Okay, $71,500 seems like a stiff price, but it's the last Chevrolet Camaro to be sold. (It's the second-to-last Camaro off the assembly line; the actual last vehicle is bound for a museum.) General Motors pulled the plug on the Camaro and its sister ship, the Pontiac Firebird, after more than three decades, citing plummeting sales and high costs — no other GM car is built on this platform.

At least it's a Z28. With T-tops, of course. And Chevy is donating the proceeds to charity. On to Woodward Avenue, and let those eight cylinders be heard!

Car and Driver editor Csaba Csere, in the October '02 issue, dissecting California Assembly Bill 1493, which orders reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases in the Golden State starting in 2006:

Yeah, that ought to make a dent in global warming.

There are none so blind as those who slide down the Interstate at 80 mph, unable to see anything beyond the frontage road. An example:

From my very own World Tour log, this past summer. Obviously the rantings of a madman, and a tired madman at that.

And there was a gentle nudge today from Regions of Mind, reminding me — as many of us perhaps need reminding once in a while — that the rim of the world is neither desolate nor deserted.

Of course, I wasn't actually going to the mall, but there are some worthwhile shops around the periphery, and while I was getting back onto the service road, I took a sideways glance at the adjacent lot, and to my surprise, there were, not one, but two middle-Fifties Studebakers. This, I decided, called for further exploration.

And sure enough, once I'd turned the corner, I found dozens of Studes on exhibition: bullet-nose sedans from '50 and '51, classic coupes from '53 on, ferocious late-50s and early 60s Hawks, a couple of the legendary Avantis ('63-'64), a smattering of pickup trucks (this is Oklahoma, after all), a vintage-'48 school bus, and, perhaps the biggest surprise of all, a '66 Commander.

I had never before seen any '66 Studebakers. After the 1964 model year proved to be one bust too many, Studebaker shut down its production facilities in South Bend, Indiana; all subsequent Studes would be built in Hamilton, Ontario. A mere two years and not quite 30,000 cars later, it was all over. This particular '66 was a nice enough medium-sized sedan with a small-block Chevrolet V8. (Studebaker's own engine-production line had died with the South Bend plant.) It seems to me that it should have been at least reasonably competitive with Detroit products of that era; certainly it was more stylish than the '66 Chevy II Nova that I used to drive. But all the '66 Studebakers combined totaled fewer than 9,000 cars. Probably that many Chevys fell off the transporter en route to the dealerships.

Fall days around here are perfect for outdoor auto shows, and I couldn't have asked for a nicer one. I didn't even carp at the presence of a semi-imposing '54 Packard Clipper sedan; this was the year, after all, that Studebaker and Packard had merged. And, needless to say, the owners were happy to bend any and all ears with Stude lore, with the notable exception of one guy who went to sleep in the trunk of his (I assume it was his) Gran Turismo Hawk.

Actual text from the owner's manual, right out of the glove compartment (which, by the way, contains no gloves):

I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems to me that if they didn't want people to put, um, packages on it, by damn, they should have called it something other than the package tray.

What happens "when 75 automobiles converge simultaneously from 4 or 5 directions and attempt to form a single file line"?

According to Marc Lundberg, nothing much this time — until that first, fateful move by the Guy in the Red Car.

Like most big-but-not-huge American cities, Indianapolis has a beltway of sorts, a highway built to Interstate standards (such as they are) which loops around the periphery and connects to other major highways. This is Interstate 465, and if David Letterman has his way, it will be renamed for him.

To me, this seems to open a world of possibilities. Interstate 5 from Los Angeles north to the Canadian border could be renamed for Alec Baldwin, who presumably would use it to emigrate. Duval Street in Austin, Texas, its curbs lined with yuppiemobiles and its surface pockmarked by pavement irregularities both accidental and deliberate, making driving on it unsafe at any speed, could become Ralph Nader Avenue. And I'm sure Massachusetts can find a bridge to name after Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Mostly reasonable points regarding auto insurance, from Colby Cosh:

This is absolutely true, but at least on this side of the 49th — I admit to being unaware of how the Canadians may handle this — states with mandatory-insurance laws also have assigned-risk pools, so that people to whom no rational company would sell insurance can pay a stiff premium and stay on the road, when what is really needed is to keep them as far away from the roads as possible.

General Motors hasn't had any problem moving Chevy trucks lately, and I'm inclined to believe it's because they knew how to sell them. A pickup, even if it's driven by your Aunt Hilda, is still a big ol' bruiser, and advertising for trucks reflects the long-standing American desire for Industrial Strength stuff at home. (Sister GMC's "We Are Professional Grade" nattering is slightly sniffier, but ultimately just as elemental.)

What the General wasn't doing all that well was selling Chevy cars, sales of which have been sinking, well, like a rock. Really, what's the last Chevrolet ad campaign you remember? If you, like me, have to go all the way back to Dinah Shore, the problem becomes obvious: Chevy is simply off most buyers' radar.

Until, perhaps, now. This year the bow-tie boys took a tiny step away from the blandness of "We'll Be There"; Campbell-Ewald, Chevy's ad agency, figured out that scores of popular songs over the years had mentioned Chevrolet and its cars, and decided to run with the idea. The first installment was a shot of a little red Corvette, complete with the appropriate lyric fragment courtesy of The Artist Usually Known As Prince. A verse from AC/DC's "That's The Way I Wanna Rock And Roll" accompanies a new Monte Carlo coupe; a '63 Impala evokes the Beach Boys' "409".

The big question, of course: will these rockin' ads strike a chord with buyers? I think they will; even if you're not considering a Chevy, you'll certainly think about Chevy. And two years ago, the precursor of this campaign, a billboard in Chevrolet's home town of Warren, Michigan, placed just in time for the Woodward Dream Cruise, said succinctly: "They don't write songs about Volvos."

Now to see if Ford fires back with some Mustang sallies.

It wasn't my drive — Weetabix did this one — but, with the exception of minor geographical discrepancies, I could have:

That's Weet's Wisconsin. The Oklahoma I know is very much like that. The red clay sticks to your shoes, to your wheels, to your very soul. There are things in the land of Central Time that I suspect simply cannot be understood on the coasts.

Originally posted 18 March 2001

I'm getting ready to back out of the parking lot at the BBQ place on the edge of town, a sack half-full of cholesterol-ridden delights at my side, when a three-quarter-ton pickup truck rolls into the lot, and pulls up just far enough to avoid blocking my exit. The truck is pulling a trailer, and on board is a vintage (say, 1960 or so) farm tractor, cleaned up if not exactly concours condition, apparently on its way to a new home. Within seconds, a crowd had gathered to see the old relic, and here and there I picked up snatches of conversations along the following lines:

And it occurred to me as I sped away, if "sped" is the word that applies to a four-cylinder sedan heading up a twelve-percent grade, that there was no way in hell the government and the Greens were going to talk these people into Honda Insights and such. Two-dollar gas, three-dollar gas, five-dollar gas — we'd no more give up our trucks than our guns.

And yes, before you ask, there is a National Motorists Association.

Originally posted 23 March 2002

Scene: Late Seventies. We're tooling down a very straight, very dull road in rural Oklahoma. Conversation has ground to a halt. What to do? Turn up the radio? No, she hates it loud. Peer down her blouse? Seat angle and fabric arrangement make this difficult, not to mention fairly unsafe. (The same, only more so, for "look up her skirt".) Finally, I glance at this Japanese simulation of a British dashboard and remark, "Why in the hell does the speedo go up to 125 miles per hour? This thing wouldn't do one-twenty-five if you pushed it off the frigging Sears Tower."

She glares — after all, she was the one who picked it out — and says, "And how do you know it wouldn't?"

I pull the stick back into fourth and push the pedal through the floorboard, and we're off: seventy-five, eighty, ninety. Back into fifth, and eventually the needle settles halfway between 100 and 105. The tach flutters just on the far side of 5000 rpm. It is about this point that it occurs to us that the road is becoming both less straight and less rural, and that we're risking a fine of about a week's pay, and I rein in our trusty steed, half grinning, half gasping for breath, mostly the same expression I tend to exhibit after sex, except that I'm not sleepy.

