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.

I live in a little suburb outside Columbus, Ohio. My afternoon commute takes me through an even smaller suburb of perhaps five hundred residents. This suburb rigorously enforces a 40mph limit on the 1.5 miles of state highway passing through its borders, and it has at least two police-liveried Explorers with which to do so. I’m used to having my lime-green Audi S5 lit up with multiple laser shots and frustrated, angry looks from those Explorers as I cruise-control by at 38 miles per hour, not a bit more. I know that if I stray above forty I’ll be ticketed. A friend of mine got a $200-ish ticket a while ago for running his Supra by the local yokels at forty-five.

Today, as I was idling through that town, I was nearly struck head-on by one of the aforementioned police Explorers, running flat-out to catch a speeder. I’m no accurate judge of oncoming-vehicle speed (and, for that matter, neither is anyone else I’ve ever met) but I think it’s fair to say this cop was doing at least sixty, maybe seventy, and he was treating the double-yellow separating me from him with a considerable amount of disregard. It didn’t take me much mental effort to move over and avoid a collision, but it started me thinking about some basic assumptions regarding speeding and police conduct.

We can start by examining the most basic assumption regarding speeding, namely the idea that there should be such an offense. For better or worse, I’m inclined to think that some sort of speed limit is a reasonable idea. I’d like to buzz down the freeway at a buck-fifty, and I occasionally do buzz down the freeway at a buck-fifty, but I’m not certain that the current states of vehicle repair, tire inflation, driver education, and drug/alcohol/phone/boomin’-system use in this country support the idea of unlimited speed on all roads.

Now we arrive at the first contradiction in modern speeding laws: the fine-based approach. If you break a speed limit by less than thirty miles per hour in most areas, you will be fined and/or receive “points” on your license. If speeding is dangerous, and if people die from speeding, why aren’t speeders thrown in jail? Throwing old-school Jarts into a crowd is dangerous, and if you get caught doing it chances are you won’t simply be permitted to avoid criminal penalities by mailing a hundred bucks to your local mayor’s court. Why do we, as a society, treat speeding differently? Could it be a tacit recognition by the justice system pf the fact that nearly everyone exceeds the artificially low speed limits in the United States?

Of course, if you live in an area where photo radar or some other Orwellian automatic enforcement hasn’t yet become popular, you will have to receive your speeding ticket from a police officer. Unless you slow down below the posted limit upon seeing said cop and then patiently wait for him or her to arrive behind you, your pursuer will have to break the speed limit as well.

Think about that. It’s not usually necessary to murder people to catch a murderer, nor is it necessary to rape innocent bystanders to punish a rapist. If your car was stolen, you would not expect the policeman taking your report to arrive in a stolen car. And yet we generally accept the idea that a police officer will break the speed limit in order to catch speeders. Even more interestingly, we accept that it will be “necessary” to break the speed limit by considerably more than the original offender did.

Some back-of-the-envelope stuff: If a driver is doing fifty in a forty and passes a stationary cop in a P71 Crown Vic “Police Interceptor”, that cop will need at least ten seconds to pull out and accelerate to fifty miles per hour. At that point, he is at least four hundred feet behind the speeder, probably more. If he wants to catch that speeder within three or so minutes and stay within his jurisdiction, he needs to step it up to fifty-five or sixty miles per hour. He’s now doing half again the speed limit and possibly represents a greater threat to the public welfare than the original offender.

This wouldn’t be a problem if cops didn’t crash, but they do. All the time, as a matter of fact. A long time ago, I had a police firearms instructor tell me, “There are two things cops can’t do: shoot and drive.” He was right. NHTSA states that over 3,000 people have died in police chases during the past decade. In 2001, for example, 365 people were killed, including 140 who were in no way involved with the chase. For more information, check out Victims Of Police Pursuit. Many municipalities are moving to reduce high-speed chases — or eliminate them altogether.

If we, as a society, are not willing to risk innocent lives to catch bank robbers or fleeing felons, why should we endure a similar risk simply to tax motorists who are often traveling at a speed which is entirely reasonable and appropriate for the conditions? Speed limits could still be enforced through cameras, automated devices, and the old Ohio Highway Patrol standby of having a cop call ahead to another cop up the road who waves the motorist over to receive a ticket. If this increases the cost of speeding enforcement, perhaps it will inspire municipalities, and the citizens of those municipalities, to more closely consider whether their police are best serving the public by serving as roadside tax collectors.

It seems reasonable enough that police shouldn’t be allowed to drag-race down the road, endangering the public simply to write tickets. The problem then becomes: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchers? How can police be prevented from endangering the public? In the long run, an OnStar-style system of GPS-based speed management could be used to ensure that police (and, come to think of it, any other person who suckles from the teat of public employment) adhere to the speed limit at all times. This is the only fair system. While I’m sure that we all like the idea of police rushing at triple digit-speeds to save us from a home invasion, that implies that the lives of crime victims are somehow more valuable than the lives being risked by police who operate vehicles at a speed beyond their capacities. If a policeman kills innocent kids through negligent speed, does the fact that he is rushing to respond to a break-in bring those kids back to life?

While we are waiting for a perfect, nationwide-capable GPS speed-enforcement mechanism to arrive, action can still be taken to save thousands of lives every decade. It’s this simple: an old-school speed governor can be installed on every cop car. The maximum speed should be set to the limit chosen by that state for two-lane highways. Simple as that. For most states, that limit is fifty-five miles per hour.

As fate would have it, the Connecticut State Senator for Milford recently opined that a broad increase in requirements and penalties for teenaged drivers would be justified “if it saves one life.” I don’t know if changing the curfew for teen drivers from midnight to eleven p.m. will save any lives, but I’m pretty sure that governing the Milford Police’s cruisers to fifty-five would have saved two lives. Those lives have names: Ashlie Krakowski and David Servin.

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”?

I’ve been fascinated lately by the story of the US Postal Service and its efforts to obtain and use “long life vehicles”. You can read a fair amount of the LLV’s history at LLV.com. The original Sixties Jeep stepvans were rather intelligent attempts to marry a World War II-proven mechanical platform with a much more spacious interior.

The resulting packaging is very efficient and well-adapted to any relatively low-speed motoring application where aerodynamic drag isn’t an issue. Since postal delivery tends to be one of those low-speed applications, the Postal Service was quite interested in the little vans. There was just one problem: they weren’t quite big enough. Enter the LLV.

The Grumman LLV takes the stepvan concept, adds aerospace-style riveted construction, and plops the whole thing on the simplest platform General Motors could muster — that of the S-10 pickup. The intent was to create a vehicle with a long life. Duh. It’s called the “Long Life Vehicle.” But what does that mean?

I’ve identified three basic approaches to creating durable vehicles. The first one we’ll call the aircooled-Porsche approach. Aircooled Porsches were built to exacting tolerances from expensive materials. Starting in the mid-Seventies, they were galvanized to prevent corrosion. The basic guts of a 911 should last a million miles. You may have to replace some relays, redye the leather, or rebuild the engine, but the basics of the car are high-quality and durable. If you want to drive your 911 until the odometer turns over, you can do it — but it will cost you.

Some of the iconic Japanese cars of the Eighties, such as the Civic and Corolla, were built using a different approach. They were what Toyota now calls “fat product” cars — vehicles built to be just a little better than they really needed to be. The engineering of these cars was very thorough, money was spent where it needed to be spent to ensure mechanical reliability, and as a result you can drive a 1989 Honda Civic a very long time. Eventually, you will fall prey to the relatively low cost of the materials used in said Honda Civic. The body will rust or corrode. The engine will wear out and will not accept another rebuild. A Civic won’t last as long as a 911, but it won’t cost you nearly as much time or effort to keep it running during its lifetime.

Grumman chose a third way. The Chevrolet S-10 and its 2.5L “Iron Duke” engine were known, even then, to be pretty low-quality items. The advantage in using those low-quality items came in ease and cost of service and parts replacement. It takes less mechanical aptitude to service an LLV than it does to service a Corolla or Porsche. In fact, it’s my understanding that the Postal Service sometimes trains its own mechanics, just like the Army does. To be geeky about it, the set of all techniques and knowledge required to maintain an LLV is a subset of the set of all techniques and knowledge required to maintain modern passenger vehicles, and a small subset at that.

The LLV body itself appears to be almost maintenance-free. It’s aluminum, riveted like an aircraft body and just as weather-resistant. Most of the LLVs I see continue to look pretty decent. The bumpers are large, strong, utterly repulsive-looking black rubber affairs. The homeowners in my neighborhood rush home early every Thursday to get their trash cans out of the street before the postal workers clock ‘em out of the way with their big LLV bumpers. I’ve personally seen a large steel trash can fly nearly twenty feet after being struck by a speeding LLV, with no visible damage whatsoever to the aforementioned stepvan. Don’t try this with your Lamborghini Valentino Balboni LP550-2.

Come to think of it, I’ve seen all sorts of abuse heaped on LLVs by postal workers, and rarely do the LLVs complain. They catch fire sometimes (apparently some shortcuts were taken in Grumman’s wiring, so to speak) and I wouldn’t want to crash one into anything more substantial than a steel trash can, but in general these are hard-working, reliable, abuse-resistant vehicles. The Postal Service seems to agree. Nominally speaking, the LLV will eventually be replaced by the larger, more sophisticated Ford CRV in both gasoline and electric variants. In practice, the LLVs are being refurbished and extended at least to the end of this young decade. It’s not unlikely that the existing LLV chassis will survive, perhaps with replacement electric or hybrid powertrains, well into the 2030s.

What we have with the Grumman LLV, then, is a vehicle which can last twenty-five years or longer with relatively unskilled maintenance. It uses inexpensive parts. It has plenty of space. With something besides an Iron Duke ahead of the firewall, it would probably even get decent gas mileage. I would ask “Why isn’t there a civilian version?” but the quickie answers to that — crash safety, uggo bumpers, hurricane-force highway wind noise — are too easy to produce.

Instead, let’s ask this question: We have cars on the market that are sold on safety. We have cars on the market which are sold on performance. We have cars on the market which are sold on price, perceived reliability, environmental impact, cupholder count, faux-coupe silhouette, you name it. There’s a car out there catering to nearly every possible desire, from the ridiculous to the sublime… except long-term durability. Isn’t there anybody out there who wants a long-life vehicle of their own?

It wouldn’t have to be a riveted-aluminum box. It could be a sedan, wagon, or sports car. Nor would it have to miserable to operate. There is plenty of well-understood and time-tested convenience equipment out there. Many existing suppliers understand very well what’s required to significantly increase the life of their products; somebody would just have to be willing to pay the extra cost.

What would that cost be? I can’t believe that it would be double the cost of existing vehicles. If a Honda Civic can be profitably sold at $17,000, a long-life version almost certainly wouldn’t cost $34,000. Perhaps there would be a 50% markup. I’m not convinced it would cost any more than the addition of a hybrid powertrain. Let’s dream up a long-life Civic real quick: a plain 1.6 SOHC sixteen-valve engine, with high-strength steel and hardened components. Five-speed manual transmission. Simplified electronics, with upgraded connectors and sensors. Steel wheels. Galvanized body. High-strength fabric interior. A simplified dashboard with access panels to reach the components within. Thicker body panels that are bolted, rather than plastic-riveted, to the frame rails. The list goes on. The million-mile Civic could probably be engineered and built without too much difficulty. It’s certainly a simpler item than an Acura ZDX.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure it would be any more popular than that rather beaky-looking awkward-mobile. The Element hasn’t set any sales records, and that’s probably the closest thing on the market to a deliberately simplified, utilitarian production vehicle. It would be hard to explain to new-car buyers why they should pay more for a vehicle that they probably won’t keep more than a few years. While the resale value of long-life Civics would be high, Honda might not appreciate having to compete with its own products for thirty years. Why buy a new “LLC” when used ones are, literally, just as good? It’s the same problem that haunts companies like Glock and Gibson: when your old stuff doesn’t wear out, the new stuff doesn’t always fly off the shelves.

It’s difficult to imagine that Honda would embrace a Long Life Civic, particularly not when every new Honda bears conspicuous evidence of cost-cutting. Toyota is currently facing a tsunami of trouble based on its decision to save money on gas pedals and electronics, but I wouldn’t look for their pendulum to swing back to the 1990 Corolla any time soon. Porsche and Mercedes-Benz have learned the hard way that snazzy features and hard-sell marketing move more iron than evergreen aircooled Carreras or million-mile W123 sedans. There doesn’t seem to be any room in the market for a product sold on the basis of reliability.

