Teh Car Blogz

When a manufacturer releases their latest and greatest innovation on society, they usually pump it up with great fanfare, a huge advertising budget, and all the hoopala they can possibly drum up. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s completely unnecessary (VW sold out the entire US allotment of 5,000 first-generation R32’s without spending a dime on advertising), and sometimes it just doesn’t make a difference to the fact that the car they’re selling is complete, unmitigated crap. Hey, it happens. Just ask Ford:

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Here are a few more photos from Worthersee that didn’t really fit in the main post. There were some really neat cars there, to be sure

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One thing I’ve noticed about car magazines in the US (besides the boring ones like Consumer Reports) is that above anything, they like to emphasize acceleration as a defining characteristic of a car’s worth. It’s not hard to notice. On the front cover of the latest Car and Driver, they have a few headlines. The big one proclaims “The Fast Lane!: BMW 135i, 0-60 4.7s.” Further down there’s “Nissan GT-R 0-60 3.3.” At the bottom, in small font is “The Slow Lane: Smart ForTwo, 0-60 14.4s.”

Let me be the first one to say: Who gives a shit how fast a Smart Car gets to sixty miles an hour? No one’s going to be drag-racing from light to light in their Smart. A Smart is an economical fashion accessory, like a Swatch (imagine that!) It’s a conversation piece. It’s the new Prius. The only people racing smarts are the ones with Smartuki conversions, so all three of them. The 0-60 time on a Smart is about as relevant as the fuel efficiency of a dump truck.
But this is America, where we have (comparatively) cheap gas, the roads are wide and straight, and if you’re not going 80 on the highway, you’re getting run over. So magazines shout about how fast a car can reach 60 - which is a pretty arbitrary number.

There are a lot of fast cars out there. But let me let you in on a secret: some of them really, truly suck.

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Got a flat tonight on my way home from Denny’s. I figured it would be a nail or a sidewall puncture or something. But no. It was half of a freaking Leatherman Multi-Tool. Holy crap. Check out the carnage.  More pics after the jump, plus a bonus.

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While I was in Chapel Hill with my mother shopping for her new car, I happened to chance a glance over to the BMW dealer and was delighted to see this beauty parked off to the side of the main lot:

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Saab story

One of the most fervently discussed topics in the automotive arena these days is what will become of Saab. The brand that was (actually) “born from jets” started out as fiercly independent, open-minded, individualistic, and Swedish. Financial troubles led to the Saab car brand being split off of parent company and producer of heavy equipment, Scania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scania_AB) and being bought up by the evil whoremonger GM in 1990. Things pretty much went downhill (slowly at first) from there…

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