Right now, it is 12:23 AM on a very early Thursday morning. I have spent the last few hours staring at a barely quarter-done podcast script, trying to hammer my mind into the shape required to make something that even approaches what I’d consider an acceptable level of quality, and you know what? It’s just not coming. The sheer mental effort required to cram information about the molecular processes behind intercellular communication and the other things I have to be able to regurgitate in a week’s time has completely sucked up all my time and energy. I could try to slap something together, but it wouldn’t be something that you’d want to listen to, nor would it be what I want to put out. So instead of blowing a big hole in both my college grades and the quality of the podcast, I’m taking this last week and this upcoming weekend off. Speed:Sport:Life Radio will be returning in less than two weeks, not necessarily rested, but certainly ready to deliver the high quality mediocrity that you’ve come to expect from us here at Speed:Sport:Life. If there’s anything that’s particularly groundbreaking that happens between now and the end of the semester, I will make a post about it here, but I highly doubt that something like that will happen. So, failing something completely unexpected, I’ll talk to you again in a week and a half.

Click for Larger Image

It’s not our normal practice to publish “teaser” stories, but given the importance of this particular car to our reader base here at Speed:Sport:Life, I’m going to break tradition a bit to let you know that we’ve just returned from the 2009 Audi A4 press preview at Infineon Raceway in sunny Sonoma, CA.

Assuming we survive competing in the 24 Hours of LeMons this weekend at Altamont, we’ll have a complete and detailed drive report on the A4 early next week, including some amusing Tommy Kendall-style in-car, on-track video footage and an exclusive “walkaround” interview with Carter Balkcom, Audi’s product manager.

In the meantime, we can set the record straight on one important point. If you’ve been worried that Audi would “ruin” the new A4 - that this all-new, considerably larger car has deviated away from the pattern that has made the A4 the most successful car in Audi’s history - there’s no need to worry. This one’s a solid winner from stem to stern and we feel confident that it will be the clear market leader in its segment. Our time on the road and around the track revealed a sedan which is superbly satisfying in every regard, packing 95% of the comfort and space found in the A6 in a dynamic package which is far faster around a road course than its predecessor. For the rest of the story - including the “secret” combination of “Driver Select” settings which unlocks the possibility for maximum racetrack hoonage - come back Tuesday morning and read our full-length, full-detail article. See you there!

Our dedication to our listeners knows no bounds here at Saucer Shaped Ligands Radio, and it’s with that in mind that we present to you the latest edition of our patent-pending automotive news adequacy. I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t entirely in my right mind when I recorded this. After shotgunning a Mountain Dew or two though, I regained my sanity enough to edit out the twenty minutes of circular rantings about how the stack of papers and soda cans on my desk was slowly rearranging itself into a gestalt of wood pulp and rolled aluminum in order to exact its bloody revenge on me and my family. So if the sound levels in the podcast are a little uneven, you now know why. Share and Enjoy™.

Click for Larger Image

Gather ‘round, everybody. I have an epic tale to tell. It’s the story of how Fake Luxury Conquered The World. There are heroes, and villains, and sweeping vistas, and if we don’t exactly have a princess cooped up in a tower, we might have a few sexually liberated young women in airbrush-mural vans. Interested? Follow along with me as we return to the dark days of the early Seventies…

(more…)

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth - Photography by the endlessly patient Michelle Baruth

It’s been said that NASCAR’s single-car qualifying is perhaps the most stressful few minutes in motorsport. You’re all alone out there, the sole focus of every track official, every competing team and driver, the thousands of fans in the stands, all the cameras - it’s murder. And yet until this very moment, as I dive into the first turn at Michigan’s Flat Rock Speedway in a tired old Ford Tempo, all by myself on the track, the only show in town, I hadn’t really understood what it might be like. The little quarter-mile bullring is lined with seasoned old oval veterans, leaning casually against the track’s catch-fencing, making the most economical hand gestures possible while speaking in a manner which combines vicious twang and brutal understatements, (e.g. “You mess up like that again and you’re like to hit the wall and crack up a bit”) all idly Staring. Directly. At. Me. They are staring at me and my little Tempo, chugging around the track, and I don’t think any of them are inwardly characterizing me as “the next Kasey Kahne”.

