Click for Larger Image

Story and Photographs by Jack Baruth

Sixty-three years ago, a young woman left Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio and headed back to her home town with a single goal in mind: to build homes in the new “Usonian” style for her family and friends. The result was the Rush Creek development in Worthington, Ohio, a tightly knit collection of more than forty-five houses built during the Fifties and Sixties to embody Wright’s principles of modern living.

In this era of massive McMansions with thousand-square-foot “great rooms”, kitchens large enough for a Spinning class, and four-car garages cluttered with the detritus of America’s incandescent prosperity, it’s a shock to cruise through Rush Creek and notice how small everything is. Most of the homes are well under two thousand square feet, and some don’t even reach half that size. They seem to hide in the landscape rather than stand proud of it; many of them have no “curb appeal” at all, as they are deliberately obscure, or invisible, from the street. There isn’t a single garage in the neighborhood, although a few homes have add-on open-air carports which wouldn’t cover a Toyota Highlander from head to toe. A stereotypical “modern family” would find living in Rush Creek to be unbearable, even before they began to find out first-hand how expensive and difficult it is to maintain and repair a half-century-old home built by iconoclastic architects, out of unusual materials, to one-of-a-kind specifications. And yet these still, small residences command quite a premium on the rare occasions when they come up for sale, often changing hands at prices up to twice as high as the transactions on the larger, more convenient, and utterly traditional tract houses which surround Rush Creek on all sides, in the manner of an angry Wehrmacht menacing Stalingrad.

If you can understand why this is the case - why a one-bedroom, leaky-roofed, nine-hundred-square-foot home tucked against the ground to the point of invisibility would cost more than a perfectly decent, brand-new single family “soft contemporary” - then you will have no difficulty understanding the Audi TT.

Read the rest of this entry »

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth, photography by Matt Chow and Zerin Dube

It’s the space of an eyeblink. Three-tenths of a second. At one hundred and forty-six miles per hour, as the bright blue Viper SRT-10 convertible hammers into MSR Houston’s Turn Six, I am covering sixty-four feet in every twitch of the eyelid. In that space of time, as I apply the first touch of braking with my left foot while simultaneously easing off with the right, - in that sixty-four feet - the Viper strikes in a sudden scream of tire, the world slews sideways through the windshield, and I know, beyond doubt, that I have just made a very serious mistake.

Read the rest of this entry »

A slightly still sugar-buzzed edition of SSL Radio this week. If you eat too many of those marshmallow Peeps at once your heart explodes, so I’ve had to spread it out over the last few days. We wrap up coverage of the New York International Auto Show, finally get an answer to the ridiculous Z06 vs. GT-R battle, GM finds a way to put a stain on the until now spotless new Camaro, yet another corporate CEO is given an amusing characterization, and more miniature car fun on this week’s edition of Suspicious Solar Lighting Radio.

 

 SSL Radio 3/25/08 [15:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Behold, our new, colon-filled title! Seriously, Speed:Sport:Life is a much better title than Dubspeed Driven, despite my ineffectual and half-hearted grousing to the contrary, since, as I mention in the podcast, it’s hard to make a quality first impression that shows off our professionalism and dedication to the honest truth about the automotive industry when I have the word “Dub” tacked onto the front of my name badge. And the fact that I’m roughly 20 years too young to be considered a human being in the automotive industry. And my wardrobe, which consists almost entirely of jeans and t-shirts purchased off the Internet. But I’ll be damned if we didn’t fix that first problem! Anyway, we’ve got a quality but short podcast for you this week. Enjoy.

 

 SSL Radio 3/18/08 [11:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Despite the way the podcasts sound, I’m not spending my days just hitting the refresh button on Autoblog like a rat hitting the stimulus bar in a Skinner box. I have other obsessions, and my other addiction of choice is video gaming. I’m the proud owner of both an Xbox 360 and a Playstation 3, oh, excuse me Sony, a PLAYSTATION 3, and I’ve been playing driving games since my parents bought home used copies of the original Test Drive and Test Drive 2 on the PC, complete with the California Challenge pack.