Except. There’s a company that has a bit of a financial advantage at the moment, some momentum, and engineering prowess to spare. They really need the PR boost and public image buffing that could come from deliberately making long-life vehicles, and they know how it was done before. Ladies and gentlemen, I propose… The Grumman/General Motors Long Life Cruze. Enjoy a million miles behind the wheel of your stylish little sedan! Embrace simplicity and try the locally produced Long Life Cruze! Forget the vagaries of fashion by driving a car that already looks like it was styled a decade ago! It only accelerates when you ask it to!

It’s a dumb idea, but it’s not as stupid as the Chevy Volt Dance.

“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.

Let’s start (cue groan from the readers) with the reason automotive journalism in its traditional form exists It’s interesting to note that special-interest car rags have been around nearly as long as the automobile itself. Autocar was founded in 1895, and the inimitable LJK Setright tells us that it was originally a bit of a shill rag, featuring far-from-impartial opinions to benefit its owner, who also held part of Daimler. The idea of the self-published auto magazine is still with us — nearly every major carmaker publishes an utterly worthless color rag on a quarterly-ish basis, complete with moronic reviews of luxury hotels, expensive watches, and second-tier men’s fashion — but I find it hilarious that the most dignified name in the print trade was corrupt from Day One.

As we’ve all heard, the automobile is the second-most expensive purchase we will make in our lives, unless we buy a used Porsche 928, in which it will be the most expensive purchase we will ever make. It’s no surprise, then, that buyers have been looking for advice since the nineteenth century. In some cases, such as when Patrick Bedard left an engineering career to work for C/D, or when Consumer Reports decided to pay its own money for cars to test (mostly) impartially, the buyer has been well-served by listening to that “expert advice”.

Other examples of automotive “expertise” are closer to being laughable than reputable. Consider the “Wheels” section in nearly every major newspaper. The “Wheels” writers are as numerous as Biblical locusts at the new-car launches, and they descend on the buffet table with the same legendary ferocity, but in most cases they are completely unqualified to review automobiles. They aren’t engineers like Patrick Bedard, race car drivers like Paul Frere, or even hopelessly passionate and lyrical enthusiasts like Gordon Baxter. They’re just the guys who sucked too hard to be permitted to write about something critical, like municipal levies, local flower shows, or country-club golf tournaments. The “media associations” like TAWA and MAMA are filled to bursting with these $40,000-a-year careerists.

I believe that the phenomenon of the all-expenses-paid press event evolved to suit these easily-impressed mooks. As Mr. Banovsky notes in his article, there’s an almost hilarious conflict of interest involved here. You take a guy who barely earns enough to feed his family and put him up for two nights in a boutique hotel, pay for all his meals, keep his glass filled with cost-no-object alcohol, and let him drive brand-new cars. He’s living like a prince on someone else’s dime! Only a fool would do anything on the flight home but rewrite the press release.

And if the proverbial carrot is large, the proverbial stick can be larger still. This Panamera review made Porsche PR people angry enough to call my editors and make some “suggestions for improvement”. Since I already own three Porsches and am accustomed to the policy of hateful contempt with which the company views all but its most monied customers, I wasn’t really surprised, but I also have the luxury of not relying on autojournalism to pay my rent. I’m now more or less banned from Porsche events. If I needed to make my living writing about cars, I’d be in a world of hurt.

This is the problem in a nutshell. Real journalists go out and find their stories at their own expense, or their employers’ expense. Automotive journalists are effectively compensated by the manufacturers on which they report. And if an autojourno decides to take a “principled” approach, refusing to participate in press launches or take loaner cars… that writer will be effectively six months behind the competition. Would you, as a reader, rather read about the 2011 Shelby GT500 in May or November? Will you wait until November to read a review of a dealership-stock car, or will you eagerly gobble-up the May review, which will be paid for in some way by Ford?

The solution proposed by Mr. Banovsky: stop inviting journalists to events. Rather, manufacturers should invite existing customers to attend preview events, and manufacturer-sponsored discussion forums should eventually replace general-interest automotive news sources as the place for consumers to get their information. The dirty business of checking panel gaps and testing slalom speed can be left to Consumer Reports. Anybody stupid enough to read their local “Wheels” section will still probably see a regurgitated press release on the top fold fifty times a year, so no harm done there.

The advantages of this approach are easy to see. The direct interaction between manufacturer and consumer allows the desired messages to pass both ways with minimal interference.

“Hey, customer, We put the 5.0 in the Mustang just like you asked.”

“Great! And while you’re at it, could you put a Blu-Ray player in the 2012 model?”

“Sure! Come back to www.yourfordmustanginfosource.com for the details on how you’ll be able to order it, and while you’re here, why not purchase a ‘The 5.0 Is Back’ T-shirt?”

This doesn’t sound like a very impartial way for consumers to receive new-car information, but trust me: Putting a fifty-year-old man who normally drives a used Corolla behind the wheel of a Corvette ZR1 and letting him putter around a racetrack, thirty seconds a lap off the pace, isn’t exactly delivering absolute truth either. The feedback received by the manufacturers will also be of much higher quality. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard some drunken moron lecturing an engineer about “the real best way” to do something during an after-dinner free-drinks session, I could probably afford a “The 5.0 is Back!” T-shirt. It’s been shown time and time again that listening to auto journalists is a losing game, particularly when it comes to introducing high-cost specialist product. Consider that the auto press moaned for years about the lack of a manual-transmission E60 M5 and then crucified the car upon its arrival. Oops! And the Astra. And the GTO. The list goes on. The color rags have no idea what really sells cars, and neither do the bloggers. If bloggers were in charge of product planning, every manufacturer would offer a six-speed turbodiesel wagon of every single model, and the resulting flood of absolutely unsaleable cars would cause California to collapse into the ocean.

Customers, on the other hand, tend to be reliable sources of purchase information. Know why? They’ve actually purchased the product in the past. They have credibility. Asking some community-college lard-ass who’s never bought anything newer than an old Volvo station wagon what you should sell to the general public is a losing strategy. As Packard used to say, ask the man who owns one.

I’m speaking from personal experience here. I’ve purchased several new VWs, including two freakin’ Phaetons. I have probably signed sales orders for $300,000 of new Volkswagens. VW has never asked me anything. Instead, they hold cost-no-object parties for “social media leaders”, who tell them to import more diesel wagons and then drive home in twenty-year-old GTIs with ironic stickers covering the tailgate. No wonder the VW brand is in free-fall. Maybe VW should try something different. I don’t think it would be a bad idea to interact with the customers.

Automotive journalism has survived due to arbitrage of information. As discussed above. autojournos see the product well before the public does, and are granted no-cost access to it through loaners and long-term fleet cars. They — we — have the information and you don’t. If the manufacturers took that “gap” in time and access away, the “experts” would simply vanish. Why listen to what Bob Denimjacket has to say in your local paper about the 2016 Chevrolet Impala SSSSSSS if you can attend a customer event on the same day and see for yourself? Sure, there will still be a small market for detailed performance numbers, but in an era where everybody takes a video record of their dragstrip runs and open-track laps, that market will be small indeed.

This is my vision of the future: Joe Customer wakes up on a sunny Sunday. His tablet/smart paper/superphone says to him, “Good morning Joe. You’ve been happy with your Nissan 160Z and you’ve been an active Official Z Forum participant. The new Nissan 180Z is coming to a release event in our town this week. Would you like to chat with an expert system about the car’s features, schedule your own exposure event, or have a complete simulation of the car loaded into your PS6 for a few laps of the old Fuji circuit?” In a world like that, nobody’s reading some smarmy, cliche-ridden drivel review in Motor Trend. The guy from MT won’t see the car before you do, and you wouldn’t trust him anyway. You might trust nissanZfan1983, a guy you know on the forums who races Z-cars. Maybe he’ll meet you at the event, or you will chat about it over Skype, or you’ll race each other in a simulator. In any event, you’ll make up your own mind.

When you have your own personal Nissan 180Z long-lead event, probably a parking-lot autocross with 100 or so other owners, you might say, “You know, I like the seats in my current 160Z better. Can you do something similar to those?” If the feedback from enough 160Z owners is along the same lines, when the 180Z reaches your dealership, those seats will be an option.

That’s the future, and it’s outstanding. It probably means more “Wheels” guys will be homeless and holding cardboard signs at freeway exits reading “Will Shill for Grey Goose”. I consider this a bonus. But the road to that future is going to be bumpy. The first manufacturer to take Mr. Banovsky’s advice and turn away from the free-ride merry-go-round is going to take a pasting. They won’t be discussed favorably in print or in major blogs. Rumors will fly. Mean things will be said. Snide comments will be made. It will be widely supposed that they have turned away from conventional press PR because their product is antiquated, or second-rate, or simply not good enough for the (*snicker*) “glaring spotlight of journalism”.

In fact, any carmaker who wants to know what it’s like to focus on real customers instead of the press can talk to Tony Crook. Mr. Crook is a former Grand Prix driver who ran Bristol Cars for nearly a decade. Bristol doesn’t bother with press drives. There are no press loaners. There are no press events. The auto media is not welcome to tour the factory. Bristol prefers to work directly with their existing customers and find out what they want in a car. Their business grows, such as it does, by word of mouth and exposure to the product in the hands of owners. Go read a Bristol non-review in an English magazine to get a sense of what will be said about any manufacturer who hops off the freebie train. It’s rarely complimentary.

Still, Bristol is alive and Pontiac is dead. There’s a lesson here, if we could only figure it out.

“…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.

I can see your lips moving. “What? A $23,000 hatchback with a battery pack is a luxury car? Are you kidding?” Now waiiiiiiiit a minute. I didn’t say that the Prius was a luxury car. I said it was a luxury product. There’s an important distinction between the two. I’ve written quite a bit about the traditional luxury car and its uncertain fate. I’m a devoted student of velour seats, Landau tops, and crystal hood ornaments. What we’re discussing here, however, has nothing to do with Cadillacs or Camargues. Luxury cars are primarily purchased to convey the impression of wealth, and although the Prius has stellar demographics, it’s not just a car for the wealthy. Middle-class families buy them. Fixed-income retirees buy them. Feature for feature, a Prius is no more expensive than a Camry.

On the other hand, by that same feature-by-feature yardstick, a Prius is much more expensive than a Hyundai Elantra, and that’s where the issue of “luxury” comes in. The actual mathematics of the so-called hybrid tax are too involved to get into here, but I think it’s fair to say that nobody has yet convincingly argued that Prius ownership is as economically sensible as Elantra ownership, at least not in a world where gas sells for two or three bucks a gallon and replacement battery packs are far from cheap.

No, people don’t buy the Toyopod for financial reasons. If you asked Prius owners why they made the choice to buy their car, I imagine you would hear a lot about the environment, sustainability, reducing dependence on foreign oil, blah blah blah. That’s all crap. I know that’s all crap because the Honda Insight is rusting on dealer lots as we speak. That’s right. The Insight is nearly as efficient as the Prius, is just as reliable, and sells for less — but nobody wants one. And if you think the Insight is a marketplace failure, look at the car rusting on the lot next to it, which is probably a Honda Civic Hybrid. If you want to know if the Civic you are examining is a Hybrid, look for the two telltale signs: disc-like polished aluminum wheels, and thick, dusty cobwebs between those polished wheels and the fenders surrounding them. Nobody buys Civic Hybrids. Nobody bought Accord Hybrids, either. They are (or were, as the case may be) good cars, but they are not Priuses.

When I think of the current Insight, I think of the many “all-in-one” computers introduced in the wake of the original iMac’s roaring success. There was a time when every computer manufacturer on the planet made an all-in-one, from the now-defunct Monorail to Dell. Most of them had far more computing power than the iMac, even if they suffered from the clunky Windows OS of the time. And they all cost far less. But none of them had the sheer magic design or peerless pedigree of the iMac, so they failed. Nobody wants to be seen with an imitation iMac. The iMac is associated with “cool” people — designers, freelancers, artsy folks who live in San Francisco and bicycle to work. Imitation iMacs are issued to corporate drones in dank cubicles in order to compete the destruction of their worthless souls. Which end user would you rather be? I thought so.