Around noon today, I was on that same road, with the music up loud and the passenger seat occupied by no one, and I wasn't doing anything like 102.5 mph; indeed, there were extended periods of 0 mph while the construction crews repositioned themselves. And it's a good thing that they were there, since this is one of those roads that was apparently originally paved with reclaimed emery boards and then striped randomly with "I Can't Believe It's Not Tar". Forget old memories and such: I was definitely happy to get out of that neck of the woods. The construction zone ended after about ten miles, and a few minutes later I found myself between two Chevy Suburbans, the first of which was making a move to pass up a cement truck doing a modest 58. For some reason, I decided I didn't want the second 'Burb riding me all the way to the city, so I followed the first guy into the left lane. It was only after I'd dropped back into position that I noticed the speedo needle: 94 mph. There must be something about that road.

And one more thing: Why the hell does the speedo go up to 150 miles per hour? This thing wouldn't do one-fifty if you pushed it off the frigging Sears Tower.

Originally posted 7 June 2002

Automotive magazines are routinely pilloried these days for such grave breaches of the peace as feature articles on sport-utility vehicles ("Isn't this supposed to be a car magazine?"), payola from advertisers ("The PDQ-10 was two-tenths of a second slower in the quarter but you ranked it first, no doubt in exchange for that two-page spread right after the letters column, didn't you?"), and, perhaps most heinous of all, testing vehicles that mere mortals couldn't possibly afford. The July issue of Automobile exemplifies this latter offense with a cover story featuring five cars of varying degrees of superness (the least-expensive being a Mercedes-Benz), averaging around 489 hp, being driven in Italy fergoshsakes. How are Carl and Lenny in Springfield supposed to relate to that?

The answer, I would argue, is that they're supposed to be motivated to drive, even if it's some disreputable middle-80s rustbucket with no more sporting credentials than Ralph Nader. One of the advantages of living here in the Big PX is that we still have a fair amount of wide-open space that (sometimes) can be traversed at wide-open throttle, and despite the best efforts of twee types who think we should be happy to ride the bus with all the other [fill in vague ethnic or socioeconomic pejorative], Americans, by and large, keep the pedal to the metal. And it actually may be, in some ways, more fun with less car; my innocuous little sedan with its modest 130 hp obviously won't flatten corners of the autostrada at triple-digit speeds, but I can run all day at six or seven-tenths without incurring the wrath of The Man. Provided I don't do anything stupid while running, that is. And many moons ago, I got enough seat time in a Maserati Quattroporte (you gotta love a language that has a word as luscious as that to mean something as mundane as "four-door") to learn a healthy measure of respect for a machine that pays you back for not paying attention by putting you into a ditch. Or worse.

I'm not particularly hot-blooded, but I am running a fever of a hundred and three, and it's severely affecting my ability to come up with Neat Stuff for this section.

Fortunately, the December Car and Driver is here, and as always, it's packed full of quotable goodies.

Patrick Bedard, on the Washington-area red-light cameras:

John Phillips, reviewing the don't-call-it-a-BRAT Subaru Baja:

Twenty-four years I've read this magazine, and I could do another twenty-four if I live that long. If this fever doesn't break, though, I won't.

The Evangelical Environmental Network and Creation Care magazine are asking one and all to ask themselves: What Would Jesus Drive?

"Economic issues," says Rev. Jim Ball of EEN, "are moral issues," and their upcoming ad campaign will exhort the faithful to consider the effect on God's gardens before rendering unto Chevrolet the forty grand for a Suburban.

There is, of course, Biblical precedent for this. In Acts 2, the car pool was invented: the disciples apparently managed to get to the first Pentecost in one Accord.

(Muchas gracias: Bob Whaley at Cruel Shoes.)

In 1985, Malcolm Bricklin decided that what the US market needed was a really cheap car, and the next year he began selling a couple of Fiat 128-based cars built by Zastava Motor Works in the Serbian sector of Yugoslavia. The Yugos sold well at first; in fact, they sold so well that the Serbs squeezed Bricklin out and took over US distribution themselves, which proved to be a serious mistake.

The bigger mistake, though, was selling a car based on the Fiat 128, a model so ancient even Fiat gave up on it after 1978. And the usual Fix-It-Again-Tony woes that dogged the 128 were just as evident in the Yugos. Production ended in the early 90s, at least partially because the Zastava plant was damaged in the Balkan war.

It is now 2002, and Malcolm Bricklin has decided that what the US market needs is a really cheap car. Next year he plans to sell a line of four vehicles not even slightly based on Fiats, built by Zastava Motor Works, using engines from Peugeot. No attempt will be made to claim any connection with the ill-fated Yugos of yore; Zastava's cars will bear its own badge.

ZMW.

Well, okay, no one will likely confuse any of these with those driving machines closer to the ultimate. The real question is whether American consumers, who generally prefer to buy loaded luxoboats, will consider something priced below even South Korean levels. If Bricklin can find 60,000 buyers a year, he'll make a fortune. If he can't — well, as Peter Noone once said, "Second verse, same as the first."

The quest for Newer and Cooler Stuff isn't doing us a whole lot of good, says Trinity:

[Mental note: This is not the place to mention my nifty little phone that plays "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Even at under $20.]

"Anti-anti-lock brakes". I like that. There's something vaguely disquieting about turning a major driving function over to a bunch of microchips; I still get slightly queasy at the thought of cruise control, fercrissake.

I'm not giving up my cupholders, though.

And the prodigal returns.

I realize that nothing, not even US highways, are forever — consider the bloody dismemberment of Route 66 in favor of a fistful of Interstates — but how many signs can you slap on one road? There's a stretch of I-35 through southern Johnson County, Kansas that's also signed US 50, US 56 and US 169. And they wonder why they needed those extra lanes.

They call it the Bedlam Series, the annual meetings between the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University, and no matter what the sport — for all I know, they might compete in intercollegiate saxophone-polishing — the turnout is high. How high? I was southbound on I-35 at Oklahoma 51, the major route to Stillwater, and northbound traffic trying to exit onto 51 was backed up approximately 10.3 miles (figure 12:46 for "Black Cow", skipping "Aja", then "Deacon Blues", divided by 74 mph).

Speaking of 74 mph, turnpike service areas are your friend. Yes, they charge a few cents extra per gallon. On the other hand, when states like Kansas which are now putting entry time to the exact second on toll tickets figure out that they can compute your average speed when you turn in that ticket, a few minutes' layover at Phillips 66 may be just the thing that keeps your average speed below the speed limit. Of course, you can crawl along at 62 mph, but this irritates everyone else.

So much for tales of the turnpike. Regular bloggage resumes whenever.

Mark, the self-proclaimed Heavy Metal Redneck, takes issue with that Forbes.com poll to determine the Crappiest American Cars:

Anything that can't outrun my four-banger (zero to sixty in 11.2 on a good day) is in need of repair, is being driven by a narcoleptic, or is a Segway.

The problem is, I can remember the last time I saw a Camry. In fact, just about every damn time I pull into a parking lot, I see a Camry.

Uh, Mark, does your mom know you've had women in the back seat? (And why the hell didn't I ever do this?)

Actually, my FWD "jap job" (made in Flat Rock, Michigan) does pretty well in the snow; I haven't had a serious slide in the slush in years.

If you're not doing anything this weekend, why don't you run him over with a Caprice? You'd be doing us all a favor, and Chevrolet could use the publicity. I won't even make any jokes about Iraq-and-pinion steering.

During the World Tour, I caught my breath long enough to say something about driving in rural Kentucky, and it seemed to go over fairly well, so I'm happy to pass on a second opinion.

The following paragraph comes from Jean Jennings, editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine, and she's describing a late-October (I think) slide through the countryside.

