Author Archives: Jay B.

Making this blog sexier one picture at a time

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s60Does 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.

Best Bang for Your Beater Buck

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autopiabannerLast 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.

No Cash for Trash

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trashed 240Congress’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.

No Bomb for Obama

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nj-turnpikeWe braved the crowded Metro, the packed Mall and the DC beltway for the Inauguration of Barack Obama, only to wind up parking the car for 3 hours in a traffic jam on the Jersey Turnpike.

A guy from Massachucetts was driving to DC when his family called authorities to say he had a bomb and was going to blow up the Mall. The threat escalated to the FBI and Secret Service and both sides of the Turnpike were closed from the Delaware Bridge to Exit 4, over 30 miles. Turns out it was a false alarm, and they’re now questioning the mental health of the person who called it in.

We thought we’d beat the traffic by leaving right after the inaugural address, and travel was brisk until NJ. We were getting bits and pieces of traffic reports on the radio, but had no idea how long it would last. Slowly one hour turned to two, then to three as we idled motionless. Disney’s Robin Hood played for the kids in the back seat while we watched people get out of their cars to piss in the woods. Finally cars and trucks started moving again and a few miles later we passed the flashing lights and security vehicles around a little sub-compact sitting alone on the south-bound lane, jamming up the system with its hoax.

Fishy Brick

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The “Sashimi Tabernackle Choir” is an 80’s 240 that was outfitted with two hundred fifty “Billy Bass”-type automated rubber fish and lobsters. Built in 2001, the choir syncs the reverse engineered robots to orchestrate music for parades in Texas.

With wry humor they document the process here, including this comment on why they used the 240:

Volvos make the best Art Cars because (A) they have nice thick metal to bolt things to, (B) they last forever, and (C) when bystanders start throwing stuff at you, you need a nice solid car around you.

The Lobster conductor at 1:03 in this video is kinda’ frightening.

Check out more parade cars here.

Photo from SashmiTabernacleChoir.org

What’s wrong with Wagons?

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A couple of weeks ago the NY Times had an article titled “A Market Segment That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” And what segment would that be? The station wagon.

Ezra Dyer outlines three non-wagons that seem to defy categorization. The Ford Flex, BMX X6, and the Infinity EX35, seen below.

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Auto manufacturers have obviously seen that the market for full-size SUVs is dwindling, but they know that Americans still need lots of trunk space to carry all their stuff. The Infinity and BMW are interesting crossovers in that they are large hatchbacks with a high stance, allowing drivers a more upright seating position, similar to an SUV, but with much more cargo room than a compact hatchback, like the Mazda 3. But why would you want to sacrifice the handling characteristics of a lower center-of-gravity conventional wagon when you know you’re not going off-road?

The Flex is a station wagon that won’t admit it. From the Times article:

The Flex’s mandate is to fulfill the mission of a minivan or large S.U.V. (it seats seven) while looking nothing like either one. The Flex makes no pretense of off-road ability, but it will tow 4,500 pounds — a fair amount more than most cars. So what is it?

It’s a hefty wagon, a Country Squire for the hip-hop age. Why it’s marketed as a crossover, along with the Taurus X and the Fusion, I do not know. Is the word “stationwagon” as unfashionable as the term “minivan”?

Sexist Volvo Ad?

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thm_ad_sexist.jpgFeministing posted a vintage Volvo ad from the 60’s that would never fly today. First, because it treats the woman in the ad as an inept, incompetent shrew. Second, because plenty of women buy cars themselves and the ad’s target audience seems to be guys who need help in convincing their non-driving wives of the wisdom of their decisions. The narrator says:

If your wife won’t let you buy a Volvo (what, is she your mother?), let her drive one. That’ll really do the job. Once she gets the feel of it, she might like knowing you’re getting a car that, in most cases, lasts long enough to get people out of car payments, and into new furniture payments, or swimming pool payments, or fur coat payments.

All the while this dude’s wife is bumping and jostling down the road, trying to drive a manual, or riding in reverse in the automatic. Get it? Women can’t drive! Ha!I

Is it just me or does that dude look old enough to be her dad?

thm_ad_target.jpgSarah Haskins on Current TV shows that things aren’t that much better now when she deconstructs the loving carress of a Volvo S80.