Over time, that perceived coolness spread to the rest of Apple’s insanely great lineup, and it’s now a self-fulfilling stereotype. Hipsters buy Apple products because they are cool, and those products are cool because they are used by hipsters. Simple as that. If you want to know how Apple’s core demographic views the people who buy imitation Apple stuff, try pulling a Microsoft Zune out of your pocket in the middle of People’s Park. You will be lucky if the gentle, loving souls around you don’t kick your flyover-country ass all the way back to Wal-Mart. Cool people don’t want uncool people around them. The uncoolness might be catching, and it’s a real bummer anyway, man. So if you want to be cool, you’d better be prepared to pay the Cupertino Tax, because the cool people all pay it without hesitation, and the cool people are buying Apple.

What comes next will be tough for some of us to accept. Take a deep breath, then read this next sentence. The cool people out there are buying the Prius. No, they aren’t “cool” in the Steve McQueen sense of the term. Many of them are actively frightened by everything from trans fats to mild thunderstorms. I’ve never seen a Prius in a rap video, and I’ve never seen anybody driving one who looks like they could bench their own salad-starved weight. We all know the stereotypes about hybrid drivers, and these stereotypes are, frankly, usually true. If James Dean were here, he’d flick his cigarette in their lemon-sucking, tobacco-averse faces.

Unfortunately for me, and for many of you, this ain’t 1955 any more. Kids aren’t having fumbling, terrified sex in the back of hopped-up Chevrolets; they’re creating shot-by-shot remakes of gonzo porn in their own rooms, surrounded by iMacs, the Internet, and their amicably-separated parents’ indulgent approval. Hot, sweaty, bad-ass speed is for old men and white trash. The cool kids don’t want cars, and if they have to have a car, they want it to be one that is as un-car-like as possible. Which means buying a Prius, and paying extra for the name and the design. They have no problem paying extra for a name and a design, because most of them have been doing it ever since they got their first iPod.

If all you want is an economical, affordable car, Hyundai and Kia have you covered. If you want a greenwash on that, Honda would love to sell you an Insight. Really, they would. Call today. There’s a deal. I promise. But if you want the right look… if you want to be associated with the right people… if you want the same sense of ironclad consumer rightness that every iPad owner in North America will have, then you need to buy a Prius. Nothing else will do. If you buy an Insight, you’ll have to explain why you didn’t buy a Prius. People will ask you if you own a Zune. If you buy a Civic Hybrid, then some self-righteous woman in cat-eye glasses will stop you in the university parking lot and tell you that your sports car is killing the environment. If you buy a plain Corolla and save seven grand, the word will spread that you stole the car from your fresh-off-the-boat Pakistani roommate. Don’t bother to “think different” here. Put an iPod and an iPad in your Prius and relax, knowing that you are just as unique as everyone else in your social group.

And if your parents tell you that they are considering a Lexus HS250h, for the love of the God in which your yoga teacher professes not to believe, stop them. Tell them about the Sears Tele-Games. You see, back in 1977, the Atari VCS game system came out. They called it the 2600 later, but to begin with it was just the VCS. It was cool and every kid had to have one. Sears wanted in on the action, and they were in the habit of re-branding things, which is why you can still buy a KitchenAid microwave with “Kenmore” on the door. So they took the Atari VCS and relabeled it as the “Sears Tele-Games”. Loving parents brought Tele-Games consoles home to incandescently furious kids. “WHAT THE HELL, MOM! THIS IS NOT AN ATARI!”

“The man at Sears said it was the same, and it plays Atari games.”

“DOES IT SAY ATARI ON IT? MOMMMMMMMMMMMM!”

The Lexus HS250h is a Prius with a trunk. It costs ten grand more, and although it has a nicer interior than its cousin, the Sears Tele-Games had cool-ass burl walnut trim and it still sucked, so be aware. Worst of all, it doesn’t say “Prius” on it, which means you will have to explain to everybody why your parents hate the environment. Don’t buy one. Nobody’s buying one, which is why Lexus is leasing that model for just about free right now. Toyota is learning the hard way what Honda, Ford, and GM already know. “Hybrid” is a pretty meaningless badge. It’s the “Prius” one that counts.

Amazingly, Toyota is going to capitalize on this success by drafting in a smaller “Prius” in a year or so. We saw it as the “FT-CH Concept” in Detroit. It’s a hell of an idea, and I know it’s a hell of an idea, because Apple already had it. It was called the iPod Nano. Look for the little Prius to be as hot as the Nano. And the likely success of the iPad makes me think there’s room for a bigger, more expensive Prius in the future. Not as a Lexus, but as a Prius Plus. In the space of a few years, “Prius” has joined Apple on the List Of Perfect Brands. I think you will be able to buy all sorts of Prius-branded cars in the future. But if what I saw today is any indication, don’t expect them to come with, er, complete plug-in capability.

This past Friday, I was seated in a long-lead briefing for another auto manufacturer when the whispered word was passed down the line of seated journalists: “There’s an emergency conference call regarding Saab in ten minutes.” Not too long after that: “Saab is dead. There’s no deal.” All around me, I saw men with their heads cradled in their hands, though I could not tell whether it was from sympathy, misery, or simple world-weariness. From the seat next to me, a sorrowful, poignant comment: “I don’t want to live in a world where the ES350 is a best-seller and Saab is dead.”

What a perceptive statement! For there were more than fifteen long years where people willingly deluded themselves into believing that this world was one where the Camry-by-Lexus could rule the sales roost and, yet, Saab could live. With evidence to the contrary literally surrounding them, Saab’s incompetent, careless stewards at General Motors continued to push the lie: Saab is premium, Saab is luxury, Saab can compete with the Japanese and Germans on equal ground. By the time Saab’s lifeless body finally thumped against the ground, the story had assumed the mantle of tragedy. And like most tragedies, it began with a misunderstanding.

As noted earlier in this series, the primary reason for the prestige accorded European cars in this country in the post-Vietnam era was simply their outrageous cost and relative rarity. This bizarre situation — that of cars selling well simply because they were priced above their true value — led European manufacturers to focus obsessively on the United States on general and the coastal markets in particular. It also created the myth that virtually all European cars priced above a VW Rabbit were inherently “upscale”. (Eventually, that myth would drag even the humble Rabbit up the marketing ladder, but that is a bunny tale for another time.)

Perhaps the upscale-ness (upscality?) of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class was not open to question, but what about cars which served more or less as the Fords or Chevrolets of their home countries, such as Renault, Peugeot, or… Saab? The Saab 99, which carried the Swedish company’s fortunes at home and abroad during the Seventies, was hardly a luxury car by any objective measure. A low-power, front-wheel-drive hatchback with better-than-average seats and an impressive cargo capacity, it should have occupied approximately the same space in the market as the Honda Accord or yet-to-arrive Chevrolet Citation. True, Saab ownership may have been considered a mild luxury back home, but the ownership of any car has traditionally been a privilege in cramped, tax-trampled Europe.

In the prosperous United States, the 99’s all-weather capability combined with its obvious non-American-ness to make it a favorite among university professors, architects, and all those people who are universally represented in mid-Seventies advertising by a pipe-fondling fellow wearing a turtleneck and tweed jacket. The arrival of the “Turbo” model added some measure of performance cachet to the mix, and suddenly Saab was a rather hip car to own. With the introduction of long-nosed, better-equipped 99 variant, known as the “900″, Saab’s position as a niche product for comparative-literature professors and the occasional Cannonball Run wannabe was more or less assured.

Sure, as a company Saab had a product-development timetable that might best be described as “leisurely”, but what did that matter when the best carmaker in the world, Mercedes-Benz, only replaced their mainline sedans every nine or ten years? And if comparable Japanese or American cars offered far more in the way of comfort, features, and performance for less money… what Saab customer would ever want to be seen behind the wheel of a Caprice or a Cressida? The truth of the matter was that people bought Saabs — and Volvos, and Audis, and other European cars — less for what they were that for what they were not. As the American dollar fell through the floor in the Eighties, Saab pricing soared and the market responded by demanding better-equipped, even more expensive Saabs. This luxury-car game was an unbeatable scam. It let a small Swedish company sell rather prosaic cars to important people for outrageous prices, and it showed absolutely no signs of ever coming to an end.

Of course, the end came rather suddenly with the arrival of the second-generation Lexus ES. Based on the 1992 Toyota Camry, arguably the best family sedan in history, the ES300 was flawlessly assembled, impressively equipped, priced in absolutely predatory fashion, and backed by a monstrous armada of pretentious yet effective marketing aimed directly at the heart of America’s nouveau riche. The tweed-jacket crowd didn’t cotton to the snub-nosed Lexus immediately — darling, it looks cheap and common — but as tales of the super-Toyota’s relentless reliability circulated through the dusty, crowded Saab service-department waiting rooms, surely more than one assistant dean seriously considered the idea of switching loyalties.

Most importantly, the 1992 ES was modern, based as it was on a new-for-1992 car. The 1992 Saab 900 was based on the 1968 Saab 99, and it didn’t take too perceptive of an eye to see it. Of course, by then, Saab had already fallen into the orbit of cash-rich General Motors, and GM had new product coming. Kind of. The 1993 Saab 900 was based on a 1988 Opel, said Opel not being a very good car. In Sweden, where nobody expected Saabs to be world-beating luxury superstars, it wasn’t such a big deal. In America, the press and the public measured it against competition ranging from the aforementioned ES300 to the spectacular new E36 BMW and found it to be well below par.

The new-generation Saab lineup of 900 and 9-5 (also, sadly, based on an old Opel) didn’t make the cut from the beginning. A more active corporate custodian would have noticed this and taken swift action. GM, however, apparently felt itself to be in the position of a new boyfriend demanding to be serviced in identical fashion to the old. The 99/900 had lasted twenty-four years and sold well from start to end, therefore the new-gen cars would also have an extended model run regardless of the consequences. The 900 was facelifted into the 9-3 and rotted in the dealerships for a decade before being replaced by another Opel-platform mediocrity. Just for the sake of perspective, it should be noted that the 900/9-3 was sold against three generations of Lexus ES, any and all of which were more reliable, comfortable, and practical than the aging Swede. Even staid old Mercedes-Benz managed to field two new C-Class models during the 900/9-3’s extended run. The addition of a rebadged Oldsmobile Bravada as a third model line did nothing to help matters.

Give Saab’s tweed-clad customer base some credit: many of them remained loyal through years of underwhelming product and unmet promises. By last year, however, Saab buyers were nearly as extinct as the passenger pigeon. Just 21,368 Saabs found American homes in 2008. Lexus sales for 2008 were 23,362. By “2008″, I mean December of 2008. And that’s how the story ends: with a whimper. It’s worth noting that the success of Lexus and Infiniti did not really come at the expense of BMW and Mercedes-Benz, both of which have set US sales records in recent years. It came at the expense of American luxury makers and it came at the expense of the second-tier players like Saab.

It would be deeply satisfying at this point to rant about how American consumer-sheep are morons who would buy a rebadged Camry over a sleek, Euro-speedy Saab, but let’s keep it real. American consumer-sheep aren’t so stupid that they don’t prefer a rebadged modern Camry over a rebadged old Opel. The current 9-3 is a relative to the Chevrolet Malibu and — whisper it — probably isn’t as good of a car, overall, as the Malibu. The current 9-5 is a relative to the dismal old Saturn L-Series. In order to continue as a rational human being on this planet, I simply must believe that at some point, the veneer of psuedo-prestige wears thin enough to expose the rotting structure beneath, and Saab reached that point a long time ago.

The Saab story includes airplanes, rally drivers, turbochargers, iconoclastic personalities, and more than half a century of fabulous designs. The Lexus story is this: it’s a Toyota for people too snobbish or fearful to be seen in a Toyota. Saabs have been wonderful, frisky, characterful companions for a very long time. People cry when their Saabs are towed away for the last time. Nobody’s ever cried over a Lexus, except possibly when they received a repair bill for their out-of-warranty second-gen LS400. Saab was real. Lexus is fake. Simple as that.

Or is it that simple? Saab has been a fraud and a fake for nearly twenty years, selling second-rate cars on dimly remembered glories. Meanwhile, Lexus has been continually building the cars their customers want, always fresh, nearly always reliable, always sold and serviced with a smile. Saab’s better future was perpetually around the corner; meanwhile, the next Lexus was completed on time and plopped, Harvest-Gold-colored, on a calmly rotating showroom turntable. Ask any Saab enthusiast about the brand and they will tell you about the 900 SPG, but ask a Lexus owner about his car and he will tell you he likes it. What is real, and what is no longer relevant?