Of course, this was before they rolled the Ford SVT Focus, but that was in Tennessee.

Auto insurers always have an explanation for why your rates are incredibly high. In this part of the world, it's theft: cars are stolen here at a brisk clip, some destined for chop shops, others for faraway buyers who ask no questions. In California, it's the high cost of doing business in general. In New Jersey — well, it's New Jersey.

And in Floyd County, Virginia, it's deer. Fred will explain.

They're called "left-lane bandits," and you've certainly seen them, sitting in what's supposed to be the fast, or at least the passing, lane, traveling at a speed which they think to be conspiciously law-abiding. While these characters probably deserve whatever they get, it's probably not advisable for you to administer same, says Moira Breen:

Better, perhaps, to let the lessons be taught by Kenworth and Peterbilt. That massive grille looming seemingly right behind one's back seat has a way of motivating even the most militant member of the Anti-Destination League.

Keith Bradsher, the New York Times hack who spewed out that anti-SUV book last year, is apparently going wider with his campaign: his publisher has kicked in a few bucks' worth of underwriting to Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of Car Talk, the popular NPR radio show. (I caught the first sponsorship announcement on show #304, this weekend.) By no coincidence, the brothers had been conducting a campaign they call Live Large, Drive Small, which needs (and, frankly, deserves) no explanation.

Much is made of the fact that SUVs, being taller, have a higher center of gravity, and therefore are more likely to roll over than real cars. Now real drivers — "On the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers," explains Volkswagen — are aware of this and conduct themselves accordingly behind the wheel. Your basic leftist, on the other hand, resents the very idea that different people have different skill levels, and seeks to replace it with criteria of a more political nature. Out here in the Real World, we tend to think that if some idiot goes too fast around a curve and rolls his expensive new toy, well, the word "idiot" is pretty much self-explanatory. Proponents of the Nanny State, however, demand that we be solicitous of idiots, and in fact encourage them to employ solicitors when idiocy produces undesired results.

As usual, most of the proffered "solutions" do nothing for the problems they imagine. Changing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards will have exactly zero effect on the vehicles already on the road. If they seriously wanted people to get into smaller, more fuel-efficient automobiles, they would push for a substantial (at least $1.00 per gallon) increase in the gas tax. But they won't do that, because it would affect everyone with a gas tank, including themselves; what they really want to do, of course, is to punish Those Other People.

In the long run, what does all this mean? Backlash, baby, backlash. When all is said and done, Keith Bradsher may wind up selling more sport-utility vehicles than Cal Worthington ever imagined.

Brock Yates, inventor of the Cannonball Run, owns one. My daughter isn't quite the leadfoot that the Assassin is, but she wants one too. And me?

Well...

Of such notions are Vents built.

Well, sort of. Avanti Motors, which in various incarnations has been building the sequel to Studebaker's fabled Avanti sport coupe, has decided to resurrect the Stude marque for an Xtreme Utility Vehicle.

A preproduction XUV was unwrapped at the Chicago Auto Show last week; it's built on a Ford F-250 SuperDuty truck chassis, but it more closely resembles the Hummer H2. Too closely, says General Motors, which has filed suit, charging Avanti with trademark infringement. DaimlerChrysler, which isn't particularly fond of the H2's Jeep-imitation seven-slot grille, hasn't said a word yet.

No reports of any bullet-nose sedans in the works.

Back in 1999, Peter Michael DeLorenzo ran into a severe case of mixed emotions. He loved the auto industry, its passion for power and its delight in design. Simultaneously, he hated the auto industry for its failure to exercise any of that power to bring good designs to the showroom where you and I could get at them.

The way out of this dilemma was called Autoextremist.com. From his perch in a Detroit suburb, DeLorenzo issued Rant after blistering Rant about the industry's myriad failings and what could be done about them. Nobody admitted to reading DeLorenzo, but damned near everybody did.

And now that the industry is paying attention and reshaping itself into the sort of lean, mean driving machine the times demand, DaimlerChrysler asked itself "Why can't we get this guy working for us?" Turns out they could; DeLorenzo announced today he is taking a sabbatical from the site to shake up things in Dodgetown. (Now there's a reversal of form: giving up a Web site to take a day job.) There's more to Autoextremist.com than just Peter Michael DeLorenzo, and it will continue in his absence, but still, this is the sort of career move that a blogger could envy.

Now when is ABC going to replace Jimmy Kimmel with Scott Ott?

Two words: Jewish bikers.

You gotta love it.

(Muchas gracias: Max Power.)

I've learned to be suspicious of these, but in view of last week, I need all the warmth I can get.

There was actual sunshine today after about 3 pm or so, and while the temperature is still on the low side (lower 40s), it beats the heck out of what we've been getting, and besides, we haven't seen the sun since Washington's birthday.

More to the point, perhaps, was the Austin-Healey Sprite (of course, a Bugeye) tootling along the boulevard, its driver apparently utterly unconcerned about being surrounded by vicious-looking vehicles like the Pontiac Aztek, an automotive boîte du merde that is as ugly as the Sprite is cute.

And while Bugeyes aren't very fast — apart from being about 43 years old, they have only about 43 horsepower — there's a certain thrill in driving the living whee out of something in an effort to stay just ahead of the traffic flow.

Besides, it was painted green, and British racing green at that. Just try to tell me that's not a sign of spring.

Americans have lots of thoughts about things automotive. (This is, in case you've forgotten or you've been living in Berkeley for the last ten years, because we actually have lots of cars and we get to drive them all over the place.) Inevitably, some of those thoughts prove to be erroneous, egregious, or downright excruciating (cf. an otherwise perfectly innocuous Honda Civic with two-thirds of its bodywork covered in bubbly decalcomania and its exhaust terminating in a Folger's can).

There is one thought which borders on the universal, though: the thought that the so-called Check Engine Light is a conspiracy against the laity, that the evil little glow means only that your local wrenchman has a boat payment due. At least once a week, I get an anguished letter from some poor soul asking how to shut the thing off, and I'm running out of variations on ways to say "Take it to the shop and have the farging codes pulled."

The truth of the matter is simply this: modern engines run with extremely tight calibrations to meet extremely tight (and becoming more so) emissions specifications, and if any one component of the twenty bazillion or so under the hood isn't pulling its weight, the Malfunction Indicator Light (to give it its correct name) snaps on and the engine computer records the appropriate error code. Unless you know what that error code is and what it means — and I, buried in email, certainly can't read it from here — you're out of luck. And present-day OBD II-equipped vehicles don't give up their codes to just anyone: you need the appropriate scan tool.

Which, of course, is part of the conspiracy. If you don't want to pay the dealer $75 to pull the codes, you probably also don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for your very own scanning device. But the unpleasant fact is this: the shadetree mechanic is well on his way to dropping off the Endangered Species list and into extinction. The techniques that used to work to squeeze a couple more months out of a worn set of points don't mean a thing to a mass airflow meter. And given the fact that most people think they're more mechanically inclined than they really are — myself included — twelve or thirteen times out of ten they're going to make matters worse by trying to fix these things themselves.

Please. Take it to the shop and have the farging codes pulled.

In Minnesota, warning signs are yellow, and their meaning is clear:

So that's what Steve Gigl did. I think.

Ford's current advertising tagline is "If you haven't looked at Ford lately...look again."

Unless you happen to work in automotive advertising, in which case you've probably already atrophied from the clavicle up, you're going to translate this in the back of your brain as "We don't suck as much as you think we do."

Even Ford enthusiasts are largely unenthusiastic about this pitch. I'll be surprised if it lasts as long as Buick's ridiculous "It's all good" slogan, since replaced by a lame evocation of mid-20th-century automotive designer Harley Earl, whose name is likely to have meaning only to the 70-year-olds who buy LeSabres.

You'd never know it by looking at suburban surface streets at 5:10 pm, but driving — not the mindless Point-A-to-Point-B rote you look at every day, but actual, honest-to-Fangio driving — is something of an art form.

