The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers (AAM) is serving-up some more PC for your PC. The just-launched www.EcoDrivingUSA.com tells you how to drive your car like an old man. "Drivers don't have to wait to buy a new, fuel-efficient vehicle to start reducing fuel costs and CO2," AAM CEO Dave McCurdy insists. "Though I do encourage everyone to buy one of our new fuel-efficient vehicles immediately." But seriously folks, this is a classic deflection strategy. Or, if you prefer, it's blaming the victim. The Governator is the site's plastic surgery-intensive spokesman for the politically shape-shifting carmakers. Ahnold speaks from experience when he says we "can't wait for the politicians to take action." Yup, it's up to you (that's you) to properly pressurize your damn tires already, and hypermile yourself to a 15 percent savings on your gas bills. In fact, if we all eco-drove, we could save enough energy to power Skynet for 1000 years. Or something like that. 

I'm flabbergasted. Presidential hopeful John McCain (or someone on his staff) pens an opinion piece for The Detroit News and the paper doesn't make ANY mention of the Arizona senator's bespoke opus on their on-line home page OR the Autos section. In fact, I would have missed McCain's rant entirely if not for an article in… The Detroit Free Press. WTF is that all about? Anyway, John is holding fast to his "no federal bail out for losers" position. Per se. "With a transition to alternative-fuel vehicles, we can rejuvenate the auto industry, drive cheaply and cleanly and be more secure. I will bring customers to the showroom with up to $5,000 in tax credits to encourage the purchase of these cleaner cars." Did he say American cars? No? Shit! Chill Motown; McCain's left himself some mighty fine wiggle room. "I will continue to meet with the leaders and workers of the Big 3 automakers. If the industry should need federal assistance, I will consider any reasonable proposal they develop that moves the industry to a more stable and prosperous future." So I guess that means McCain still considers it unreasonable to suggest that a federal bailout is reasonable. Or the other way around. 

The Wall Street Journal's article on the new Ford Flex starts off as all these things do: a personal anecdote from an enthusiastic buyer, some spin from the marketing folk and… oh dear. Not such a happy picture after all. "The Flex isn't a miser on fuel, getting 17 miles per gallon in the city and 24 mpg on the highway. According to Edmunds.com, the company has already put $1,315 in incentives on the Flex in July, a potentially worrisome development for a new vehicle. It is also unclear how the Flex will play with Ford's mainstream customers in the middle of the U.S. Many comments on car blogs have praised its design, but some have complained it resembles a hearse." And the hits keep happening. "Ford has said it expects to sell as many as 100,000 Flexes a year, but it will need to up the sales pace to achieve that. In June and July, the first two months it was on sale, 3,413 were sold. The Ford Explorer sport-utility vehicle can also seat seven; Ford sold 12,223 of them in June and July." The WSJ repeats Ford's claim that the "slow rollout has been by design" (why hurry?) and ends on the usual up note, relating CA IT maven Rueben Muinos' freshly-minted Flex appeal. "When he drove it home, he was surprised by how many people starred [sic]. "I thought I was talking on my cell phone illegally," he said, realizing only later that all eyes were on his Flex." We have no, well, little reason to believe Muinos was driving naked. 

One more time! Maybe even literally. Strangely, GM's told its dealers that revealing the imminent arrival of "employee pricing for all" to the outside world would be a felony. So I guess you can call me Miss Demeanor (you know; if I wasn't a Silverado-loving man's man). Anyway, it's all over the damn web. Reuters reports [here and via Automotive News] that "the offer starts Wednesday, runs until Sept. 2 and applies to all 2008 model year Chevrolet vehicles, according to the dealer, who was not authorized to discuss the GM plan." See? The black ops are only a beat behind. So to speak. And if employee pricing isn't enough to pull in the punters, "the top-selling U.S. automaker will offer cash back on slower-selling light trucks, including the Silverado pickup, said the dealer, who had just been briefed by GM." Top selling? Slower-selling? Careful you don't hurt yourself pulling those punches. Anway, we now have confirmation that ALL GM brands are involved in the fire sale. Oh, and try and guess the Money Factor in a standard GM lease these days. It's 16 percent. Which will apply to the new Malibu on Wednesday.