I have a bit of a fantasy, as a former Saab owner and unrepentant fan of the old cars. I dream that Saab comes roaring back under some daring little ownership umbrella, freed to somehow create world-class product on a shoestring and humiliate the Japanese juggernauts on the open road. I close my eyes and hope for a stunning new car that has the spirit of that old 99 Turbo and brings the old virtues to a generation not even alive when the only two turbo cars on the market were the Saab and the Porsche 930. I think of the Saab workers, earning a decent wage and building cars they love, a bulwark against the vomitous tide of look-alike crap from the Pacific Rim, the Asian Tigers, and eventually the open maw of China. I can think about this, and I can smile.

And then I open my eyes to see a Hyundai Genesis gliding by, more Lexus than Lexus, more fake than the original fakers, yet honest and real in the same way the Lexus ES is honest and real. That’s the future. Luxury was always an illusion. Now it is deliberately so. To imagine that future, if I may paraphrase Orwell, imagine a Chinese-made faux-Ferragamo boot stomping on a human face. Plastic chrome, meaningless names, flowery symbols. This is the future, and in that future, Saab is, inexorably and completely, dead.

Ron Carter Saab Gallery by Adam Barrera @ highmileage.org

[View with PicLens]

 

It seems like yesterday, but it was long ago, as the song says. One day in the spring of 1982, my father pulled into the driveway behind the wheel of a new Lincoln Town Car Signature Series. His new Lincoln Town Car Signature Series, purchased to commemorate his ascension to the post of Executive Vice President in a small food brokerage. Let the record show that my father was thirty-seven years old, as I am now. If he was confused and occasionally frustrated by life, as I am now, he never showed it; if he struggled with doubts and fear, as I occasionally do, it was never apparent. He was a respected businessman and stalwart, if not particularly cheerful, presence at church each Sunday. Still, I take comfort in the fact that his Town Car was painted a particularly outrageous shade of sky blue, referred to as “Wedgwood” in the manual but immediately characterized by my automotively diffident mother as “Polock Blue”. Not as outrageous as a bright green Audi S5, perhaps, but neither was this the car of a man who shied away from attention.

His choice of a Town Car surprised me. My grandfather — his father — was a confirmed Cadillac man who piloted a stainless-roofed Eldorado Biarritz from home to country club and back every day. Surely a Sedan de Ville (French, amusingly, for “town car”) would have been a better choice? As always, though, Dad had his finger vaguely on the American pulse. The Town Car was “hot” and the de Ville was “cold”, so he chose the former. And how I loved to ride in that blue-velour interior, surrounded by chromed script and plastic wood, serenaded by the “Premium Sound” system complete with door-mounted subwoofers! And though my father would eventually follow that American pulse away from Lincoln, through a series of BMWs, Jags, Lexuses, and Infinitis, I never forgot this: sliding behind the wheel of a big new Lincoln meant that one had “made it”.

Fast-forward to the present day. I am in full attack mode, bearing down on the tail of an E36 BMW through a series of vicious decreasing-radius turns. He’s pushing hard, breaking the tail loose slightly at every exit. I’m holding the gap from braking zone to apex and closing it from there. A pair of utterly silent turbochargers quicken the cultured twin-cam music filtering into an exceptionally quiet cabin. We have all-wheel-drive and make full use of it, clawing the road at full throttle and ripping the scenery back through the windshield. On a wide sweeper, I see the needle swing well past the triple-digit hash mark, the Bimmer’s license plate swells to myopic visibility, and the chase is finally over. We’re on his tail, will not be shaken. My three passengers relax a bit. They are each reclined in a power-ventilated individual chair, surrounded by figured maple and stitched leather, lit by the sun through a panoramic glass roof and soothed by a studio-quality sound system. We’re in a Lincoln. More pertinently, we’re in a Lincoln station wagon.

Every brand needs a core. From the core, the marketroids derive image and positioning. The core is what the man in the street remembers, what the neighbor notices, the image that floats unbidden across one’s mind. In the modern era, deviations from the core are punished without mercy by the ever-sensitive customer. Rolex once made quartz watches; today they are an embarrassing rarity, forgotten in company publicity and mentioned in whispers by a select group of iconoclastic collectors. The core of the Mercedes-Benz product lineup is the S-Class, which is why the $45,000 C350 is referred to as the “Cheap-class” in Mercedes-Benz service departments. The core of the BMW product lineup is the 3-Series, which is why the 7-Series will always play second fiddle to the big Benz. The core Jaguar is the XJ; the core Porsche is the 911. Infiniti struggled for years in the market until ithe G35 arrived to become its true core car. Lexus debuted with the LS400 at the core but that mantle has passed to the ES350.

Through the early part of this century, Lincoln and Cadillac were brands without core products, mismanaged and sickly. The DTS sedan, successor to the de Ville and ostensibly Cadillac’s core car, was a warmed-over 1995 Aurora blighted by an unreliable engine and an Avis-quality interior. Lincoln was in worse shape: the Town Car was still riding on the same basic platform as my father’s 1982 Signature Series and was sold mostly to the livery trade. Each brand had made an attempt to provide a mid-sized rear-driver, but the Lincoln LS and Cadillac Catera had failed to find friends among the import intenders. Instead, the showroom traffic at America’s premier luxury brands was primarily focused on a disturbingly cynical pair of rebadged work trucks, the Navigator and Escalade. The coveted title of “best-selling luxury brand in America” had been handed to Lexus, perhaps permanently. As my friend Adam Barrera of highmileage.org says, “Lincoln was a punchline! Cadillac was a punchline!”

Salvation came for Cadillac in the form of the 2003 CTS. This awkward-looking, rather cheaply-finished car was very far from perfect, but it ushered in a unique and recognizable “Cadillac style”. The cars that followed — SRX, STS, facelifted DTS, and revamped Escalade — built on that style. Today, as in 1959, a Cadillac is instantly recognizable on the street. The second-generation CTS provided the icing on the cake, fixing most of the original car’s defects while hammering the “Art & Science” look further into the public consciousness. If the old hands at Cadillac were depressed that the core product of the “Standard of the World” was now an Infiniti G35 competitor instead of a prestigious full-sizer, they managed to conceal their horror behind a simple gratitude for continued employment.

Their counterparts at Lincoln could count on no such saving grace. The 2006 Cadillac lineup was visually unified and mostly brand-exclusive, but the 2006 Lincoln lineup was nothing short of depressing. There was a Ford Fusion derivative whose name, Zephyr, had been most recently used on a Ford Fairmont derivative — and that was, really, the best product in the showroom. The Town Car was celebrating its twenty-seventh birthday, and the other two Lincolns were variants of full-sized Ford trucks. Without a true core product, Lincoln dealers were forced to watch sales follow public perception down the rabbit hole. Pundits inside and outside the industry openly discussed the brand’s impending demise, and the PR pleas to “just wait a little while” seemed to be mere wishful thinking. Forty-odd years ago, the Lincoln Continental had been the finest luxury car available at any price, but those days seemed to be long gone. It was a brand without a purpose.

Cadillac had a purpose, and that purpose was performance. The capstone on this new corporate image was to be the 2009 CTS-V, a Nurburgring-ripping supercharged statement of superiority. The “V” brand would achieve parity with AMG or BMW’s M Division, and by extension — so the theory went — Cadillac would achieve parity with Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Well, maybe not parity, but enough prestige would be generated to justify the fact that a base CTS costs $38,860 while a base Mercedes C300 sells for $33,600.

To combat this bespoke lineup of high-speed rear-drive super-sedans, Lincoln planned… a bunch of FWD platform derivatives. Their CTS fighter, the revamped MKZ, would continue to be a Fusion under the skin, while the MKS sedan and MKT crossover would be related to the Taurus and Flex. The analysts looked at the two companies and took their knives out for Lincoln. It would take more than a few chrome-nosed front-drivers to compete with mighty Cadillac.

It’s at this point that I would like to ask the reader to indulge me in a bit of time travel. We’re going to go back to 1985, if you don’t mind. You see, it was in 1985 that General Motors unveiled their all-new lineup of “downsized” front-wheel-drive luxury cars. Born and bred for a world of OPEC-controlled fuel prices, the GM B-body (LeSabre, Delta 88) and C-body (Electra, Ninety-Eight, de Ville, Fleetwood) cars were just the right product at the right time. Ford knew that it needed downsized FWD sedans to compete against GM’s new lineup, but it didn’t have the development money, so it simply let the full-sized “Panther” RWD Crown Victoria, Grand Marquis, and Town Car continue on without revisions. Everybody sat back and waited for GM to kick the living you-know-what out of the market.

You know what happened next, or maybe you don’t, if you’re young enough. Ronald Reagan broke OPEC’s back, fuel prices fell overnight, and the downsized GM luxury cars were showroom poison. Two successive “up-sizing” efforts on the original platforms failed to recapture customers who were appalled by the dismal-looking 1985 models. Where did those customers go? Why, to Ford, of course. The big “Panthers” acquired sales momentum so powerful that it took twenty years of neglect to destroy the brand equity in the Town Car and Grand Marquis names. The moral of the story? Sometimes it’s better to be lucky.

Let’s return to the present day. Once again, times have changed in ways that the automakers could not predict. Fuel prices are up again, this time perhaps permanently. Whether you call the current state of the American economy “recession” or “depression”, there’s no doubting the effect it’s had on domestic automakers. GM is bankrupt and taking welfare checks from the government, while Ford is backed into a financial corner that would tax Houdini’s powers of escape. Purchasing power is down. Performance is no longer tops on the luxury buyer’s agenda.

As in 1985, Ford’s inability to pay for a clean-sheet luxury lineup may turn to its advantage. I spent last week in San Francisco driving the revised Lincoln lineup. The facelifted MKZ is a genuinely decent car, and the EcoBoost MKS is a nice way to get a Taurus SHO’s pace with additional headroom and luxury features, but the Flex-based MKT…

…well, this is a core car. To begin with, it’s the first American luxury vehicle in a very long time to offer four absolutely premium seating positions. The middle row of an MKT is simply a spectacular experience, from the wide-opening doors to the multiple-speed seat ventilaton. If the Cadillac CTS-V is a love letter to America’s drivers, the MKT is a bouquet of roses delivered to the door of its passengers. The seats recline, legroom is worthy of a long-wheelbase S-class, and the uncanny isolation of the MKT’s interior makes it possible to hold a cross-cabin conversation at very high speeds. As in the Flex, there is a freezer/refrigerator between the seats, but unlike the Flex there’s also a full-length console with storage areas. Passengers looking for a better experience are best advised to consider the Maybach 62, because short of that humpbacked super-Benzo it’s almost impossible to find this level of comfort and convenience.

The MKT doesn’t have a Maybach’s worth of power, but the EcoBoost variant is rapid in the best Hot Rod Lincoln tradition. A flat torque curve assures rapid step-off for part-throttle drivers, while drivers who press the pedal to the floor will be rewarded with a Cosworth-esque wail and a quarter-mile time somewhere in the mid-fourteens. As is the case with the Taurus SHO and MKS Ecoboost, the brakes are worthless; this rig is fast enough to literally set the brakes on fire in fast driving. It could really use a set of big Brembos, such as those supplied on the… Cadillac CTS-V.

On a racetrack, the CTS-V would leave the MKT behind. In fact, it would leave most cars behind, a fact no doubt noted by GM product czar Bob Lutz when he challenged “any member of the media” to beat a Lutz-driven CTS-V around a racetrack in any other stock production sedan. This challenge was later modified to exclude “ringers” such as, ahem, your humble author, but the point was made: the CTS-V is very possibly the fastest new sedan money can buy. Does it matter? Cadillac has bet, and bet heavily, on the fact that “luxury” really means “luxury performance” in the BMW tradition. The CTS and STS are not spacious cars, and they are not necessarily comfortable ones, particularly not in the second row. They are meant to be driven.

Lincoln, on the other hand, has placed its chips on traditional American luxury virtues: evocative styling, unparalleled comfort, reasonable pricing, high feature count. The worst back seat in the Lincoln lineup — the one in the MKZ — is as good as the best one at the Caddy dealer. In a perfect world, both companies would continue to find an audience, but this is no longer a perfect world. This is Recession America, and there may not be enough space at the dinner table for two full-line domestic luxury brands.

