Speed:Sport:Life

Here’s the press release:

Read More…

Dates in fleet:8/28/2010 – 9/2/2010

Mileage: 2470

MSRP and major options: $49,195. SRT Option Group II — electronic upgrades ($900), Kicker SRT sound system ($685)

J. BARUTH: With the LY-based 2011 model just around the corner, could our Deep Sea Blue SRT-8 be perhaps the very last LX-platform Chrysler 300 to find its way into a press fleet? It’s certainly one of the most expensive cars in history to wear the Chrysler nameplate, just knocking politely at the door labeled “Fifty Grand”. For that kind of money — less than five hundred dollars cheaper than a new BMW 535i — this had better be a very special car indeed. To find out, we crossed the country at, ahem, a brisk pace, winding up at Virginia International Raceway.
Read More…

Ninety-nine percent of “automotive journalism” is repeating what you’ve just been told, particularly if it seems to make a bit of sense, so it’s no surprise that several color rags and major websites have run nearly identical features about the sales of Ford’s marked-for-death Panther-platform cars and Ranger pickups. In July, the Ranger outsold the Volvo brand in the United States, nearly outsold Lincoln, and moved more units than nearly every other Ford vehicle available. The Crown Victoria, Grand Marquis, and Town Car together are outselling the brand-new Taurus and nearly-new Flex despite having not received a major update since 1998 or thereabouts.

Most of these articles will then go on to wonder why Ford is throwing away nearly 15,000 units a month of paid-off platform sales, particularly when they have no replacement for either the Ranger or the Panthers on the horizon. 180,000 sales a year isn’t anything to sneeze about in this market, and surely the profits on these vehicles are extremely substantial. Why not just keep making the Ranger, Crown Vic, Grand Marquis, and Town Car until the volume doesn’t justify starting up the assembly plant in the morning?

Twenty or thirty years ago, that’s exactly what Ford would have done, and they would have been right to do so. Today, the answer isn’t so clear-cut. What’s changed? Branding. Follow along as I explain why Ford needs to cut these nameplates loose… but why it might make sense to keep the vehicles themselves in production.

Read More…

Dates in fleet:: 7/14/2010 – 7/21/2010

Mileage:: 1410

MSRP and major options: $23,600. Roll Stability Control ($545)

J. BARUTH: Ford made one major mistake with the Transit Connect: not bringing it here five years ago. As a small businessman myself, and someone who has worked a ton of lousy delivery jobs, I would suggest that the Transit Connect could replace perhaps half of the full-size vans in service today.

I used the Transit Connect for two major jobs. Job 1 was transporting myself, thirteen guitars, one amplifier, and a stacked set of air mattresses to the “ElectraFest” in St. Louis. ElectraFest is a private meeting of vintage Japanese guitar enthusiasts. (The guitars are Japanese and vintage, while the attendees are merely vintage.) Over the course of a thousand miles, the TC was fast enough, quite economical, quiet, and pleasant to drive. Job 2 was taking twenty 18″ Porsche wheel/tire combos from my garage to our race shop; click the jump to see how they fit.

Read More…

Are Toyotas really accelerating without warning? It’s hard to say, since it’s been years since I saw any Toyota besides a Tundra even keep up with the normal flow of traffic. The Camry is the official car of the left-lane hog, the chosen transport of that woman ahead of you who ABS-locks her brakes for a yellow light and then won’t enter the intersection for a left on green. By and large, Toyotas are characterless cars purchased by fearful, fretting nebbishes. Twenty years ago, Toyota ads screamed “OH WHAT A FEELING!” but today’s Toyota ads are naked appeals to terror of the unknown. Do you clutch your organic-fiber blanket in bed at night and roll around shaking, dreading the day when your car requires service or — gasp! — maintenance? Toyota has the car for you. Corolla! It’s for cowards! Oh what a feeling!

If the average Toyota buyer is afraid of her own shadow and worries about automotive catastrophe constantly, surely the prospect of UNINTENDED ACCELERATION RIGHT INTO A FLAMING WALL OF DEATH should be enough to keep every Camry in the United States off the road, right? Well, that would certainly be the case, except for one little thing: there is a force that motivates the average Toyota fan or purchase far more than fear, and that force is pure, blinding hatred.
Read More…

It has all the qualities of a particularly unusual dream, but I doubt that I am dreaming. I am sitting in a 2011 Grand Cherokee Overland V6, next to the absolutely stunning Latina television host, Teresa Bravo, and we are banked to nearly forty-five lateral degrees. To our left is an unforgiving rock face; to the right, a drop of perhaps five hundred feet, all the way down to to where we started. I can see other Grand Cherokees down there, and they are small enough to be covered by a thumb held at arm’s length. This qualifies as a sticky situation.

