Teh Car Blogz

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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I recently had the opportunity to get behind the wheel of the new Dodge Caliber SRT-4, the Chrysler group’s latest effort at a performance compact car, and thought I would share some impressions.

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Mazda is known for, if anything, doing things differently. They single-handedly brought about the resurrection of the 2-seat small convertible, a previously dead market, in 1989 with the MX-5 Miata. Which has been a resounding success. They made a production road car with a Miller Cycle supercharged engine, pretty much just because they could. (Remember the Millenia S? Yeah, 2.3L V6, Miller Cycle, supercharged. Why? I have no idea.) But the biggest gamble that Mazda ever took was the rotary engine. And when they came out with it, they needed some unique advertising to get the word out. This is what they came up with.

“Piston engine goes BOING BOING BOING
But the Mazda goes Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”
The ad was for the RX-3 wagon.  Although it’s cute, I’m not sure that a country song and the message “Buy this car and a pretty girl will steal it from you” was what they were aiming for.

With some cars, it’s not hard to see the performance hidden beneath a layer of boring, anodyne stockness. Cars like 1.8 Turbo Audi A4’s. They’re not quick from the factory but a few choice extra bits can get you a whole lot of shove. Most people who know cars know this, which seems to me to make the feat a whole lot less impressive.

Many people pick up sport compacts and modify them because they think it makes them more clever than the domestic drivers. “I’m getting 300 wheel horsepower out of my four cylinder!” is a good rallying cry when proclaiming your superiority of dumbestics. (Actually, that’s up for debate.) But really, is there anyone who knows cars who is surprised you can make a really fast SRT-4? If that’s a secret, then so is that whole Clinton-Lewinski affair debacle. I mean, hooray. You can put a chip, a diverter valve and a downpipe on your GTI and then you have a lot of extra power. But you’re not original.

No, what appeals to me are cars that no one would ever expect to be fast. Cars that even surprise true died-in-the-wool car guys. Here are a few ideas.

1) Toyota Matrix

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