cred? Re-connect with baby boomers who left the buff book in disgust at its fall from Wilkinsonian grace? Who knows. But one thing is for sure: Davis’ latest column is an unconscionable, virtually unreadable sop to Ford, CEO Alan Mulally and the dead-in-the-water Lincoln brand. Davis starts as he means to finish, deploying prose that’s the metaphorical equivalent of Huggy Bear’s wardrobe: “Mr. Mulally has now demonstrated beyond all doubt that he’s the real thing, and his revamped Ford Motor Company, with a terrific portfolio of new products, is rolling proof.” Strip away the Bend Down Low vibe and sure, you could make the case. But it doesn’t take Davis but a brace of paragraphs to stretch both credibility and credulity to the breaking point. “The Lincoln MKT is the latest of several new products that are helping Ford regain lost territory.” Speaking of losing it . . .
Never one to miss a chance to put a left/right slant on, well, anything, today’s New York Times contains an editorial claiming that the Cash for Clunkers (a.k.a. C.A.R.S.) program is a triumph of the Obama administration over Republican naysayers/hypocrites/rat bastards. Blogger Timothy Egan begins by suggesting that C4C is a Republican-style economic stimulus thingie, then excoriates the elephant party for not loving it long time. “They hate it, many of these Republicans, because it’s a huge hit. It’s working as planned, and this cannot stand. America must fail in order for President Obama to fail. Don’t be surprised if the tea party goons now being dispatched to shout down town hall forums on health care start showing up at your car dealers, megaphones in hand.” Incendiary much? I’ll have mine with a side order of sarcasm, please. “But try to give struggling families a one-time boost to buy a more fuel-efficient car, with an amount that wouldn’t pay for paper clips at A.I.G., and it’s . . . outrageous!”
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