I spend an unhealthy amount of time watching car accident footage on YouTube. This one is SFW though, and even the driver thinks it’s funny… if expensive. Too much torque and a few loose bolts and you too could lose the wheels off your bitchin’ Camaro.
Since the Simpsons just revamped their opening sequence after 20 years, I figured I’d pull up this 3 year old video out of Europe that reconceives the intro using live action. Marge winds up in a faded red 240, rather than the bulbous wagon from the cartoon.
… and Saab splits from Detroit first.
Truth About Cars has a great guest post from Stein X Leikanger documenting a marketing meeting during the continuing destruction of the “soul” of Saab under GM.
GM wanted Cross-Platform Synergies, and didn’t pay much attention to the individual brands. Just look at www.gm.com – I hate that place – they still think there is such a thing as a GM-car, at the expense of the individual brands, and they’re never going to abandon that mindset.
I wasn’t familiar with the “Saab versus…” ad campaign he mentions in the post, but a search for “Saab vs Volvo” pulls up this awesome clip from “Scorched Heat” of a 740t being chased by 900 series cop cars.
From TTAC today:
Either Ford gets a signature from a willing buyer or Volvo will be terminated… Ford is reported to be asking between $3b to $4b for Volvo, much less than the $6.4b they paid.
And the potential suitors? China’s Chery. China’s Changan. China’s Dongfeng.
This is a far cry from the Swedish nationalization rumors that were flying around late last year. Whatever happens it looks like it’ll go down this month.
IPD released its February Rear Wheel Drive newsletter and they feature a sweet 242 “drift car” from Rob Prince.
I upped the boost to 25psi at SE 6.0 in the fall of 2007, and dynoed 280whp and 305 wtq, in a dyno room that was 114 degrees F!!! It felt much faster, of course, but I had to wait for cooler weather back home to find out what it could really do. On 255 width street tires, I ran a 12.5 @ 116 in the quarter mile. Once I installed a set of Mickey Thompson ET Drag slicks, that dropped to a 11.8 @ 114 mph! It was so much fun to drive at that point, and kind of hairy to drive on the street.
I bet.
Does Automobile Magazine really lead their article on the debut of the 2010 Volvo S60 with this paragraph?
Sleek and sexy are words that are rarely associated with Volvos. Rather, the name Volvo generally conjures up adjectives such as safe and secure. Yet, the 2009 Volvo S60 concept seeks to change that notion and instead prove that a Volvo can be both safe and sexy.
I feel like I’ve been time-warped back to 1997 for the debut of the C70. Or to art school in 1995 to revisit the death of painting, which had happened 10 years previous.
The suicide-door-opening, Benz-C-class-looking, curvy, crispy, sleek S60 concept certainly is appealing. Hopefully this blog will gain an ounce of sex appeal by being tangentily associated with all of it’s $50k+ glory.
Oh yeah, blah blah blah Detroit Auto Show blah blah blah economy blah. Blah blah blah stimulus package blah blah. Consumers blah blah wallet blah blah blah Big Three. Blah blah green blah blah carpocalypse.
Last August Wired’s Autopia blog rated the red-block Volvos as the winner in the Beater class for its “5 Best Bang for Your Buck” cars.
(People) will assume that you could be driving a better car, but that you just have better things on which to spend your money.
Unfortunately it placed 5th in on-line voting.
On a related front, Get Rich Slowly makes some good points in “Why I Drive a 13 Year Old Car“. The author calculates how much he saves over buying a new car, based on the annual cost of repairs on a 1995 Geo Metro (My buddy Chuck would argue those repair costs would be zero if he owned a Honda Accord). It drives home the point about breaking free from the new car fetish so many Americans have and embracing the idea that cars can be repaired instead of scrapped.
I owe my Brick ownership partially to Dave Ramsey’s “Drive Free, Live Rich“, and partially to a low bonus payment from MTV back in 2006. I didn’t have a car for 10 years, so I didn’t have a car payment for 10 years. Seeing as I’m now unemployed, but have a car with no car payment, I think I made the right choice. But PDXgirl comments on Get Rich Slowly that she doesn’t know if she’d be driving her 1982 Volvo tank if she had kids, or had to make long trips. I’ll try to answer that in eleven years.
Congress’s stimulus package included a proposal to pay drivers to junk their old cars in return for cash to buy a new car. Luckily, it just died this week.
The “Cash for Clunkers” program would have given up to $10,000 to people of cars older than 10 years as long as they used it to buy a new American car. The idea was that it would pull allegedly polluting deathtraps off the road and jump start Detroit. But it was such a dumb, misguided idea that we can rejoice in its defeat.
I’d been putting together some links to make a mega-post about the subject, but it’s moot now. So here’s a link dump.
• Freakonomics points out what should be obvious; people who drive older cars aren’t the kind of people who are in the market for a new car. They buy used!
• The Truth About Cars takes a look at the potential for fraud. If you were in the market for a new car, wouldn’t you try to find the cheapest POS on CraigsList and get it to limp into the federal garage for your incentive check?
• SEMA opposed the program because it would do more harm than good. How many crap cars are really out there anyway, and do we really need to scrap them when they could have perfectly good parts that could be picked and pulled?
• Hot Rod Magazine follows a similar logic and opposes the scrapping of cars that could be candidates for restoration and repair.
• Wired points out that if you want to do something about global warming, buy a used car. “…it takes 113 million BTUs of energy to make a Toyota Prius. Because there are about 113,000 BTUs of energy in a gallon of gasoline, the Prius has consumed the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gasoline before it reaches the showroom. Think of it as a carbon debt — one you won’t pay off until the Prius has turned over 46,000 miles or so.”
Here’s hoping “Cash for Clunkers” doesn’t raise its ugly head again in the near future.