The V-6 growls, the absurdly intelligent Quadra-Drive II system speaks to the sand through the three tires still in contact with the ground, and we are around the embankment and back on solid ground. It was a masterful piece of driving, if I do say so myself… and I will do so reluctantly, because Teresa, not I, was responsible for it.
Read More…

Dates in fleet: 5/8/10-5/14/10

Mileage: 820

MSRP and significant options: $60,810. Powerstroke Diesel – $7,835, Lariat Ultimate Package – $3,995, Spray-in bedliner – $450

J. BARUTH: It’s rare for us to not misuse our press-fleet trucks for race-car-hauling duties, but there weren’t any events during our time with this rather chrome-bedecked Super Duty. Instead, we took it to a Pat Metheny concert at the Taft Theater in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Kind of a hoity-toity thing to do with a three-quarter-ton truck, but that’s okay, because there’s a lot of velvet glove surrounding this particular iron fist.

Read More…

If you’re reading this, chances are you have what is known as “teh Internets” among tech-savvy folks. And if you have teh Internets, chances are you’ve heard of the “Fiesta Movement”. The “Fiesta Movement” was Ford’s bold attempt to round up the one hundred most annoying “social media intenders” in the United States and get them to “tweet” about the Fiesta to all their self-involved pals. Had Ford asked me my opinion of the “Fiesta Movement”, I would have told them that it was very possibly the stupidest idea in the history of Western civilization.

Luckily for them, Ford didn’t ask me, and the Movement turned out to be a complete success. As a result, the 2011 Fiesta has arrived on a wave of pre-launch all-media publicity capable of wiping out the entire West Coast. You’ve all seen the car. You’ve all heard about the frisky interior, the SYNC system and its new capabilities, (Pandora, Twitter, and other Android/BlackBerry applications) and the rainbow of millennial-friendly colors available for selection. The only thing you haven’t heard about is what it’s like to thrash the little Fiesta to within an inch of its 1.6-liter life. Stick around, because the road sign in front of us reads “Curves Ahead”.

Read More…

The nice folks at autowriters.com published a modified version of Avoidable Contact #31 last week, and as one might suspect it’s raised quite the fervor among the Frank Bacons of the world. This is all well and good, but it has occurred to me that, in the course of exposing the mendacity/mediocrity two-punch combo which characterizes our industry, I may have inadvertently crushed some of my readers’ dreams of becoming an automotive “journalist”. To those readers, I offer my most sincere apologies.

Better yet, I offer a solution. Instead of becoming an automotive journalist, why not become an English automotive journalist? Trust me, it’s a better gig. Not only will you instantly acquire the kind of cast-iron credibility that American autowriters will never so much as sniff, if you are lucky someone may even bring you back “across the pond” to run an American auto rag!

Naturally, you’ll need a little help to make this dream become reality. I cannot help you fake the accent, and I cannot teach you to operate a stick-shift with your left hand, but I can show you how to write just like an English journo. It’s easy! I’ve provided five “tropes” below to get you started. According to the nice people at tvtropes.org, a site I am not linking directly because it’s so good you will never return to S:S:L, “Tropes are “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” It’s almost impossible to find a Brit-rag article that does not use one or more of these, so a solid command of this fab five is essential to your future career. Each trope is carefully described and a kind-of-fictional example is provided for your use. What are you waiting for? Get writing — and by next week you could be driving an Azure on the Mulsanne!

Read More…

Imagine that you’re an alien. Not an undocumented immigrant, mind you, but a genuine, green-tentacle-and-glass-helmet monstrosity of a visitor from beyond the stars. While your fellow aliens examine the defense systems of Earth (not so hot) and the intelligence of the population (somewhat simian), you attempt to reconcile all the written history you can find with the evidence before your massive, bloodshot, singular eye. You are particularly interested in the history and psychology behind the local transportation devices, known as “cars”, “whips”, “hogs”, or “causes for divorce”.

Most of what you’ve learned is pretty common-sense stuff, even for an alien. There’s a problem, however, and you have, after some months of study, come to call it “The Grand National Problem”. You’ve used your indistinguishable-from-magic science to read everything in the vast record-keeping halls of General Motors. You know from the documentation that the vast majority of Buick Regals produced during the Eighties were chrome-laden, velour-lined “Custom” and “Limited” models. It’s as plain as the order codes on all the old Selectric-typed order forms.

Or is it? All those Customs and Limiteds GM supposedly rolled off the lines at, um, Flint? They’re gone. All your spaceship’s sensors can detect on the roads, all the ones you see at the half-ass local old-car shows, are examples of a rather minor production variant: the “Grand National”. In some years, Grand Nationals accounted for under ten percent of Regal production, but in the twenty-first century virtually every roadworthy example of the baroque Buick sports the blown-six logo and the “Darth Vader” paintjob. The regular Regals have been out of circulation so long, your orbital telescopes cannot even pick them out in junkyards. Something’s gone wrong, either with the data or the observations. Was there a G-body genocide? What happened?

Read More…