Plus the right rear tire is rubbing itself to violent death against the fender, and I think the car’s leaking gasoline again. I reflect for a moment about the solid two and a half minutes it took me to get into this car, and I wonder about how long those minutes will seem if this sucker catches aflame, and how the locals will laconically characterize my fiery demise. “He was fixin’ to burn up there.”

“Yup. Sure was.”

“And then he did burn right up. Didn’t even bother to get outta the car. Wonder why that was.”

“Yup.”

How’d I get into this situation? Who’s stupid enough to rent a race car when the rental fee is a measly fifty bucks?

(more…)

Yes, it’s another hideously late podcast, which means that it must be getting close to that magical time of year, when those of us who are so obsessed with learning stuff that we (well, not us usually, our parents) are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege to do so start pulling our hair out with frustration and stress as we approach the dreaded Final Exams. This will play havoc with the posting schedule for the podcast over the next few weeks, but hopefully they won’t be up as late as the last two have been. This week, BMW finds yet another place where they can go racing, the UAW starts throwing its weight around again, I express an opinion that’s sure to finally get me some bona fide hate mail, and a potentially world-record holding vehicle within the reach of the average consumer on this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke. Share and Enjoy™.

Click for Larger Image

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

Are you a shy person? Do you suffer from social anxiety? Are you uncomfortable with being the center of attention in public settings? If the answer to any of the above questions is “Yes”, then we respectfully suggest you avoid the 2008 Dodge Viper SRT-10 convertible, particularly in the eye-searing shade of blue applied to our test car. As a Viper owner, you will be permanently on the American road’s center stage, targeted by dropped jaws, pointed fingers, and comments ranging from the predictable “NIIIICE CARRRRR!” to the rather confusing statement delivered to us at a gas station by a fading flower of a middle-aged Texas woman in a Town Car -“We’re so proud of you.” Who was “we”, and of whom, exactly, were “they” proud, and why? Perhaps she’d spotted the manufacturer tag on the car and thought we were affiliated with the intrepid (no pun intended) folks at Chrysler’s SRT division, or she simply wanted to let us know how happy she was that we’d chosen an American sports car over the evil foreign competition, or she thought your humble author was a famous bearded celebrity – one of the Geico cavemen, perhaps, or even Michael McDonald, touring the country in a six-hundred-horsepower droptop while contemplating which Motown originals would be easiest to mangle into blandness for his next album. We’ll never know. Apparently, mere possession of America’s most cylinder-intense sporting car turns one into a public figure, with all the attendant positives and negatives. Learn from our experience and consider yourself warned. Driving a Viper is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for the wallflowers among us.

If, however, you are a painfully modest or fearful individual who nonetheless feels compelled to own an SRT-10, there is one potential solution, assuming you have the bucks: buy an Audi R8 and hire somebody to drive it around behind you. In the Audi’s incandescent presence, the big blue Viper becomes well-nigh invisible, just another minnow in the school of freeway fish which clump and cluster in the R8’s wake, camera phones aloft and trembling at The Presence Of The Future Among Us.

(more…)

Yes, this podcast is colossally late. Real life has once again dragged me away from spending time with you, the listeners, and forced me to pay attention to other things. Now though, we’re back, and we’ve brought a very special treat for you and put it inside the podcast. As far as news goes, we have some BMW news, some legislature news, some endurance racing news, and the final mention we’re giving NBC’s Gear until the show debuts, unless one of the hosts flips a Ferrari over and is killed. Share and Enjoy™.

Click for Larger Image

Photography by Matt Chow

You asked for more event coverage, and we are more than happy to deliver. We are kicking off our first HIN event coverage of the year with the Boost Mobile Nightshift, which was held in Austin, TX this past weekend. We’ve got plenty of photos from the car show, and even more photos of the models. We look forward to October when Hot Import Nights roars into Dallas for another energy packed event.