I'm not sure that Chrysler's new The Art of Driving promotion, offering participants a chance to play epicure while they sample the newest vehicles, is quite the way to make this point, although pushing Celine Dion tickets might inspire people to drive at high speeds in the opposite direction.

On the other hand, Mazda's Rev It Up program, in which you get to prove your mettle in a specially-prepped Mazda6, may be too much for some people: it's a racing school, or at least as much of a racing school as can be squeezed into one day and a $39 fee. And I have to admire the FAQ, which starts with the simple question "What is the meaning of life?"

Which reminds me: World Tour '03 is coming up this July, and at the heart of it is about 4500 miles of driving, on the superslabs and through the twisties, in big cities and small towns and everything in between. Everyone should do this at least once; this will be my third time, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of it.

Dr. Bud E. Bryan, Road Kill columnist for autoextremist.com, offers this reminder:

I can hardly wait.

I have complained before about the mixed signals in current Chrysler advertising, and, well, I'm about to do it again.

To plug stuff like the Pacifica (don't call it a wagon, and for gosh sakes, don't call it a minivan) "sports touring vehicle", the Auburn Hills boys have adopted one of those artsy black-and-white campaigns, which is fine with me, and for one page, which is captioned simply STYLE, they've photographed an utterly lovely right foot in a strappy sandal, which is even finer with me.

Until you look past her perfect pedicure and notice that she's got her foot on the brake.

And another pleasant daydream goes sixty to zero in seconds, um, flat.

As American traditions go, the Sunday drive is definitely on the wane, shunted aside by our longer workweeks — gotta husband that leisure time carefully, doncha know — and sporadic haranguing by green types in blue states (or is that blue types in green states?) who object to any use of fuel that isn't on their Approved List. All the more reason, I figure, to take one when the schedule permits, and having gotten today's chores done early for once (clean up the bathrooms, do two loads of wash, defrag four drive partitions), I packed up some suitable tunes and hit the road. (Fred will be happy to hear that today's selections were chosen from the 1963 archives.)

Central Oklahoma, laid out mostly like a waffle iron, doesn't have anything quite like L.A.'s Mullholland Drive, but getting off the beaten path doesn't require an hour down the Interstate, either. I set the northern boundary at Wilshire, which in the city proper is noted for being halfway between 63rd and Britton Road, but which offers a quirk throughout its entire discontinuous thirty-mile length: it is at Wilshire where the section lines, and therefore the major roads which follow them, are supposedly adjusted slightly to allow for the curvature of the earth. Intersections at Wilshire are therefore decidedly non-standard, though seldom as perverse as, say, New Jersey jughandles.

I picked up Wilshire on the east side at the 9000 block, on the far side of one of those discontinuities, mainly because Douglas, which was a perfectly respectable suburban boulevard a few miles ago, shrinks as it goes; at this point, it's down to 1.4 lanes and won't go any further. It wasn't entirely clear whether I was within the city limits or not, since the intersection isn't marked. Heading eastward, I set a 40-mph pace, subject to road conditions, and observed.

Oklahoma City, for reasons having to do with ancient history — "ancient" in this part of the world meaning "before 1907" — is centered, not in the middle of the county, but towards its southwest corner. So this area, which starts maybe four miles from the county center, is almost entirely rural. The roads range from not bad to fairly grungy to downright awful, and they seem to change from one category to another just about every mile. Actual farming still goes on here, though it's sort of offputting to see a farm with a street address (911 insists); I saw three tractors in use, and two of them were apparently being operated by women. There were big houses and small houses, presumably designed for form rather than function; the overdesigned monstrosities in the newer developments simply don't exist out here. Someone who lives out this way who isn't farming, I have to assume, is here to get away from the rest of the world; it's hard to happen upon this neck of the woods by accident.

Somewhere around the 19300 block, there's a four-way intersection with three dead ends. Rather than back up, I chose the right turn, and found myself on a winding (well, sort of) two-lane that, surprisingly, had two houses for sale, one of which was open for inspection. And apparently I'd misjudged my location somewhat, because the open house was on a lakefront — which explains the multiple dead ends, anyway. I wheeled around in a hurry and got out of there, lest I be smitten by the place.

Rethreading myself, I headed south on Luther Road and noticed that all of a sudden I was getting seriously strong cell signals. A couple miles later, I spied the tower, which happened to be a few yards from an electrical power plant. Probably the same one that supplies my juice, even. I've lived in the eastern half of the county for most of the last twenty years, and I had no idea it was even there. "I really must get out more," I decided.

And eventually I turned back westward, following Reno Avenue, the main drag through the east end, wondering what Serious Urban Planners would think of it, what with little crapbox country houses cheek by jowl with overwrought suburban McMansions, and, this being Oklahoma, a church every mile. I suspect they'd be appalled at the lack of stylistic unity, the mailboxes that haven't seen a coat of paint since the Korean War, the little gas stations where you can get your fishing and hunting licenses, and the mere fact that people are living way the hell out here a good fifteen miles from downtown and twenty miles from major shopping areas, thereby wasting precious fuelstuffs on the way. Why, I must have wasted a good two bucks' worth just looking at these things. (Which was still cheaper than dinner: $5.77 at Braum's.)

And, yes, I enjoyed every minute of it.

I remember the last time I was on US Highway 666. It was at least fairly hellish, partially due to the fact that I was just outside Gallup, New Mexico, one of the few American towns anticipated by Dante.

And "the last time" is now the literal truth, for US 666 is no more, the three states through which it runs these days (the southern spur into Arizona was snubbed years ago) having whined sufficiently to the authorities; the old Devil's Highway is now the innocuous-sounding US 491.

There's some vague sense to this — three-digit US routes are generally considered tributaries of the corresponding two-digit highways, and US 66 faded into history years ago — but I definitely don't envy the state highway guys who had to petition the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, who presumably had to come up with arguments meatier than "My invisible friend is upset."

There is at present no Interstate 666, though I think the number could be put to use most appropriately, by affixing it to the New Jersey Turnpike. And no, it doesn't fit into the national grid there, but if Bud Shuster can have his damnable I-99 in the middle of Pennsylvania when by rights it should be in the middle of the Bay of Fundy, there's more than enough excuse to give the Garden State its own ticket to hell — and a toll ticket at that.

It's only just now starting to take shape, but it begins on 13 July and will continue through the rest of the month and into the beginning of August.

Already things are not happening according to plan, but given the vague, inchoate nature of those plans anyway, I don't consider this a particular disadvantage.

Four venues are on the Must list this year:

Bloomington, Minnesota: The Mall of America, just because. (I will be accompanied for this segment by my two children, both of whom are hoping I will buy them stuff.)

Flat Rock, Michigan: My car would like to meet its parents, so to speak; more important, this gives me a chance to watch Dean Esmay get older.

Jamesburg, New Jersey: Annual pilgrimage to the spiritual home of tollbooths, and a two-day party.

Floyd County, Virginia: Just once I'd like to fact-check Fred on something.

As usual, I will be schlepping a notebook and will post daily updates from the road (well, actually from the hotel room); there will be a Movable Type category set up to keep the pertinent posts together.

Previous World Tours have averaged 4,500 miles or so; I suspect this one will be about the same. This very journey, needless to say, is a slap in the face of the Extremely Green, who envision a world where "Is this trip really necessary?" is exhumed from World War II rationing days and thrown up at motorists at every opportunity, and who can't imagine why someone might want to burn up a couple hundred gallons of gas for fun, fercrissake. In some ways I envy them — I've never quite been able to strike the perfect balance between anxiety and smugness, something they manage almost effortlessly — but they'll never understand the call of the open road, the delight of a perfectly-executed 50-mph apex on a 30-mph curve, the wonder of so many places separated by so much space. Maybe they can think about it while they wait for the bus.

The state of Oregon isn't pulling in enough money from its 24-cent gasoline tax to cover its road-maintenance budget. What to do? Why, spend millions on a GPS-based system to tax motorists by road usage, of course.