In this battle of core cars, my decision comes down to a very simple fact. It’s possible to find a more entertaining drive than a CTS-V for less money, but the MKT offers a passenger experience that can’t be matched by cars costing half again as much. Furthermore, the MKT isn’t a terrible drive, particularly in turbo form, while the CTS is rather dismal when pressed into passenger duty.

Scratch that. I’m fibbing. Well, I’m not fibbing necessarily, but I’m not being completely honest. I’m picking the MKT because the CTS-V, as wonderful as it may be, is simply an American M5. It’s an imitation. It’s an attempt to be something that Cadillac never really was. The MKT, by contrast, is a perfect successor to that iconic 1961 Continental. It’s the ultimate American luxury car, and the fact that it’s technically a Canadian-built truck doesn’t matter one bit. In a world where I had followed my father’s path — an alternative universe where I had chosen hard work and respectability over club racing and sleeping ’till noon — I’d bring a new car home to my kids to celebrate my new job, and it would be a Lincoln. Trust me on this one. When the smoke clears, the last brand standing in domestic luxury will be the one from Dearborn.

I remember the event as if it were yesterday, although in fact it was twenty-six years ago. My relentless, Rommel-esque campaign to get my mother into a 1983 Honda Civic 1500S had very nearly reached a successful conclusion. For months I had worked tirelessly to steer Mom towards a Honda dealership for our new “family car”, always with the ostensible and sensible goal of purchasing the $6,995 1500GL wagon. Once we were inside the doors of the dealership — doors I had personally darkened many a time before then, since it was only a four-mile walk each way from my house — it would be a simple matter of bait-and-switching her away from the wagon and into a bright red 1500S hatchback. I’d walked to the showroom the day before and verified the presence of one, priced at a compelling $6,495.

As fate would have it, however, the red 1500S had sold, leaving just a black one available. (The 1983 Civic 1500S, the only Civic of that generation to carry the “S” tag, was available in just two colors: black and red.) No matter: we’d take it. In just a few nearly tearful moments, I convinced her that the 141-inch long, two-door hatchback was an ideal car for a single mother and two growing boys. The sales manager, displaying the utterly despicable greed that is still a hallmark of Honda dealers today, allowed us to buy the car at sticker. Providing, that is, we would pay an additional $349 for a two-speaker cassette player and $99 for a useless tape stripe.

That Civic was a truly great car. Economical, quick enough, sporty-looking, bulletproof, fun. It certainly would have lasted my mother a decade or more, had she not been struck just two years after the purchase by a drunk driver in Cadillac deVille. The impact put parts of the back seat into the front seats. Hondas were not terribly crash-safe into those days.

Still, the ‘83 Civic was the best Civic in history up to that point. The ‘84 “breadvan” Civic was better. Much better. The Civic that followed was even better, and so on, until we reached the point of the 1999 Civic Si coupe, widely acclaimed as nearly everyone’s favorite Civic. And then a funny thing happened.

I don’t think my Mom ever drove like this, although she was known to be a little aggressive from the stoplights. But this is that rarest of rare Civics: the one-year-only second-gen 1500S.

The last two generations of Civic haven’t been that well-received among Honda enthusiasts, although the current Si sedan seems to be making some friends. Nor do the newer models appear to be much like the Civics of old. The weight has shot up, from around 1800 pounds to nearly 3000. The current Si has four times the power of the 1983 Civic 1300FE. I’d say that the modern Civic is like the old Accord, but that would be fibbing, since you could park a 1977 Accord behind a 2009 Civic and it would be utterly, completely, invisible. Many of the virtues once prized by Honda owners — simplicity, light weight, low component count — seem to have fallen by the wayside.

If the Civic has lost its way, the entire Acura lineup has lost its mind. The recent introduction of a V6-powered TSX is an unintentionally eloquent statement about the elephantine size and weight increases of Acuras in the past decade. A brand which launched with the nimble Integra and iconoclastic Legend is now stuffed full of monstrous Accord-platform derivatives, each bigger than the last. If the original Legend were to return to Acura showrooms, it would be the smallest and lightest car available from the brand today.

Something’s rotten in Tokyo, and it isn’t limited to Honda. Toyota’s current lineup is a bloated mess of two-ton Camry variants, without a single sporting vehicle in the lineup. Virtually everything Nissan sells is either an “FM” or an Altima derivative, and they are all powered by the unlovable VQ engine. The Maxima, which was a world-class sporting sedan two decades ago, has been reduced to Altima-in-drag status. Subaru has accomplished the unique feat of making every single Impreza it has introduced in the market somewhat less popular than the one before it. Mitsubishi has precisely one decent product — the Evolution — and the new model isn’t as good as its predecessor.

This isn’t the way things are supposed to be. We take it for granted that each new Porsche will be a significant improvement over the previous model, the abysmal 1999 “996″ aside. The same is true for Ferrari, Lamborghini, Mercedes-Benz, and even Volkswagen (in the post-MkIII era). Styling quibbles aside, each new BMW is an improvement. Audi has been on a tremendous roll in the past decade. Heck, even Lotus is making a succession of decent cars lately. Nor can you forget about the domestics. Among US-based automakers, there’s been an amazing spiral of desirability lately. Who wouldn’t rather have a new CTS than an old one? Do you like the Charger SRT-8 more than the old Intrepid Sport? Is there anybody out there willing to take a 2002 Taurus over the new 2010?

Talk to any Ford, Chevrolet or Dodge fan about trucks and you’ll hear how great the new ones are. Listen to a Toyota loyalist and he’ll tell you the average 1984 Toyota truck, known simply as “Truck” in this market, will still be on the road when every Tacoma ever made has fallen apart. Nobody’s excited about the current Nissan Titan or Toyota Sequoia. The Land Cruiser “wonks” absolutely hate the new one and are panic-buying the previous-generation V8s at ridiculous prices.

Strange, isn’t it? Ask nearly any Japanese-car enthusiast about his favorite cars or trucks, and chances are that you’ll hear the old list of Japan’s Greatest Hits. The 1989 Civic Si. The hachi-roku Corolla. Toyota’s original LS400 and the follow-up 1992 Camry that made that same build quality affordable for the masses. Mark IV Supras. Twin-turbo Zs. Mitsubishi Evolution 8 and 9. The pignose STi. Celicas of all shapes. Integra Type-R. Fifth-gen Accords. All these truly great, game-changing, world-beating Japanese cars, and almost all of them built between 1985 and 1999. Even the Skyline guys will admit that, yeah, given the choice they’d really rather have an R34 than the new car. In fact, one could argue that there’s only been one truly great, completely iconic new Japanese car built in the past decade, and it’s the friggin’ second-gen Prius.

Something’s changed, but what is it? What’s happened to make Japanese cars less desirable than their predecessors? We could blame it on government regulation, but that hasn’t stopped the 2009 Boxster S being approximately a zillion times better than the 1997 Boxster 2.5. We could talk about a changing market, forgetting that those “changes” took away the Bonneville and gave us the G8.

I would suggest, instead, that the problem is a lack of authenticity and character. Virtually all the great Japanese cars mentioned above were the product of Japanese design teams designing cars for either their home market or a broadly defined “world market”. The 1983 Civic was, in many respects, a simple ripoff of the Mini Cooper, but it was clearly and thoroughly a Honda in execution, from the grinning grille to the dumpy taillights. The Celica and Supra may have been Japanese Mustangs, but they were still recognizably Japanese. Just as importantly, in the Seventies and Eighties there were clear and distinct differences between Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Subaru. (Note that I’m leaving Mazda out of this, since they are really neither “domestic” nor “foreign”.)

With the arrival of “transplant” factories and the development of US-specific models, often with the assistance or interference of American design teams like CALTY, that Japanese magic started to fade away. The current Camry, Accord, and Altima are all very similar cars. They look the same, they drive the same, they’re equipped and priced along similar lines. This is reasonable, because they are all aimed at the same buyer. The 1995 Camry was very different from the 1995 Accord, and they were both way different from a 1995 Altima… but today’s models are almost NASCAR-style “common template” competitors.

In fact, the current “CamAltiCords” resemble nothing so much as the old General Motors A-bodies: big, bland, soft crapwagons designed to drag middle-aged people from home to work and back. Those of you who read Orson Scott Card’s “Speaker For The Dead” or “Wyrms” may remember his concept of a lifeform which mates with arriving aliens, shares their DNA, and takes their shapes. A very similar process has taken place with the Japanese transplant manufacturers. When the Accord arrived in this country, the most popular car sold in America was the Cutlass Supreme. Guess what? The 2009 Accord is closer in size, weight, power, and general appearance to a 1978 Cutlass Supreme than it is to a 1978 Honda Accord.

For your own amusement, go check out the dimensions of the 1978 Ford Fairmont. Now go dig up the dimensions of the 2009 Nissan Altima. Spooky, huh? In replacing the domestic manufacturers as the default bread-and-butter sedans, the Japanese nameplates accidentally became the cars they were replacing. Thirty years after the full-scale “Japanese invasion”, it turns out that the American market has completely co-opted its conquerors. And the same kinds of fat, annoying, self-satisfied, middle-class faces that stared out the windshields of Malibus and Zephyrs back in 1983 now gaze lifelessly from Camrys and Accords.

Meanwhile, the contrarians, free-thinkers, and avant-garde types who bought those 1978 Accords have moved on… and many of them have moved on to the domestics. The same kind of person who loved the original Accord’s low dash and rakish styling might find the new Fusion to have twice the character of any Camcord. The clarity of purpose and execution that marked the original Camry can now be found behind the wheel of a Malibu. Freed from the job of providing a million bland sedans a year to people who hate cars, Ford, GM, and Chrysler are producing truly great vehicles again. That’s what happens when you don’t need to serve the mainstream, and it’s why GM has managed to produce a new Camaro even as Toyota cancels their Supra project. Each new domestic automobile feels more vibrant, more completely realized, more American than the one before it.

The Japanese are now stuck in the same trap that swallowed the domestics thirty years ago. They’ve acquired the mass market and they need to build cars for that market. Until they are freed of that immensely profitable burden, they won’t be able to make great Japanese cars again. Don’t look for them to give up that market willingly, because their massive transplant facilities depend on seven-figure sales. It’s like crack. You can’t quit once you’re hooked on massive volume. Luckily for those of us who love great Japanese cars, however, salvation is just around the corner.

It took Toyota thirty years in the market to build a better, more popular mid-size sedan than GM could, but in just a decade, the Hyundai Sonata has moved up to parity with the Camry. In five more years, Kia and Hyundai could be the new mass-market champions, cranking out a million bland sedans from their own shiny transplant factories. And, if history is any guide, the Chinese, once they hit America in force, will catch the Koreans even more quickly than the Koreans caught the Japanese.

Faced with dwindling sales, loss of profitability, and a declining foothold in the American mass market, what will Toyota, Honda, and Nissan do? I’d like to think that they will forget about trying to make the perfect 3900-pound vanilla sedan. I’d like to think that they will open up their old catalogs and rediscover what made them great. In my dreams, the Celicas and 200SXes will come rushing back out of the factories, the Civics will once again be wide, low sportsters, the Z-car will be a bespoke platform and not a chopped-down Infiniti FX. We’ll see more cars like the Cube and fewer ones like the new Maxima. It will once again become possible to tell a Camry from an Accord. In short, the best Japanese cars will return, just as we are seeing the best American cars make a reappearance now. If that happens, I might just drag my Mom back down to that crummy old Honda dealer for a Civic. Come to think of it, maybe I’d buy one for me, too.

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Photography by Andrew Didorosi

They say that sincerity is the new irony. So let’s be sincere. Prior to two weeks ago, I had never driven a car with the raw horsepower of the Switzer Performance P800 Nissan GT-R. We’re talking about seven hundred and seven ponies at all four wheels, on 93-octane gasoline, dyno-proven and road-tested. It’s terribly fashionable in this business to pretend that we’ve seen it all before, but you deserve to know the truth. Prior to driving this car, the most powerful car I’d driven was the six-hundred-horsepower 2008 Dodge Viper. On a weekly basis, I rarely drive anything faster than my poky little Audi S5 or Porsche 993. My Neon race car puts about one hundred and forty horsepower to the front wheels, although that’s enough to put you in the wall at a pretty high speed. Ask me how I know.

So while it would be very hip and print-journo of me to act like I get up every morning and drive random mega-horsepower cars, the truth of the matter is that it ain’t so. For that reason, I was very, very excited to drive the Switzer P800, particularly as it would be on a road course which I know reasonably well. This wasn’t the typical “press junket” kind of trip. I drove four hundred and fifty miles at my own expense, skipped work, and endured some really lousy weather to make it happen.