Click for Larger Image

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth - Race Photography by Dave Everest

Rain. Today’s race day was defined by the rain - starting miserably and getting steadily worse. The previous day’s race had shown the occasional bit of dry pavement to my co-driver, Brian M., but for my race it’s forty-two degrees outside and almost Katrina-esque in the fury of the storm above. In the 8am practice, I spin the Green Baron Motorsports #187 PTE Neon and run off track at the bottom of the Esses, but have no problem getting back on. Not everybody else is as lucky; the wrecked cars are coming in two and three at a time. Trailers are fleeing Mid-O like the proverbial rats from the proverbial sinking ship. Race Group A, over seventy cars strong yesterday, fields thirty-three entries today…

(more…)

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth - Workshop Photos by Jack Baruth - Race Photography by Dave Everest

That Mazda television ad is lying to you. You know, the one where they say… “There’s an old saying in racing. To build a great race car, start with a great street car” or something like that. What a crock. To build a great race car, everybody knows that you start with a Porsche LMP2, which is not a street car, not even in Dubai.

The saying is really this: “To build a cheap race car, start with one that’s already been rolled.” And without further ado, we present our new team - Green Baron Motorsports - and our new race car for the 2008 season - a 1994-build original Neon ACR. Sold as a Showroom Stock race car fourteen years ago, it’s been rolled, crashed, possibly set on fire, you name it - but it’s still one of those original race-only ACRs, and that means it’s, like, totally the Hemi ‘Cuda of 1994. So we invested a new Corolla’s worth of cash and hundreds of man-hours to bring it back on track, including a miserable four-day no-sleep final crunch to make sure it passed its first NASA tech inspection. It passed, it got a logbook, and today, in the hands of old pro Brian M., it took its first NASA podium in its first race.

(more…)

Highway 395 is a lonely stretch of asphalt on the back side of the Sierra Nevadas, and one of the most beautiful roads in California. Situated in the Owens Valley, it has spectacular views of the mountains that surround it on both sides. It’s also apparently a very popular place for butterflies and other insects to breed, as they were doing so in the middle of the road. A great many flying insects met their fates that day, but my personal favorite was the butterflies. They were large enough that you could see them arc into the windshield, where they exploded in a sticky yellow burst that sounded like a small bird detonating on the glass. One particularly good one was smeared from the bottom of the windshield almost to the top. It was a very amusing way to pass time between Lake Tahoe and Death Valley.

Anyway, this week, we have more news on the Tata Motors purchase of Jaguar and Land Rover, BMW considers shedding the pounds on future M cars, Jay Leno weighs in on the potential suck of the US version of Top Gear, and fancy footwear on this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke. Share and Enjoy™.

Click for Larger Image

Story and Photographs by Jack Baruth

Three months ago, we reported that the Cayenne GTS manual was in danger of cancellation, but as you can see, we were dead wrong. The first manual-transmission Cayenne GTS in the state has hit the ground and it’s in our hot little hands for a long-term test.

Normally, when a magazine talks about a “long-term test”, they mean they’ve finagled a free press car from a manufacturer for somewhat longer than the normal one-week period, but this time we mean long-term. As in, we’ve managed to drop almost ninety-four “stacks”, which is to say, $93,800, on a 2008 GTS of our very own. Props go out to our good friend, “The Big Dog”, who made this possible by opening his wallet just a little farther than was prudent. With the keys in hand, we immediately set out to do what Porsche designed the Cayenne specifically to do: namely, haul some parts for our Neon ACR race car.

(more…)

It turns out that a 6.2L 450hp V8, a 7-speed automatic gearbox tuned for maximum performance and a twenty-five mile traffic jam masquerading as a highway are not conducive to good fuel economy.

We’ll have more on the 2008 Mercedes-Benz C63 (including a full performance test) coming very soon!

If there’s one thing we can’t stand here at Speed:Sport:Life (not that there’s only one thing we can’t stand, I think you all know by now that there’s many, many things we hate here), it’s a tease. Indian manufacturer Tata Motors has spent the last few months playing a “will we/won’t we” game with the automotive community, looking for all the world like they’re going to snatch up Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford, but never really quite committing to it. Well, they’ve finally finished off that third scotch, walked up to the bar and sealed the deal with Ford after spending the night forcing us to watch them try to sneak peeks down their dress.

