The nice folks at Jalopnik link to us so often, it’s the least I can do to begin this column by suggesting you watch this video over there. For those of you who don’t like watching videos, it shows a police car operating at a velocity of ninety-four miles per hour in a marked 40 zone. At around the one-minute mark, we see the police car strike a Mazda containing two teenagers. Both are killed. The police car is not running its lights, was not operating the siren, and was not even responding to an emergency.

Here’s the best (or worst) part: the officer who killed the kids, Jason Anderson, was apparently “racing” the officer whose car recorded the video, one Richard Pisani. Pisani is traveling at about 74 mph during one part of the video. In a marked 40. I cannot find any evidence that Office Pisani was in any way disciplined for his conduct. Think about that for a moment.

Perhaps most worryingly, the video shows absolutely no awareness, driving ability, or the vaunted “high-speed police training” on the part of Officer Anderson. It’s fairly obvious that the Mazda is going to cross Anderson’s path. We’re regularly told that by police departments that their officers have “special training”, but this is an accident that most solid NASA HPDE drivers could easily avoid. A modest amount of steering to the left would have saved two lives. Instead, Anderson simply drives right into the Mazda, with his car’s “black box” recording 100% accelerator pressure up to the crash. He was flat-out to the very end.

The good news is that the technology exists to prevent a tragic event such as this from ever happening again. In fact, the technology has existed for a very, very long time, and it could be easily installed on every police vehicle in the country. Let’s discuss.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #33: A modest proposal — cops don’t need to speed.

When we last met, I was enraged about the diffidence with which Volkswagen has treated its New Beetle. Kindly note that, since the publication of Dub Chick Be Trippin’, Tracy Morgan’s been profiled in several glossies. It seems that though my perception might have been the harshest, I’m certainly not alone.

But that’s ancient history. It was before the Chicago Auto Show media preview, anyway, at which I was reassured that really, not much has changed with VW. Whether I attend several auto shows a year or just one, it’ll feel as if I never left.

Continue reading Rational Bohemian #7: The Buggy’s Punch

Anyone who spends enough time on The Car Lounge has doubtlessly seen numerous threads and posts with all manner of Volkswagens, Subarus, Hondas and (ugh) Miatas with improbably low ride heights, low offset BBS RS wheels in all colours of the Popsicle rainbow, roof racks and even rusted body parts.

The “stance” movement is the biggest thing going for people who seek validation from anonymous automotive forum members, though I have yet to really see a car like this in person. Maybe it will fly in California, but in Toronto, with roads like the surface of the Moon and 6 months of snow, this style is impractical if not unfeasible.

Continue reading Rich Corinthian Leather #2: Hella Suck

You want to get involved in some sort of motorsports but you’re dead broke and the car you’re driving has 90 horsepower on a good day, and that’s downhill. You’re in luck! There is an event perfect for you. Enter a Coursemarker/Gimmick Rallye, where the challenge isn’t who has the best ride, but who has the best mind. Coursemarker/Gimmick rallyes are events where a driver and a navigator use a set of instructions to drive through a predetermined course on public roads. The instructions are littered with gimmicks to trick teams into driving on the “incorrect” course as opposed to the “correct” one where points are gained by finding coursemarkers. These coursemarkers may give you more instructions (and possibly more gimmicks) along the rallye. First one to the finish line is usually the loser. There is no speed component to gimmick rallyes. It’s like ole Wyatt Earp said, “Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.”

Continue reading Racer Boy: Coursemarker/Gimmick Rallyes – How to drive around lost for three hours and win a trophy doing it.

2010 Honda Accord Crosstour EX-L AWD

by Byron Hurd. Photos courtesy of Honda.

It takes about six seconds to travel from the stop box to the “time writer” official at a NASA Mid-Atlantic autocross (or “NASA-X”). If you’re in it to win it, those six seconds are excruciating. What should really be a short time might as well be an hour-long debriefing. Six. What did I screw up that time? Five.Did that wobbler back at the offset box fall over? Four. Did I tap one in that second slalom? Three. Does Jon Felton hate Miatas? Two.

One.

But this time, I don’t give a damn. I’m not playing for keeps. Brian, this heat’s time writer, is smiling and shaking his head as he leans in to his radio. He writes it on a post-it note and reaches out toward my driver-side window as I roll up. “You are consistent.” He tells me, laughing. I know what that means before I take the slip from him.