More rantings, pretty pictures and actual news below the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

It looks like someone over at General Motor’s web division got a little overzealous yesterday, and published this teaser icon on the Pontiac website. If you can’t tell by glancing at the picture, the car at the bottom is the much anticipated Pontiac Solstice Coupe. We’ve heard that the official name will be the Solstice Targa, but we can’t confirm this beyond what we’ve heard. Hopefully the Coupe or Targa or whatever they end up calling it will resolve the biggest gripe I have about the current model; that is complete lack of storage space and a top that is annoying as hell to deal with. Either way, the new Solstice Coupe looks like it’s going to be a fantastic looking car, and an even better performer than the convertible.

We’ll have more from the 2008 NYIAS, including a full photo gallery, later in the week.

Photo credit: Zerin Dube

Photo from our upcoming coverage of the Audi Winter Driving Experience, featuring a driving impression of the Audi A5 Clean Diesel.

Post and Podcast by Kasey Kagawa

Ah, the air in the Swiss Alps is so fresh this time of year. Or so I’m told, as I’m far too poor to be able to afford to jet to the Alps to cover some fancy motor show. Still, we’ve got a lot of great news for you this week, almost all of it from Geneva. Also, globalism news, Champ Car imploding a lot faster than everyone thought it would, and the death of Mopey McWhinesalot, all of this and more on this SSRI-fueled edition of Dubspeed Radio.

 

 Dubspeed Radio 3/10/08: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth, photography by Matt Chow

Don’t look now, but Dubspeed Driven has become a pretty big deal in the past year or so. Thanks to you, our faithful and patient readers, we’re knocking the teeth out of some of the biggest names in auto-blog-o-lism. While our competitors spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on snazzy offices, first-class flights to Europe, “branding consultants”, and high-priced, low-talent hack writers, we’re getting it done with the proverbial two tables and a microphone… which is really more like four part-timers and a couple of Canon DSLRs, but you get the idea. There’s no money in this for us, no banner ads funneling cheddar into offshore accounts. You won’t find any ulterior motives at work here - we just want to have fun and share some neat cars with you along the way.

With so many “eyeballs” in the same electronic room, so to speak, it’s time to shove the walls out a bit and remodel to serve you better. In the next month, the site you know as Dubspeed Driven will formally re-brand as Speed:Sport:Life, with a new, more readable format and a double-barrel blast of new content. I’d like to tell you that we’re getting a ground-up redesign along the lines of our big-dollar “e-magazine” competition, but let’s face it: if we had that kind of money, we’d spend it filling a Daytona Prototype with strippers, not building a photo studio and filling it with trolls. Sorry about that. We will, however, be making a solid effort to make it easier for you to read and enjoy the articles. Fonts, whitespace, formatting - we’re working on all of that.

Oh yeah, we also have a new test driver. He’s an evil cyborg made from German scrap metal, artificial eyeballs grown in a dry-ice-flooded laboratory, and a stolen pig heart.

Read the rest of this entry »

Post and Podcast by Kasey Kagawa

It’s really easy to tell when I wrote the script for the podcast. The later at night I finish it, the more dour and depressed I sound at the end of it. The same goes for the post for each podcast, so read on with that in mind. It’s partially driven by exhaustion, but usually the sound of fail that surrounds the end of a late podcast comes from crushing guilt over having botched hitting my largely self-imposed deadline for the podcast. This hits late at night because I’m only ever really burning the 3:00 AM oil when the podcast is way, way late. This one has the added depression multipliers of a absolutely dismal week for news and me sounding like absolute garbage on this podcast. You may not think so, but this is, I guarantee you, the worst podcast I’ve ever done. It’s like using Q-Tips wrapped in sandpaper and cancer on my inner ear for me to listen to this. Usually, it’s poor form to discourage people from listening to the content that I produce, but this one deserves it, and it’s not like anything happened this last week anyway. Except for my own shortcomings being paraded around the Internet. This weekend will be better, I promise. Geneva’s here, so I’ll have news from that. Stick around, regular service will be resumed momentarily.

 

 Dubspeed Radio 3/5/08 [10:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download