On Tuesday, and in a move that shows you exactly how timely we can be with important news, I don’t mean today, I mean last week, Tata officially announced that it has purchased Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford for $2.65 billion. This completes the gutting of Jacques Nasser’s dream of creating a premium line of marques owned by Ford, as the only remaining brand in the Premier Auto Group is Volvo, which Ford has said is not for sale. As an added bonus for taking the burden of owning a car brand whose reputation is about to shoot up into geosynchronous orbit and is set to break all sales records away from Ford, Tata receives ownership of the Daimler and Lanchester brands through Jaguar and the Rover brand through Land Rover. Daimler, which is licensed from Daimler AG from an eons-old agreement, is used to make even more premium versions of the Jaguar line, and Lanchester hasn’t been used since the 1960’s, but they might be able to license the name. The hidden cash cow of this deal is quite possibly the Rover name, as Shanghai Automotive bought the rights to the Rover line but Ford exercised its right to buy the Rover name before SAIC had the chance, and I don’t doubt that they’d pay a good amount to be able to market their mediocre and relatively ancient designs with the name that was previously associated with said mediocre cars. Hopefully this will give Ford the shot in the arm it needs to pull itself out of its hole, and that Tata doesn’t proceed to run Jaguar and Land Rover into the ground.

Click for Larger Image

The success of Roger Penske’s project to import the Smart to these shores has been well documented, but it’s been less well known that the primary objection offered by would-be Smart buyers is a rather superstitious objection to owning and operating a three-cylinder car. The RENNtech 7.22 is the answer, combining high tech, high performance, and functional brake venting in a small car which can be easily parked sideways in most American cities.

(more…)

Click for Larger Image

Story and Photographs by Jack Baruth

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

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

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

(more…)

Click for Larger Image

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

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

(more…)

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

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

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

More rantings, pretty pictures and actual news below the jump.
(more…)

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

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

Photo credit: Zerin Dube

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

Post and Podcast by Kasey Kagawa

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

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth, photography by Matt Chow

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

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

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

(more…)

Post and Podcast by Kasey Kagawa

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

Post and Podcast by Kasey Kagawa

It’s lean times for the automotive podcast writer. Stuck in the doldrums between auto shows, we’re forced to resort to such vulgar measures as intellectual cannibalism and inflating otherwise unimportant stories into the world’s most important news story ever just to stay afloat. Fortunately, we’re not so desperate as to stoop to printing leaks and broken embargoes, but we spent a good long time staring at a few choice leaks, salivating at the extra time those things would generate. Thanks to the ingenuity of our crack team of writers, however, we here at Dubspeed Radio have just managed to make a podcast worthy to be shot through the Intertubes and into our audience’s waiting ears. Enjoy, and when you listen, think of the poor writers who toiled for hours in their boiler room office to bring you this fine bit of automotive journalism.

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth, photo by “bubba sideways”

I can’t count the number of times during my long and painful BMX career when I sat on my bike, sized up some dirt jump, wooden ramp, or fifteen-stair drop-off, and thought long and hard about how much I’d regret what I was about to do, should it go wrong. Most of the time, my pessimism was unfounded - I’d clear the jump, bound over the obstacle, land the drop. Every once in a while, however, I’d lose my balance, slip a pedal, or just plain run out of talent, and for a tiny, sickening fraction of a second, my breath would catch in my throat before I hit the ground to the accompanying “crack” of a broken bone. I never actually heard a bone break, mind you; it always felt like a really sharp pinch in a place where no pinching should be possible. The memory of that little “pinch” is what made me sit on my bike for an extra moment or two before cranking off towards disaster. There were times I’d have liked to just sit there until it was time to go home, but the difference between the rider and the poser is that the poser never stops just sitting there on the bike. You’ll never get hurt just sitting there.

If I don’t make the prediction I’m about to unleash - if I turn this column towards a safer topic, like E85 pricing or trail-braking techniques for FWD race cars - I won’t get hurt. There won’t be any hate mail. Zerin, my long-suffering editor, won’t get any calls from the manufacturers. It’ll be business as usual. I should really shut up right now.

Oh, the hell with that. Let’s pedal towards the jump and make a prediction. I believe that Nissan is making a potentially serious error in importing the new GT-R to the United States and Canada. I believe that they will eventually regret doing so, and that the GT-R will join that time-honored long list of big-money automotive marketing mistakes that contains everything from the Edsel to the Lincoln Blackwood. Yeah, yeah, I know. Some of my dear readers are already searching for the “Respond” button at the bottom of this column so they can make unpleasant and biologically improbable suggestions regarding my momma, while the more action-oriented among you are already GoogleMapping a very special trip for the purpose of beating my face in at the NASA season opener. (It’s April 12, at Mid-Ohio, if you must know.) If there’s anybody left who simply wants to know the reasons behind this particular piece of prophecy… you’ll just have to put the chainsaw down and keep reading.