To me, the only good reason to have a GPS in your car is to tell you that you're about to drive into the middle of Lake Itasca, a dubious functionality in my view, and there's always the concern about giving Big Brother access to my dashboard. And where will all these black boxes come from? The auto industry is going to be loath to install Oregon-specific equipment in one percent of its vehicles.

What's most annoying about this, I think, is that the state is going through all this folderol because the electorate won't put up with an increase in the gas tax, fully in keeping with today's modern "We want this service but we want someone else to pay for it" attitude. For the amount they'll spend on this, they could buy every driver in the state an early-Seventies Ford LTD or comparable beater that struggles to get 8 mpg when it's in tune, which would increase the take from the gas tax considerably and simultaneously cheese off the Greener Than Thou crowd.

(Muchas gracias: Alexander Craghead.)

Despite my best efforts, an itinerary for World Tour '03 is beginning to take shape. I have added to the list of Major Stops:

Brighton, Delaware: Nonexistent for now, but wait.

Herndon, Virginia: I am informed that it came to me in a dream.

Draw a giant clock-face on the contiguous 48 states. If you have a recommendation between noon and three, let me know.

As mentioned here earlier, Avanti Motors is reviving the Studebaker name for a humongous sport-utility vehicle dubbed XUV, the X denoting, um, "Xtreme". It's certainly xtremely large, at 216 inches long and 80 inches wide — and 80 inches tall, yet. The new Stude is based on Ford's F-250 SuperDuty chassis and comes with Dearborn's 6.8-liter V10 or 6.0-liter turbodiesel V8. Contrary to a General Motors lawsuit filed earlier this year, the überStude resembles the Hummer H2 not in the least.

Do I want one of these things? Not particularly. Unless, of course, Big Brother decides to tell me that I can't have one.

And a damned good reason, too. (Requires QuickTime)

(Muchas gracias: Accidental Julie.)

From Autoextremist.com, a summary of why the Big 2.5 (or whatever) American automakers are a long way from the comeback trail:

That's $300-400 per vehicle, mind you. And these numbers (from the Harbour Report) appeared just in time for negotiations with the United Auto Workers, too. How will the UAW address these issues? Autoextremist.com quotes union president Ron Gettelfinger:

The UAW, judging by the numbers I've seen, is starting to get a handle on the quality-control issue; maybe they can deal with only one problem at a time?

None of this implies that Ford or GM is doomed, necessarily, or that the Daimler-Benz guys are rethinking their ownership of the Chrysler Group. But clearly they can't go on with such meager margins, and there seems to be a real fear that if the flood of rebates is shut off, market share will dwindle even faster.

Which is why, more than ever, what Detroit needs is superior product, cars and trucks and whatever the hell falls between, vehicles so good that Joe and Susan Sixpack, whom they lost to Toyota years ago, will rush back into the showrooms and sign the check and not expect $2000 cash back. I have no doubt that they can do it: but will the planners and the bean counters and the union actually let them do it?

David E. Davis, Jr., founder and something-or-other-emeritus of Automobile magazine, points out in the August '03 issue (not yet online as of this writing) that Formula 1 auto racing has become (horrors!) dull and boring:

And even if F1 Looming Presence Bernie Ecclestone could be persuaded to make these changes, Formula 1 would still be a flop in the States, predicts Davis:

Our hooligans, of course, prefer NASCAR. And my personal racing fantasies run to time/distance rallying in cars vaguely resembling stock, sort of what you'd have if you turned NASCARmobiles loose on, say, Arkansas 7, though I'd insist on having my incredibly-gorgeous co-pilot (leadfoot up to perfect mid-thigh) at my side, of course, which pretty much eliminates sneaking a car out of Darlington in the dead of night.

Kim du Toit would love to have a Giulia.

And can you blame him? I can't. Yeah, the engine is ancient — the 1.3 DOHC four goes all the way back to the '54 Giulietta — and yeah, it's built with all the craftsmanship you expect from Italian cars, which is to say none, and what's more, it's not even gorgeous. (The Duetto convertible version built by Pininfarina is gorgeous, but that's not the one he wants.)

Not that any of that matters when you get it out on the road. The little engine revs like crazy and the suspension keeps you on curves that would throw more mundane vehicles into the guardrail. Or so I'm assuming, anyway; that's been the case with every Italian car I've ever driven, even the bottom-feeder fwd Fiat Strada. There's only 90 hp to play with, but the car weighs barely more than a ton, even a couple hundred pounds lighter than BMW's reborn Mini Cooper, so quickness and litheness are baked into the package.

Alfa is coming back to the States, perhaps by 2007, and they're promising a "full range" of cars, to include something vaguely SUV-like, but the idea will be to position Alfa as a premium Eurobrand, so there's not much chance of a budget buzz bomb in the Giulia tradition, even if they still built one. Which they don't.

The Professor has bagged himself a Mazda RX-8, the very car I was drooling upon at the local dealership last Friday. (Well, not the same literal car, but you know what I mean.)

What I want to know is: Did he get the stick shift?

Get your minds out of the gutter. (Yes, I know this was a favorite phrase of my high-school class, but climb up on the curb for a moment, fercrissake.)

Chris Lawrence, a cheerful fellow I met up at Dean Esmay's birthday party last month, runs a site called I69Info.com, all about Interstate 69, the very road I took out of Indianapolis to start my trek up to Dean's place, and how it's eventually going to be extended south. Way south. I'm talking south Texas here.

The number of motor vehicles in this country is increasing faster than the number of miles of roadway, so I'm definitely interested in stuff like this, if only because I may need to drive somewhere someday.

The Professor tells us what it's like to whip a Mazda RX-8 around town and out in the twisties.

Which means, for me as a D-list blogger anyway, that it's time I finished off this box of Cheerios and did some testing on the little metal NASCAR simulacrum packed therein.

With the return of school comes the return of school zones, and a new season of one peculiar subset of left-lane bandits. You know the ones I mean: nailed for six over while they were in the school zone, they are now plodding along at six under, trying to create the illusion that they are morally upright, law-abiding citizens. The rest of the world quite properly views them, not as pillars of the community, but as mobile speed bumps.

What's worse, of course, is getting two of these twits in parallel on a four-lane, which is what happened this morning. The clod to the left, in a late-Seventies GM beater with the not-quite-completely-detached headliner whipping around the interior like a bullfighter's cape, finally got the message and pulled over to the right, but it took him miles to see the light. I'm sure he'll get some sort of commendation from the Anti-Destination League.

How did I miss this? Blame it on magazine — specifically, Automobile magazine — lead times; this story showed up in the September issue.

Christie's auto auction at Rockefeller Center in early June offered 42 vehicles, including a one-off Abarth Biposto from 1952, a Morgan Plus Four roadster, and Frank Sinatra's Lamborghini Miura (a hideous shade of orange), but here's what's way out there on the asymptote marked High Weirdness: somebody bid $6463, about fifteen hundred dollars over sticker, for a new-in-box Segway Human Transporter gizmo.

Car craziness, I conclude, extends well beyond mere cars.

What would you do with a million euros?

If your immediate answer is "Buy a car," here's the car you're going to buy: the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, which will be produced by Volkswagen (!) in a limited edition of three hundred for yes, one million euros. Plus tax.

If your response to this is "But this is insane," well, you'll get no argument from me. I mean, a million euros would buy you quite a fleet of Volkswagen's real cars.

Still, zero to 300 km/h (188 mph) in 14 seconds? Top speed of 400 km/h?

No. NO. I must look away now.

Septembers in Oklahoma have been known to be heinously hot, but this one is starting out beautifully, if you can overlook the morning fog, which of late has been almost tactile; you want to reach out of the window, grab a handful, and shove it out of your way. But it burns off by nine, and this evening, with twilight shading itself into the background, Domenico Modugno crooning from the center console (ah, mono), and still air just warm enough to justify the reach to the A/C button, it was a lovely drive down good old 62.

