Nissan now has a zero emissions van that you’ll be able to buy in a couple years -if that’s what you’re into. We won’t judge. Either way, the company seems to be creating a brand identity for its electric vehicles.
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This to me is a classic case of the corporate world trying to flex its muscle on the “nobodies”. Is the MOCA the appropriate place for this kind of flexing? Of course not …or is it? Giving the power of curation and enforcement of corporate policies on an exhibition and venue like this is not the way it is supposed to go down. Is MOCA a car lot? Is MOCA a venue for advertisements where the interests of the brand comes before the art? Who empowered them to simply go around and pluck whatever art out of the show to throw in the trash? I made this art on my own dime, traveled down there on my own dime, displayed it on my own time.
Anyone who has watched Harvey Keitel and/or Nicholas Cage chew up the scenery in the two “Bad Lieutenant” movies knows how delightful it can be to be a truly evil policeman. The problem, of course, is that most cops aren’t anything like that. Officer Derrick Saunders, on the other hand, does all the fun stuff that us civvies like to think we’d do with the protection of the badge. When McDonald’s was a little slow with his order, he allegedly put a pistol in someone’s face about it. Come on! You’d do the same thing, wouldn’t you? And when he felt like having a drink and busting along at one hundred and forty-three awesome miles per hour, he just went ahead and did it!
Now, thanks to TTAC reader dfp21, we have an update on the kind of swift justice that the system has meted out to Officer Saunders.
A credit to my parents (among many); they turned everything into a “teachable moment”. A new addition to my vocabulary came with a lesson on the root word, and whether it came from Latin, or French or Greek. A new song came with a quick history of Manchester 80’s New Wave, or Delta blues. My allowance was paid after chores and before a lesson on budgeting. A new car magazine had to be read and not just scanned through for pretty pictures.
And so came one of the lessons that ended up changing how I viewed the world. I was in my early teens, and had just discovered Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, when my father suggested I read Paul Fussell’s Class. “It’s even got some car stuff in there; he talks about how people buy SUVs to look like they’re rich enough to have a country home. Just read it. You’ll like it.”
Despite an explicit suggestion from Opel’s own CEO that Chevrolet cars could be built in European Opel plants, GM Korea has shut the door on such an idea.
With the my Miata now gone (sold to a friend who has given me the right of first refusal when it comes time for him to sell it), I needed a new car with a bit more practicality, and a low price tag. A quick call to my friend Vasco, who functions as Toronto’s version of our own Steve Lang, led me to the car you see above. Did I mention it’s a manual?
The Subaru Tribeca, aka “The Flying Vagina“, aka the car that really got things going for TTAC, is due to die after the 2013 model year.
Reports of a next-generation Cadillac Escalade, due in 2014 after a brush with the Grim Reaper, have us asking the all-important question; what was GM thinking in trying to kill the car off in the first place?
What would you do? You’re taking your five year old son to feed ducks by the river and as you stop to choose a parking space, he hops out of the car and before you can do anything, your child runs towards the embankment, a 35 foot drop to the river. You’d do exactly what Frank Roder, of Winfield Park, NJ did. He jumped out of his 2006 Jeep Commander, ran to his boy and snatched him up, just a few feet from the ledge. As he was hugging his son, Aidan, the boy brought his father’s attention to the Jeep as it rolled into the Rahway River below.
Great story, no? Heroic father saves child. Here’s where it takes a turn into Alice’s looking glass. Read More >
It’s not that uncommon for a writer to make a mistake. You’re in the flow of the moment, tapping out stylish bon mots with just the right balance of serious and snark and it sounds right so you don’t bother to research the point and you later find out in the comments section that you made a factual error. It’s usually much more than that, but an 800 word post on a car blog is not a treatise written with graduate school levels of footnotes and citations, so mistakes get made and I’m hardly blameless in that regard. Still, sometimes you gotta call a mistake a mistake, and Jalopnik made a whopper.
An interview in July’s Automobile magazine has Sergio Marchionne putting to rest a number of future product plans for Chrysler, among them, the definitive fate of the minivan.
A little acceleration. A lot of plastic, and a Lilliputian’s worth of smallness.
The Fiat 500C Cabrio that had been parked on my driveway seemed like a small car’s dream gone by. There were a few chrome accents. A soft top that retracted like an old power curtain contrivance from a 1960’s James Bond movie. Power? The spec sheet showed only 101 horsepower and a mild level of torque. To be brutally blunt, I was ready to be subjected to a Corolla’s worth of acceleration with enough wind buffeting to make the experience not even worth the effort.
Then I turned the key…
Imagine barreling down the road in a hot prototype. Now you don’t have to imagine anymore, because these pictures, taken on the first day of the annual conference of the Japan chapter of the SAE, show you in graphic detail what your workplace would look like. Like a mess.
It’s almost a cliche. Someone mentions the $23.5 loan package that Ford Motor Company presciently took out in 2006, a loan that allowed Ford to develop new products and survive the economic meltdown and credit crunch of 2008 while its crosstown rivals were reduced to begging Washington for a bailout, and almost invariably they will bring up the fact that Ford pawned everything including their “blue oval”. Well, Ford once again owns the famous cerulean logo free and clear. Now that Moody’s has joined Fitch Ratings in restoring the rating on Ford’s debt to investment grade from junk status, the collateral that Ford put up for the loan, which included the logo, Ford’s “glass house” headquarters, several factories, and intellectual property including the Mustang and F-150 trademarks, is no longer security on that debt, per the terms of the loan.
Back when I was searching for my first car, I briefly found an Alfa Romeo Spider that looked like it would be in passable condition. Before I could even call the number from the classified ad, my father chimed in with his usual wisdom. “Oh, you don’t want to start with those. They were crap! Just get a Miata and finish!”.
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