Teh Car Blogz

Even people who know nothing about cars, know that there are cheap cars and there are expensive cars, and there are cars in between. It’s a pretty simple concept.

People automatically assume that a more expensive car is, by definition, a better one. You pay more, you get more. There’s a reason that a $10,775 Hyundai Accent has a 1.6L 110bhp engine, and a $320,000 Mercedes SL65 AMG Black has… 670 horsepower.

Still, when you boil cars down to their most basic, they all do the same thing (if they’re working): you get in them, turn them on, operate the controls and they transport you from starting point A to destination B. A $10,775 Accent Coupe then is exactly the same as the $320,000(estimated) SL65 AMG Black. Obviously, this makes no sense! There must be something, some reason for Gallardo’s to exist!

Of course there is. Otherwise, it’d be a pretty bleak world for us car guys to exist in. Here are some of my findings I attained after exhaustive research.

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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 the rest of the cars I didn’t share with you all in the last post. Hope you enjoy!

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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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Nowadays, most people take the safety features of their cars for granted. There aren’t really a whole lot of cars on the market that actually get bad crash test ratings from any of the various agencies that rate them. Rafts of standard airbags, stability control, antilock brakes, brakeforce distribution, electronic brake assist, and built in anti-submarining and crumple zones mean that even a base-model economy car isn’t a bad bet in a wreck. It hasn’t always been like this. There are still a few cars around that I would recommend not driving for the practical reason that they might end your life.
1) 2001-2004 Chevy Blazer 2-Door 2WD

Why: High occurence of rollover-related deaths due to inadequate roof structural integrity

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These days it seems the only sport approaching the popularity of Bush-bashing is that of GM-bashing. It’s not hard to see why; it’s so easy. Piss-poor product, short-sighted development strategies, a thick-headed and outspoken (even if rather charismatic) CEO, plummeting stock prices, constant problems with the UAW as well as third-party suppliers, and the general prevalence of the stench of “fuck-up” in most everything they do. Making fun of GM is analagous to saying “You know, SNL just isn’t as funny as it used to be.” We know, goddamit, get over it.

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