I wasn’t the only person busting tail to make sure our readers had a chance to experience the car. A notorious pro racer/road-rally bon vivant rented the track for the entire day and consented to let us share his playdate on the condition that we would maintain strict confidence about his secret new project. Tym Switzer, owner of the tuning shop which bears his name, arranged for the GT-R’s arrival and agreed that we, the Press As A Whole, would print the truth about the car’s performance, no matter what. Jo Borras, Switzer’s newly arrived PR mensch, coordinated the entire effort from the leather captain’s chair of his refrigerator-white VW Routan “press office”. The crew from Jalopnik agreed to share photographs with me in exchange for my services as camera-car operator and winter-weather stunt driver. Last but not least, the GT-R’s owner, J.R., agreed in the most nonchalant way possible to let me drive his pride and joy at one hundred and thirty miles per hour. In the snow.

You get the idea. A lot of people put in a lot of effort. It wasn’t a case of General Motors putting us up in the Hard Rock Hotel, comping all the drinks, and then expressing a general corporate indifference to the tone of our review. Tym, Jo, J.R., and everybody else are real people, and it’s very difficult to put that out of my head as I write about this car. The easiest, and most profitable, thing to do would be to puff-piece it out of courtesy to everyone involved. It wouldn’t really hurt anyone, and it would ensure that nobody felt mistreated or misused. This, right here, is the temptation of automotive journalism. Forget that business about free drinks, travel, and hotel rooms. That stuff comes no matter what you write about the cars. The real pressure is the pressure you feel when good, hard-working people are standing in front of you with the product of that hard work. It’s one thing to damn faceless, anonymous GM to bankruptcy in print; it’s another thing to cost Tym Switzer a potential customer by revealing the shortcomings of his products.

The good news is that I don’t have to. The P800 does what it says on the tin. It’s unbelievably fast — 600cc sportbike fast. It really does run on pump gas. It didn’t break once during the course of the day’s testing. When I turned the key, it started. It never behaved like a “tuner car”. My old Mopar “Stage” Neon SRT-4 acted more like a tuner car than this GT-R did, and that was a factory-developed package. With the P800, there’s no ski-slope power curve, no pop-and-hiss, no dead spots in the delivery, no clutch-and-jerk from the transmission, nothing. From idle to redline, the God-damned thing just acts like a factory car that happens to have two Corvette’s worth of twist under the hood. It’s a totally predictable, totally usable package.

And that’s a good thing, because my drive of the P800 occurred under conditions that could only be considered “dismal”. We’re talking twenty-seven degrees ambient temperature, with heavy sleet that destroyed visibility and coated the track surface with a slushy, snowball-capable mixture at unpredictable intervals. A few recon/photography laps, performed in my infamous Lime Green S5, didn’t inspire a ton of confidence — and the S5 is one of the most solid wet-weather performance cars you can buy. As the snow came down and the track started to disappear under a dirty-white blanket, I began to feel a little less than sanguine about operating the GT-R under “winter mix” conditions. Concerns that I’d crumple the car with its disturbingly suave owner sitting right next to me, and concerns that I wouldn’t be able to explore the Nissan’s limits in a manner to do justice to our readers’ expectations, assumed pink-elephant proportions in my mind.

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I needn’t have worried. Even in “R-mode”, even with eight hundred horsepower at the crank (or thereabouts), the GT-R is hilariously simple to drive. In fact, it’s so easy to pedal that it took a ride-along with a pro racer in another, similarly-tuned GT-R to convince me that I wasn’t seriously underdriving the car somehow. If anything, watching someone else showboat around a little reinforced my conviction. Here’s an example of something you can get away with in a 700-plus-horsepower GT-R: Take a corner combination, such as that found between Turns 2 and 6 at BeaveRun. Early-apex the entry to the first corner and grind out to the exit under part-throttle. After all, the car’s so strong and the diff is so clever that it isn’t really all that necessary to unwind perfectly at the clipping point. With just a bit of steering still in the car, hit the exit. Oops! You’re gonna run off the road, pal. Nothing you can do about it. You’re going too fast, you’ve used more than the proverbial dollar’s worth of traction in your front tires, and you aren’t pointed towards the racetrack.

Under normal circumstances, there’d be nothing to do but unwind the wheel, make sure your thumbs aren’t in a position to be broken when you hit the dirt, and start checking your rear-view mirror for re-entry onto the track. But these aren’t normal circumstances. We’re in a Switzer P800 GT-R, so this is what you do: Crank the wheel more and mash your foot to the carpet. The magic diff will figure out that you need to turn, and somehow the massive, lagless power is routed to the rear wheels, which promptly spin and let the car rotate. Meanwhile, something’s happening up front. Power’s being shifted left and right until the nose pulls the car straight in the direction of your steering input. The rear wheels stop spinning, the all-wheel-drive maxes out the grip and the collective intelligence of the drivetrain rockets you out towards the next clipping point. At some point in the exit, you’ll want to pull the right-side paddle and experience that big shove one more time before it’s time to hit the brakes again.

Although the weather gets steadily worse during our session, the Barry-Bonds-esque Nissan never gets out of hand. Instead, it simply delivers whatever you ask for. Want a big, showy drift? Crank the wheel and floor the throttle. When you’re done showing off, just straighten out the wheel. Doesn’t matter what the speed is, doesn’t matter how sloppily you let it happen. A Viper would punish you with a terrifying oscillation in those conditions, and a Cayman sans PCM would rotate you backwards off the track, but the GT-R just snaps right back into a perfectly straight-ahead path. Down the hill which leads to BeaveRun’s back stretch, we run over visibly different levels of snow, slush, and water. Who cares? Keep the throttle pinned. The GT-R will unfailingly select the wheel with the most traction, but it won’t let the power transition unsettle the car or affect the steering.

Secure in the passenger seat, J.R. is happy to let me circulate the track all day in conditions which are more and more approximating the truncated half of the Malaysian Grand Prix, but I have the realization that I’m starting to make some really stupid moves just to try to perturb the P800’s placid countenance. Which means it’s time to bring the car in and hang up the helmet for the day.

As I’m stepping out of the deep-red Japanese catfish, the strangest thought comes to my mind: With anything less than 800 horsepower, this car would be really boring. In fact, it isn’t terribly exciting with 800 horsepower. I’m not talking about the objective performance: in the right hands, under the right conditions, the P800 has the potential to run sub-one-minute laps at BeaveRun. That’s formula-car pace, and that’s exciting. On the front straight, under winter conditions, the P800 can knock on 130 miles per hour. That’s staggering. Here’s another way to look at it: You could enter the Switzer P800 into a NASA American Iron Xtreme race, on street tires, and not only would you win, you might lap the field during a 40-minute race. While the AIX guys were struggling to keep their big-power Mustangs in a straight line, smoking sideways at every exit, threshold-braking at the ragged edge, and fighting the outrageous, wriggly-fish lack of straight-line stability that comes standard with a competition-aligned ponycar, you’d have the A/C on and the radio turned up. It wouldn’t feel like much work at all…

…and that’s the problem. Driving an American Iron or American Iron Xtreme race car is hard work. We’d call it “man’s work” but I believe there are a few ladies driving in the class, and I wouldn’t want to offend them to the point that they gently nudge my little Neon off-track at the next race. The great AI drivers are engaged in a constant, high-speed wrestling match with their recalcitrant steeds. It’s some of the greatest sedan racing out there. But the GT-R would let even a newbie Skip Barber graduate roll out and whip the collective asses of the very best AI drivers. You don’t need slow hands, a cool head, or a fiery heart. Just point the car and let it do the work.

Let’s watch a video. You’re probably already seen it; if you have, just remember it. This is the old RUF “Yellowbird” running around the Nurburgring. If it’s new to you… As Katt Williams says, “Go ahead. I’ll wait.”

Okay. The driver’s showboating a bit, but make no mistake: that Ruf is no easy steer. It’s a full-frontal challenge to your skill as a driver. The more skill and courage you bring, the better you’ll do. Hacks, backmarkers, and cowards need not apply. When people talk about the “mystique of the ‘Ring”, this is what they have in mind. The Yellowbird wasn’t just hard to drive in the corners; it was friggin’ tough to drive in a straight line. It’s a constant struggle to keep up with the swinging pendulum of a rear-engined car, with the penalty for making a mistake measured in units of transfused blood or casket length. If there’s an ounce of metaphorical motor oil running through your veins, the Yellowbird video should cause you to vibrate with excitement.

Now consider this: I have seventeen laps of the Nurburgring to my credit, lifetime. But I’m one hundred percent sure that, given a Switzer P800 and a morning’s worth of practice, I could utterly smoke the Yellowbird, no matter who is driving. It wouldn’t be close. And there’d be little to no drama. I’d do it the way I drove the car at BeaveRun: big throttle, big brake, let the diff sort the car through the corners. And it isn’t just me. Pretty much everybody who lines up on the Performance Touring grid with me could do it. Some of the NASA Time Trial guys could do it. Hell, some of the NASA HPDE guys could do it. The GT-R doesn’t wobble in a straight line, doesn’t slide without warning in the midcorner, doesn’t oscillate every time you sniff a curb. It’s the easiest fast car in the history of fast cars.

This is not to say that I accept Nissan’s marketroid Nordschleife times as fact. If anything, the deceptive ease with which Switzer has wrung an additional three hundred-plus ponies from the GT-R makes me more convinced than ever that the average Godzilla buyer isn’t really getting a 7:26 ‘Ringmeister. Still, let’s give credit where it’s due. There’s never been a production car before which wouldn’t feel like an utter maniacal beast with eight hundred horsepower. With the GT-R, it just means the view out the windshield is set to fast-forward. It’ll cost you under twenty thousand bucks to make yours this fast, and then you’ll fear no club racer at your local trackday, no matter how much of a shuffle-steering, non-Nomex-Puma-wearing jerkoff you are.

My afternoon with the P800 just about snuffed out the enduring flame of my automotive enthusiasm. What’s the point of working, striving, practicing, and suffering to be the best driver you can be if technology can swallow up your talent? Why bother to set the best lap time you can when anybody with a hundred grand can eclipse it as easily as you’d shove a child out the way in the line at McDonald’s? The video footage of my GT-R drive made me look like a superstar — but that car makes anybody look like a superstar. Who cares. So what. The kawaii-obsessed nerds of the GT-R forums are right. The numbers are all that matter, and the numbers are solidly on the side of inhuman competence. It’s Judgment Day and the machines are winning the war. I leave the track and my mood is as dismal as the weather.

Screw it. Still raining. Hold the dashboard button down on the Audi. ASR off. ESP off. Slick concrete on-ramp. Second gear. Six thousand revs. Feed the power and the S5 rotates the scenery before me… this much… this much… this much. And no further, because my fingertips might as well be brushing the road. We have control. Which is to say, I have control. It would be better in my Boxster, better still in my 993, but we’ll take what we can get. Shift up. No paddles. Save my soul. Let me drive. Time for the exit. Unwind with a precision that feels like a knob turning to a perfectly firm click. Feed the power. Not the car. It was me. The GT-R would have been faster, but the GT-R is not me and I am not a GT-R. Breathe out, relax. And drive. Just drive.

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It’s sad but true: when I was a kid, Internet access pretty much didn’t exist. I didn’t even start reading USENET until 1990, at which point I was already eighteen years old. In the pre-Web days, if you wanted to know something, you went to the library. If you were lucky, the answer was in a book. If you couldn’t find a book with the answer, you were more or less screwed. For example, my elementary-school library had a copy of “The Car Book 1971″ that had all the prices of new cars from 1971, and I memorized the book to the point that I could instantly recall the prices and specs of every new car sold that year. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the same book from 1972, which meant that as far as I knew, there were no cars sold in 1972. Or they were all free. Or they were all $1,999. There was simply no way to know.

The arrival of the Information Age has made that kind of knowledge starvation a thing of the past, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is information on amateur and entry-level-professional sedan racing. Those who talk about it on the Internet don’t really know; those who know aren’t telling, for a variety of reasons we’ll discuss below. When I started my racing “career” a few years ago, I had to learn about the costs and difficulties of racing firsthand, at my own considerable expense, and my conversations with other racers have indicated that this state of affairs is nearly universal.