Another 67.

That’s a healthy six seconds off what would be my normal pace for a course this size. I normally peak mid-way through my session, and if I’ve settled to a 67.49 on run four, it’s pretty much a given that I’m not going to improve much from here. So why the lack of concern? Simple. Today, I’m not driving a Mazdaspeed3 or an RX-8 or a NA Miata. I’m not even driving our Focus.

I’m driving a 2010 Honda Accord Crosstour. And let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like hanging out the ass end of a 4100lb hatchback-on-stilts.

Continue reading Lord Byron — Over the river and through the cones: The 2010 Honda Accord Crosstour

It was a sunny day in 1994 when I fired up my 1990 Volkswagen Fox and took my newly acquired “Swedish Mauser” 6.5×55 rifle to the local range. At that point in time, the rifle was around eighty-two years old, having been manufactured at some point in 1912. It worked fine and was accurate to slightly under one inch at one hundred yards — the so-called “minute of angle” which is a basic standard of accuracy for long guns. Having satisfied myself that this time-worn gun was up to snuff, I went home and played some guitar. In this case, the guitar was my 1982 Electra Phoenix X130, already twelve years old but showing very little wear despite a harrowing four years following me around a college campus.

My mail had been delivered that day by a mailman driving a Grumman LLV, very similar to the one pictured at the top of this column. And although I didn’t know it, Porsche was less than three months away from building a particular white 1995 993 Carrera with factory-matched white wheels.

Nearly sixteen years later, my Mauser is doing fine service for another shooter, who reports that it has required no repair or maintenance beyond the basics. It will turn one hundred years old in 2012. My Electra rarely comes out of its case any more, since I have an, ahem, Gibson CS-336 and Heritage H-535 Anniversary to supplant it, but when I do play it there’s no evidence that it’s now a twenty-eight-year-old guitar. My mail was delivered today by a mail lady in a Grumman LLV which could not have been manufactured any fewer than fourteen years ago. And my 1995 Porsche 993 Carrera slumbers in the cold garage dreaming of spring, shiny and corrosion-free.

The 1990 Fox I drove to the range that long-ago day? Gone, junked, rusted out, driven into the ground. In a story full of what they call “durable goods”, the Fox wasn’t truly durable at all. It was used and discarded, probably utterly worthless by the time the odometer reached the 150,000 mark. Surely VW understood how to make a consumer product as durable as a wooden Japanese guitar or a ninety-year-old rifle. The industry as a whole understood how to make durable items. My little white 993 still runs. The local mail truck still runs, although we’ll discuss later why Grumman’s understanding of “durable” differs from Porsche’s. The Fox’s lack of durability was almost certainly due to a particular decision or series of decisions made somewhere at Volkswagen. Why? What is the advantage of deliberately creating less-than-durable products? Put another way — why aren’t all vehicles “long life vehicles”?

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #32: Nobody wants a car to last forever.

“If Woodward and Bernstein had been automotive journalists, the Watergate story would have been a five-star review of Richard Nixon’s personal tape recorder.” I’m putting that in quotes, even though I just wrote it, because I think it’s quotable.

“I’m increasingly of the opinion that while critical opinion is necessary — especially with a big purchase like a car — manufacturers are wasting time and money by catering to writers with large or focused audiences but little pull in terms of who actually purchases the items.” Now that was written by Michael Banovsky, in his recent piece regarding free-ride automotive journalism, and I think it’s also quotable, although it lacks that certain ‘zing’ that my quote has.

The aforementioned Mr. Banovsky has a novel idea: that manufacturers should stop paying for auto journalists to enjoy unbelievably sybaritic new-vehicle launches, $80,000 free loaner cars disguised as “long-term testers”, and all of the other little bennies of the biz. Instead, the money (and it’s a lot of money, reckoned to be over five million dollars per year in the case of some of the bigger automakers) should be spent reaching out to, and connecting with, the actual customers for their products. In short, auto journalism as we know it needs to die. The denim-jacket fatties and bald old buzzards who shuffle-steer their incompetent way through a driving event, hold down barstools for the evening, and then rewrite the press release during the flight home — well, they should be taken out back and shot. The color rags should wither and fall from the shelves like autumn leaves, with only the lace-like rotted pages of a MacNeil Products special-advertising section remaining. The functional illiterates who take a free plane ticket to an auto show, have their hands held by PR reps through a scripted sequence of roundtables, and then breathlessly blog about the “awesomeness” of cars they’ve never driven — they will become as difficult to find as their talent was. All change, as they say. Everybody goes home.