Unfortunately, the reason I was on good old 62 at a quarter past eight was because I'd just gotten off work; the elements which normally cooperate perfunctorily at best didn't bother to go through the motions today, and my 13-hour-plus day, horrid as it was, was still shorter than the sentences served by a couple of other poor souls.

Still, with just that faintest hint of the day that was, accompanied by a song both down-to-earth and otherworldly (I know very little Italian that isn't in some way pasta-related), it was a sweet end to a day that otherwise went on too long.

So I'm listening to Car Talk this morning, and the young woman from the East Village is describing the no-start issues with her car, and either Click or Clack asks: "Is this a Honda?"

And of course it's not: "It's an Acura Integra."

Either an unprecedented level of restraint or the miracle of post-production editing prevented them from responding "It's still a Honda."

I wonder how many Lexus owners realize they're driving Toyotas.

Peter M. DeLorenzo, the original Autoextremist, has his hopes up:

I don't have a problem with the Benz bits; Chrysler didn't have any suitable (which is to say, "non-truck") RWD platform of its own, and really, if you're going to dip into someone's parts bin, the Mercedes parts bin is generally a pretty nice place to rummage around.

I've seen photos of these cars, and while the Dodge Magnum, which will be issued first as a wagon, looks too much like an armored vehicle for Middle East arms dealers, the Chrysler 300C comes off as a solid, traditional American sedan, with all of that legendary genre's virtues (incredible amounts of room, the ability to consume vast numbers of highway miles in short periods) and vices (gawd, but that's a lot of brightwork in its mouth). Considering what we've been getting in the way of American sedans — have you looked at Ford lately? — the prospects for these Mopars look good, and I've tentatively added the 300C to my short list of Vehicles To Consider next time around. For me, this is a sea change, since normally I shop for a modicum of performance within the context of minimum visibility, but as the man says, sometimes you have to go big or go home.

No, I didn't do this one; it was fifty years before I was born, fercryingoutloud.

And in 1903, the idea of a cross-country motor trip was simply unheard of. This was long before Interstates — there were few roads as we know them, and no pavement to speak of — and long before mass-produced motor vehicles. In fact, it was before you could even get auto parts; Henry Leland was only just then assuming command at Cadillac, and had yet to introduce the startling concept of standardized, mass-produced, interchangeable parts, a notion which would win Cadillac a Dewar Trophy in 1908.

In the Age of Teddy Roosevelt, though, a sense of adventure was still something in good supply, and in 1903, a Vermont physician, Dr Horatio Nelson Jackson, having bet $50 (a tidy sum in those days) that he could cross the country in a car in 90 days or less, put his motor where his mouth was, and set off from San Francisco with the hope of getting to New York in one piece.

This is the sort of period Americana that almost cries out for a Ken Burns-type documentary, and as good fortune would have it, Horatio's Drive, a documentary directed by, yes, Ken Burns, will premiere in October on PBS. Once again, Burns' partner is Dayton Duncan, who worked with him on Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997).

Nowadays, people drive four thousand miles without so much as breaking a sweat; seeing what it was like a hundred years ago should be a revelation.

(Muchas gracias: Syaffolee.)

The Buick LaCrosse sedan/sport/utility/whatever vehicle, replacement for the aged Regal, will be sold in Canada, but not with that name.

To us, "lacrosse" is a sport played on a field with sticks. To the Québécois, apparently, it's a solo act, practiced often in the bathroom, rumored to cause hair growth on one's palms and/or blindness.

General Motors product czar Bob Lutz, addressing GM dealers in Toronto, professed to be surprised: "I thought I knew every expression existing in the French language for self-gratification, including the crudest ones known to man," he said.

The new Canadian name has not been announced, though I suspect it will probably not be "Nova", the name of a Chevrolet model which according to legend (the facts say otherwise) didn't play well in Spanish-speaking countries.

At least at the higher end of the market, we're in something of a horsepower war these days, with automakers scrambling to outdo the competition with dazzling numbers. Routine V6 family sedans now pack 200 hp or more; dedicated sports machines can carry 300, 400, sometimes more. Generally, this is a Good Thing — too small an engine will be strained, and gas mileage will be as bad, if not worse, than with a bigger mill — but while the SAE net horsepower standard is pretty well established in North America, there are a few potential fudge factors baked into it, and a number of automakers have been tripped up when testing revealed fewer horses than advertised.

The proposed new SAE standard will tighten up the specs, and will allow for independent review of horsepower ratings. It's not a cure-all, and there's still going to be no conversion factor between SAE net and the pre-1970s SAE gross rating, but anything that improves the accuracy of automotive specifications gets a smile from me.

Our road warriors cover much of the Mountain time zone, so while I was making notes for some future ('06?) World Tour, I popped the question to one of them: "How would you organize a trip to Montana from here without having to go through Denver?"

The warrior beamed, for he knew that this time he would not have to impart the lesson of a lifetime: Do not, under any circumstances, go through Denver.

As it happens, Fûz has been contemplating what it's like to go through Denver, and he thinks the plans being implemented are wrong-headed and utterly miss the point. His thesis:

Those extra 14 miles come from taking the new E470 route instead of I-25. As an alternative, Fûz proposes a High Occupancy/Toll lane on I-25 with limited access and egress. For the Interstate traveler heading north (as I would be, except of course that I'm trying to avoid going through Denver), the Fûz plan offers three choices:

1. Go straight up I-25, quickly and without dodging local traffic. You pay one toll at the Lone Tree plaza, just North of Exit 191. Stay in the HOT lane until you pass the Boulder Pike plaza and you pay nothing more.

2. Go straight up I-25, local lanes, and dodge the local traffic. Count on spending 45 minutes more to do so in lieu of paying the toll.

3. Take E470, you pay nothing.

Even if it's ten bucks for #1, this strikes me as more sensible; the whole idea of E470 should be to divert people (especially local traffic) from I-25 in the first place, and you don't divert people by hitting them with both a toll and a greater distance to drive.

In Oklahoma, where we all hate toll roads with a passion, some of them are actually justified, and none of them more so than the Kilpatrick Turnpike, which describes a 120-degree arc from I-35 near the Oklahoma City/Edmond line to I-40 out near El Reno. The northern segment of the Kilpatrick runs more or less parallel to Memorial Road, a major east-west artery that is hopelessly clogged with local traffic. Is it worth a buck to bypass all that to go from the eastern terminus (roughly the 5000 block east) to, say, Quail Springs Mall (roughly 2500 west)? Easily. And if you use the RF devices, it's only 90 cents.

My new commute, once I'm into the new digs, will run about 11 miles, three times what I'm used to, and that includes a loop on I-44 east to I-35 south. Both of these roads are fairly heinous in the morning hours, and the I-44 segment includes the infamous Belle Isle Bridge. If I confine myself to surface streets, the distance shortens to about 9 miles, though the time required increases markedly. There are no plans to make either of the two Interstate segments toll roads at this time. (The portion of I-44 actually in Oklahoma City is one of the few stretches in the state that isn't a toll road.) And taking the Kilpatrick itself adds 15 miles to the trip. But would I pay, say, $2 a day for a 70-mph Kilpatrick-like breeze through the city? In a heartbeat. There's no room for another in-town loop, though, and I doubt that ODOT could get Fûz to go to work for them.

Toyota's youth-oriented Scion division is contemplating offering cars without factory paint jobs.

At the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association show in Las Vegas, Scion showed an unpainted xA hatchback; its sheetmetal was covered with standard gray primer only. Hardcore tuners — right in the middle of Scion's target market — apparently have been buying cars and sanding off the factory paint, then applying their own custom paint.

As yet, Scion is sold only on the West Coast; I have no idea how well this will go over when, a year or so for now, Toyota starts selling these vehicles here on the Lone Prairie.

A couple of months ago, Automobile's Eddie Alterman said something or other about the leather upholstery in the new Lamborghini Gallardo and tacked on a quip about an alarm going off in PETA headquarters.