(more…)

Post and Podcast by Kasey Kagawa

All of you who wasted two hours of your life on Sunday night watching the new Knight Rider TV movie, or as I like to think of it, Knight Rider, Brought To You By Ford, well, I thought about being sympathetic, but given that the show couldn’t have telegraphed the fact that it was going to suck more strongly unless it bought full-page print ads and one minute TV spots that were just “Knight Rider is going to be awful, don’t watch it” in white block print over a black background, you’re getting nothing from me. It was so bad that Autoblog, who in the days leading up to the show’s premier, had more than two different posts about it on the front page at any given time, gave it a hearty and resounding thumbs down (my favorite quote: “Bionic Woman is Goodfellas compared to this.”). Of course, the Hoff was awesome, but he’s the freakin’ Hoff. He is second only to His Holy Lutz himself. When the Hoff is assumed into Awesome Heaven, which is what Heaven would have been if God wasn’t kicked out by Lutz for being a total slacker and not paying His rent on time, he will be seated at The Lutz’s right hand. Anyway, enjoy the podcast.

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth - Photo by Zerin Dube

It’s an old joke, non-hilariously updated for the purposes of this review: A Buddhist monk walks into an Audi showroom and is greeted by an Audi salesman. The salesman says, “How may I help you today?” The monk replies,

“I would like to have a truly Zen A4.”

“A truly Zen A4?” repeats the salesman, somewhat confused. Smiling serenely, the monk whispers,

“Make me one with everything.”

(more…)

Click for Larger Image

Story by Robert S. Schultz

The Chicago Auto Show may not be first on the annual schedule of automotive extravaganzas. But don’t even suggest it is the “second city” of shows. In square footage alone—1.3 million—it is the largest show in North America. And though Detroit presents the majority of premieres each year, Chicago scores its share of noteworthy debuts. As a mighty winter storm pelted McCormick Place with rain, sleet, snow and the city’s trademark breezes, we visited the auto makers’ press events, among them the much-anticipated coming-out party for the Dodge Challenger.

(more…)

Post by Kasey Kagawa

Well, I’m off to a much undeserved Las Vegas vacation. My Presidential suite has been prepared and my multi-million dollar credit line is waiting, both perks of working here at Dubspeed Towers. Soon, I shall take the Rolls to my private jet and cruise to Vegas in luxury. I leave you all in the very capable hands of Zerin, who has something special ready for all of you tomorrow. I hope that you pay him the same attention that you do my weekly missives, and I’ll talk to you all again next week.

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth

She’d entered our dealer principal’s office as a coltish, blinking young woman, stepping awkwardly in new high heels. Almost six feet tall, impossibly thin, painfully beautiful, wearing a purposely dowdy pantsuit. It was always fun to see the new dealer reps arrive from Ford; without exception they were tall, good-looking young men and women with impeccable degrees from Michigan universities, earnest Midwestern faces, and a charmingly naive sense of the world. They’d meet the dealer, a hard-assed former B-17 pilot who had built the dealership with his own hands, and they’d meet the general manager, a hulking man with a Mafioso’s hair and the easy yet malicious attitude of a professional assassin, and those two old bastards would grind ‘em into the ground. We enjoyed the show. Sure, these kids were on their way to six-figure salaries, a home in Bloomfield Hills, and the outrageously hedonistic life of a Detroit executive - but before they could make the big money, they’d have to take a beating from our guys. Of course, things were slightly different this time. Our dealer principal had recently handed over the daily operations to his phlegmatic, fortysomething son, whose demeanor and physique had long ago earned him the nickname “Droopy The Dog”. Droopy had insisted on seeing the Ford rep alone, probably hoping that he could earn some respect among the sales staff by beating up a twenty-three-year-old girl. Rumor said this meeting was to discuss an extra “allocation” - the amount of stock sent to each dealer on an annual basis. We all knew what we wanted from this girl - we wanted extra allocation of PowerStroke diesels, we wanted more three-quarter-ton trucks, and we wanted to become an SVT dealer. With any luck, Droopy would get the job done.

