Teh Car Blogz

The further along we got in our trip (which wound up being around 4800 miles round-trip - a long time to spend in a car!) the more I realized the importance of roadside attractions in the upper midwest. You see, driving through states like Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota - states that a lot of people refer to as “fly-over states,” as in lots of people fly over them but no one lives there - there is literally NOTHING on the highway. Just cornfield after cornfield, with a sprinkle of truckstops, Indian Reservations and weird stuff. So when you’ve been on the road forever and see a sign for a roadside museum or attraction, you’ll probably stop - just to alleviate the boredom of being in I-90 in the middle of a bunch of cornfields for hours on end!

Now sometimes these roadside attractions amount to little more than someone’s garage stuffed full of crap. Sometimes you strike gold. I was lucky enough on this trip to find two very good ones - the museum of military vehicles shown earlier, as well as this auto museum that is literally in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota. It’s in a town called Murdo, which is in southern central South Dakota just off of I-80.

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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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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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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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The world is filled with fast cars. Fast, of course, is relative. If you’re driving a 4-cylinder Camry, then a Mini Cooper S will feel like a rocket ship. If you’re driving a Corvette, it’s going to take more to put some fire up your ass.

A lot of car guys tend to get caught up in the numbers, in the on-paper promise. It is alluring: which car is better, the one with 3.0L and 12 valves and 200bhp, or the 2.0L with 20 valves? 6-speed manual, or 7-speed SMG? 100bhp/l or 75 bhp/l? Direct injection or port? High power peak or strong low-end torque?

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I’ve come to realize one thing that bonds “car guys” together, even if they don’t know it. No matter who you are, what you’re into, where you’re from or how old you are, you have that “dream project” floating around your head. You might ponder on while sitting in a soul-crushing sales data meeting. You might imagine it as you fall asleep to bring ease to your mind. Hell, you might even be picking the right A/R ratio for that huge turbo while your girlfriend goes on about shoes. Whatever it is, you know you have one.

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