Which, apparently, it did. The December '03 issue contains a letter from PETA president Ingrid Newkirk which makes the following claim:

The next time I'm at the dealership — in addition to mere Mazdas, they sell Cadillacs, Audis, Porsches, Land-Rovers and Infinitis — I'll ask them if anyone at all has requested a leather-delete option.

And if someone wants to explain to me why the events of 9/11 would have turned someone into a vegetarian, I'd love to hear it.

Meanwhile, I'll be sitting on the modest cloth upholstery in my car as I drive to the furniture store in search of a leather sofa. Just because.

The Indianapolis Police Department is running short on traffic tickets. The Marion County Superior Court apparently underestimated the number of citations that would be handed out when placing its order for the ticket forms last year.

Which is undoubtedly why the order for next year's forms, which just went in, calls for a 25-percent increase — and Indy is covering the difference with a 36-percent increase in the base traffic fine.

(Via Fark)

One of the features this month in Automobile magazine (18 pages!) deals with rock stars and their cars.

Geez, what a waste. I can see giving some space to Sammy Hagar — after all, he can't drive 55, a feeling many of us can appreciate — but why would it matter to anyone what Nick Mason (Pink Floyd) or Wyclef Jean (Fugees) or Mark Knopfler drives?

The Oklahoman reports that there is no construction on Interstate 35 between here and Kansas City.

Yes, that is news. I've driven this route for various reasons for twenty years or so — my descendants are clustered at the far end, you may remember — and I don't remember any time when there wasn't at least some road work going on.

Of course, if I really need to remind myself what it's like, I can always turn the other way: there is plenty of construction between here and Norman, and more heading into Texas.

I never did quite understand why DaimlerChrysler felt the need to exhume the name and the nameplate of Wilhelm and Karl Maybach to sell a new ultra-luxe sedan with a price tag that looks more like a real-estate deal; wasn't Mercedes-Benz supposed to be "Das Beste oder Nichts"?

Whatever they might have been thinking, the child of this German brain trust, the putative vehicle of choice for NBA stars, rappers, and other people with more money than taste, is moving in numbers which can be charitably described as "limited": Autoextremist.com reports that Maybach sold all of eight cars last month, bringing the yearly total to a startling 59. At three hundred K per copy (for the short-wheelbase 57; add fifty K for the 62, half a meter longer), that's still a fair chunk of change, but it's not the sort of volume with which one can challenge Rolls-Royce.

Except maybe this year. BMW, owner of the Rolls-Royce name and tradition, has issued something called the Phantom, which in its own way is as over the top as the Maybach. Eight of them crawled out of showrooms in November, making 79 for the year.

Still, you probably shouldn't venture into your local dealership expecting rebates.

There is reason to be suspicious of the upcoming Saab 9-7X, not least because it's basically the same platform that General Motors has been selling as the Chevrolet TrailBlazer (not to mention GMC, Buick and, for the next few months anyway, Oldsmobile versions) and sneaking out the back door to Isuzu stores as the Ascender. Whatever Saab might require in its hour of need, it wouldn't seem to be Yet Another Generic Sport-Utility Vehicle.

On the other hand, so long as Saab sales are in the doldrums and SUVs continue to move, it's hard to blame GM, which has yet to make any money from its purchase of Saab's automotive business, for wanting to get some return on its investment, and if this artist's conception is at all accurate, there will be a fair number of buyers lined up at the Saab store who will have no idea that the sturdy Swedish steed before them was bred from purely American stock.

No comment from me on the Subaru-based 9-2. Yet.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is seeking public comment on revising the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. The most obvious comment, I think, is "What does fuel economy have to do with traffic safety?" Apart from the obvious laws-of-physics considerations — all else being equal, the heavier vehicle, while it uses more fuel, tends to come out better in a crash — the answer would seem to be "Not much."

The real problem for the government here is that they can't very well come out in favor of greater vehicle weight, because the Greener Than Thou folks who begrudge any use of fuel that doesn't strike their fancy will pitch the hissiest of fits, and if NHTSA should choose to embrace economy above all else, there will be hell to pay from the auto industry, which fears consumer rejection if they simplify and add lightness, and from the insurance industry, which fears anything that might cost them a dollar somewhere down the road.

The answer is hidden in their request for comments, but they don't really recognize it as an answer:

The simplest way to do this is to dump the entire concept of CAFE, which so far has produced far more pages of regulation than gallons of gas. If it is necessary to, um, persuade consumers to buy fuel-efficient vehicles, a proposition rather difficult to defend without falling back on "Because we said so," the most direct approach is to increase the tax on fuel. This puts the decision into the hands of the individual, where it rightfully belongs. If J. Random Driver still wants a Ford Excrescence or whatever that will cost him $100 every fillup, that should be his issue — not yours, not mine, not Washington's, and not the Sierra Club's.

A question from Alan K. Henderson:

The short answer: well, it's between 38th and 39th. In Austin generally, the half-streets are used in preference to dubbing one of them "Place" or "Terrace", as is done up here in Oklahoma; the highest-numbered street in Austin, if I remember correctly, is 56½ Street.

If you exit west from I-35 at 38½ Street, eventually (west of Red River Street, I believe) you will be diverted onto 38th, which in turn mutates into 35th. Visitors are perplexed; so are residents.

If you show up at U-Haul with a Ford Explorer, you will leave without the trailer you were planning to tow; The Detroit News is reporting that U-Haul International has forbidden its 17,000 local outlets to rent trailers to Explorer owners, citing ongoing lawsuits involving America's largest-selling sport-utility vehicle.

The ban applies to all model years, despite the fact that most of the litigation, including the Firestone debacle, involved the previous generation of the Explorer; Ford redesigned the truck for 2003 with an independent rear suspension, which enhances handling and lowers the center of gravity.

Curiously, the Mercury Mountaineer, which is basically the Explorer with a brushed-aluminum interior and the top-line powertrain, is not included in the ban.

The pavement-inhaling WRX aside, Subaru, perhaps more than any other automotive marque, gets respect from the Greener Than Thou crowd, inasmuch as it makes generally sensibly-sized vehicles which eschew the more egregious frills one finds on other brands; Fuji Heavy Industries, the manufacturer, is viewed as the Anti-Detroit. (The fact that General Motors owns a small chunk of Fuji is either overlooked or ignored.)

So there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth when word gets around that there will be just enough modifications made to the 2005 edition of Subaru's popular Outback wagon and sedan to qualify them under Federal regulations as light trucks, subject to a less-stringent fuel-economy standard. The reason for this is blindingly simple: there's a horsepower race on, and Subaru doesn't want to be left behind. The wagon, at least, might pass for a truck, given the proliferation of crossover quasi-SUVs, but the sedan?

One wail has already been heard. The Sierra Club's Daniel Becker, seeing shades of 1984 in these 2005 models, pronounced: "This is a new low for the auto industry and it would make George Orwell proud." I would remind Mr Becker that when you have stupid rules (and Corporate Average Fuel Economy is the poster child for stupid rules), you can expect stupid stratagems to get around them.

(Via Autoextremist.com)

When Toyota pulled ahead of DaimlerChrysler to become the world's third-largest automaker, there were rumblings in Detroit. There will no doubt be more of the same now that Toyota has passed Ford to take over the number-two slot.

For calendar year 2003, Toyota sold 6.78 million vehicles worldwide, a hair above Ford's 6.72 million — though the Ford total does not include approximately one million Mazdas. (Ford owns 33.4 percent of Mazda, enough to give it corporate control under Japanese law.)

Toyota is shooting for 15 percent of the world market, which would be sufficient to displace General Motors at the top; GM currently holds a 14.7-percent market share worldwide.

New poll at Forbes.com: The Worst Cars of All Time.

The nominees seem plausible enough — at least there's a Trabant — though I have some problems with the Edsel listing, inasmuch as (1) it's not a Ford (it was based on a Ford, except for the top two trim lines in Edsel's first year, which were built off a larger Mercury platform) and (2) the model years in question were not 1957-59, but 1958-60.