When she walked out of his door, the awkward young volleyball player had become a triumphant Valkyrie. She grinned at the assembled sales staff and strutted to her cream-colored Town Car Cartier. From colt to racehorse, in one meeting flat. Our general manager frowned, went into Droopy’s office, and slammed the door. Hushed voices turned loud, and before long the two men were screaming at each other. The rest of the salesmen had melted away by the time the door banged back open, leaving me to face the general manager alone. He looked at me and said,

“Aerostars. Aerostars! The bitch made him take four AEROSTARS!.”

(more…)

Post and Podcast by Kasey Kagawa

Thanks to many years of ruthlessly abusing my body, I can go without sleep for a good period of time, something that comes in handy when you’re producing an almost 20 minute podcast around a college schedule. Anyway, here’s your big heapin’ helping of podcast goodness. This one features a potential hot version of the Tesla Roadster, His Supreme Lutzness, awesome coming from surprising places, lameness coming from not-so-surprising places, Consumer Reports confirms what we knew all along, and a three for one deal in this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke that ends with a science-y kind of a rant. Be warned, I get very worked up over things that might not matter all that much to you. But that’s kind of the point of a rant, I suppose. Oh well, enjoy the episode.

Post and Podcast by Kasey Kagawa

Now that my computer is functioning properly, we can get on with the show. Thanks to a tooth damaged in an old injury finally dying off, I had to get a root canal on Tuesday, which on top of leading to a very painful last week of winter break, has made my upper lip swell up to an amusing size. It’s still impeding my ability to speak clearly a little bit, so if you can’t quite make out what I’m saying, it’s the root canal. Not my own personal shortcomings. Anyway, this week features news on the Tesla Roadster, a possible glimpse at the future of the Corvette, Ford of North America reboots the Taurus to get rid of that Five Hundred smell and Ford of Europe gets the C1 Focus RS. Chrysler announces they’re making what seems like a bad decision that might actually be a good one, Lotus looks into green research, and a extra-tasty Useless Automotive Tchotchke. Also, I go off on a rant for a few minutes to explain why I’ve been so hard on Toyota over the last few weeks. I think it comes off okay, but if you don’t want to hear about such things, I warn you in advance. If you want more of that sort of thing, drop me a line at my new email address: kasey@speedsportlife.com. If not, send me email anyway and hopefully your witty comebacks will shatter my ego so much that I surrender the will to live.

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth

The word on the street is that GM’s new Malibu is quite the sales success. Nearly thirteen thousand of the “New ‘Bu” found homes in December - but wait! They could have sold even more, if they’d had any left! That’s right: for the first time in any of our recent memories, a domestically produced mid-sized sedan is “production constrained”. By any standard you want to use - sales, customer feedback, the drooling, incomprehensible babbles of The Press As A Whole - the Malibu is a winner. This is the one for which we’ve waited, the make-no-excuses product to take the fight to the Japanese. There’s nothing standing between General Motors and complete dominance over the HondOta CamCord.

Nothing, that is, except your inner chimpanzee.

(more…)

Click for Larger Image

Story by Jack Baruth; photos by Zerin Dube and Carl Modesette

Are you sick of the Detroit Auto Show yet? Have the endless broken embargoes, family-vacation-disposable-camera-quality photographs, hilariously car-ignorant reporting, and faux-world-weary meta-coverage vomited across the blogosphere finally made you permanently allergic to the condition known as NAIAS? We don’t blame you. It’s been less than ten days since the ZR-1 made its majestic rotating-platform ascension above the crowd at the Friday-night “GM Style” opening event, and it already seems as if 2008 Detroit Show coverage has been with us longer than the previous-generation Land Cruiser.

The farther away we get from the show and its seven thousand sweating journalists, however, the easier it becomes to get a bit of perspective on the whole thing, and we therefore humbly ask you to hang on for just one more article. There won’t be any outrageous Chinese-car-company-chairman stunts in this one. Nor will there be any straight-from-the-show-floor photos that make those old shots of the Loch Ness Monster look like Ansel Adams’ best work. Instead, we’ll simply recap the show and award the Rockers, Suckers, and Snoozers which made the ‘08 show one to both remember and forget. Let’s get started.

(more…)