Universal it may be, but it isn’t right. So in this episode of Avoidable Contact, I’m going to give you a brief tour of amateur and entry-level-professional sedan racing. Specifically, we’re going to talk about requirements, costs, and results. I can’t put you in the seat of a real race car — only you can do that for yourself — but I can at least give you a reasonable idea of what’s involved. There are resources, both print and Web, which claim to tell the truth about the costs of racing, but trust me: most of them are either pursuing an agenda or making bizarre assumptions regarding your access to things like frame jigs, TIG welders, and $100 Hayabusa engines. Since most people can’t actually do things like “knock together” an SCCA GT-2 tube chassis, a lot of the advice and information that’s out there might as well be fantasy.

To keep things simple and comparable, most of the costs discussed here will be “rent-a-ride” costs; I will discuss ownership costs in a future column, assuming there’s any interest. We’ll start with the 24 Hours of Lemons and go as far as the Speed World Challenge. So, without further ado, let’s climb to the top of the “Pyramid Of Speed” and see what’s there.

24 Hours Of Lemons: $500-1000 a weekend

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There are a variety of really low-cost entry-level wheel-to-wheel options out there, such as $300 ARCA circle-track rentals, but the average would-be road-racer is likely to be most satisfied by buying a seat in a 24 Hours of Lemons team. For somewhere between five hundred bucks and a solid G, you should be able to find a spot with a team that is serious about winning the event. Another five hundred should buy you a basic SA2005-rated helmet, cheapo three-layer driver’s suit, and fireproof gloves and shoes.

While most of the Lemons teams out there are reasonably scrupulous about adhering to the $500 car rule, that amount doesn’t cover the rollcage, the tires, the brakes, the consumables, or any number of other allowables. It’s very possible to spend three or four grand on a “$500 car”, so budget accordingly.

The requirements for being a Lemons driver are absolutely minimal. You’ll need the aforementioned personal equipment plus $75 for a one-time license. Your money should get you between two and six hours on the racetrack. Speeds rarely exceed sixty miles per hour, but you will learn a lot about managing traffic, passing, and withstanding impact. Winning Lemons will impress exactly nobody, as I found out when I won the 2007 Flat Rock event, but it’s neither easy nor trivial to hoist that cup full of nickels above your head. Still, it isn’t “real” racing. For that, you’ll need to sack up and choose one of the next options.

SCCA Improved Touring and Regional Racing: $1000+ per weekend

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SCCA has two kinds of racing. There’s “Regional” racing, which is a relatively low-budget affair designed for people who don’t want to compete on a National level, and then there’s “National” stuff. The mainstay of Regional sedan racing is the Improved Touring series. Magazines like Grassroots Motorsports like to make racing in “IT” sound as simple and cheap as running down to your local dragstrip on Grudge Match night. It ain’t so, but neither is it prohibitively expensive for most people.

You’ll need to join the SCCA to start, and if you’re smart you’ll also find a program like NASA’s HPDE, SCCA’s PDX, or one of the marque-club Driver’s Education programs to show you how to get around a racetrack without killing yourself. Once you’re comfortable being on a track in a street car, it’s time to attend an SCCA competition school. You’ll need to rent a race car for this in most regions. Plan on spending between $1000 and $2500 for a “double driver’s school” weekend in someone else’s car. Don’t hurt the car; you’ll have to pay to fix it, and that could run you serious cash. The purpose of SCCA drivers’ schools is to teach you how to pass, how to watch the flags, and how to behave on-track. At no point will anyone teach you to be Randy Pobst. You will have to learn that yourself, later. And don’t catch the “red mist” during school. As someone once told me, you can’t “win” the driver’s school, but you can sure as hell “lose” it by crashing out.

With your Regional license in hand from passing the driver’s school, it’s time to find an Improved Touring seat. This can be tough for somebody who has never raced before, because most car owners don’t want to take a chance on somebody new. Look in your local SCCA newsletter or on the regional website to find an “IT” rental opportunity. Call ‘em up. Be polite, concise, and factual. Expect to spend between one and two grand for a weekend. This will get you a car that might be capable of winning a race, but probably not in your hands. It will pay for some used tires and fuel. It won’t pay for damage, excess wear and tear caused by temper or stupidity, or new tires. So race smart, even if you have to race slow, and learn your craft.

In the real world, by the time you drive to a race, stay in a hotel, eat a meal or two, pay your entry fee (which is a minimum of $250 most places) and buy a T-shirt, you’re going to spend a minimum of $1500 to go Improved Touring racing in someone else’s car. Let’s put that in perspective: racing an old VW Golf or Honda Civic once a month costs as much as buying a Nissan GT-R or Porsche Cayman S on a five-year loan. Are you starting to get a sense of why racers are all “coin-operated”? Our next option is no cheaper, just different.

NASA Cheap Classes: $1500-5000 a weekend

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There are two major organizations in American amateur racing. SCCA is the older, established, more prestigious group, while NASA is the new kid on the block. It would take a whole book to discuss the differences between the two, but here’s one way to look at it: NASA offers a wider variety of race options for production-based cars, is more contact-and-drama-tolerant, and is also more welcoming to new racers. I’m a NASA racer. It’s the right fit for me, but some people are better-suited for the SCCA. After a few races with either sanction, you’ll know where you belong, and it’s possible for rent-a-riders to move back and forth between the two, as most SCCA and NASA Regions will honor a competition license from the “other” sanction.

NASA offers a variety of affordable production-car classes: Spec Miata, Performance Touring, the slower German Touring Series classes, Honda Challenge, Spec Focus, and others. To get started, you’ll want to have some on-track experience in your street car. One year with NASA’s HPDE program should take care of that. You can then attend one of NASA’s driver schools. The Mid-Ohio School offers a pretty good one-day course, using their Acura TSX “school cars”, for about a grand. Of course, you’ll need the same helmet, suit, gloves, and shoes you’d need for SCCA or Lemons. You’ll also need a HANS Device or similar, which costs $695 or more, to race wheel-to-wheel in NASA.

Pass your driver’s school and you’ll be eligible to rent a car and go racing. Unlike SCCA, NASA makes no distinction between Regional and National racing. It’s possible to take Comp School in July, race twice in July and August, and then go run the National Championships in September of that same year.

Rental costs for entry-level classes in NASA range from $1500 (for a tired Spec Miata) to $5000 or more (for a well-prepared GTS or Performance Touring car). It’s very, very possible to spend $15,000 on a NASA racing weekend, but you don’t want to do that right away. Heck, you really don’t want to do it at all, because for that kind of money you could race “pro”. In fact, NASA permits cars from the Speed World Challenge and Koni Challenge pro series to run in Performance Touring, so if you want to try a “pro” car in a low-stress environment, NASA can be the right place for you. Plan on spending a minimum of $5000 to do that for a weekend. Be aware, too, that most rentals in NASA have a minimum damage amount of ten grand or more. You can do $50,000 worth of damage to many GTS-class race cars in a second or less, and it’s usually payable immediately, in certified funds, before the end of the weekend. Even a lowly Spec Focus can cost $15,000 to repair. And here’s the best part: it might not even be your fault. You could be minding your own business, get put in the wall by somebody else, and still have to pay. Make. Sure. You. Understand. This. Before. You. Take. A. Green. Flag. Okay?

Winning a NASA National Championship will get you… um, nothing. All sorts of hacks and idiots win NASA National Championships. Heck, I was one error in judgment away from being a NASA National Champion in 2007. As the sanction ages and competition thickens, that situation will change, but in the meantime, if you want respect in amateur racing… look below.

SCCA National Championship Racing – $3000 and up. Way up.

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Now we’re getting close to The Show. Winning an SCCA National Championship is a gold-plated testimony to your talent as a driver, your skill as a car builder, or both. The list of SCCA National Champions reads like a “Who’s Who” of serious racers. But it ain’t cheap. To begin with, you’ll need to have a year of mostly incident-free Regional racing under your belt, and you’ll need to find a National ride. People can and do spend six figures to win National Championships, but $3000 should get you a Spec Miata or American Sedan seat at a National race. Of course, if you want to go to the actual championship race, (referred to as the Runoffs) in any class, you will need a lot more than that. But if you win the Runoffs, you will want a new challenge…

Speed World Challenge and Grand-Am Koni Challenge: $8000-50,000 per weekend. That’s right.

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Here we are. The Show. Professional racing. And guess what? You’re gonna pay to race. Almost everybody does. It’s the dirty little secret of “pro” racing. Everybody pays. Sure, some teams offer a salary to a few of their drivers, but the number of people actually making a living in Speed World Challenge or Koni Challenge probably wouldn’t fill an extended-length E-150. Instead, drivers beg their sponsors, friends, families, and spouses for money to make the grid. Ah, money. Well, just the annual license for Koni Challenge costs six hundred bucks. The good news: you get to attend all the Rolex Series races for free as long as you’re wearing it. To qualify for that license, you’ll want to have some club racing background, preferably without too many black marks on your record or too many probationary periods. One year should be enough. During that one year, try to win the lottery, inherit some money, or become a lobbyist for a group of Florida orange-juice farmers, ’cause it takes cheddar to race professionally.

Eight grand or thereabouts will sit you in a decent ride for the Speed Touring Car or Koni “ST” class. You’ll be on television. Maybe. To have a chance at winning, you’ll want to spend more. Ten or fifteen grand will put you up at the sharp end, where the announcers can mispronounce your name and criticize your driving. If you want to run the faster cars in the “GS/GT” classes of Koni or Speed, you’ll pay more. A lot more. A weekend in a Ford FR500C Mustang might cost $20,000. And guess what? It’s possible to do $175,000 worth of damage to that car. In under one second. You know the drill. Pay before you leave.

It’s kind of funny, really. Nearly everybody who brags on Facebook or on their personal website about being “signed” to a Koni or SWC team is really writing a big check to that team. And some of the checks are quite large. Koni Challenge is an enduro series, so you can spend a little more money and get a known hotshoe to be your second driver. The arrangement is common, even in Daytona Prototype. The paying driver is the “gentleman driver”; the paid driver is the “pro”. I heard a rumor recently that one “gentleman” paid $185,000 for a Koni Challenge season with a well-respected “pro”.

Think about it. At this level, it costs just as much to race a Honda Civic or Volkswagen GTI for a year as it does to own a Lamborghini Gallardo. Which one will impress your friends more? You know the answer to that. But if you have the burning desire to race, to be in The Show, and to live a little bit before you die, owning a high-priced street car isn’t even an option. Racing on television is the ultimate high, the biggest hit possible. It’s what we all wanted to do as kids. Everything else, as Steve McQueen memorably said, is just waiting.

But wait, there’s more.

As you now understand, racing is expensive. But the weekend costs we’ve discussed don’t cover it all. In order to be competitive, you’ll want to run some practice days, which run from $500 a day in an Improved Touring Civic to twenty times that much for a Koni GS-class Porsche. To win races, you’ll need to buy new tires as often as possible, maybe four times a weekend, at a cost of anywhere between eight hundred and two thousand dollars a set. You’ll want the best equipment; my Impact! carbon fiber Air Draft helmet and HANS Professional Device together cost well over three thousand dollars, and a custom driving suit with the logo of your “sponsor” might run you another three G. Top-tier coaching from people like Ross Bentley will take precious tenths off your lap time, but each one of those tenths may cost you as much as a Rolex Submariner.

You’ll miss work to race, skip family events, disappoint friends, and force your loved ones to spend their weekends wondering if you’ll come home injured or in a box. The stress of knowing that you could end a race a hundred grand in the hole, or in that hole yourself, might drive you to make some very strange decisions. Some people lose their nerve out there on the track and return to the pits utterly broken inside. Others let the burning hunger for lap time, TV time, plastic trophies, or simple victory take over the rest of their lives. And once you’ve won a race, the fever to do it again will never truly leave you. Once you’ve put your foot on someone else’s neck — once you’ve looked out of your window net and simply destroyed another man’s confidence on the entry to a critical corner — you will want to do it again and again until it either kills you or ruins your life.

Those are the real costs. I’ve spent the equivalent of a new Corvette racing crappy little cars in the past two years, but that doesn’t cover half of it. The true cost arrived the moment I realized that I couldn’t stand a life where I wasn’t scheduled to race at some point in the near future. So I’ll be out on the grid again in 2009, and that includes a couple of shots at The Show. Cross your fingers for me, and I’ll look to see you out there, too.

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“…so we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A Dark Knight.”