In Vent #260, I held up the Chevrolet Vega as an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences:

The best-laid plans, and all that.

When Governor Schwarzenegger moved to roll back California's motor-vehicle license fees, prompting the usual suspects to challenge the move in court, the city of Berkeley calculated that it would lose $1.3 million, and decided there had to be another way to pry money out of the owners of those hateful belching machines.

What they came up with was a tax on owners of multiple cars. The amount has yet to be determined — Councilman Kriss Worthington, who owns no cars, says the "outer edge" might be $1000 — and there's some doubt as to how it could be implemented in the first place, but details like that won't stop Mayor Tom Bates:

Meanwhile, across the Bay, Assemblyman Mark Leno has proposed a measure to return the license fee in San Francisco to pre-Schwarzenegger levels. Personally, I think that if San Francisco needs an infusion of cash, they should just increase the current $82 marriage-license fee to maybe, oh, $1000 at the "outer edge."

Ford is coming under fire in Britain for an attempt at viral marketing in which the sunroof of the SportKa minicar, in the process of closing, decapitates a cat.

According to Ford, this campaign and a similar one showing a pigeon smacking into the hood were developed and promptly rejected for reasons of taste; they have no idea how they were leaked to the Net.

Ads for GM's Vauxhall unit have already attacked the Ford spots as "acts of such blatant cruelty in a desperate attempt to sell cars."

Maybe it was the humidity, maybe it was the threat of thunderstorms, maybe it was just bad luck, but this morning's jaunt from Surlywood to 42nd and Treadmill was far more complicated than usual, owing to heavy participation by hardcore members of the Anti-Destination League, people who watch their vehicles, their whole vehicles, and nothing but their vehicles. I had to dodge (or, in a couple of cases, chevy) half a dozen of these miscreants over the eleven-mile run, and while the average speed was about the same as usual, the fluctuations were ferocious; I had to come up with a brief 82-mph burst to shake off a cluster of motorized cockleburs, something I don't much enjoy doing when a 40-mph exit is waiting for me a thousand feet ahead.

On the other hand, Sandy, the little blonde sedan who is the other half of this team, seemed happy to open up a can of Zoom Zoom on these people, and I suppose that if it gladdens her two-liter heart, it's probably a Good Thing.

As a person who actually likes cars, as distinguished from the folks who view them as (at best) necessary evils, I tend to take a dim view of the government's Corporate Average Fuel Economy scheme. How dim? I wrote this in December:

As an object lesson in how purely arbitrary these so-called "standards" are, the NHTSA announced this week that Nissan will be exempted for the next five years from one of them: the so-called "two-fleet" rule, which specifies that imported models and domestics must meet the standards separately. GM, for instance, can't use the tiny Chevrolet Aveo, produced by what's left of Daewoo in South Korea, to offset an Impala.

In Nissan's case, the small Sentra sedan, assembled in Mexico, has been balancing out Infiniti Q45s and such from Japan. Under the rules of NAFTA, the Sentra will be reclassified as a domestic as of 2005, meaning Nissan's imports will no longer meet CAFE targets. NHTSA's decision, opposed by actual US automakers, means that Nissan can count both imports and domestics in a single fleet.

This is only the second such waiver granted by NHTSA since the beginnings of CAFE. (Volkswagen got the first; it has since expired.) Nissan had threatened to cut production at its two US plants, one in Mississippi, the other in Tennessee, should the waiver not be granted. Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) and Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) — what a surprise! — had lobbied NHTSA to cut Nissan some slack.

The two-fleet rule is, of course, rather stupid. So is the rule which counts cars and "light trucks" in separate fleets: to pick just one example of egregiousness, Chrysler's PT Cruiser, which has a removable back seat, is considered a truck — except for its convertible version, whose back seat is not removable, which means it's a car.

There's no justification for this program anymore, if indeed there ever was. The government can publish all the fuel-economy numbers it wants, but buyers have the right to ignore them should they so desire, and manufacturers, once basic safety standards are met, shouldn't have to answer to Washington for their design decisions.

General Motors today unwraps a limited-edition (500 copies) Oldsmobile Alero to mark the end of America's oldest automotive nameplate. I have to wonder: why bother? The Alero, a relentlessly-average compact sedan, is the very antithesis of what Oldsmobile was in its glory days: the General's skunkworks, its experimental division, the place where high tech was put to the test before it filtered down to the rest of the GM brands. (Think "Rocket 88" or "Toronado".)

After GM decided to save a few bucks by pooling the engineering teams, rather than assigning engineers to individual marques, Oldsmobiles ceased to be distinctive and became Buicks with different trim packages. One wag posited that "Oldsmobile" was in fact an acronym: "Old, Leisurely-Driven Sedan Made Of Buick's Inferior Leftover Equipment." And when the General's attention was drawn away by the Saturn experiment, a painfully-obvious attempt to see if it was possible to sell ordinary cars with extraordinary dealer service, Olds was doomed: the only surprise is that some other GM marque, Buick or Pontiac, didn't go with it. (And Pontiac, with a lineup notably devoid of "excitement" — only the new GTO, a rebadged Holden Monaro from Australia, has any appeal to the driving enthusiast — has perhaps even less reason to live than Oldsmobile.)

This isn't the first time GM has shed brands. In the Twenties, companion makes were introduced for every division except Chevrolet. Buick's Marquette and Oldsmobile's Viking died at the beginning of the Great Depression; Cadillac's LaSalle held out until 1940. Pontiac survived, but its parent Oakland was put to sleep.

If there's still an Oldsmobile dealer near you, he has Aleros and Bravadas. The Bravada is a truck, a sport-utility vehicle that is shared with other GM divisions. Ransom Eli Olds died in 1950; I wouldn't be surprised to hear that deep within his crypt at Mount Hope Cemetery in Lansing, Michigan, the town that Oldsmobile built, Mr Olds is doing about 600 rpm.

Aaron Robinson of Car and Driver (June '04) detects mixed signals from the Mercedes-Benz E55 AMG:

(snort)

I remember when C/D said of some Honda (probably an Accord) that its primary appeal would be to Presbyterians. I'm not a wild and crazy guy myself, but I have no reason to think that either denomination is utterly devoid of wack-job gearheads.

And come to think of it, the E55, besides being about three times beyond any conceivable automotive budget I might have, inverts my own particular desiderata: while I don't want some blindingly-flashy Atari dash, I'd much rather have the bucks spent on spiffing up the interior than on a bunch of obvious Arrest Me parts for the outside.

Like most people, I have a list of Dreams Unfulfilled; once in a blue moon — well, actually, I'm now averaging one every other year, which is better than I had any reason to expect — I manage to cross one off.

The automotive section of this list has been kept deliberately small, mostly to dissuade me from assuming mountains of debt in pursuit of something thereupon. Still, I've gotten back into road-trip mode, something I gave up too many years ago; I've actually driven a Maserati (okay, it was a Quattroporte, but it's a lot more of a Maser than that godawful Chrysler thing); I've seen Duesenbergs in the flesh sheet metal; and one strange week in Los Angeles, I drove both Dead Man's Curve (what's left of it, anyway) and Mulholland Drive.

However, I have never, ever seen a Tucker.

Preston Tucker never managed to get series production started on his rear-engined marvel back in 1948, and only 51 cars were built on the pilot production line. But forty-seven of them are still around, and one of them (serial #1043, if you're keeping score) sold at auction this past January for $495,000. There isn't a chance I'll ever get any seat time in any Tucker, but see one I shall, some day.

(Hmmm. 1948 again. Regular readers will remember that Surlywood was built in that mysterious year, five years before my birth. What other secrets have been waiting for me these five and a half decades?)

I reprint this item from On the Table at Autoextremist.com, just as a reminder:

There is, of course, the question of how quick I'd be to post this if I were getting lower mileage than the EPA estimates on my own vehicle.

Besides, the very nature of a hybrid makes it almos