First, this post dovetails nicely with the Ask the B&B question on homoerotic truck ads. I mean, if the testosterone-laden Torque.tv's announcer's tongue isn't firmly in his cheek, well… Anyway, the video also suggest a click on over to Paul Niedermeyer's excellent editorial on the coming showdown between the 2010 Prius and the 2010 Honda Hybrid. Personally, I find the producer's choice of cartoon clown xylophone background music a bit OTT. But I'm glad the torque team pointed out that a properly-flogged Prius can suck more unleaded than a 'Vette. It brings back fond memories of the time I tried to discover how much gas I could use in a Prius. I never got it below 17mpg. Guess I wasn't trying hard enough.

H2H Ep12, Honda Civic Hybrid Vs. Toyota Prius

As a high school soccer player, I shared a locker room with the football team. Apparently my choice of the world's most popular sport indicated that I and my fellow teammates were all homosexual. Huh? Not that I debated the point with the tight end, but I reckoned there was a distinctly homoerotic undertone to our tormentors' camaraderie (me thinks thou dost towel whip too much). And I've started to notice that truck advertising– always mucho macho– is wandering into the same hyper-male territory. I refer here to the glossy Silverado pimpatorial in September's Car and Driver. "If you're a man's man, you need to be driving a truck's truck." What does that make a Honda Ridegline, an F-150's bitch? I like functional tools as much as the next guy, but I'm beginning to think truck maker's might want to ease-off on the gravelly-voiced steroid approach. Or not. What's your take?

Anyone who thinks GM isn't in a cash crunch better come up with some serious spin stat. The American automaker has officially confirmed that it's withdrawing from the Oscars. No, I don't mean it's removing itself from contention for "The Most Shameless Product Placement in any Movie Since Cinema Was Invented" Oscar. We're talking about ad sponsorship. As in no more. Which also means the Autoblog gallery-filling pre-Oscar stars and our cars "Style" event is toast. The Wall Street Journal makes the contrast with years past. "Not only has GM — the maker of brands such as Cadillac, Chevrolet and Saturn — aired a slew of commercials during the popular awards show, it also has paid extra to be the exclusive auto advertiser during some of the Oscar broadcasts. GM's marketing around the program has included on-the-ground promotions, such as giving the show dozens of GM vehicles to shuttle celebrities to the event and to Oscar-related parties." What, no Escalade Hybrid limos? Nope. And no Emmy sponsorship. And the next Olympics will not have anything shiny and blue paying the bills. It would be nice to think that all this money saved will be going towards new product development. But it's not. It's what the non-technical analysts call throwing shit overboard to stop the ship from sinking. 

Me, never. Why would I? But I know plenty of pistonheads who have. I remember a particularly coke-fueled neighborhood Porsche driver who was crazy enough to get some serious distance from the local po-po, who were Hell bent on throwing his dangerous driving ass in jail. He screeched into his [blacked out] garage, stripped, jumped in bed and pretended to be asleep. Mind if we have a look around? Long-suffering wife: with all due respect officers, talk to my fucking lawyer. These days, it's not enough to evade the long arm of the law. If you're way cool, you race the cops, videotape the result and share your criminal activities with the world. To wit: superspeeders.com, "where horsepower rules, and the rules of the road don't apply." And their teaser video for same, via Streetfire.net [Note to the SF guys: please don't pull the link. This is instructive stuff.] I guess discretion is no longer the better part of stupidity. If it ever was. Anyway, you ever done shit like this?

Cops have a little run in with Ford GT

Steven Cole Smith is The Orlando Sentinel's automotive editor. You may remember Smith as Car and Driver's executive editor and/or as a syndicated New York Times car columnist. Or perhaps you've seen his byline at Edmunds or AutoWeek. Now I'm not going to say Smith pulls his punches to please his paper's patrons, be they carmakers or car dealers. But I will say the Aveo is one of the nastiest cars I've ever driven, and I'm pretending this is 1977. Smith disagrees. "The 1.6-liter, four-cylinder engine is surprisingly smooth and quiet, and while gas mileage isn't great for a car this small, it's pretty darn good: an EPA-rated 25 mpg in the city, 34 mpg on the highway in our test car." And "Headroom in the Aveo5 is generous, and rear-seat room isn't that bad, unless you have some long-legged people in the front seat. That room comes at the expense of luggage space in the back, but the rear seat folds down." And then he gets NASTY, in a loving kind of way. "Inside, for the most part, the Aveo looked and felt surprisingly upscale, but there were a few tipoffs to the fact that this is an inexpensive car: While the flip-down sun visors had vanity mirrors, the mirrors were uncovered, meaning that when the visors were down, they reflected you and everything behind the car. It was annoying enough that I'd have to use a strip of duct tape to cover them if I owned the car." Wait. Smith would actually consider owning one of these shit-boxes? Not bloody likely. 