He’s right, and he’s right about why. The Internet will eventually connect manufacturers and consumers directly, with very little third-party (lack of) expertise muddling the flow. That’s the end of the story. But the road to that happy ending will be longer than the road Dorothy took to Oz, and here’s why.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #31: Automotive “journalism” is a joke, and it needs a punchline.

I don’t care about Toyota.  I haven’t for years. I’ve observed their place in the market and even expressed some degree of interest in a very small handful of their offerings over the last decade, but I’ve never really thought much of them one way or another. That may become a somewhat difficult assertion to defend after the next thousand words or so, but take my word for it.

See, many car enthusiasts care a great deal about Toyota. They’re the ones who take every opportunity to tell you how awful their cars are, how dreadfully overrated they are, and how lifeless and soulless and dishwasher-like they are. They tell you how cheap and how poorly-engineered they are. You want a Prius? This guy tells you to get a used Jetta TDI. Your mom wants a nice, reliable Camry? Tell her to get a Volvo! You like the old MR2s? Wise up and get a 944. You want a MkIV Supra turbo? Supercharge an old F-Body for 1/3 of the price.

It’s the same thing, you know, just without all that Japanese suck.

Continue reading Lord Byron — The Good Ship Toyota

Photo courtesy of Volkswagen of America

This installment of Rational Bohemian was scheduled to be a eulogy for the New Beetle, since Volkswagen hasn’t really troubled themselves with anything of the sort. Attendees of the L.A. Auto Show did get a long-expected, totally overdue announcement of the model’s retirement and the inevitable commemorative special editions, but that was about it.

So I’ll say it now, in brief: New Beetle, I adore you and I’ll miss you. Your not-insignificant role in reviving the brand will not be forgotten (by me, anyway). In light of a press release I received last week, though, there are more pressing concerns; a respectful and sentimental sendoff will have to wait.
Because what the hell, Volkswagen? Really, what the hell?

Continue reading Rational Bohemian #6: Dub Chick Be Trippin’

“…is going to buy whatever Apple unveils today, right at 5pm, no matter what it is.” — Seen on Facebook, January 27, 2010

As I write this, it has been fourteen hours since Apple’s Steve Jobs revealed the iPad to a crowd of cheering followers, er, customers, this morning. For what it’s worth, I’m in no way impressed with the new iProduct. I’ve been working with Apple systems since I hacked up a “worm race” program for the Apple ][+ back in 1982, and I am writing this column on a 24″ iMac, so I’m very far from being anti-Apple — but this new tablet doesn’t do it for me.

Not that Mr. Jobs would care. As a company, Apple is very far from being the hacker-friendly maker of expansion-slot-packed beige wedges I knew as a child. One could argue that Apple isn’t even really a computer company any more, insofar as they don’t devote a lot of attention to making computers. Instead, Apple is a producer of design-centric goods which offer little more utility than their competitors while commanding significantly higher prices. Hmm… I think that means that Apple is a luxury brand. Don’t you?

After all, “luxury” doesn’t necessarily mean Brioni suits, megayachts, or any of the verses from Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”. Rather, a luxury is simply something that one does not need, but that one wants, often for no other reason than the social standing or perceived prestige associated with the item. Luxury, in other words, is something that offers a boost in self-image and image within a community. The iPad will be a luxury item. Nobody needs an iPad. The functionality of the iPad doesn’t justify the price. There are cheaper, uglier, more drab devices that provide about the same utility for less money.

I would suggest that most iPad purchasers will be people who identify with the Apple brand and its cultural associations. If iPads were invisible, or if they looked exactly like Dell laptops, they would collect dust on the brightly lit Apple Store shelves. Instead, they will fly off those shelves and into the hands of people who want to be seen with the “right” product. Regardless of price. Regardless of function. Regardless of utility. Image is the key. And that is why the Toyota Prius is a successful luxury product. It’s also why the Honda Insight has cratered in the market, and it’s why the Prius spinoff, the hopelessly dumpy HS250h, is utterly doomed.
Continue reading Avoidable Contact #30: Prius is very iPad! Prius is real luxury! HS250h is more like a Sears Tele-Games! You’ll buy anything!