It feels more than a little trite and melodramatic to begin this column with a quote from a Batman movie, but if the auto business has any profession which lends itself to celebrity culture, it is that of the stylist. Harley Earl set the template: physically enormous and personally outrageous, he created our modern notion of the automobile as aesthetic object. And while there have been many flamboyant “superstar” designers who followed in his footsteps, from Tjaarda to Stephenson, history will surely acknowledge that a few men managed to accomplish more than merely sketching a pretty shape. Bill Mitchell brought us the 1961 Chevrolet, which set a visual template for modern sedans that persists to this day. William Lyons fathered the XJ6, perhaps the greatest sporting sedan design in history, even if he didn’t actually draw it. Alex Issigonis invented the “small car” as we know it today, and Giorgetto Giugiaro rationalized it into the unmatchable first-generation Golf. Marcello Gandini created the supercar; Jack Telnack revitalized the Mustang and with it an entire generation of automotive enthusiasm.

Years from now, when the smoke of history clears, another name will be added to that list of designers who were capable of re-imagining the automobile. Born and raised in the American Midwest, Christopher Edward Bangle joined BMW with a rather singular goal in mind: to create what would be only the second major design direction in the company’s history. His complete and utter success in this task has permitted BMW to become a major player on the global stage; along the way, he rewrote the design language for the entire auto industry.

Such is the man’s star power that, like George W. Bush, Bill Gates, or the Almighty Himself, Bangle is regularly blamed for or credited with the accomplishments of others — but it isn’t necessary. His own successes are enough. To understand them, and to grasp why it is possible to respect or even admire the man himself without particularly loving his creations, we will have to take the advice of David E Davis and open our hymnals…

…not to page 2002, as DED Jr. originally commanded, but to the year 1962, when the BMW Neue Klasse debuted.

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The BMW Neue Klasse would spawn the 1602, and in turn, the 2002.

It seems almost impossible to conceive now, but forty-seven years ago BMW was very far from being an unstoppable market force or a purveyor of so-called “ultimate driving machines”. Germany was still recovering from the nightmare of the Second World War, no more distant in time from 1962 than the First Gulf War is for us today and powerfully present in the memories and mindsets of Germans in a way that a brief overseas bitch-slapping could never be for the average American. The floundering Bayerische Motoren Werke had scrimped and saved to create a new family-sized sedan, complete with a rather extravangant one-and-a-half-liter engine. For those efforts, they were promptly rewarded with more business than they could handle, even though the “1500″ model couldn’t break the hundred-mile-per-hour mark, it had only four cylinders, and it could easily be hidden behind a modern Hyundai Accent. In other words, it was a BMW, but not as we know them today.

Still, the car was a success and it was eventually developed into the two-liter, two-door 2002 that captured the heart of Car and Driver’s chief editor and made BMW the expensive, exotic choice of the leather-driving-glove crowd in the early Seventies. By then, BMW was on a roll and had developed a “full-sized” sedan, the most common US-market variant of which was the “Bavaria”. The conception of the Bavaria is a story in itself, involving as it does the amazing Max Hoffman, but but suffice it to say that in general size, style, and (six-cylinder) power, the Bavaria set the template for BMW’s products in this country. It would be several more years before the 325e brought the inline six to the US-market 3-series, but by then the general idea of BMW — sporty, expensive, square body, round headlamps, six cylinders — was pretty well-fixed in the American mind.

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The “Bavaria” was a full-sized BMW, equipped like a German “2500″ model but with the larger “2800″ six.

The Eighties and early Nineties were good times for the men from Bavaria. In the space of thirty years, BMW transformed itself from a niche company that sold fewer than ten thousand miniscule “bubblecars” and irrelevant, mostly disregarded high-end luxury cars to a solid volume player worldwide. There was just one little problem.

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The successor to the Bavaria was the E23, available in this country as the 730i, 733i, and 735i. As you can see, it was not a major stylistic change from the Bavaria.

The entire reputation of BMW, particularly in the United States, was based on the Neue Klasse sedans and the derivative “02″ coupes. Among BMW enthusiasts, the 2002 was widely understand to be the “heart” of the company. For that reason, every successive BMW was required to pay visual homage to the Neue Klasse, which meant round headlamps, a relatively square profile, a big greenhouse with a kinked rear window, and a set of proportions best suited to a small car.

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More than twenty years after the first big BMW sedan debuted, the E32 735i was still required to “sample” the proportions and details of its predecessors.

This required styling relationship to a sedan which had been hastily designed for a 1961 introduction into the German family-car market was both blessing and curse. Bimmers (for the record, a “Beemer” has two wheels until you cross the pond to the United Kingdom, where they call everything from Bavaria a “Beemer”) were instantly recognizable worldwide and as such possessed very powerful branding. It would be virtually impossible for a Rip van Winkle from 1962 to recognize a 1993-model Chevrolet or Ford, but he would have no trouble picking out a BMW from the crowd.

On the debit side of the equation, BMW was rapidly starting to look a little, well, stodgy. Audi had long since embraced avant-garde aerodynamic styling, a change undertaken in somewhat more reserved fashion by Bruno Sacco and his W201 “baby Benz”. The Japanese had launched three luxury brands with flagship cars that simply looked far more modern than any Bavarian box ever could. When the E38 large sedan and E39 midsized sedan were introduced in Europe, the press started to grumble that, just maybe, BMW was being a little conservative in its visual approach. CAR magazine went farther, referring to the E39 as “depressing and timid”. Truth be told, they had a point: the E39 was virtually identical to the outgoing E34, and the very few styling changes it did have were generally held to be unfortunately executed.

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The 1997 E38 big BMW probably represented the nadir of BMW’s styling paralysis; it looked like a squished E32, with a relatively cramped interior and crass-looking headlight assemblies that became even uglier in the “baggy-eyed” mid-cycle refresh.

Faced with the prospect of perpetually redrawing the same basic car, an approach memorably described in the UK press as “selling the same sausage in three different lengths”, the board members of BMW AG made what had to have been an unbelievably difficult decision: they looked to the outside for help. That assistance came in the form of a man who had recently gained notoriety for drawing a series of bizarre-looking Fiats, someone who said that design leadership consisted of taking the customer where “they don’t want to go”. Chris Bangle had worked at Opel prior to his Fiat engagement, but it was with the Fiat Coupe — a raw slash of a car which would later donate much of its fundamental proportion and design thought to the infamous “X Coupe” concept — that he caught the attention of BMW’s management.

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This was not your grandfather’s Fiat. As it turned out, it wouldn’t be your kid’s Fiat, either. His Fiat would be the New 500, which was a retro rip of your grandfather’s Fiat.

The attractiveness of the Fiat Coupe could certainly be debated, but its originality and vision were plain to anyone with a bare minimum of aesthetic sense. The BMW board, in many ways a puppet whose strings were pulled by the mysterious Quandt family, gave Bangle its full public support. No matter what happened, the new design direction would be pursued to its conclusion.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, another “luxury” manufacturer was returning from a frustrating, unprofitable dalliance with modernism. Jaguar had built its seminal XJ6 sedan with fairly minor alterations from 1968 to 1986, having considerable success along the way and escaping the hellhole known as British Leyland, but the successor “XJ40″ had been publicly crucified for its “digital dash” and — horrors! — square headlights. Shortly afterwards, Ford rescued the company from a financial collapse which was more or less entirely the XJ40’s fault and immediately threw in a quick “retro” restyle to bring the “X300″ into visual line with the 1968 original. Sales went up, customers were happier, and plans were made for the “X350″ successor to imitate the retro look. Although the X350 was a technologically daring aluminum-unibody sedan in the mold of the Audi A8, it would not be permitted to visually differ from the X300, which was itself intended to be nearly indistinguishable from the 1968 XJ6.

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Well, this looks different, doesn’t it?

The first production “Bangle BMW” was the “E46″ 3 Series, but anybody who had bothered to take a look at the concept cars being shown at the same time, most notably the aforementioned X Coupe, should have known that the real future design direction of BMW had yet to appear. When it did, it literally shocked the world. The “E65″ 745i full-sized sedan looked like no BMW in history, which made it quite a departure from the company’s previous practice of having all BMWs look like every BMW in history. (Understanding, of course, that “history” started in 1961.) The E65 could hardly be accused of being beautiful, but it struck a chord with buyers. For the first time in most peoples’ living memories, a genuinely new BMW was available.

Naturally, the always-fickle Press As A Whole completely forgot their vicious panning of the previous-generation 740i in their unseemly haste to dogpile this “challenging” new Bimmer. The BMW board never blinked in their determination to back Bangle; the E60 5-Series which followed was an uncompromsing extension of the styling themes seen in the E65. “Flame surfacing” entered the automotive enthusiast vocabulary, along with the less complimentary (and utterly inaccurate) “Bangle Butt”.

The man behind the aforementioned Butt held fast in the face of criticism from all quarters. Although Bangle had not styled the new generation of BMWs himself, he cheerfully served as the lightning rod for the storm of negative reaction, the board continued to back him, and sales continued to climb. The leather-driving-glove crowd was eventually won over by the sheer mechanical excellence of modern Bimmers, although the “Letters” section of Roundel continues to boil over even today with cartoonish indignation. While Mercedes-Benz writhed in quality-control turmoil and Audi plotted a future renaissance, BMW quietly assumed the title of the world’s premier mass-market automotive brand.

Jaguar released the sublime and satisfying X350 in 2003, complete with perfected “homage” styling calculated to satisfy the most ardent Jaguar traditionalist… and the car fell on its face, setting off a chain reaction of events that would eventually result in the brand’s sale to an Indian industrialist. Meanwhile, BMW went from strength to strength; the long-awaited arrival of the “Bangled” 3-Series (a tag which ignored the fact that the 1999 3 Series had also been “Bangled”) proved to be an unqualified success. Still, there was a sense that BMW was pulling the reins tighter on its maverick design team; each new BMW appeared just slightly less daring than the one before. Who could blame them? After all, it’s one thing to bet the farm, but it’s quite another to bet the farm, win the bet, and leave your chips on the table to do it all again.

In a conversation I had with Mr. Bangle at the 2008 NAIAS, he noted rather caustically that his “old” E65 was still the most “challenging” car on the market, years after its release. The 2009 release of the relatively conservative new 7 Series (castigated as “timid” once again by the ever-schizophrenic UK press) does nothing to invalidate that statement. The past half-decade has also seen the fundamental principles of Bangle-era styling stolen, excuse me, “appropriated”, by everyone from Audi (with their “emotional surfaces”) to Toyota and Lexus (the LS460 and current Camry, in addition to looking exactly like each other, also look like generic-label versions of the E65). Even Jaguar has finally wised up and delivered a car — the new XF — which contains just enough “flame surfacing” to look vaguely modern.

What would a BMW without Bangle be like? It is hard to imagine that even the most doggedly mundane of stylists could have squeezed two more generations of sausages from the Neue Klasse tube, but had they done so, the highways would look very different today. We simply take it for granted that the “man from Ohio” solved a variety of automotive styling problems on our behalf. Ever notice just how tall cars are today? That’s a packaging requirement, and it can be done awkwardly (the non-flame-surfaced 2008 Taurus) or invisibly (the flame-surfaced 2010 model). Ever bothered to read the Euro pedestrian impact standards? They forced blunt noses and tall bonnets on sedan makers, who were then able to look at a BMW to get a sense of how to meet those requirements. Have you noticed that the trunk on a 1999 740il is a “two-person” trunk while the new 750il has luggage room for four? That’s courtesy of the “stacked” trunk profile popularized by you-know-who.

My friends in the blogosphere are stage-whispering to anyone who will listen that Bangle was “forced out” or “pushed”, but anybody with a lick of sense can see that it was time for the man to walk away. What’s left for him to do? He has saved BMW from a Jaguar-esque retro-fate, re-imagined the way cars are styled in the twenty-first century, and lived to see his critics either dwindle into irrelevance or voluntarily engage in shameless “copypasta” of his ideas. Why not walk into the sunset? His parting phraseology — that he is moving “beyond automobiles” — could be an indicator of anything, or of nothing.

Chris Bangle has taken a million morons’ hatred, ignorance, and misunderstanding squarely on the chin and kept moving the art of automotive design forward, often alone, always under fire. From the crucible of fifteen years’ effort and battle, he’s emerged as more than just a “hero” or “celebrity” designer, more than just an opinionated controvery artist. If you ask me, he’s earned a rest. And if you love BMWs in particular, or just cars in general, he’s earned your thanks, as well.