Terry's one of the good guys: a plain-speaking auto reviewer/ranter for the Dallas Morning News [full version via The Washington Post] who never loses sight of the common man. Well, at least not until he's behind the wheel of a death car muscle car. And then he's gone baby gone! Despite the fact that the V8-lovin' Lone Star scribe's feeling the heat over global warming, it's one of those cold, dead hands deals. "I know that my days as an unrepentant gearhead may be numbered. Sky-high gas prices, global warming, urban sprawl, maybe even the "oil war" in Iraq, are all being piled on cars. Yet despite the growing drumbeat against them, the allegations that they're melting glaciers and maiming thousands, the claim that we're choking on them, the fear that they're our worst national addiction, I love them dearly." What follows is a poetic paean to profligate petrol consumption. Box ultimately argues against those who argue against gas-guzzling-for-fun thus: I'm a climate killer, you're a hypocrite; I'll stop when you stop. As if. 

Wow! More egalitarian than the Marquette County Fair baking competition? More democratic than the contest to name the Pontiac G8 ST? I guess we've got to forgive Detroit Free Press cheerleader Mark Phelan for doing what he does best (as far as we know). And I suppose writing negatively about "the Cruise" (how str8 is that?) would be the very definition of "churlish." But forgive me for saying that Woodward's panoply of pistonheads isn't exactly my cup of leaded gasoline. It's just too painful to see so much rolling proof that a once-proud American industry has joined Fonzie in the Shark-Jumping Hall of Fame. The fact that Paul Eisenstein (my good pal from The Car Connection) has glommed-on to the event with an alt power parade does nothing to convince me that Detroit's glory days lie ahead. "'If it's loud and fast, it's good,' said 19-year-old Alex Bui of White Lake Township. He planned to cruise in his tuned 2006 Honda Civic." And there you have it.

If we (and I'm using that in The New York Times Op Ed "Royal We" sense of the word) had any doubts that The Big Apple is the locus of America's anti-car jihad, scribe Hope Cohen is determined to remove them. In the provocatively titled "No Parking, Ever," Cohen argues that Hizzoner has the "four wheels bad" religion, but lacks sufficient zeal. "Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg… the department has been encouraging alternative transportation by reassigning street space long reserved for cars and trucks to bikes, buses and pedestrians. To accommodate all this movement, the city can no longer be as accommodating as it has been toward stationary vehicles. Before traffic reaches a standstill, as it threatens to do, the city should start phasing out curbside parking." Deftly played, Hope. As is this little carrot. "It is vital that vehicles move smoothly and quickly through New York City’s streets, delivering people and goods to their destinations. Making room for vehicles that are not moving should be a far lower priority." I can understand why they don't, but it really grinds my gears (Jonny) that anti-car advocates don't just come out and call for a passenger car ban. 'Cause you know that's what they really, really want.

Manny Lopez is The Detroit News ' head cheerleader. The Auto Editor hires the team, chooses the cheers and makes sure everyone stays on message. Manny's megaphone emits the same hoarse polemic the paper's been shouting since the 60's: "they" don't understand us. His latest: if the "Planet Protectors" (Nancy Pelosi, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Gore) watched the Woodward Dream Cruise they'd leave us the fuck alone [paraphrasing]. Manny's madder than that though. He launches a personal attack that posits what cars the terrible trio MAY have owned before their rise to power, to show their possible hypocrisy. Nancy's imaginary past puts her at the wheel of a "sun-drenched yellow Bug that was dressed up and clean." Arnie drove "a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado with a 500-cubic inch V-8 engine pulling 300-plus horsepower." And Al Gore piloted "a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda complete with a 426 Hemi engine." And then Manny plays CYA. "Perhaps they drove econoboxes and my guesses are all wrong, but I bet they have distinct memories of classic cars, nonetheless." I don't suppose the Auto Editor thought about actually establishing the facts of the matter, any more than Detroit considers the possibility that "outsiders" may have something valid to say about the industry.

OK, so Streetfire.net pulled the suburban sreet racing 'Vette video from their site, to which this post was originally linked. Fair enough. Commendable, really– if you adhere to the school of thought that presenting dangerous criminal activities to the general public may not be the best possible use of bandwidth. Rest assured I see the other side of this: first amendment and all that. Besides, there are plenty of illegal automobiling videos on Streetfire and YouTube. Do we really expect them to police every one? 

PHILLY STREET RACING